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Actually, Mach eighteen... that's 18x the speed of sound.

Taken from http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/status.ht ml

During a mission status news conference yesterday, Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain was asked about any possible damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles during launch. The tiles are what protect the shuttle during the fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

Tracking video of launch shows what appears to be a piece of foam insulation from the shuttle's external tank falling away during ascent and hitting the shuttle's left wing near its leading edge.

But Cain said engineers "took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever. We haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. It will be a nominal, standard trajectory."

But the damage has been done: the astronauts are dead, and the U.S. space program -- which never recovered from Challenger's loss -- may soon be dead as well.

-j.

Check this: [latest is at the top]

1502 GMT (10:02 a.m. EST)

News reports say President Bush is being briefed. It is expected he could soon make a statement to the nation.

1500 GMT (10:00 a.m. EST)

There have been no further announcements from Mission Control.

1440 GMT (9:40 a.m. EST)

During a mission status news conference yesterday, Entry Flight Director Leroy Cain was asked about any possible damage to the shuttle's thermal tiles during launch. The tiles are what protect the shuttle during the fiery reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

Tracking video of launch shows what appears to be a piece of foam insulation from the shuttle's external tank falling away during ascent and hitting the shuttle's left wing near its leading edge.

But Cain said engineers "took a very thorough look at the situation with the tile on the left wing and we have no concerns whatsoever. We haven't changed anything with respect to our trajectory design. It will be a nominal, standard trajectory."

1436 GMT (9:36 a.m. EST)

NASA is asking that any persons finding debris should stay clear given the hazardous nature of the materials and alert local authorities. ...

Here's a timestamped update of the final minutes of the mission on the Spaceflight Now site.

Nope! One theory goes that this is the same way that Earth got its water. (Orginal water was boiled away in early hot days when there was no atmosphere). The only problem with such theories is the isotope ratios of the water found in comets versus Earth. Search around a bit, you'll find more. One Two Three

They explain it was detected by observing the effects the stars magnetic field has on charged particles. With a magnetic field of 10^15 gauss (vs 1-5 for the sun and the 10 - 50 for the Earth), it was mentioned that it won't just suck change out of your pocket, but rearrange the molecules in your body. Sounds like fun, doesn't it.

Nothing? Hahaha!

Ok, try this.

"When I was about to beat off to the Ellen Feiss lookalike page, my erection went from this to this.
(See nose.)"

Check the article at SpaceFlight Now.

The article I read indicates it will be one starting 10 minutes before launch and last until a short time after separation.

They turned the camera on for a temporary test. Here's an actual preview of what the shot looks like from the Shuttle. Gonna be pretty cool.

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/sts112/02091 2shuttlecam/

I tried it too. Then I tried clicking on the cached version. It took a couple of minutes before my browser gave up on fetching some gifs. Google said that page was cached in 1993. I did however click on this link to info on the crawler's cracked bearings, from August 12th.

• Increased resistance to winds while on the pad and during launch (useful in hurricane-prone Florida)
  
• Faster setup time on the pad (half-day for final setup and fueling, versus weeks) (no, I don't understand this one, but I heard it on the news last night)
  
• Decreased reliance on complex launch gantry (look at the shuttle pad. Or the titan pad. then look at the atlas -- it's just got a little tower next to it, not a huge superstructure).
  
• Modular design. If I recall correctly, current (Titan, Delta, and older Atlas) rockets require significant mission-specific construction details. Like, "oh, you're going to this orbit? Then we need to make the booster a little lighter. We'll have that booster ready in, oh, 18 months?" Now the core is the same for all payloads and all orbits, so it's "Ok, you'll need two strap-ons. How's next Friday?"

The reason seeing this preview choked me up was because it brought back to me the thought that, yes, we could have done it. We could have put those space stations up, we could have gone to Mars. We could have done so much more than we did in space. Instead, the money was spent on military hardware.

Does this sentence mean what it says, taken from this:
" The crawler-transporters are impressive machines, built on site in the mid 1960s to move Saturn 5 moon rockets from the VAB to the launch pad.", I quess it does, because there's another sentence saying "Apollo-era".

If yes, are you amazed that it has cracked bearings if it has been sitting in a garage for 40 years? Could it be time ermm.. upgrade?:)

but having something that big in space is out of the question. With a paradigm shift however, the problem is solved. Check out the DART which consists of two parabolically curved sheets (2D) instead of one large dish (3D). Because it consists of sheets you could just roll the material out of a shuttle onto a framework constructed in space. They are currently building precision small scale prototypes of this at JPL , and they are talking about making them very very big.

I would rather have six dozen Terrestrial Planet Finders than a single manned mission to mars.

As for a moonbase, that can wait a few hundred years, too.

A peek in the future: in an embarassing statement the Mars scientist admit that what was previously thought as evidence for great Marsian flood (topomap.jpg) is, actually, the sperm sample (sperm.jpg) of one of the scientists.

No. Gyros have to be carried on board the Shuttle. They are not intended to be launched on board an unmanned rocket and must be manually lifted from the shuttle's payload bay using the Canadarm (RMS) and installed on the station by spacewalking astronauts with the help of a shuttle crew.

From http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/sts111/02060 8cmg/ :

NASA has a spare CMG available, but it cannot be launched until early next year. That's because a CMG package - the gyro and necessary sub-assemblies - weighs some 1,100 pounds at launch and must be mounted on a special carrier beam in the shuttle's cargo bay. The next two shuttle flights, in August and October, will carry up huge sections of the station's solar array truss and don't have room for a CMG. As a result, the station may have to get by with three CMGs until early next year.

However, what the Slashdot story failed to note is that redundancy: only two control moment gyros are required for full control. One failed, leaving the station with three. No need to panic yet -- and even if the last one fails, the Russian modules attached to the station (which seem to be forgotten now, since all the activity is on the US side) are capable of using conventional rocket thrusters to control the station.

As usual, spaceflightnow.com and space.com have better articles with more detail. These sites usually have space/shuttle/station information up very quickly so I tend to rely on them more.

Excellent question. Take a close look at Lockheed Martin's proposal. See anything you recognise? :-)

Also the moon is only 10% reflective, equal to dark slate. Thus a solar array on the surface would not be bright and shiny but rather nearly as dark assuming the surface of the material is no glossy by rather flat black. Thus no one is likely to complain about the appearance as it would look just like the black craters which cover the surface.

--Karl

The scientist quoted did use an ambiguous phrase, but when mentioning Earth 10M years ago I'm pretty sure he was referring to floods of lava, not water.

The proposed floods of water 10M years ago at Cerebus Plains on Mars were preceded by large, flood-like flows of lava that left a large area covered with a flat lava plateau. Presumably that volcanic activity provided the energy to melt the ice (or, the water could have come up as gas dissolved in the magma).

More details in the U of Arizona press release

These eruptions aren't quite like a normal volcano in that they produce such gigantic amounts of highly fluid lava so quickly; doesn't make a cone, it's more like, well, a flood!

Even if he didn't mean there were lava floods at that location on Mars, what I'm pretty sure he is referring to on Earth is the Columbia River flood basalts, which cover most of eastern Washington and Oregon. They erupted about 12M years ago, and covered that whole region in lava a couple of thousand feet thick. Some flows made it all the way to the Pacific, 300 miles from their source. Even bigger examples are the Deccan Traps in India (65 million years ago), and the Siberian Traps in Russia (250M years ago). Same sort of thing made the "seas" (mare) on the Moon, 3+ billion years ago.

Am I the only person to see a hooded face in this picture? It's about half way down, and 1/4 of the way from the right edge.

There have been many space telescopes... depending on which wavelength range you are talking about. The author seems to be writing about visible wavelengths... even there, there was a telescope flown on the shuttle and there are plans for one on the space station. But Chandra, SIRTF (space infrared telescope facility), COBE, Hipparcos (sp?), and the CGO (Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory) were all space-based telescopes.

Of more interest to us astronomy-types is the latest go-ahead given by NASA to Kepler which is a space-based telescope that will look for Earth-like planets around other stars.

Joe from berkeley.

