[ Update Feb.20: The test flight has been postponed due to weather issues:
Our test flight window opened this morning, but the Mojave weather isn’t cooperating. We plan to try again in the next few days. We’ll keep you posted.
Virgin Galactic plans to send the SpaceShipTwo “VSS Unity” once again to the border of space on Wednesday morning in Mojave, California (see earlier posting). No target time posted yet for takeoff of the WhiteKnightTwo with the SS2 hung beneath. Winds could always lead to delays. Once the duo takes off, it takes about 45 minutes to reach the altitude for the drop of the SS2. Check updates at Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) | Twitter.
This new video released on Tuesday focuses on the pilots:
Here are tweets about the two pilots, Dave Mackay and Mike ‘Sooch’ Masucci:
Get to know @VirginGalactic Chief Pilot, Dave Mackay. He has over forty years’ experience as a pilot, flying more than 140 types of aircraft. He has flown everything from Harrier jump jets, to Boeing 747’s and SpaceShipTwo. He’ll be in the cockpit for our next test flight. pic.twitter.com/HvYoOiXyz6
Co-piloting SpaceShipTwo for our fifth supersonic powered test flight will be Mike ‘Sooch’ Masucci. He’s flown over 80 different types of aircraft and accumulated more than 10,000 hours in the air as a pilot. Our test flight window opens tomorrow morning. pic.twitter.com/pn94WNvUsa
A sampling of recent items related to traveling to and through space:
** Second suborbital space flight of Virgin Galactic‘s SpaceShipTwo is expected within the next few days. Here is a new video from VG about preparations for the flight:
With the usual caveats that apply to all test flights, and with the added uncertainties of weather at this time of year in Mojave, the window for our fifth supersonic powered test flight opens on February 20, 2019, and our test flight is planned for the morning of Wednesday, February 20.
Although we passed a major milestone in December, we still have a way to go in testing the many factors that can affect a flight. So, for this flight, we will be expanding the envelope to gather new and vital data essential to future tests and operations, including vehicle center of gravity.
We are proud to be flying NASA Flight Opportunity program research payloads again. The spaceship will be a little heavier than last time, and very close to a full commercial weight.
We are now at the stage where we can confirm some of the aspects of the customer cabin and this will be a continuing theme as we enter this final stage of flight test. It is of paramount importance to our future business success that we not only give our future astronauts a safe ride, but an experience which exceeds expectations. We know, as part of a Group that has led the way in commercial aviation customer experience, cabin design is fundamental to that objective and so this element is an integral part of our flight test program.
** SEOPS deployed 2 CubeSats from Northrop-Grumman’s Cygnus cargo vehicle after it departed from the ISS on February 8th. These were the first satellite deployments from the Cygnus for SEOPS™, LLC., a new company based in Houston. SEOPS joins NanoRacks as a provider of satellite deployments from the Cygnus and ISS. NanoRacks also deployed three smallsats from the Cygnus using deployers attached to the side of the Cygnus (see earlier posting).
SEOPS uses a deployer called SlingShot, which is attached to the hatch of the Cygnus by ISS crew members (see two gold colored boxes in image below).
Click for time lapse GIF. “SS Crew members David Saint-Jacques and Anne Mcclain installed two Slingshot deployables, SEOPS-Quantum Radar -1 and -2s, onto the outer hatch of the Cygnus Spacecraft. Also installed in a deployable slot is the UbiquityLink-1 orbit to ground communications hardware. The two passive optical reflector satellites will be released after Cygnus moves away from the ISS.” Credits: NASA
The deployers can also be seen in this image of the Cygnus during its unberthing from the station:
****A Falcon 9 launch is set for Thursday at Cape Canaveral following a successful static firing test on Monday. Liftoff time is 8:45 pm. EST (0145 GMT on 22nd). The payloads include the PSN 6 communications satellite for Indonesia, a USAF technology demo smallsat, and the Beresheet lunar lander built by the non-profit group SpaceIL of Israel.
Will SpaceX Shut Europe Out of the Space Launch Market? – Motley Fool – The throwaway Ariane 6 may offer flights at half the price of the Ariane 5 but that may not be sufficient to keep payload owners from moving to the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Blue Origin New Glenn, which can be cheaper still because of their reusable first stages.
Rise of the Rockets – NOVA/PBS – A recent NOVA science program episode looked at the boom in development of new rockets. The complete 54 minute video is currently available for viewing at the link.
3. Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019; 7-8:30 pm PST (9-10:30 pm CST, 10-11:30 pm EST): We welcome back Matt Bille regarding using microsats to track whales. See uploaded items on The Space Show website page for this show.
4. Friday, Feb. 22, 2019; 9:30-11 am PST (11:30 AM-1 pm CST, 12:30-2 pm EST): We welcome Dr. Zina Jarrahi-Cinker regarding graphene and its uses for space and space mfg.
5. Sunday, Feb. 24, 2019; 12-1:30 pm PST (3-4:30 pm EST, 2-3:30 pm CST): We welcome back Linda Plush, aerospace medicine nurse and specialist in human spaceflight. News and updates from the front lines.
A selection of recent programs:
** Fri, 02/15/2019 – Dr. William Dawson talked about “dark matter, dark energy, physics research, black holes, research goals and legacy, gravitational waves, gravitational lensing and much more”.
** Sun, 02/10/2019 – Dr. Beth O’Leary and Lisa Westwood discussed preservation of “space historical sites in space, on the Moon, on Earth and throughout the solar system”.
