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Yup, and apparently they also tested a restart of the second stage after coasting for a while, so the final velocity is quite likely higher.

The second burn of the second stage was probably to circularize (God, that's a clumsy word!) the orbit. Even so, to put the payload into orbit would've required almost a five minute burn, and that second burn would have had to be within a very few minutes of the end of the first burn.

Otherwise, the Falcon's trajectory would've looked like an ICBM's trajectory - hitting atmosphere within about fifteen minutes of the end of that first burn.

Yup. A story just came out with the full details:

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon/004/index.html

The rocket initially reached an orbit stretching from a low point of 205 miles to a high point of 404 miles. The orbital inclination was 9.3 degrees.

SpaceX released information before the launch indicating that the rocket would target an orbit with an apogee, or high point, of 426 miles. But Musk said the rocket hit an orbit very close to prelaunch predictions.

After coasting through space for several minutes, the second stage engine restarted for a brief firing to circularize the orbit at an altitude just shy of 400 miles, according to U.S. military tracking data.

"Restarting rocket upper stages is not a trivial matter, so there was definitely a big icing on the cake there," Musk said. "I would have been happy if we just made it to orbit, but the restart was definitely great."

are great examples of fuckups by contractors (read: private enterprise), not NASA.

Perkin-Elmer was contracted to make that mirror, and it was one of their employees who improperly assembled the inspection gage leading to the grinding error:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717301.000-the-testing-error-that-led-to-hubble-mirror-fiasco-.html

It was a Lockheed-Martin employee who took the bolts out of the satellite holddown cart, and some more private employees who then moved the thing without following the checklist, dropping the satellite onto the floor:

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0410/04noaanreport/

Both incidents point to the need for greater NASA oversight of outside contractors. Of course, any such action would be portrayed by the "privatize everything" crowd as needless red-tape and protectionism by NASA bureaucrats.

Right, it looks the part; what could possibly go wrong?

In a related martian breakthrough, apparently an asteroid hit Mars with an energy of "1029 joules, which is equivalent to 100 billion gigatons of TNT."

I assume they meant 10^29 J. But still, the inability of most scientific journalist's to even check the plausibility of their figures is astounding.

In a related martian breakthrough, apparently an asteroid hit Mars with an energy of "1029 joules, which is equivalent to 100 billion gigatons of TNT."

I assume they meant 10^29 J. But still, the inability of most scientific journalist's to even check the plausibility of their figures is astounding.

"We set out to show that it's possible to make a big hole without melting the majority of the surface of Mars," Aharonson says. The team modeled a range of projectile parameters that could yield a cavity the size and ellipticity of the Mars lowlands without melting the whole planet or making a crater rim.

After cranking 500 simulations combining various energies, velocities, and impact angles through the GPS division's Beowulf-class computer cluster CITerra, the researchers narrowed in on a "sweet spot"--a range of single-impact parameters that would make exactly the type of crater found on Mars. Although a large impact had been suggested (and discounted) in the past, Aharonson says, computers weren't fast enough to run the models. "The ability to search for parameters that allow an impact compatible with observations is enabled by the dedicated machine at Caltech," he adds.

Most of the discussion seems to be focusing on the brick lining inside the trench.

What about what look like large concrete slabs that have been cracked and lifted on the outside slope of the pad here and here. Were these caused by the launch too ?

Loose bricks flying out of the trench would travel away from the pad and hit the boundary fence. In which case, what caused the damage to the concrete slabs ?

It looks to me like the inner walls may have eroded/cracked and let exhaust gases into the structure and those gases blew out the external wall sections on the slope.

Ref: http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts124/080601pad/damage.html

No. Columbia's crew, the one which blew up during launch (or was that Challenger?) was probably alive when it hit the ocean. Whether they were conscious is not public info, but they were alive for a while, based on evidence that some of them tried to put on oxygen bottles, IIRC. They could have used an escape pod.