From the User's Guide:

"The three solid rocket motors were designed and optimized specifically for Pegasus and include features that emphasize reliability, manufacturability, and affordability. The design was developed using previously flight-proven and qualified materials and components. Common design features, materials, and production techniques are applied to all three motors to maximize cost efficiency and reliability. These motors are fully flight-qualified.

From the User's Guide:

"The three solid rocket motors were designed and optimized specifically for Pegasus and include features that emphasize reliability, manufacturability, and affordability. The design was developed using previously flight-proven and qualified materials and components. Common design features, materials, and production techniques are applied to all three motors to maximize cost efficiency and reliability. These motors are fully flight-qualified.

The test firing (it was about this time last year I think) must have been important because all sorts of VIPs from NASA and the Air Force showed up, which didn't normally happen.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Test firings are cool! The shockwave hitting you is really a unique experience.

satellite is out of range at T+18 minutes. Next pass is in 1 hour over Kenya. Spaceflightnow has a status center here http://www.spaceflightnow.com/athena/kodiakstar/st atus.html

There are 4 payloads on this rocket. The following descriptions are from the spaceflightnow website

The NASA-sponsored, student-built Starshine 3 satellite is covered with 1,500 aluminum mirrors, the highly reflective sphere will be seen flying overhead with the naked eye, allowing schoolchildren around the world to track the satellite.

The three Department of Defense Space Test Program payloads are PICOSat, PCSat and Sapphire.

PICOSat, built by Surrey Satellite Technology in the U.K., features four onboard experiments including tests of a flexible polymer battery, using GPS to study the ionospheric impacts to communications and navigation signals and vibration control for satellite sensors.

The Prototype Communications Satellite, or PCSat, is the first in a planned series of small spacecraft designed, built and tested by midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. The craft will be used to relay position data from amateur radio operators to ground stations.

Sapphire, built by Stanford University, carries a couple of experiments and a voice synthesizer microchip designed to convert text messages into a human voice for transmission over amateur radio frequencies.

Check out this status report on the spaceflightnow website for more detailed updates on the attempt to get this bird off the ground over the past week or so.

fp

First, it helps to bring the concept of the solar sail as a valid idea to the public eye. Solar sails have been something of a mainstay in some science fiction series as a way of getting to other planets and have even shown up in some popular sci-fi series (one episode of Deep Space Nine, for instance, showed an old Bajoran solar sail vessel, albeit with far too little sail area to accelerate as "fast" as more serious concepts would). However, other more conventional systems (by far the chemical rocket, but followed to a lesser extent by nuclear rockets (does anyone recall the NERVA program that might have sent humans to Mars by the 1980s?) and ion propulsion: how many of you knew that the term TIE Fighter from Star Wars stands for "Twin Ion Engine"? Star Wars never stated what gas was used in those systems, but the gas that has been used in the Deep Space 1 mission and in the Artemis commercial spacecraft. Now that the Planetary Society, which is a well-respected organization, has attempted to actually fly a solar sail, the public will become aware of the possibility.

It helps to bring the existence of such organizations into the spotlight as well. The Planetary Society has been active for decades -- it was founded by Carl Sagan -- and there are others, including what is perhaps the best-known of these groups: the National Space Society. Others, far less well known, exist, ranging from fan clubs for shows like Babylon 5 (which I applaud for showing what space exploration will be like in perhaps a few decades once we've gotten the hang of building spacecraft with rotating gravity sections to avoid the problems that long stays in microgravity cause) to other grassroots groups that give more or less anonymously (that is, they don't get press coverage) to serious efforts.

And it also helps to give people like us the idea that we might eventually actually get to go to space ourselves. If someone can spend $20 million for a ride on a Soyuz capsule, and if a non-profit organization can launch a solar sail, then what could happen in fifty years?

This was, like Apollo 13, a "successful failure".

This won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle!

