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This article contains some more specifics regarding the problem. Apparently one of the main engine controller computers (the computers that regulate main engine gimbaling and throttle control) failed to power up properly. There was a short time period where a low-voltage occurred which flagged a boot-up sequence issue. Engineers are trying to figure out what caused the voltage drop and, thus, triggered the error in the processor initialization. More information regarding the SSME controllers can be found here.

Apparently the breaker that controls the processor was cycled five times over night. Engineers are guessing that the cycling caused some funny transient anomalies in the circuit which caused the fault. Despite the fault, the main events controller for the shuttle system was brought to full power and is operating nominally, so it's not like the whole computer is crap. NASA just wants to be sure that, a) the fault was actually caused by the breaker cycling and b) the fault won't cause further glitches in any of the other controller systems on the shuttle.

Interesting stuff indeed. It's probably a good thing that NASA is demanding certainty from it's engineers before clearing Discovery for launch.

Speaking on the House floor before the vote Wednesday, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, said the legislation "lacks serious budgetary discipline" and includes an "unfunded mandate to keep the shuttle program going through all of fiscal year 2011 even after the shuttle is retired, which NASA estimates will cost the agency more than half a billion dollars."

-- Source.

You see that? Right there a Democrat from Arizona was one of the prime champions of Constellation and derailing funding to commercial spaceflight development. Do you want more proof? Take a look at the article linked to in the summary.It goes into plenty of detail about how that bitch Giffords took up most of the debate time in the proceeds to complain about what a bad bill it was. Does that register to you? This bill, and most bills in Congress, are no longer about those darn Republicans vs. those darn Democrats.Both parties are corrupt, pandering, lip-servicing morons that can't tell their head from their ass. That doesn't change just because the bill involves NASA. Take your two-party political bickering elsewhere you misinformed douche.

As if SpaceX is having a problem with getting stuff into space. If they were having some serious problems with getting that task accomplished, I would agree that this test would be a relatively non-issue...

But the vehicle for getting into space has already flown that this capsule is going to be sitting on top of. I should note here too that SpaceX has also announced with this test what the flight profile is going to be like for the next Falcon 9 flight:

During the Dragon's orbital shakedown later this year, the ship will cruise around Earth between one and three times, fire its Draco maneuvering thrusters and fall into the Pacific Ocean somewhere off the coast of Los Angeles near the Channel Islands.

The flight could last from less than two hours to five hours, depending on SpaceX's final decision on its duration.

--- Spaceflight Now

This drop test was mainly to test the parachute system and to establish the recovery procedures for when this next flight is going to happen that will make it to orbit. Rather than using an entire Air Carrier task force from the U.S. Navy (how the Apollo and Gemini capsules were recovered), SpaceX is using a fleet of three boats that are all about the size of the S.S. Minnow from Gilligan's Island. That is a huge deal and I hope the cost savings for that difference in the recovery fleet should be glaringly obvious.

The point here too is that SpaceX is very close to having a full fledged spacecraft that can go up into space, maneuver around while up there, and safely bring cargo back down from orbit. Besides the Soyuz, Space Shuttle, and Shenzhou spacecraft, the Dragon will be the only one currently capable of doing that sort of mission profile. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle next year, the Dragon will be the only American spacecraft to be capable of doing this and it will also be only the second vehicle that you can put money onto the table to simply purchase a flight into space (after the Soyuz). Given the reluctance of the Russians to permit that kind of flight and the demand they have for at least two Russian cosmonauts to be involved, the Dragon offers an even more unique perspective for being able to bring stuff back home or to go up into space if you need a pressurized cargo capacity.

Yes, both Orbital Science and Boeing are in the process of building orbital spacecraft that will be capable of returning back to the Earth.... but at what stage in the development of those vehicles are they at? What is NASA working on for their own space-capable vehicle? Please don't tell me that the Ares I with the Orion capsule is going to be oh so much better.... if that is even going to be built at all.

Here's an article about it that sucks slightly less, with more and bigger paintings:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1007/21boeing/

It's still a stretch to call it "showing off" when you haven't even got a mock up.

