NASA’s Project Morpheus flew yet again their Armadillo Aerospace quad-style vertical takeoff and landing rocket vehicle today at Kennedy Space Center. This was 4th free flight of the “Bravo” vehicle, which
reached 93m (305ft) altitude, then traversed 109m (358ft) in 25 seconds before landing in the Hazard Field. Bravo flew its pre-planned trajectory flawlessly, reaching a max ascent velocity of 11.4 m/s (25.5 mph), and landing within 0.38m (15″) from its intended target 64 seconds after launch. Landing was obscured by dust, as expected, due to the Shuttle crawler-way fines covering the landing pad, but telemetry data indicated the landing and engine shutdown were nominal. The Morpheus Team again demonstrated engineering and operational excellence, relying upon training, experience and discipline to ensure a successful flight test.
As I’ve argued with Bob several times about the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 (CSLAA, pdf) , the choice was not between regulating commercial human spaceflight and not regulating it. The choice was between a regulatory regime designed with industry input versus the big mess of a regulatory regime that would emerge from the battle among the FAA’s commercial space transportation office, the much bigger and more powerful aviation wing of the FAA, state regulators, and trial lawyers. The FAA aviation wing, for example, was intent on imposing aircraft certification on suborbital reusable rocket vehicles, which would have been extremely expensive; disastrously so for small start-up companies.
The only substantial flaw in the CSLAA was in setting the 8 year delay of the expansion of rules regarding space flight participants to start from the time of passage of the bill rather than from the time of the first licensed flight. Such a flight is taking far longer to happen than expected in 2004, so there has been an effort to alter this part of the legislation. The delay has been extended once to 2015. Though there will be an effort to extend it again, the FAA has been gathering input from industry and the public on rules that it will implement if the delay expires in 2015.
Here is the latest episode of The Virtual SpaceTV 3D show with Amanda Bush. The programs are created by BINARY SPACE (www.binary-space.com) with story content from HobbySpace.com.
Amanda reports on the following topics: 01:14 — 02:19 SpaceX sends another satellite to GEO 02:20 — 03:42 Cygnus delivers cargo to the ISS 03:43 — 04:56 Europe partners a Dream Chaser 04:57 — 06:22 SpaceShipTwo fires in the sky again 06:23 — 07:40 Update on rovers on the Moon and Mars
These videos are intended as educational programs and as demonstrations of an experimental technique for generating animated presentations. The show was generated autonomously by software according to a text script. The project is described in the Virtual Producer whitepaper (Release 1.1, Oct.2013, pdf). For further information contact info@binary-space.com.
Rosetta was launched on an Ariane 5G+ rocket on March 2, 2004. It flew passed asteroids 2867 Steins (in 2008) and 21 Lutetia (in 2010), and then went into hibernation in 2011. It will now pursue its main goal, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It will rendezvous with the comet in August 2014 and go into orbit around it. It will also put a small lander on the comet.
Here’s a short ESA video about Rosetta waking up from its hibernation period:
Caption:
Visualisation of how the Rosetta spacecraft wakes up from deep space hibernation, 673 million kilometres from the Sun, on 20 January 2014.
Prior to entering hibernation on 8 June 2011, Rosetta was oriented so that its solar arrays faced the Sun, and it began rotating once per minute for stability. The only devices left running were its computer and several heaters.
Rosetta’s computer is programmed to carry out a sequence of events to re-establish contact with the Earth on 20 January, starting with an ‘alarm clock’ at 10:00 GMT. Immediately after, the star trackers begin to warm up. Around 6 hours later the thrusters are fired and the slow rotation stops. A slight adjustment is made to Rosetta’s orientation to ensure that the solar arrays now face the Sun. Then the star trackers switch on to determine its attitude. The spacecraft rotates towards Earth, and the transmitter is switched on. Then Rosetta’s high-gain antenna points to Earth and the signal is sent. The journey takes 45 minutes before the signal is received and mission controllers can begin to check Rosetta’s health, ready for the next phase of the mission.
Update: Here’s a cute animated depiction of the Rosetta mission: