30 May 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶STS-115 Update
OK, I'm now officially starting the updates for the launch
after STS-121 (currently scheduled for July 1).
Per Space.com:
NASA next week will begin assembly of shuttle Atlantis for a planned Aug. 28 launch on a mission aimed at resuming construction of the half-built International Space Station.
Set to begin Friday, the assembly work also is timed to enable NASA to launch Atlantis on a mid-August rescue mission should serious problems crop up during a test flight aboard Discovery in July.
The assembly work will begin in high bay 3 of the Kennedy Space Center Vehicle Assembly Building, where workers will start stacking two solid rocket boosters on a mobile launcher platform.
Atlantis is to be rolled from a nearby hangar into the 52-story assembly building July 25. Crane operators will hoist the spaceship atop the mobile launcher platform and connect it to an external tank outfitted with the two boosters.
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Heavenly Goings-On
In honor of Jordan, here's some
astronomy news from Science@NASA:
Something remarkable is about to happen in the evening sky. Three planets and a star cluster are converging for a close encounter you won't want to miss.
19 May 2006
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶STS-121 Update
Good news about rollout -- for me, at least. It's been delayed so that
first motion is now scheduled for 11 a.m. CDT, so anyone who's interested can watch, without having had to get up in the middle of the night last night. The event will be webcast on
NASA TV. Granted, roll-out is one of those things that gets tedious pretty quickly, but that first bit as the shuttle stack leaves the VAB is pretty cool stuff to watch.
18 May 2006
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶Challenging Film
Right Stuff director Philip Kaufman will be revisiting the space program in
his next film, Challenger, which will focus on Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman's investigation into the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Starring as Feynman will be David Strathairn, who played Edward Murrow in Good Night And Good Luck. The film will be produced by Media 8 Entertainment, Inc., an independent studio whose releases include Monster and The Upside of Anger.
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶STS-121 Update
Per NASA:
Carried in a special canister mounted on a transporter, the payloads for mission STS-121 trekked across NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 17, arriving at Launch Pad 39B in early afternoon. The payloads will be loaded into Space Shuttle Discovery's payload bay after the vehicle reaches the launch pad.
Discovery will join her STS-121 payloads at 39B tomorrow. Roll-out is scheduled to begin at 1 a.m. CDT, which would put Discovery on the pad around 7 a.m.
Also per NASA, in an unrelated bit:
If there are bowling-ball size satellites flying in formation inside the International Space Station, where's Luke Skywalker?
...
Astronaut Jeff Williams wont need the Force or a lightsaber May 18 when he unveils the first of three free-flying nano-satellites and releases it for a test flight inside the U.S. Destiny Lab.
17 May 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶STS-121 Update
When Discovery finally rolled out to the launch pad last year (the first time) to return to shuttle fleet to flight, I watched with great excitement (well, not the whole time, to be sure; but on and off), even though it can be a pretty tedious event. The leaving the VAB bit is pretty good, though.
If you're interested in doing the same for STS-121 Friday, though, you'd better be prepared to get up early.
Roll-out is scheduled to begin at 1 a.m. CDT, which would put Discovery on the pad around 7 a.m.
16 May 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶STS-121 Update
Discovery has been
mated to the ET/SRB stack in preparation for the STS-121 mission, currently scheduled for NET July 1. The completed stack is scheduled to roll out to the launch pad on Friday.
For all the challenges that have gone into the last two launches, and the history that made a return to flight necessary, it's impossible for me not to get excited seeing pictures like this one.
According to the current schedule, we are now at T-minus one month, 16 days. And counting.
12 May 2006
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶Picture Of The Day
Beautiful, isn't she?
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶STS-121 Update
Rollin', rollin', rollin'...
As I write this, the transporter started its engine about six minutes ago to begin carrying Discovery on its roll-over from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building, where it will be mated during the next week to the ET/SRB stack in preparation for roll-out to the pad one week from today.
Updates can be found at
Spaceflight Now's Mission Status Center.
11 May 2006
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶STS-121 Update
Remember the other day when I reported that roll-over of Discovery to the VAB was going to be today instead of tomorrow? Well,
it's going to be tomorrow after all. There's a broken jack screw in the system that lifts the orbiter to be mated to the ET/SRB stack, and, while that should be fixed this morning or early afternoon, expected bad weather has pushed the move to tomorrow.
10 May 2006
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶HSM-4
I'm not sure how much credence I give the source, but NASASpaceFlight.com is reporting that
a Hubble-servicing Shuttle mission has been moved up in the schedule. According to the report, STS-125, to be flown by Discovery has a launch planning date of April 11, 2008.
The article goes on to report that if things go as planned, there will be three more shuttle flights in 2006, five in 2007 (on in February, the other four in June through November), five in 2008, four in 2009 and the last flight will be STS-132 on January 21, 2010. The last flight for OV-104, Atlantis, it reports will be STS-126, scheduled for August 2008.
