May the 4th is almost here, and NASA had to call on R2-D2 to help make sure the space station astronauts could wish all of us a happy Star Wars Day.
R2-D2 Saves Space Station Crew for Star Wars Day
U.S. Should Send Astronauts To Space Station By Trampoline: Russian Official
Facing sanctions from the United States government, a high-ranking Russian official took to Twitter today (April 29) to express his frustration, warning that NASA has few options should Soyuz flights to the International Space Station cease.
“After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline,” wrote Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s deputy prime minister, in a Russian-language tweet highlighted by NBC News.
The jibe points to the fact that only the Russians can bring crews up to the space station right now. Rogozin also linked to a story in Russian RT where he is quoted as saying (if Google Translate is correct) that the Americans will see a “boomerang” of sanctions laid upon Russian officials.
On April 2, as part of a larger policy of the Obama administration, NASA announced it would cease most connections with Russia except for those essential ones related to the International Space Station. NASA administrator Charles Bolden has repeatedly said that things are normal with the Russians when it comes to the station.
The United States is dependent on the Russian Soyuz to bring astronauts to the space station. The U.S. method of transportation ceased in 2011 after the space shuttle retired, and commercial spacecraft — though being developed — are not expected to be ready until about 2017.
That said, one of the developers of these spacecraft — SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — wrote on Twitter that the public will soon see the unveiling of the human-rated Dragon spacecraft that the company has been working on with contract money from NASA. (The other funded spacecraft proposals are Boeing’s CST-100 and Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser).
Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on w @NASA. No trampoline needed — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2014
Cover drops on May 29. Actual flight design hardware of crew Dragon, not a mockup.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2014
The Russian situation is expected to weigh heavily on NASA budget discussions for fiscal 2014 and 2015 as agency officials try to make their case that commercial funding should be sustained, or even increased, for Americans to be able to launch from their own soil again quickly.
LADEE Sees Zodiacal Light before Crashing into Moon, but Apollo Mystery Remains
Sunrise over the surface of the moon: a series of star tracker images taken by LADEE Saturday, April 12. The lunar horizon is ahead, a few minutes before orbital sunrise. Image Credit: NASA Ames.
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NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) literally ‘saw the light’ just days before crashing into the lunar farside last Thursday April 17. Skimming just a few kilometers above the moon’s surface, mission controllers took advantage of this unique low angle to gaze out over the moon’s horizon in complete darkness much like the Apollo astronauts did from lunar orbit more than 40 years ago.
With the glow of Earth well-hidden, any dust in the moon’s scant atmosphere around the time of orbital sunrise should become visible. Scientists also expected to see the softly luminous glow of the zodiacal light, an extensive cloud of comet and asteroid dust concentrated in the flat plane of the solar system. The zodiacal light gets its name from the zodiac, that familiar band of constellations the planets pass through as they orbit the sun. Back on Earth, the zodiacal light looks like a big thumb of light standing up from the western horizon a couple hours after sunset in spring and before sunrise in fall.
So what did LADEE see? As you watch the animation above, comprised of images taken from darkness until sunrise, you’ll see a yellow haze on the horizon that expands into large diffuse glow tilted slightly to the right. This is the zodiacal light along with a smaller measure of light coming from sun’s outer atmosphere or corona. Together they’re referred to as CZL or ‘coronal and zodiacal light’. At the very end, the sun peaks over the lunar horizon.
What appears to be missing from the pictures are the mysterious rays seen by some of the Apollo astronauts. The rays, neatly sketched by astronaut Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17, look a lot like those beams of light and shadow streaming though holes in clouds called crepuscular rays.
Only thing is, Earth’s atmosphere is thick enough for cloud beams. The dust in the moon’s atmosphere appears much too thin to cause the same phenomenon. And yet the astronauts saw rays as if sunlight streamed between mountain peaks and scattered off the dust just like home.