If you want to hear more stories about space missions, particularly cutting edge ones, check out some of the following sites:

Spaceflightnow.com
Space.com
The Space Fellowship
The Planetary Society

and, of course,

JAXA
NASA
JPL

There are other sites, but those are some of my favorite.

Several demonstration flights this year? Despite what the SpaceX site says, there was a news story last week wherein SpaceX had told NASA that there would be at least an eight-month gap between the first two COTS demo flights. The first, according to the story, is still apparently planned for sometime in July, but an eight-month gap suggests that the C2 flight won't be until at least March 2011. Another story yesterday mentions that if things went well today, they would be looking to skip one of the COTS demo flights, specifically one that would have the Dragon approach no closer than 10km from the station, and instead have the grapple mission be the second flight, and that was mentioned as being in the second quarter of 2011.

fixing Hubble via a robot would had been easier than by a human, since Hubble is close enough to Earth that direct control is possible, and a robot doesn't need a bulky spacesuit, making it more dexterous.

The principle you outline is often correct, but in this case, no: watch the Hubble repair documentary.

If a robot had been sent to fix Hubble, the mission would have failed.

Teleoperated Robot: "~twist~ Force required to turn last screw exceeds safe limit. Awaiting further instructions. Torque limit overridden by ground control. ~twistharder~ Screw not moving, but force required has dropped to near zero. Screw is now stripped. Entering safe mode."

Human: "~twist~ Screw's stuck. ~twistharder~ Crap, Screw's stripped. Look, the objective isn't to remove the screws, it's to get the handrail out of the way, so how 'bout we wrap some tape around the end of the handrail to catch any debris and just http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090517fd7/index4.html">bend the handrail until it tears off?"

Robots are more durable than humans, but humans are more flexible.

The tests will be flown by four unmanned X-51 "Waverider" vehicles developed by a team including the U.S. Air Force, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, Boeing Phantom Works and Pratt & Whitney.

So where I think the OP was asking if there are any other designs/previous models with which to compare this flight against, the three vehicles being tested in the fall would not qualify. The three vehicles being tested in the fall are the same vehicle, but just different serial numbers.

The scramjet will circulate the fuel behind engine walls to cool the structures. Without such active cooling, the temperatures in a scramjet could reach 5,000 deg. Fahrenheit, high enough to melt virtually any metal on Earth. Solving the cooling challenge is a major AFRL/Pratt & Whitney achievement.

Source

My wager is that the entire vehicle took thermal control into its design considerations and it uses a combination of geometry, aerodynamics, and fuel management to help sink heat at an appropriately high rate to prevent too much for a build up. However, since I don't have the design specs, and I doubt anyone outside of the military will, for awhile at least, I can only speculate. You also have to understand that at those speeds, your gas dynamics become a problem of rarified gasses and heat management becomes a very tricky problem indeed, one that can't be approached by traditional cooling means. So in summation I would guess yes, they have probably found some very cool new ways to sink heat at hypersonic speeds.

Assuming all goes well on STS-134, we'd end up with a checked-out, launch-ready shuttle stack that's already been paid for. Atlantis's Launch On Need (LON) mission STS-335 could become STS-135 and fly a stripped-down, 4-person crew to the STS, delivering extra supplies and an additional Multi-Purpose Logistics Module. If something went wrong on STS-134, Soyuz capsules would be used in place of another shuttle LON. Source.

Actually, we can hope she will fly again with clean consciences.

Assuming all goes well on STS-134, we'd end up with a checked-out, launch-ready shuttle stack that's already been paid for. Atlantis's Launch On Need (LON) mission STS-335 could become STS-135 and fly a stripped-down, 4-person crew to the STS, delivering extra supplies and an additional Multi-Purpose Logistics Module. If something went wrong on STS-134, Soyuz capsules would be used in place of another shuttle LON. Source.

Well actually that's not how they did it. At least, that's not the only means they used for analyzing the problem. According to this article Voyager 2 has the ability to do a bit by bit transmission (see 3rd or 4th paragraph down) which is exactly what NASA commanded it do do. Once they had a bit by bit stream, they were simply looking to see which bit was flipped...or multiple bits maybe, I don't know.

However, they may also have done some bit-by-bit modeling in the manner you just described as well. If they did, however, I have never seen any information regarding it other than your post.