** Fri, 02/08/2019 – Mark Whittington discussed recent “space news, space policy, lunar return, launches and rocketry, Apollo history, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Elon Musk, Starship, BFR and much more”.
** The Space Show – Tue, 02/05/2019 – Robert Zimmerman spoke about “record launch activity, FH, F9, heavy lift, Geo satellite market, cubesat constellations, NASA, commercial crew, space politics, and more”.
A sampling of recent articles, press releases, etc. related to student and amateur CubeSat / SmallSat projects and programs:
**Surrey Space Center at the University of Surrey in the UK is the leader of the consortium that built the RemoveDEBRIS spacecraft, a 100 kg microsat deployed into orbit from the ISS last June with the help of NanoRacks. The goal of RemoveDEBRIS is to test several technologies for removing debris and derelict spacecraft from low earth orbit. (Stellenbosch University (South Africa) is another college member of the consortium.)
Another technology for decreasing space junk involves deployment of a “sail”, i.e. a lightweight sheet, that increases the drag of the spacecraft as it flies through the extremely wispy remnants of the atmosphere in low earth orbit (LEO) and thus greatly decreases the time it takes to fall out of orbit.
Two drag sail demos involving Surrey are part of the SSO-A mission launched by SpaceX last December, which deployed of over 60 smallsats into LEO. Two so-called “Free Flyer” structures that deployed groups of the smallsats have themselves deployed sails. The two Free Flyers do not have any communications systems and so the team needs the help of skywatchers to track them: SSO-A Solar Sails deployed – may be visible to naked eye | Southgate Amateur Radio News –
The free flyers separated from the launch vehicle and in turn deployed multiple satellites each including Microsats and CubeSats over the course of several hours. The Upper Free Flyer (NORAD ID: 43763) is a large structure at approximately 1,000kg and the Lower Free Flyer is approximately 260kg (NORAD ID: 43760). Each Free Flyer hosts one of our 16m2 aluminised kapton sail which was set to deploy 24 hours after launch.
The systems were standalone isolated systems with no communications so we don’t have any telemetry confirmation. Drag parameters from the TLEs are indicative of a successful deployment, but far from definitive. We’re therefore waiting for them to become optically visible in northern latitudes in the next couple of weeks. Based on the experience with our InflateSail mission, we’d expect these objects to be quite bright to the naked eye if the sails have deployed successfully. InflateSail was 10m2 and (initially) transparent with a +4.2 mag, whereas these sails are 16m2 and metalised so could well flare brightly.
Any observations that could be made by the community of either of these objects would be greatly appreciated and they should make for interesting targets.
A nanosatellite named MeznSat is being manufactured by a group of university students in the UAE, the Khaleej Times has reported. The aim of the satellite is to pinpoint the cause of greenhouse gases. Once the data from the satellite is shared with students, analysts and researchers, it is hoped that they can work to mitigate the production of the gases. The students, from the American University of Ras Al Khaimah (AURAK) and the Khalifa University, aim to launch the satellite later this year.
**NepaliSat-1 is a joint project of Japan’s Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech) and the Nepal Academy of Science and Technology and is funded by the government of Nepal. It is Nepal’s first satellite. The cubesat will be transported to the ISS on a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo mission scheduled for April and later deployed into orbit from the station.
In a finding that has implications for how scientists calculate natural greenhouse gas emissions, a new study finds that water levels in small lakes across northern Canada and Alaska vary during the summer much more than was assumed.
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In all, the study explored four sub-areas of the North American Arctic and sub-Arctic and found the little-studied Canadian Shield to be most dynamic of all, with about 1.4 percent of its landscape seasonally inundated by small fluctuations in lake levels.
Cooley said, “What I’m most excited about from a science perspective is the ability to make use of this new CubeSat imagery,” Cooley said. “We couldn’t have made these observations without the CubeSats, and here we show that it’s possible to extract valuable scientific information from those images.”
Large space organization satellites trimmed with touchy logical instruments can assemble a wide range of data, however, basically, don’t make enough overhead [passes] to get changes that happen over brief timeframes. Furthermore, the satellites that do ignore once a day come up short on the camera goals to mention fine-scale objective facts of the lake region.
The CubeSats, as of late propelled by an organization called Planet, offered a potential solution. The organization works in excess of 150 satellites, which circle the Earth in a course of action that empowers them to picture Earth’s whole landmass every day as the planet pivots underneath them. And keeping in mind that the small satellites need modern logical hardware, they do have powerful cameras fit for catching pictures with 3-meter resolution.
Exolaunch, the German launch services provider formerly called ECM-Space, is preparing its most complex small satellite cluster to date.
This spring or summer, Exolaunch plans to send 40 small satellites, including a 16-unit cubesat for in-space transportation startup Momentus, into orbit on a Russian Soyuz rocket.
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Since its first launch in 2013, Exolaunch, a spinoff of the Technical University of Berlin, has helped send 54 satellites into orbit, ranging in size from one-quarter of a single cubesat to a 110-kilogram small satellite. Many of those were German spacecraft funded by the German space agency DLR, including the 20-kilogram TechnoSat and four eight-kilogram S-NET communications satellites from the Technical University of Berlin, the University of Stuttgart Institute of Space Systems’ 110-kilogram Flying Laptop and Wuerzburg University’s one-kilogram UWE-4 cubesat.
A sampling of links to recent space policy, politics, and government (US and international) related space news and resource items that I found of interest:
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