09 May 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶To Mars And ... Well ....
Would you want to go to Mars? If you had it, would you be willing to pay $10,000 for the trip?
Here's the biggie: How long would you be willing to stay?
X Prize founder Peter Diamandis is proposing
a privately funded mission to Mars, in which 100,100 people would contribute amounts from $10,000 to $1 million. From those contributors, 101 would be selected to actually make the trip.
Here's the catch. The 101 who went to Mars wouldn't come back.
The goal of the project would be to create a human colony on Mars, which many believe could be done for less than the cost of sending a return mission to Mars, even with many fewer people involved. The fundraising structure, in fact, assumes a total cost for the mission of about $8 billion.
The big question I had was that the article continuously referred to the colony as a "permanent" human settlement, but doesn't, that I saw, address the issue of population sustainability. Do they mean "permanent" just in the sense that it's not for a set period of time, or do they really mean that it would coninue even beyond the initial settlers, meaning that either more people would follow behind the first group, or that future generations would be part of the plan?
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶STS-121 Update
I knew that Discovery was scheduled for a Friday roll-over -- the trip from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building where it will be mated to the ET/SRB stack -- and was trying to find a link to an article about that.
When I found one, though, it has some surprising cool news -- Things are going ahead of schedule and
roll-over is now scheduled to begin Thursday morning at 7 a.m. CDT. Roll-out to launch pad 39B is scheduled for next Friday, May 19.
If things continue to progress, we are currently at T minus one month, 22 days.
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶Supersonic For The People
In the wake of some problematic tests, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is
hoping to team with NASA to develop a supersonic commercial jet that could carry passengers from Tokyo to L.A. in three hours. The jet would be a next-generation successor to the retired Concorde, and would use an air-breathing scramjet engine.
08 May 2006
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶Rocket Test
Last week, I finally got around to doing something I've been wanting to do since working here, but had never made the time to do. I attended a
rocket engine test at Marshall. This center no longer does the big engine testing that it did in the '50s and early '60s, that sort of thing is done at Stennis now, but we still have smaller-engine tests from time to time to let the engineers here stay hands-on, and to do some try out some concepts for potential integration into bigger tests.
The test I went to involved a scale-model of the space shuttle SRB motor being fired straight up into the air for about half a minute. Very loud; very, very bright. Not nearly as impressive as an actual launch, of course, but still a cool thing to check out one afternoon.
05 May 2006
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶STS-121 Update
Per Spaceflight Now:
NASA managers today ruled out a June 1 fueling test with the shuttle Discovery, deciding there was no clear-cut technical justification for a complex exercise that would put unwanted stress on the tank's foam insulation and use up valuable contingency time.
...
Engineers currently plan to move Discovery from its processing hangar to the Vehicle Assembly Building for attachment to the tank and its twin solid-fuel boosters on May 12. Rollout to the launch pad is targeted for May 19.
Rollover could be briefly delayed if engineers decide to correct a subtle timing problem with a recently installed jet thruster control assembly. But with the elimination of the tanking test, the Kennedy Space Center launch team has 17 days of contingency time available to handle unexpected problems.
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Today In History
On this date 45 years ago, Alan Shepard made America's first spaceflight in his Freedom 7 Mercury capsule.
03 May 2006
+ 0 - 1 | § ¶Space Day
Hey, I made the
front of the NASA homepage again.
Tomorrow is Space Day, and
NASA's going to be holding a webcast from Goddard Space Flight Center that the public can watch, with astronauts and stuff, including a scheduled downlink with ISS.
01 May 2006
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶Good Luck, Eileen
When I had the opportunity to talk to Eileen Collins a couple of years before the STS-114 mission, she told me she had thought about leaving after her first flight as a shuttle commander but decided to stick around for one more flight because she wanted to see the International Space Station. Though the sticking around lasted longer than she'd anticipated when she was assigned to the flight, she got her wish last July, and has now
decided it's time to move on.
She also said that she hopes to return to orbit someday; this time as a tourist so that she'll actually be able to relax and enjoy the experience instead of worrying about what has to be done next. Here's hoping she gets a chance to enjoy the view from above.
+ 1 - 0 | § ¶STS-121 Update
The odds of making the July launch window for STS-121 got a little higher Friday, when NASA announced that it would
not be making some additional changes to the external tank for the upcoming missions, deciding instead to test the effectiveness of changes already made for the mission without the additional x-factors that further changes would throw into the mix.
A final decision on whether the ET will be safe to fly as-is will be made at the flight readiness review that begins on June 16 (by which time Discovery will be on the pad awaiting launch), though, as the linked article notes, there are several other decisions that will have to be made before and after that.
As of today, though, we are at T-minus two months. And counting.