It’s believed that dust gets lofted into the spare lunar atmosphere via electricity. Ultraviolet light from the sun knocks electrons from atoms in moon dust, giving them a positive charge. Since like charges repel, bits of dust push away from one another and move in the direction of least resistance: up. The smaller the dust particle, the higher it rises until dropping back down to the surface. Perhaps these “fountains” of lunar dust illuminated by the sun are what the astronauts recorded.
Unlike Cernan, LADEE saw only the expected coronal and zodiacal light but no rays. Scientists plan to look more closely at several sequences of images made of lunar sunrise in hopes of finding them.
UPDATE: Spacewalkers Zip Through Tasks To Fix Broken Computer
UPDATE, 11:42 a.m. EDT: Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson finished their spacewalk in just 1 hour and 36 minutes, nearly an hour faster than what NASA budgeted for. Early tests show the replacement computer is working well, providing backup once again for the robotics, solar arrays and other systems on station.
Can two astronauts fix a broken computer quickly on the International Space Station, preventing possible problems with the solar arrays and robotics? Watch live (above) to find out.
The NASA spacewalk involving Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson is scheduled to start today (April 23) at 9:20 a.m. EDT (1:20 p.m. UTC), with coverage starting around 8:30 a.m. EDT (12:30 p.m. UTC). The spacewalk is scheduled to last 2.5 hours. Bear in mind that the times could change as circumstances arise.
The computer, also called a multiplexer/demultiplexer (MDM), failed for unknown reasons a couple of weeks ago. While the primary computer is working perfectly and the crew is in no danger, things get more risky if the primary computer also breaks. That’s why NASA worked to get the spacewalkers outside as quickly as possible. You can see a full briefing of the rationale here.
As a note, all non-urgent spacewalks have been suspended because NASA is still working on addressing the recommendations given after a life-threatening water leak took place in a NASA spacesuit last summer. Urgent spacewalks can still go ahead because the agency has implemented safety measures such as snorkels and helmet absorption pads in case of another leak.
That said, in the months since NASA has traced the problem to contamination in a filter in the fan pump separator. After replacing the separator, the leaky spacesuit was used during two contingency spacewalks in December with no water problems at all.
Remembering John Houbolt: the Man Who Gave Us Lunar Orbit Rendezvous
The space community lost a colossus of the of the Apollo era last week, when John Houbolt passed away last Tuesday just five days after his 95th birthday.
Perhaps the name isn’t as familiar to many as Armstrong or Von Braun, but John Houbolt was a pivotal figure in getting us to the Moon.
Born in Altoona, Iowa on April 10th, 1919, Houbolt spent most of his youth in Joliet, Illinois. He earned a Masters degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1942 and a PhD in Technical Sciences from ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 1957. But before that, he would become a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1942, an organization that would later become the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA in 1958.
It was 1961 when Houbolt made what would be his most enduring mark on the space program. He was working as an engineer at the Langley Research Center, at a time when NASA and the United States seriously needed a win in the space race. The U.S.S.R. had enjoyed a long string of firsts, including first satellite in orbit (Sputnik 1, October 1957), first spacecraft to photograph the lunar farside (Luna 3 in October 1959) and first human in space with the launch of Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 in April 1961. A young President Kennedy would make his now famous “We choose to go to the Moon…” speech at Rice University later the next year in late 1962. Keep in mind, in U.S. astronaut John Glenn had just made his first orbital flight months before Kennedy’s speech, and total accumulated human time in space could be measured in mere hours. Unmanned Ranger spacecraft were having a tough time even getting off of the pad, and managing to crash a space probe into the Moon was considered to be a “success”. The task of sending humans “by the end of this decade” was a daunting one indeed…
NASA would soon have a mandate to sent humans to the Moon: but how could they pull it off?
Early ideas for manned lunar missions envisioned a single gigantic rocket that would head to the Moon and land, Buck Rodgers style, “fins first.” Such a rocket would have to be enormous, and carry the fuel to escape Earth’s gravity well, land and launch from the Moon, and return to Earth.