Therefore, they are referring to Challenger as it was the one that exploded during launch and its pieces fell into the ocean. My links are correct. If the secondary poster meant Columbia, here is info on that disaster:

Spaceflight Now
MSNBC
New York Times

Either way, in both cases, the astronauts knew something was wrong and they were alive for a time after the initial explosion and breakup of both Challenger and Columbia.

How about spaceflightnow!! http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0712/25glonass/
Jebus.

So potentially 2/9 so far...

I'm a european and it means that media isn't used to get money for science funds.

Yes, you use the funds to pay idle farmers.

This is however a missunderstanding, in technical design Russia is ahead, especialy in design of technology hardware.

Like these?

American flying wings, well take a look at the earodynamics of a mig 29 it can tilt backwards in flight.

Only a fool would suggest that a Mig 29 makes anything but a fine target for a front line American fighter.

Oh and their space airplane first space flight was radio controlled inlcuded the landing. Imagine the space shuttle did no human no risk cargo shipping, hmmmm.

The shuttle is capable of flying completely automated. Rumor has it that Buran fly with 4 tons of lead acid car batteries because the Russians could not master H2 fuel cells. If Buran was so good, why did it fly once?

I'm not a solar physicist, and to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't significantly directly affect weather, unless you count the Aurora Borealis. In fact, they're not even sure sunspot numbers are a good predictor of solar activity.

What solar activity does, however, is things like screw up GPS and other systems that depend on radio signals, kill satellites, and damage the power grid. It can also affect flights that go over the poles, as they try to avoid those routes during high activity.

Could this be just another failed launch such as the russian proton which failed about a week ago and was fueled with rather toxic hydrazine? Any satellites launched shortly before this peruvian incident?

Maybe this recoverable craft got recovered sooner than planned.

Could this be just another failed launch such as the russian proton which failed about a week ago and was fueled with rather toxic hydrazine? Any satellites launched shortly before this peruvian incident?

Maybe this recoverable craft got recovered sooner than planned.

I didn't mention manned missions but development and engineering practices.

Take the example of the rocket engines developed independently by both sides . The American F-1 design didn't use staged combustion cycle because it was deemed unstable and unpredictable denying their engine a the vast performance boost. At the same time, Russians developed and tested the RD-170 using the staged combustion cycle. The development ended in 1976(!) and proved to be more powerful than the F-1A (Saturn V 1st stage) engines. All the RD-170 engines were to be scrapped but were preserved by the Russian engineering team. About 20 years later they were sold to the west which still didn't have engines as efficient.

The Atlas IIIA flew in 2000 using RD-180 engines - a scaled down version of the RD-170.

Well, I may have watched the NASA press conferences, where the talked about this, for the last couple days on NASA TV.

"The MMT made two significant decisions tonight," Shannon said. "The first was a unanimous recommendation that the damage we saw after reviewing all the engineering tests and analysis was not a threat to crew safety, this was not something that the astronauts are in danger about. We had thought that for several days, but we were waiting for the final analysis to be complete.

"We did all the things that we said we were going to do over the last few days. We had engineering analyses, we had computational fluid dynamics of the cavity from both Ames Research Center and the Langley Research Center, they were both in agreement. We did the thermal analysis and that continued to show good margins and we also did two arc jet tests where we put a re-entry heating profile on the damage sites.

"We went through all of that data and it was unanimous that we were not in a loss of crew/vehicle case," Shannon said. "The discussion then centered on whether we should use as is and return Endeavour in its current condition or if the uncertainties in the analysis could potentially cause some underlying tile damage or structural damage that we would have to deal with at the Kennedy Space Center. So we had that debate. And it was not unanimous, but it was pretty overwhelming to go with the use-as-is condition, in other words not to do the tile repair."

from http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts118/07081 6norepair/

That last non unanimous vote was something like 29-1 according to the press conference.

--Original poster

The tile was then passed from student to student. As I said above, it was as hard as ceramic and as light as styrofoam. Even if an astronaut hit a tile deliberately with a sharp instrument, it is unlikely they could damage it.