What about using two Soyuz capsules? That's the obvious solution but the Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit and has to be exchanged fairly regularly. That's why Tito was able to get to space as a tourist recently...it was a Soyuz changeout mission and they really only need a crew of two to fly that. The problem is that to have crew escape for 6 (ie, two Soyuz) then you have to fly twice as many changeout missions and the Russians are stressed out trying to keep up with the changeout missions they are currently assigned. Plus in order to dock two Soyuz capsules at once would require another docking node, and nobody wants to pay for building that and taking it up - $1 billion at least, $500M to build it and $500M to launch it on a Shuttle mission that isn't available - they are all booked on previously scheduled construction flights. Plus if you had two Soyuz capsules docked it would tremendously complicate Shuttle ops around the station - mission rules call for keeping clear of the Soyuz capsules both spatially on orbit and schedulewise during their changeouts. It could be done, but the problems just snowball when you look at the two Soyuz option...

When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.

Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....

I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.

Yeah, sounds like NASA believing its own PR...

It does seem to be part of the silly hyperbolic PR that goes on, the danger is people actually believe it. Checking http://www.spaceflightnow.com today, I see the story about the malfunctioning Canadarm2- the article exclaims "..then station program managers could order the Shoulder Pitch joint be replaced with a spare in a dramatic spacewalk by shuttle astronauts..." . Yawn. It's a space walk, it will be planned out weeks in advance, it will be methodical and routine. It's not dramatic .

I think the media surrounding all the activity going on is causing more trouble than helping by playing all this drama-queen PR hype act. Seems to be pretty prevalent in US media, though, and increasingly across the rest of the world. Anyone care to comment on why this is so? Does it actually help NASA get extra funding?

That could be bigger than the 1999 double Mars probe failure, Galileo's jammed antenna, or Hubble's nearsighted mirror!

Well if it's about having the capability to launch your own people into space, then looks like China will be 'space power no.3'. Which will make the American military very happy because it will allow them to justify a lot of daft military spending...Of course with the breakup of the USSR you could say that the Ukraine (Energia) or Kazakhstan (Baikonur complex) are veritable space powers, though they've obviously taken the more pragmatic (sensible?) route of being involved with collaborative projects than sticking their own space ships up there just for the hell of it.

Will be interesting to see where India is in a couple of years with the new GSLV as well...

In our media driven society, I'm amazed that space.com didn't include any pictures of the Mir2 design. Of course, if RSC couldn't afford to make any computer renderings, this might limit the media material available.

Of my other space news sources, Spaceflight Now didn't have any information on this and NASA Watch is down this morning. Obviously, the news sources don't put a lot of stake in Mir2 ever getting beyond a few press briefings.

Russia can't even afford to meet it's ISS commitments. Every module of theirs beyond the Service Module (Zvezda) is delayed indefinitely. If Russia doesn't get moving on their Science Power Platform they may never be able to do meaningful science on their side of the station. This could also hamper their commercial asperations such as the Enterprise module.

Russia needs to get off their nationalistic bent and concentrate their efforts on what is there rather than trying to one-up the rest of the world.

Did you notice how they lost video signal at the end of this video?

http://spaceflightnow.com/mars/odyssey/010407onspi n_qt.html

Bigger, Better, Cheaper eh? ;)

In this case, it lasted almost nine hours; but the last two were spent inside the airlock, back on Shuttle power and oxygen. The point was they had to be ready, should help be required in moving the PMA-3 Shuttle docking port. As in turned out, there was a problem which took time to solve. Help from the spacewalkers was eventually not needed, but that's why they spent so much time standing by in the depressurized airlock.

See the Spaceflight Now story for details.

Once again, Space.com shows up a day late (Nasawatch.com reported this a day earlier), with misleading headlines ("Pluto mission saved"), and a misleading, incomplete article (see spaceflightnow.com article).

I swear, Space.com is looking more and more like they are graduate students at the Bill Gates School of Business.

As usual, spaceflightnow's article is more informative, has fewer banner ads, and is less sarcastic.
--

SLI has a budget of $290 million for fiscal year 2001, while the 2002 budget
proposal submitted to Congress Wednesday by President Bush calls for a 64
percent increase in the program to $475 million. The complete SLI program
envisions spending $4.5 billion over a five-year span.[1]

This particular budget cut is a travesty of magnificent proprtions. The celestial clock happens to be perfectly in tune with our technological advancement, to offer us this rare glimpse of our environment, as a species. To decide that we can't afford to redirect a few paltry resources to the task strikes me as narrow and crude. It's almost as if, as a species, we are too lazy to bother craning our necks a little to see what's outside the crib.