A second approach, known as Earth-orbit rendezvous, would see several launches assemble a mission in low Earth orbit and then head to the Moon. Curiously, though this was an early idea, it was never used in Apollo, though it was briefly resurrected during the now defunct Constellation Program.
But it was a third option that intrigued Houbolt, known as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. LOR had been proposed by rocket pioneers Yuri Kondratyuk and Hermann Oberth in 1923, but had never been seriously considered. It called for astronauts to depart the Earth in a large rocket, and instead, use a small lander designed only to land and launch from the Moon while the spacecraft for Earth return orbited overhead.
Houbolt became a staunch advocate for the idea, and spent over a year convincing NASA officials. In one famous letter to NASA associate administrator Robert Seamans, Houbolt was known to have remarked “Do we want to go to the Moon or not?”
It’s interesting to note that it was probably only in a young organization like the NASA of the early 1960s that, in Houbolt’s own words, a “voice in in the wilderness” could be heard. Had NASA become a military run organization — as many advocated for in the 1950s — a rigid chain of command could have meant that such brash ideas as Houbolt’s would have never seen the light of day. Thank scientists such as James Van Allen for promoting the idea of a civilian space program that we take for granted today.
Even then, selling LOR wasn’t easy. The idea looked preposterous: astronauts would have to learn how to undock and dock while orbiting a distant world, with no chance of rescue. There was no second chance, no backup option. Early plans called for an EVA for astronauts to enter the Lunar Module prior to descent which were later scrapped in favor of extracting it from atop the third stage and boarding internally before reaching the Moon.
Once Houbolt had sold key visionaries such as Wernher von Braun on the idea in late 1962, LOR became the way we would go to the Moon. And although Houbolt’s estimations of the mass required for the Lunar Module were off by a factor of three, the story is now the stuff of early Apollo era legend. You can see Houbolt (played by Reed Birney) and the tale of the LM and LOR in the From Earth to the Moon episode 5 entitled “Spider”.
Houbolt was awarded NASA’s medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1963, and he was in Mission Control When Apollo 11 touched down in the Sea of Tranquility.
He passed away in a Scarborough, Maine nursing home last Tuesday, and joins other unsung visionaries of the early space program such as Mary Sherman Morgan. It’s sad to think that we may soon live in a world where those who not only walked on the Moon, but those who also sent us and knew how to get there, are no longer with us.
Thanks, John… you gave us the Moon.
SpaceX Makes Strides Towards 1st Stage Falcon Rocket Recovery during Space Station Launch
Blastoff of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on April 18, 2014. Credit: Alan Walters/AmericaSpace
Story updated[/caption]
The powerful SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched successfully on a cargo delivery run for NASA bound for the Space Station on Friday, April 18, from Cape Canaveral, Fla, also had a key secondary objective for the company aimed at experimenting with eventually recovering the rockets first stage via the use of landing legs and leading to the boosters refurbishment and reuse further down the road.
Marking a first of its kind test, this 20 story tall commercial Falcon 9 rocket was equipped with a quartet of landing legs to test controlled soft landing techniques first in the ocean and then back on solid ground at some later date this year or next – by reigniting the 1st stage engines for a guided touchdown.
The 12 foot diameter Falcon 9 rocket would sprout the legs just prior to water impact for the controlled soft landing in the Atlantic Ocean, guided by SpaceX engineers.
Prior to the launch SpaceX managers were careful not to raise expectations.
“The entire recovery of the first stage is completely experimental,” said Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX vice president of mission assurance. “It has nothing to do with the primary mission.”
He estimated the odds of successfully retrieving an intact booster at merely 30 or 40 percent.
Following Friday’s blastoff, SpaceX reported they made significant strides towards that goal of a 1st stage recovery.