I'm not sure what your teacher was showing you, but the Shuttle tiles are quite definitely fragile. See these articles:

If by any chance you do need to contact the tile with your hands, we would require only gentle hand reaction alone. We want you to distribute the load over several fingers or the backs of the fingers. Source

[The tile is] a rather soft piece of material. You can easily scratch it with your fingernail. It has ... a very thin layer of fiberglass on the outside. It's a fabulous insulator and NASA gave it to us to use as an insulator for an experiment we were doing. We were working at high temperatures and needed an extremely good insulator. So I had this tile sitting on my desk and it was a curiosity all along. And then it became much more meaningful when I realized that, gee, it wouldn't be very difficult at all to damage this. I could probably, with my finger, break through it. Source

The only known technology in the early 1970s with the required thermal and weight characteristics was also so fragile, due to the very low density, that one could easily crush a TPS tile by hand. Source

Rich.

Spaceflightnow.com (http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts117/0706 14computers/index7.html) is reporting that bypassing a suspect power supply (does not indicate what the power supply is/if it's related to the new panels or not) resulted in 4 of the 6 computers coming back up and restoration of 2 of the 3 guidance lanes.

A NASA engineer told me about how some debugging code was inadvertently left in after production. Later they had in-flight problems that they couldn't fix. Finally an engineer remembered the "mighty mouse" code that would cause a reboot, and they invoked it remotely and everything was fixed.

I guess I'm a little disturbed that they had to reboot the space station... LINK.

The place and time are disturbingly close: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0703/27progress23p /

There is another point, which is right before the second separation events (from the nose; I don't know what it's called and can't get a timecode right now), there's a ring that comes off of the 2nd stage engine. Anyone know if this was normal?

In the transcript from a post flight interview it was said that these rings are titanium and applied to the edge of the nozzle with a bonding agent. The rings are there to protect the nozzle during the first part of the firing. Once the rings heat up the bonding agent breaks down and lets the rings fall away at the point where they are no longer needed. Apparently, this is normal behavior.

From Spaceflight Now: "What you might have seen was basically titanium half-hoops that are used to stabilize the nozzle on ascent. However, once you get to a certain temperature the bonding agent for those titanium rings comes off and the titanium rings float away, which occurred as expected."

From http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon/f2/status.html

2355 GMT (7:55 p.m. EDT)

The problem appears to be related to Range telemetry. The team needs another 10 minutes to examine the situation.

2350 GMT (7:50 p.m. EDT)

Engineers are working on the problem that stopped the countdown. SpaceX has time available to troubleshoot the issue and try the launch again -- so the flight has not been scrubbed for today.

MONDAY, MARCH 19, 2007
2252 GMT (6:52 p.m. EDT)

"The data is back up in El Segundo. I do believe we are a little bit behind in the count. I think we delayed some of the propellant loading activities," says Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX vice president of business development. "It looks good for today, which is obviously good news."

How far behind the countdown is running or the target launch time isn't clear at the moment.

http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon/f2/status.html

For anybody looking for more frequently-updated sources of info and don't feel like watching the entire webcase, here's some other useful sources of info:

* SpaceFlight Now's Mission Status Center: According to the status center, they're having some problems with remotely-monitoring the telemetry stream, which may end up postponing the launch.

* Kimbal Musk's "Kwajalein Atoll and Rockets" blog: Kimbal is Elon Musk's brother, and often posts interesting (and highly unofficial) updates from the launch site. He sometimes goes into liveblogging mode, but hasn't done this yet today.

I actually submitted this story (via journal entry) back in September, but it didn't make it -- it happened at the same time as Atlantis was docking with the ISS, so I guess the editors didn't have more space for more space. When the craft was launched, Chinese officials were cited as saying that "seeds exposed to space radiation and microgravity contain more vitamins and other crucial minerals.".

Wow. I guess science class in China consists of repeated viewings of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , or perhaps the Chinese scientists are simply polishing up their Ig Nobel acceptance speeches.

I don't know why anyone is every surprised when stuff goes wrong on missions, or equipment breaks down. Nasa is a governmental agency and as such has a big beaurocratic morass...