But it doesn't have to be this way. NASA isn't the only agency capable of sendiing the probe. in fact, maybe this feat could be accomplished on a voluntary basis? We have theories/plans for magical technology at our disposal, commercial support services to pester, potential launch capabilities and a wide variety of legal launch facilities around the world.

Consider: we have, just here at slashdot, the ears of a number of very technically capable individuals that might be persuaded to help create a Pluto Probe in an open sourced, ameteur manner. Corporate sponsorship would be soon to follow. Perhaps I haven't thought it out too carefully, but it is apparent to me that the potential to deploy a probe exists, despite the government.

So costly that NASA literally couldn't build a spare, so this is only a one shot deal.

<rant>

It is not particularly uncommon in this program. Was there a backup to the Service module which delayed the program two years? (The ICM could have been, sort-of, but was never built.) This led to the first two modules, Zarya and Unity, exceeding their 500-day lifetime in orbit; what would have happened if they had failed?

And what about the space shuttle? More than thirty shuttle flights are required to build the station; at a 1/450 estimated failure rate, according to the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, there is a 7-odd percent chance of another Challenger before it is completed - and the tight schedule surely is not going to help. If that happens, how does the program survive, with the Russians almost too broke to produce enough Soyuz even for the normal operation of the ISS?

That said, who won't be happy to learn that, according to NASA Watch, the Destiny lab's software wasn't even validated before launch? Or that there is a catch-22 with its avionics (computers and stuff need cooling to operate, but they need to be up to start the cooler systems)...

There is another issue: the project also depends on hundreds of hours of EVA (spacewalking), which the US lacks experience at. I don't have a reference handy, but IIRC one of the proposals to replace the space station Freedom program had been dismissed as too risky because it required way too much EVA time, and that was still less than what the ISS needs.

There is always the argument that the space program is indeed risky, but the prize is worth the game. I would agree with this, if the prize was space colonization, or at least common access to space. But this is not what NASA is after; see the jaundiced view they have about the Tito flight to ISS (set up by MirCorp and the Russians). According to the Space Frontier Foundation, " NASA is clueless about how to efficiently and fairly run this facility. They're not interested in anything but their own budget, people and programs." Space science, then? A manned facility is not really adapted to that (life support systems, people bouncing around, degrade the quality of microgravity) except for studying the effect of weightlessness on the astronauts themselves, which has already been done well enough on Mir.

There is an article from the Economist about the "waste of space" the ISS is.

</rant>

And yet, I crave for more coverage of the ISS operation, more pictures of the beautiful thing they are building up there... I was at my window a few minutes ago as the ISS was passing overhead (cloudy sky, didn't see anything but I tried), and I'm following the EVA thanks to the Spaceflight now live coverage. I can't help dreaming about that 2001 double wheel giant station, and what moved me most in recent years was reading old newspapers from around july20th, 1969. Go figure...

grab it off of spaceflightnow, they have a quicktime of it

TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken,
The Hot Burning Cajun Type...

grab it off of spaceflightnow, they have a quicktime of it

TastesLikeHerringFlavoredChicken,
The Hot Burning Cajun Type...

Finally a space article that didn't come from cnn...

Kudo's

To bad Space Elevators are the Super Dense Optical Storage Devices of Space Industry. A Red Herring.

suggested Space News Site's spaceflightnow
SpaceDaily
NasaWatch
SpaceWeather
Nasa
It's ashame that SpaceOnline bit the dust and was absorbed by space.com, along with SpaceViews

If you want some real action become a Nasa click worker at http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/top
Maybe Slashdot will even do a story on it...

I wait with herring baited breath

According to this link, the problem with Cassini's gyros appears to gone away (for now, at least).

The latest news is this problem with Cassini's pointing system appears to be resolved and hopefully we will start seeing more spectacular pictures like this very soon.

The latest news is this problem with Cassini's pointing system appears to be resolved and hopefully we will start seeing more spectacular pictures like this very soon.

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0012/21pluto/