This is probably Atlantis' last flight. However:

When she lands later this month, Atlantis won't be mothballed. She'll be put back in the standard post-flight turnaround process to ready her for the Launch On Need (LON) mission STS-335, intended to provide rescue capability if necessary for the last currently scheduled shuttle mission, Endeavor's STS-134. It has been pointed out that, assuming all goes well on STS-134, there will be a bought-and-paid-for STS stack checked out and ready to go... why not use it? STS-335 would become STS-135, and would fly next year with a four-person crew to the ISS, delivering a Multi-Purpose Logistics Module and extra supplies and equipment. Russian Soyuz ships would be used if rescue became necessary.

Source.

Been pushed back to no earlier than May 23, according to this

Uhhh.. the article provides no references.. so I don't know where Nancy Atkinson is getting this information from.

As far as I'm aware, Robonaut 2 isn't even functional yet, let alone ready for flight testing. Did the writer just make this up?

Leaving aside the obvious sexist overtones of the article, it's almost entirely a rehash of last year's news that the Leonardo MPLM will be modified to be left permanently attached to the station when it flies on STS-133, becoming the Permanent Multi-Purpose Module.

What is it about humanoid robots that makes people report bullshit?

SpaceX has been cleared by Cape Canaveral for the Falcon 9's first orbital launch next month,

No it hasn't.

from http://www.spaceflightnow.com/: "Between now and launch, engineers will install the rocket's flight termination system charges that would destroy the vehicle if it flew off course and threatened the public. "

They haven't installed and tested the equipment to allow the Air Force RSO to destroy the rocket in the event of a guidance failure. I doubt the Air Force would have signed off on the launch until that is complete. They're using an Air Force pad; so, they have to follow Air Force rules in addition to NASA flight rules

Project Dynasoar was nearly complete when they canceled it. It is probably they way we should have been going into LEO.

Coincidentally, the Air Force is getting ready to launch a vehicle to orbit which could be considered in many ways a spiritual successor to Dyna-Soar. I submitted an article about it yesterday (unfortunately rejected, but that's the way it goes sometimes), and have pasted the text below for the curious:

Air Force Spaceplane Preps For Launch

The US Air Force is currently preparing for the launch of the secretive X-37B OTV-1 (Orbital Test Vehicle 1) spaceplane; NASA had previously dropped the project in 2004 so it could devote more funds to the Constellation project. The reusable spaceplane is set to launch in April on top of a commercial Atlas V rocket, orbit for up to 270 days while testing a number of new technologies, reenter the atmosphere, then land on auto-pilot in California. The X-37 previously conducted drop tests and autonomous landing tests using the Scaled Composites White Knight carrier aircraft.

In 2004 George W Bush gave NASA the ambitious mission to send men to the Moon and Mars, but he never allocated significant funding for Moon-Mars, see http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/14/bush.space/ So all NASA could really do was "study" the mission. And even to do that NASA had to cannibalize other (unmanned) space science missions (maybe that's the explanation for the delay of DSCOVR http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0903/01dscovr/ a mission to Lagrange 1 that had already been paid for designed and built). Just like Bush, Obama is not funding Moon-Mars. However, unlike Bush, Obama is not pretending someone else will fund it.

I agree that wasting NASA money sucks. And I know this sounds more like a "blame Bush" rant than I would like. But I think most fans of space science agree that ordering Moon-Mars without funding it was going to lead to grief at some point.

"People should not think that the rocket is going to launch on whatever the first countdown day is," Musk said in an interview last month. "They shouldn't think of any day that we have planned as launch day, but it is simply an aspiration for the first day that we will try to do a countdown."

That said, this is, indeed, a very exciting launch for the space industry. The spaceflightnow article has some good techie info on the connections made between the rocket and the transport vehicle, as well as some info regarding the anchoring mechanisms for the rocket when it is hoisted.

Furthermore, I do feel it necessary to point out that this:

However if something goes wrong, those plans will come crashing to Earth along with Falcon 9.