SpaceX engineers had preprogrammed the spent first stage to relight several Merlin 1 D engines after completing the boost phase and stage seperation to stabilize it, reduce its roll rate and then gradually lower its altitude back down to the Atlantic Ocean’s surface for a soft landing attempt and later possible recovery by retrieval ships.
All these critical steps seemed to go fairly well in initial reports that are subject to change.
SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk reported at a post launch briefing and later tweeted further updates that the Falcon 9 first stage actually made a good water landing despite rough seas, with waves swelling at least six feet.
“Roll rate close to zero (v important!).”
“Data upload from tracking plane shows landing in Atlantic was good! Several boats enroute through heavy seas,” Musk tweeted.
Furthermore he reported that the 1st stage survived the ocean touchdown.
“Flight computers continued transmitting for 8 seconds after reaching the water. Stopped when booster went horizontal.”
Because of the high waves, the recovery boats had difficulty reaching the booster in the recovery area located some two hundred miles off shore from Cape Canaveral.
Several previous attempts by SpaceX to recover the first stage via parachutes and thrusters were not successful. So SpaceX adopted this new approach with the landing legs and 1st stage Merlin 1 D engines.
Further details will be proved when they become available.
The attachment of the 25 foot long 1st stage landing legs to SpaceX’s next-generation Falcon 9 rocket for ocean recovery counts as a major step towards the firm’s future goal of building a fully reusable rocket and dramatically lowering launch costs compared to expendable boosters.
The eventual goal is to accomplish a successful first stage touchdown by the landing legs on solid ground back somewhere near on Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Musk said that SpaceX is still working out the details on finding a suitable landing location with NASA and the US Air Force.
Extensive work and testing remains to develop and refine the technology before a land landing will be attempted by the company, says Musk.
It will be left to future missions to accomplish a successful first stage touchdown by the landing legs back on solid ground back through a series of ramped up rocket tests at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“Even though we probably won’t get the stage back, I think we’re really starting to connect the dots of what’s needed,” Musk said at the briefing.
“There are only a few more dots that need to be there to have it all work. I think we’ve got a decent chance of bringing a stage back this year, which would be wonderful.”
Overall Musk was very pleased with the performance of the rocket and the landing leg test.
“I would consider it a success in the sense that we were able to control the boost stage to a zero roll rate, which is previously what has destroyed the stage, an uncontrolled roll, where the on-board nitrogen thrusters weren’t able to control the aerodynamic torque and spun up.”
“This time, with more powerful thrusters and more nitrogen propellant, we were able to null the roll rates.”
“I’m feeling pretty excited,” Musk stated. “This is a happy day. Most important of all is that we did a good job for NASA.”
This extra powerful new version of the Falcon 9 dubbed v1.1 is powered by a cluster of nine of SpaceX’s new Merlin 1D engines that are about 50% more powerful compared to the standard Merlin 1C engines. The nine Merlin 1D engines 1.3 million pounds of thrust at sea level rises to 1.5 million pounds as the rocket climbs to orbit.
Therefore the upgraded Falcon 9 can boost a much heavier cargo load to the ISS, low Earth orbit, geostationary orbit and beyond.
Indeed Dragon is loaded with nearly 5000 pounds of cargo, about double the weight carried previously.
If all goes well, Dragon will reach the ISS early on Easter Sunday morning after a two day orbital chase.
Station crew members Rick Mastracchio and Steven Swanson will grapple the Dragon cargo freighter with the 57 foot long Canadarm2 on Easter Sunday at about 7:14 a.m. and then berth it at the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module.
NASA TV coverage of the Easter Sunday grappling process will begin at 5:45 a.m. with berthing coverage beginning at 9:30 a.m. : http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, commercial space, Orion, Chang’e-3, LADEE, Mars rover, MAVEN, MOM and more planetary and human spaceflight news.
Ken Kremer
SpaceX Leases Historic Launch Complex 39A from NASA for new Era of Commercial Space Launches
The keys to NASA’s historic launch Pad 39A that propelled humanity’s first man to walk on the Moon – Neil Armstrong – during the history making flight of Apollo 11, have been handed over to new owners, namely the private aerospace firm SpaceX for a new purpose – serving as a commercial launch facility.