NASA was a governmental agency when they successfully landed human beings on the moon and brought them safely back to earth. They were a governmental agency when they sent out Voyager 1, currently leaving the solar system and still operational after thirty years. Certainly NASA's administration appears to have been getting a bit top-heavy of late, but it's short-sighted to put that down to the simple fact of NASA being a governmental agency.

The fact is, space exploration is hard. Things go wrong all the time, on both commercial and government-agency missions. For a far more dramatic commercial-sector cock-up, you only have to look back two weeks to the latest Sea Launch disaster.

I'm all for private investment in space, but as far as I know no commercial mission has yet made it out of Earth's gravity well. Good luck to Burt Rutan et al., but I think it'll be a while before they land anyone on the moon, or get a probe as far as Mars.

The following article has a little more info than the original (and a dodgy artist's impression of a stellar-mass black hole):

Black hole boldly goes where no black hole has gone before

Actually that's kind of what they did when they had a problem with a bug filling the flash memory area of Spirit during the trip to mars, they set a register and booted without mounting the flash drive then cleaned up the drive to resume normal operations. This article talks about the way they fixed that problem. Another interesting thing I found in this article is that the uplink to the rovers while they were on their ways to Mars was only 2Kbit/s! Talk about limited bandwidth, speeds here at home haven't been that slow since 1987 with the introduction of the Hayes 96 with 9600 baud.

For all you space fans out there, I suggest you make an effort to watch these shuttle launches, landings, and ISS construction missions when they happen. There are only 14 more space shuttle flights planned before retirement of the entire fleet in early 2010. All except one (the Hubble Telescope repair mission) will be construcing and resupplying the space station.

Spaceflightnow.com has a nice manifest of future flights (see link below). Number 3 on the manifest just finished.

Yes the shuttles have enormous problems (huge costs and long turnaround times, for example), but they are really the most versatile and capable spacecraft ever sent into orbit. After the shuttles are retired, we'll be going back to Apollo-style craft for the foreseeable decades. I for one am glad my child is old enough to be able to see and remember these shuttles flying in their final years.

In other news, they're troubleshooting a flaky solar panel up on the space station: Live status

here's a reference for you:

http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0512/05hubbleservi cing/

To be fair though, I'm guessing there are SR-71 replacements (Aurora?) busy doing a similar job but we just don't know about it yet.

The US launches 5-10 spy satellites a year, and they publically announce when they go up (though not what they do). Just look at something like this launch schedule and look for launches with "classified spacecraft payload for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office".

And blueberries. Don't forget the blueberries found by the Opportunity rover.

Mmmm.... blueberries. Must ... get ... breakfast.

Shijian-8 carries at least 2,000 types of seed samples from a variety of species including those grown in normal crops on Earth, as well as fungi. In all, about 474 pounds of seeds are stowed away aboard the satellite, according to the state-owned Xinhua news agency.

Heralded as China's first satellite primarily designed for space breeding, Shijian-8's seed payload will be returned to Earth after about two weeks of flight, the China Daily newspaper reported in July.

After being recovered, the seeds will be used by researchers attempting to improve the quality and yield of terrestrial crops. Chinese officials contend that seeds exposed to space radiation and microgravity contain more vitamins and other crucial minerals.

There's a nice article on the flight team from a few years ago here.

Taking an educated stab in the dark (I've done satellite operations for NASA, but not on Voyager), I'm guessing that you've got a couple that deal with trajectory (where it is in space), one that handles the scheduling of time on the Deep Space Network downlink stations and queing command activities on the spacecraft itself, and maybe 3 that handle sustaining engineering on vehicle hardware systems like electrical, communications, attitude control (including momentum wheels and propulsion), and science instruments. Maybe 1 or 2 that handle the onboard computer and flight software. Finally, probably 1 or 2 maintain the ground data retention system and support workstations, plus a manager for the whole shebang.

It's also almost certain that most or all of these 10 people work on other JPL projects, too.

Relatively recently I've noticed a higher number of non-U.S., non-Israeli rockets failing just after lift-off. There's this incident which affected several satellites at once. There was the India incident: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0607/10gslvfailure / which happened at the Satish Dhawan space center on an Indian island.