...is a friggin' sensationalist claim that has no place in science reporting, either on a primary site or on a news aggregation site. Should the first Falcon 9 fail, they will learn from it and launch better designs in the future. Orbital still is working on its Taurus rocket. The EELV program (Atlas and Delta) are still pushing strong in the commercial market. If the first Falcon 9 flight fails, it will not be the end all be all of either Obama's current NASA vision, nor America's role in the space program. So please, keep the hyperbole out of the damned summaries guys.

Also for reference: Spaceflightnow's actual article as opposed to the apparent soundbite linked to in the summary....I mean really, what was it? Three paragraphs?

Agreed, and going even further a link to a copy of the actual report would have been useful as well.

Also for reference: Spaceflightnow's actual article as opposed to the apparent soundbite linked to in the summary....I mean really, what was it? Three paragraphs?

I think it's also worth pointing out Elon Musk's rebuttal to the findings of this NASA safety panel. I'm glad to see someone in the private spaceflight industry has the cajones to call BS when he sees it.

First of all, why bother linking to PopSci when the original story, even as quoted by PopSci, is at Spaceflight Now?

(Of course, the title of the Slashdot piece is pretty bad as well, so I be too surprised.)

Second, the quote in both the blurb and the PopSci article is taken out of context. The original, from Spaceflight Now:

"But we do believe that we are very, very close to proving there is or has been life there," McKay tells Spaceflight Now.

The words at the beginning make a world of difference in terms of McKay's attitude. He's not asserting something he can't know, he's stating he, personally, feels confident. (But it is stated as an opinion.) That's just crappy reporting. (Or, in this case, not even reporting: copying and pasting.)

All that said, it'll be exciting if it turns up anything, but don't hold your breath. There are just so many ways to contaminate the samples or to produce a lot of the effects that they've seen abiotically that I don't think we'll answer this question from Earth. I suspect to get most scientists to agree that there's life, we'll have to find it in situ.

Yeah I was a bit intrigued by this myself. The entire article discusses a new heavy lift vehicle, but has absolutely no specifications or details. Is it liquid, solid, or hybrid? Will it be developed in-house by NASA or contracted out? What exactly do they mean by 'simpler?'

I checked Spaceflightnow, SpaceFellowship, and ParabolicArc and couldn't find anything but a parent of the original ScienceInsider article. Google doesn't reveal a whole lot at cursory glance either. Hell I don't even see anything on NASA's own website. If anyone digs up some particulars, please post some links, I would be very interested in seeing them.

Also, offtopic, but for those who say Slashdot is behind the news release cycle and doesn't post breaking news, considering it just posted a story that 4 other space news websites haven't picked up yet, I'd say you've just been proven wrong =P

FWIW, the important parts of reentry are laminar...

They actually had to go out of their way to make it turbulent in the STS-119 experiment by attaching a modified tile to the Discovery's left wing, in an experiment last March. See:

http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts119/090329blt/

-- Terry

Nice paper rocket, like the Kliper which was also celebrated on these pages. Meanwhile NASA actually tests its designs.

It appeared that not all eight of the retro-rockets fired. They were designed to slow the first stage enough to separate the two stages, before the "tumble rockets" fired. From the footage, the retro-rocket flame is visibly asymmetrical. It appeared that only a few of the retro-rockets fired on one side of the aft skirt fairing.

Reviewing the configuration of the Ares I-X, shows the separation and tumble motors to be assembled in two groups rather than symmetrically disposed about the skirt - given the extreme angle at which the booster was viewed from the ground, I'd expect it to look asymmetrical. In fact, the video released by NASA seems to be looking right at one of the two packages.

According to the Mission Status Log on Spaceflightnow.com there appeared to be some telemetry acquisition issues as late as t + 6:30 (min:sec) mission elapsed time. I am not sure how the launch vehicle was designed or what it's asset acquisition profile was supposed to look like, however, for Atlas V and Delta IV launches I know that acquisition and vehicle state data can start dumping to ground resources at least as early as t + 100 sec (with lag of course). Does anyone know if this test launch was designed with a full communications package on board, or whether or not the Ares acquisition profile is designed to fly this long without a telemetry dump to the ground? It seems very dubious to me and, if it is an error, it is a major one. Having a launch vehicle fail to establish a proper data connection with ground assets for ~5:00 + minutes could mean anything from an incorrect roll attitude to a power system failure to software state failure.