NASA and Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) of Hawthorne, Calif., have just signed an agreement giving SpaceX rights to occupy and operate seaside Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.
SpaceX was founded by billionaire, entrepreneur and space visionary Elon Musk.
SpaceX aims to give the now dormant pad a new lease on life in the emerging New Space era by revitalizing it as a commercial launch site for the company’s mammoth new Falcon Heavy rocket, currently under development, as well as for manned launches of the firm’s human rated Dragon spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 according to Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX.
“We’ll make great use of this pad, I promise,” Shotwell told reporters at a briefing at the pad.
The liquid fueled Falcon Heavy will be the most powerful rocket in the world according to SpaceX, generating generating nearly four million pounds of liftoff thrust from 27 engines and thus significantly exceeding the power of the Delta IV Heavy manufactured by competitor United Launch Alliance.
Shotwell said renovations to pad 39A would start later this year. The maiden SpaceX launch from the complex is expected next year.
“We will launch the Falcon Heavy from here from this pad early next year,” Shotwell stated.
The SpaceX Dragon is one of three commercial crew vehicles being developed under a public-private partnership with NASA to ferry US astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) and restore America’s human spaceflight capability lost since the shuttle’s retirement.
The Boeing CST-100 and Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser are also vying for the next round of private ‘space taxi’ funding from NASA.
Pad 39A has been inactive and mothballed since the last shuttle mission, STS-135, thundered to space in July 2011.
Not a single rocket has rolled up the ramp at KSC in nearly 3 years.
Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
The new lease agreement was signed by NASA and SpaceX officials and announced onsite at Pad 39 at the briefing.
“Today this historic site from which numerous Apollo and space shuttle missions began and from which I first flew and left the planet on STS-61C on Columbia, is beginning a new mission as a commercial launch site,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
“While SpaceX will use pad 39A at Kennedy, about a mile away on pad 39B, we’re preparing for our deep space missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars. The parallel pads at Kennedy perfectly exemplify NASA’s parallel path for human spaceflight exploration — U.S. commercial companies providing access to low-Earth orbit and NASA deep space exploration missions at the same time.”
Under terms of the new agreement with NASA, the lease with SpaceX spans 20 years.
“It’s exciting that this storied NASA launch pad is opening a new chapter for space exploration and the commercial aerospace industry,” said Bolden.
SpaceX will also maintain and operate Pad 39A at its own expense, with no US federal funding from NASA.
Pad 39A will be SpaceX’s third launch site. The company also launches its Falcon 9 rockets from nearby Pad 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and a west coast pad on Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
The next Falcon 9 liftoff with an unmanned Dragon cargo freighter is currently slated from Friday, April 18 following Monday’s scrub.
NASA determined that the agency no longer has a use for pad 39A since the end of the shuttle era and has been looking for a new tenant to take over responsibility and pay for maintenance of the launch complex. The agency awarded the lease to SpaceX in December 2013.
Instead, NASA decided to completely upgrade, renovate and modernize Pad 39As twin, namely Launch Pad 39B, and invested in converting it into a 21st Century launch complex.
NASA will use Pad 39B to launch the state of the art Orion crew vehicle atop the new Space Launch System (SLS) booster for voyages beyond Earth and taking humans back to the vicinity of the Moon and further out on deep space missions to Asteroids, Mars and beyond.
The first unmanned SLS test flight from Pad 39B is slated for late 2017.
Pad 39A was an active NASA launch pad for nearly 35 years starting back near the dawn of the Space Age in the 1960s.
Apollo 4 was the first NASA booster to blast off from Pad 39A on Nov. 9, 1967 during the historic inaugural test flight of the Saturn V moon rocket that eventually served to dispatch all six US manned lunar landing missions.