If the old ICBM's safety parameters failed then the failsafes (command detonation control circuits) were activiated, courtesy of dougman explaining the internals. Why? If the flight trajectory was clear from ground to space, what happened?

Likely case: a malfunction.

Less likely case: an orbiting object in space or high altitude got in the way of the payload during the last seconds prior to lift-off, the altimetry engineers who coordinate at intervals with NORAD and USSPACECOM saw this and had no choice but to detonate.

A (hopefully) much less likely case:
1. A territorial dispute between espionage agencies (assuming one or more of the onboard sats was in part a spysat I think this is unlikely given the fact they were engineering students project sats).
2. The U.S./Israel hegemony with their fascist conservative leaderships do not want an international presence in space. This political element is still something of a (space) military monopoly. One of Richard Cheney and Co.'s long term objectives is to build nukes and weapons in space without government or citizens oversight. Someone with power in military intelligence or in the Bush Administration may have ordered electronic countermeasures against the cubesat prior to lift-off or just after lift-off.

More than 50 ballistics tests at the University of Dayton Research Institute and the University of Denver Research Institute were devoted to firing particles of 0.25-5Z8 in. toward the Bigelow shield at velocities from about 1.9-4.3 mi./sec.

"The tests showed we have a shield that performs comparably to NASA's, but at a fraction of the cost," says Brian Aiken, the overall Bigelow program manager. Aiken has extensive experience in satellite design, mostly on military spacecraft at TRW (now Northrop Grumman). Bigelow's Gamble

If you look at the maps you'll see they're not passing over the western US this time. Here's wishing them the best, even if not may people can see what's happening until the final stages.

SpaceFlightNow has a detailed timeline of the re-entry - not sure if it will still be dark enough to capture a glow across the Western US with the 9:14AM EDT first landing time ... but my guess is a LOT more camera's will be watching it come back into the atmosphere.

Seems off that only APU1 drives the landing gear, with a backup of pyrotechnics...

"APU 1 is the only hydraulic system that can deploy the shuttle's landing gear. If APU 1 is out of action, pilot Mark Kelly would have to manually fire pyrotechnic charges to deploy the gear."

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts121/06071 4mplm/

Even given how outdated, expensive, failure-prone and downright dangerous the Space Shuttle is, they're still pretty goddamn sweet looking when they lift off.

Agreed. The video footage during ascent is amazing.

The planned Ares V should continue the tradition of spectacular launches. It will use 2 shuttle-derived 5 segment solid rocket boosters and 5 (!) RS-68 H2/O2 engines that burn even more colorfully than the shuttle SSMEs. Should be a great show at night.

And the rather large piece of debris spotted by the crew - possible piece of insulating blanket from the orbiter itself 5-6 feet long.

Maybe I'm just naïve (I hardly think so), but I think if you're getting your information about the Shuttle launch and in-flight status solely from news media, you're most certainly not getting the whole story. Last year, there was a news conference after another chunk of foam came off the shuttle (after all the precautions that they went through to prevent it), with all the experts showing the evidence and explaining it. As usual, they opened it up to questions at the end. The question was along the lines of, "Are the remaining missions grounded until this is resolved?" The response was similar to, "Of course the remaining missions are delayed until we figure out what went wrong here again." Despite all of the content of the news conference (which I personally watched in its entirety), the headlines in the newspapers in the next day were, "Shuttle Fleet Grounded". All of the media made it into a much bigger deal than it actually was. Of course they're not going to send more shuttles into space after a reoccurance of what they thought they fixed without reanalyzing the situation (again).

Before you make any comments about the operations of NASA, I suggest you actually follow the status of the mission. NASA TV and Spaceflight Now should be your primary sources. NASA has a multitude of experts, each focussing on a particular area of expertise. Each one gives their opinion on "go/no-go" at various stages of the mission. Today's scrub was based solely on the weather.

There's no good reason for NASA to launch the shuttle over the July Fourth holiday weekend

There's no good reason for NASA to launch the shuttle over the July Fourth holiday weekend