If the telemetry acquisition timing wasn't planned for or accounted for, I would say that the Ares team has some major debugging to do, which, of course, means some extra time and money =)

Did anyone else notice the separation, and the flight path of the (in the future to be occupied) simulator? The booster and the simulator appeared to tumble after separation.

I was puzzled by that as well, but it turns out that was deliberate-- the stages were designed to tumble after separation in order to increase the atmospheric drag, to bring them down closer to shore.

From spaceflightnow.com:

[separation occurs and then] "A few seconds later, four more motors will ignite to put the first stage in a yawing tumble similar to what solid rocket boosters experience after being jettisoned during shuttle launches.
"We need that to happen so the parachutes will properly deploy," said Jon Cowart, Ares 1-X deputy mission manager. "If we don't get it spinning enough, there's always a chance they might get fouled on the rocket." "

Some items to note:

• The rocket [nationalgeographic.com] was the tallest [space.com] (and possibly most expensive, at $450 million) suborbital rocket ever assembled, consisting of a solid rocket motor from the Space Shuttle and an Atlas V avionics system, with a non-functional upper stage put on top.
• The Ares I-X has roughly the same shape (but different internal components) compared to NASA's planned medium-lift Ares I, which is scheduled to be completed after 2017 with an estimated cost of $1-$2 billion per launch. A lot of people have been calling this a flight test of the Ares I, but considering how drastically different the Ares I would be in flight, it's really quite a stretch, and it also unfortunately doesn't address any of the biggest potential problems with the Ares I (5-segment booster vibration properties, launch abort survivability, etc.). If anything, it's more similar to a full-size wind tunnel test.
• Even though the fate of the Ares I itself (and the overall future direction [thespacereview.com] of NASA spaceflight) is uncertain, the >700 sensors on the Ares I-X should provide data useful for validating computer models [spaceflightnow.com] used by NASA."
• For all its faults, it's still worth noting that this is somewhat of an accomplishment for NASA, as its the first new launch vehicle design they've attempted to launch in 30 years, after a long string of failed designs (X-30, X-33, X-34, National Launch System, Space Launch Initiative, Orbital Space Plane). Actually, now that I think about it, the DC-X [wikipedia.org] successfully launched, although I suppose that was constructed by McDonnell Douglas for the DOD before it was transferred to (and canceled by) NASA. Of course, one could still ask why NASA is trying to internally design a new vehicle when the private sector has a much better track record over the past 30 years of bringing new launch vehicle designs into service, but I imagine it's still been a learning experience for NASA. Hopefully they'll learn the right lessons from it, whatever those are.

(I largely copied this from a comment I made yesterday, but it still seems pertinent)

Some items to note:

• The rocket is the tallest (and possibly most expensive, at $450 million) suborbital rocket ever assembled, consisting of a solid rocket motor from the Space Shuttle and an Atlas V avionics system, with a non-functional upper stage put on top.
• The Ares I-X has roughly the same shape (but different internal components) compared to NASA's planned medium-lift Ares I, which is scheduled to be completed after 2017 with an estimated cost of $1-$2 billion per launch. A lot of people have been calling this a flight test of the Ares I, but considering how drastically different the Ares I would be in flight, it's really quite a stretch. If anything, it's more similar to a full-size wind tunnel test.
• Even though the fate of the Ares I itself (and the overall future direction of NASA spaceflight) is uncertain, the >700 sensors on the Ares I-X should provide data useful for validating computer models used by NASA."
• For all its faults, it's still worth noting that this is somewhat of an accomplishment for NASA, as its the first new launch vehicle design they've attempted to launch in 30 years, after a long string of failed designs (X-30, X-33, X-34, National Launch System, Space Launch Initiative, Orbital Space Plane). Actually, now that I think about it, the DC-X successfully launched, although I suppose that was constructed by McDonnell Douglas for the DOD before it was transferred to (and canceled by) NASA. Of course, one could still ask why NASA is trying to internally design a new vehicle when the private sector has a much better track record over the past 30 years of bringing new launch vehicle designs into service, but I imagine it's still been a learning experience for NASA. Hopefully they'll learn the right lessons from it, whatever those are.