The closing NASA use of Pad 39A took place on July 8, 2011 with the launch of STS-135 and orbiter Atlantis on the final flight of the space shuttle era.
The four person STS-135 crew delivered the last US pressurized module to the massive low-Earth orbiting ISS.
No Americans have launched to space from American soil since STS-135.
Launch Complex 39 was originally constructed to launch the Apollo moon landing missions atop NASA’s Saturn V booster in the 1960s and 1970s. Both pads were later modified to support the Space Shuttle program whose first launch took place in 1981 from pad 39A.
“Kennedy Space Center is excited to welcome SpaceX to our growing list of partners,” Center Director Bob Cabana said. “As we continue to reconfigure and repurpose these tremendous facilities, it is gratifying to see our plan for a multi-user spaceport shared by government and commercial partners coming to fruition.”
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, commercial space, Orion, Chang’e-3, LADEE, Mars rover, MAVEN, MOM and more planetary and human spaceflight news.
Shiny: Astronaut Wears ‘Firefly’ T-Shirt In First Instagram From Space
And now, time for some thrilling heroics. NASA astronaut Steve Swanson sent out the first Instagram from space last week wearing none other than a Firefly T-shirt. There’s something to be said about a space-faring guy evoking images of Captain Mal doing the impossible in the plucky Serenity spaceship, isn’t there?
We’re happy the epicness did not break NASA’s Instagram feed, as Swanson has been sending out pictures regularly since then showing the view from orbit (he joked about wanting a vacation at one point) as well as another selfie. You can check out the magic below, and follow the rest on NASA’s Instagram feed. We’ve copied and pasted Swanson’s captions below each image.
During Swanson’s first mission to space in 2007, STS-117, he brought with him the DVD set of Firefly and its movie spinoff, Serenity, and left it on the International Space Station library, according to collectSPACE.
Oh, and social media from space is also being covered on Twitter, via Expedition 39 NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata, from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
“The Turks and Caicos islands – I think I need to go there after this mission.” – Swanny #exp39 #earth #iss #international #space #station #nasa #vacation #earthrightnow
“Blood, sweat, but hopefully no tears.” – Swanny #nasa #iss #exp39 #international #space #station #blood #sweat #tears #medical
“Cape Canaveral – looking forward to when the US launches out of here again.” – Swanny #iss #exp39 #earth #florida #capecanaveral #international #space #station #launch #atlantic #coast #nasa
“The Maldive Islands” – Swanny #exp39 #iss #international #space #station #earth #earthrightnow #maldives #island
“The Northern Lights, while over Europe.” – Swanny #exp39 #nasa #iss #international #space #station #earth #europe #night #aurora
How Not To Get Bored During A Year On Space Station
When planning for long-duration space travel, many people would think along the lines of not forgetting a towel or something of that nature. But we on Earth who are spoiled by the astounding pictures beamed from space must realize that even astronauts can get tired of looking at the same few walls for months at a time.
Scott Kelly is going to spend a year in space in 2015, and he highlighted boredom as one of the things he will need to fight against during his time on the International Space Station.
“There are things I will do a little bit differently with regards to pacing myself. You wouldn’t think this is true, but you do have to kind of stay entertained over that kind of period,” said Scott Kelly in a NASA interview late last week, which you can watch above.
“No matter how exciting that kind of things is, no matter how beautiful the Earth is, when you’re doing it for a year there is still the factor of trying to keep yourself engaged and interested.”
Kelly also highlighted some of the training challenges he will face being that he will be up there twice as long as the typical six-month space station mission. While it won’t take twice as long to do emergency training, he is required to do it with twice as many astronauts/cosmonauts because he will be working with four crews in space.
He also will train with two different Soyuz spacecraft commanders (which will add “complexity”, he noted) and have twice as much science to perform. That includes several “twin” studies where scientists will compare Kelly and his identical brother Mark, a four-time shuttle flyer who retired from the program in 2011.