"This gives us the best flight data in advance of our first COTS mission," Musk said. "It also removes the (payload) fairing from the schedule critical path and allows us to spend more time on making the fairing lighter and more reliable."

Source: SpaceX doubles down on inaugural Falcon 9 mission

The Council of Elders has declared tomorrow a day of commemoration. K'breel, Speaker for the Council, spake thus:

"By Gfa'rdmn, a little over half a year ago, our forces celebrated victory over the plumb-bob-waving monstrosity from the North, having slowly chilled it to death. The Invader from the Plains sits enmired in our sandpit. The Twin by the Crater has begun to stir, but it stood paralyzed by fear for sixty days by the mere sight of the spent husk of a Kinetic Bombardment Force component."

"So thorough has been our dominance of the blue planet's terror craft that they have not since dared to touch our red sands with their filthy metallic fingertips. Yes, their robotic spies continue to flail wildly around our great world - but despite dozens of passes over the pole, and countless radiofrequency emanations beamed down in an effort to re-establish communications with frozen hulk of the Invader from the North, their efforts have revealed nothing but ice! And they report these sightings of "nothing but ice" back to their puerile blue world as though this were somehow a great propaganda victory! The beings from the blue planet are impotent! Their efforts are futile! Rejoice!"

When a junior climatologist suggested that the overflights could perhaps have been part of an effort to use radar map the depth of our ice caps in order to better understand their own world's shrinking ice caps, K'Breel had the dissenter's gelsacs flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen, shattered with a hammer, and the resulting shards thawed in a microwave oven before subsequently roasting them on a spit.

Spaceflightnow.com had an article posted about a week ago that had to do with the Augustine commissions initial presentation of the report to once of the congressional science committees. You can read it here. There are some interesting remarks made by some of the committee members in that particular article. Specifically, the Arizona representative quoted near the end of the article seems particularly condescending and, well, f***ing stupid.

I can understand that Congress doesn't want to scrap a current project that has some momentum behind it. Aerospace projects take quite awhile to develop, especially the ones that break atmosphere. That being said, if they really do want to get the Constellation program back on its feet, they should fund it. If they are going to play God with their checkbooks though and hold the space program ransom in the name of national interest, screw them. If they won't fund the program properly then it is just going to die slowly and be a money sink until then. If there is anything that NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" space program showed us, it was that space projects that aren't developed properly die gloriously (for reference, that was the program that produced the Mars orbiter which smashed into the surface of Mars due to one subcontractor using metric measurements and one using SI measurements). If Congress refuses to fund the Constellation program properly, you can be guaranteed that shit is going to explode at some point.

If Congress is unwilling to consider alternative missions, you can be guaranteed that manned exploration of space will stagnate in America's government funded agencies.

If Congress doesn't listen to the experts because their hubris has gotten the best of them, you can be guaranteed that the interests of science will no longer be served in this country.

That's really uninformed and outdated scare mongering. The soyuz spacecraft did NOT nearly burn up, it entered in a ballistic trajectory (i.e.without lift). This is uncomfortable, and undesirable as it is a backup emagency mode, which causes brief periods of high G and causes the craft to land off-course but is still safe. The problem was investigated, fixes determined, and recent soyuz launches work fine. Cites : http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/exp16/080422descent.html http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/24/soyuz-hard-landing-the-facts/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/23/nasa_says_soyuz_all_fixed_now/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TMA-13

LCROSS had some issues last weekend which caused it to lose a good portion of its fuel. The mission is down to the wire and may not make it. If it does, it will be because of the skill and dedication of the NASA team.

The data they collect from the impact, from LRO, earth and space telescopes and LCROSS itself, will provide the missing piece of the puzzle for Lunar ISRU. Up until now, the promise of ice on the Moon has been a distant "yeah, we'll do that one day" proposition, but with this data NASA will finally be able to do study on what kinda of equipment will be required to process the ice and produce potable water, oxygen and rocket fuel (most likely methane) and that will drive the design of Lunar exploration systems.

How can commercial entities, who have so far demonstrated only toy rockets, possibly be closer to achieving space flight than NASA, who demonstrated that capability decades ago and has since done it countless times?

What are you talking about? The commercial entities launch many (large and small) rockets every year, many times more often than NASA:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/launchlog.html

I don't know where to get statistics for this but a commercial launch is something very common place.

You can see a list of recent worldwide launches here:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/launchlog.html

As far as the US goes, the only non-commercial launches are the Space Shuttles, and there's quite a few commercial launches per Space Shuttle launch.

Nice submission, although here's a few more details from my own submission:

Excalibur Almaz has come out of stealth mode and unveiled their reusable spacecraft capable of carrying a crew of three and/or cargo to orbit for up to a week. According to VP (and former NASA astronaut) Leroy Chiao, the spacecraft are designed to be launched on a variety of rockets, and are modernized versions of vehicles developed and flight-tested for the Soviet Union's military space station program (the company has also purchased some of the space stations for potential future use). EA plans to begin flight tests in 2012, with revenue flights starting in 2013. The company will likely be competing with the SpaceX Dragon and Bigelow Aerospace's recently-announced "Orion Lite" for a chunk of the emerging commercial orbital transportation market.

An interesting bit of trivia is that the original Soviet Almaz space station carried a rapid-fire cannon and performed a successful test-firing on a target satellite. I'm assuming the space stations which Excalibur Almaz bought don't have the cannons anymore. :(

Honestly, how many astronauts does it take to install a "front porch" for the Kibo module? Certainly not 13.

 
That's only a small part of what they are doing. There's a bunch of spacewalks, maintenance, etc... More info here.

http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/

"When we made the decision, the odds were 1-in-473 that we would have a problem on the shuttle for which a rescue shuttle was the solution," Griffin said. "Now, there are a lot of problems you can have on the shuttle, right? There are a lot of ways you can die on the shuttle, which is what gives you the overall shuttle PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) of about 1-in-75 or so. So you're roughly five-and-a-half, six times likelier to die on the shuttle for some reason that the backup shuttle can't save you from than you are to die from one the backup shuttle can save you from. ... From a statistical point of view, it makes no real sense to have a backup shuttle.

"However, here's the flip side. ... Those numbers cannot be explained to politicians or the general public. And should we have a failure with those 1-in-473 or whatever odds it was, should we have a failure that the rescue shuttle could have saved you from and we had not done it, the consequence to NASA would have been incalculable. We would appear to have been cavalier with human life, we would appear to have not taken every possible precaution, we would appear to have been coldly calculating the odds and rolling the dice with people's lives. And the appearance of behaving that way, in my judgment, was unacceptable. I could not risk that for NASA."

While the overall risk of impact damage is about three times higher for a Hubble mission than a flight to the International Space Station, it is not as bad as flight planners initially feared.

"We know we're accepting a little higher risk for this flight," Steve Stich, manager of the orbiter project office at the Johnson Space Center, said in an interview. "That's why we've tracked it very carefully."

Even factoring in debris from a satellite collision in February between a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite and an Iridium telephone relay station, the mean odds of a catastrophic impact during the Hubble mission are on the order of 1-in-229, which is well below the 1-in-200 threshold that requires an executive-level decision by NASA's leadership.

A preliminary analysis put the odds at 1-in-185, but the numbers improved after recent radar observations and consideration of the shuttle's orientation in space during the Hubble mission. The planned orientation, or attitude timeline, reduces the crew's exposure to impacts that could damage critical areas of the ship's heat shield, the coolant loops in the shuttle's cargo bay door radiators and cockpit windows.

More info here: http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090512fd2/index5.html

"And Scooter, also I've got some good news about the tile damage that we saw on the starboard chine area earlier today," astronaut Alan Poindexter radioed from mission control shortly after 8 p.m.

"Oh, I'm looking forward to that. Go ahead," replied shuttle commander Scott "Scooter" Altman.

"It turns out that a focussed inspection of that area on the starboard chine is not going to be required," Poindexter reported.

"All right, you've got some happy EVA campers on that," Altman said.

I'm just surprised nobody in this thread has mentioned NASA's rather similar failure to launch a satellite into orbit all of one month ago.

Actually, the Range reports a precise liftoff time down to the millisecond, based on first motion of the vehicle. In this case, it was 7:43:44.074 p.m. EDT according to Spaceflight Now.