Another lesson learned from his last six-month flight in 2010? “I know what I want to bring this time that I didn’t have last time,” Kelly said, although he didn’t elaborate on what those items are.
Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will begin their mission just under one year from now.
SpaceX Cargo Launch to Station “GO” for April 14 – Watch Live Here
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket preparing for April 14, 2014 liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. Credit: Julian Leek
Watch the SpaceX Launch Live here – NASA TV link below[/caption]
Following closely on the heels of Thursday’s spectacular Atlas V rocket blastoff from Cape Canaveral and a last moment computer failure at the ISS over the weekend, an upgraded Space X Falcon 9 rocket is now poised to launch on Monday (April 14) and complete a double barreled salvo of liftoffs from the Florida Space Coast merely 4 days apart – if all goes well.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon resupply freighter is slated to launch on Monday at 4:58 p.m. EDT, 2058 GMT, from Launch Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.
Update 4/14- 345 PM: Todays launch attempt scrubbed due to 1st stage Helium leak. Friday is earliest target date
This flight marks the third operational Dragon resupply mission to the 1 million pound International Space Station (ISS).
You can watch the launch live on NASA TV : http://www.nasa.gov/ntv
NASA TV live coverage will begin at 3:45 p.m. EDT and conclude at approximately 5:20 p.m.
Weather forecasters are predicting an 80 percent chance of favorable weather conditions at the scheduled liftoff time.
Monday’s launch was temporarily put in doubt by the unexpected loss on Friday (April 11) of a backup computer command relay box called a multiplexer/demultiplexer (MDM) that resides in the station’s S0 truss.
The primary MDM continued to function normally.
The MDM’s provide commanding to the station’s external cooling system, Solar Alpha Rotary joints, Mobile Transporter rail car and insight into other truss systems.
It must function in order for the astronauts to use the robotic arm to grapple and berth the Dragon at a station docking port when it arrives on Wednesday, April 16, at about 7 a.m. EDT.
NASA managers held an extensive series of review meetings since Friday with ISS program managers, station partners, and SpaceX to exhaustively consider all possibilities and insure it was safe to fly the Dragon mission.
NASA gave the final go ahead after a readiness review this Sunday morning of managers, engineers and flight controllers.
ISS crew members will conduct a spacewalk to replace the failed MDM unit after the Dragon arrives.
This unmanned SpaceX mission dubbed CRS-3 mission will deliver some 5000 pounds of science experiments, a pair of hi tech legs for Robonaut 2, a high definition imaging camera suite, an optical communications experiment (OPALS) and essential gear, the VEGGIE lettuce growing experiment, spare parts, crew provisions, food, clothing and supplies to the six person crews living and working aboard the ISS soaring in low Earth orbit under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract.
This launch has already been postponed twice since mid-March.
The original March 16 launch target was postponed 2 days before liftoff due to contamination issues with insulation blankets located inside the unpressurized trunk section of Dragon.
The second postponement from March 30 occurred when an electrical short knocked out the critical Air Force tracking required to insure a safe launch from the Eastern Range in case the rocket veers off course towards populated ares and has to be destroyed in a split second.
SpaceX is under contract to NASA to deliver 20,000 kg (44,000 pounds) of cargo to the ISS during a dozen Dragon cargo spacecraft flights over the next few years at a cost of about $1.6 Billion.
To date SpaceX has completed two operational cargo resupply missions and a test flight. The last flight dubbed CRS-2 blasted off a year ago on March 1, 2013 atop the initial version of the Falcon 9 rocket.
For this Falcon 9 flight, the rocket will sprout legs for a controlled soft landing in the Atlantic Ocean, guided by SpaceX engineers.
Eventually SpaceX will test land landings in a ramped up series of rocket tests
Stay tuned here for Ken’s continuing SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, commercial space, Orion, Chang’e-3, LADEE, Mars rover, MAVEN, MOM and more planetary and human spaceflight news.