April 16 Ariane 5 Herschel & Planck
Launch time: approx. 1230 GMT (8:30 a.m. EDT)
Launch site: ELA-3, Kourou, French Guiana

Arianespace Flight 188 will use an Ariane 5 rocket with an ECA upper stage to launch the European Space Agency's Herschel and Planck observatories. The Herschel infrared telescope will study the evolution of stars and galaxies and the Planck spacecraft will observe the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. [Jan. 14]

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/tracking/index.html

Not only do we have landers, rovers, and satellites around another planet, but we can coordinate them so one of the orbiting satellites can take a picture of a lander as it is landing!

A photo from Mars Odyssey (satellite) taking a picture of Mars Phoenix Lander with enough detail to see the parachute shroud lines can be found here

I'll admit, I'm a bit more morbid than the average bear. But the report is heavily sugar-coated, with the obvious goal of making sure nobody thinks anyone "suffered". That's the biggest thing in American culture, it seems; "At least they didn't suffer". When my grandfather died of a heart attack, someone told my uncle something about massive "blood clots in the heart" indicating that he "didn't suffer".

Sorry, I don't buy it. At least, not the Disney-fied public-consumption version.

The Spaceflight Now summary notes five "lethal events", and implies that the *first* one caused immediate unconciousness:

* Depressurization
* Buffeting without being fully buckled in
* "Separation of the crew from the crew module and the seat"
* Exposure to near-vacuum
* Impact

The claim that the initial "depressurization" would make the crew "incapacitated within seconds" relies on the common perception that exposure to the vacuum of space makes your face explode. That's not the case, as has been explained over and over -- you can't breathe (" respiration ceased after the depressurization" in the report), but not breathing hasn't been the criteria for "death" since the Middle Ages.

It's the second one that probably did most of the crew in. The crew compartment started spinning and tumbling, and "As a result, the unconscious or deceased crew was exposed to cyclical rotational motion while restrained only at the lower body." I would say that "unconscious or deceased" is window dressing, like hoping that the girl from "Dead Like Me" would grab you just before your car runs off a cliff.

But even that assumes that "the seat inertial reel mechanisms on the crews' shoulder harnesses did not lock". I kinda thought that's what seat belts were *supposed* to do. So I can only assume that at least some of the unfortunate crew made it to phase three, which is awfully hard to make sound pretty. "Separation of the crew from the crew module and the seat" sounds almost gentle, but what it means is that the forces were eventually so great that their bodies were ripped apart by the very straps designed to hold them in place.

Unfortunately for those who want their dead to enter the next world peacefully, I think it's pretty likely that the crew's last experience was anything but a peaceful passing from lack of oxygen.

Now, is that so awful? I don't think so. I don't even like to ride a roller coaster, myself, but these were a bunch of adrenaline junkies strapped to a freakin' ROCKET. These weren't people who planned to die in their sleep. I would imagine that all of them -- and especially the pilots, who were almost certainly strapped in and helmets on -- would want to go out kicking, screaming, and pushing every possible button to try to turn the damned thing around.

They died with their boots on. Give them that, at least.

On November 4, engineers and scientists throughout NASA and academia scratched their collective heads and asked, "Which Obama is the real Obama?"

Now, we have the answer. Obama recently returned to the idea of sacrificing NASA programs in favor of his political agenda.

As Obama dismantles the American space program, perhaps we Americans should look to Japan for leadership in the peaceful development of space.

Maybe, However, if you have a chance to visit one of the Space Museums you should ask if they have a pair of gloves that the astronauts use. Try them on... They aren't as tactile and mobile as you would expect. So if an item unexpected moves your reactions are pretty much tuned to respond to things falling not floating in an unpredictable path based on how it was bumped/etc. Have a look at this link where as I mentioned in my original post. Items in the airlock bag weren't transferred properly. In other words, they weren't all tethered once put into the air lock bag. http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts126/081119fd6/index2.html

A better story is found at the following URL:

SpaceFlightNow.com

This one talks about how the craft is wired, and explains in more detail how this failure is going to affect the systems on-board during the switch-over, as well as some of the challenges they're facing.