Who knows?
Judging by this, we can’t rely on anything they tell us about their progress.
China’s state news agency published a despatch from the country’s three latest astronauts describing their first night in space before they had even left Earth.
Including a fauxtograph.
We didn’t fake the moon landings, but given this, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Chinese attempt it.
Mike Griffin says that space exploration is crucial to the survival of humanity.
I’ve never been there, but here are some spectacular pics.
Judging by the comments here, the natives are growing ever more restless at NASA, over the sham PDR they just held:
Is NASA trying to put lipstick on a pig? This one, highly-visible decision on how to report status says more than enough. It is a political gimmick if ever we have seen one. And being an election year, I guess it is de rigeur. How terribly sad…
…I think NASA should get rid of the red category all together, because if anything gets put in that category, it doesn’t look good. They might want to get rid of orange also, because that’s too close to red. Here is how I think the categories should be arranged.
GREEN
GREEN/GREEN
GREEN/LIGHT GREEN
GREEN/TEAL
GREEN/EMERALDNow, don’t these colors make you feel good?
It kind of reminds me of Tom Ridge’s terror alerts.
From Carolyn Porco.
No, we don’t need “big” rockets. We need affordable rockets.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The perennial question: why do reporters (even science and technology reporters) think that scientists are a good source for technology policy advice?
Just got an email from Elon:
The static fire took place on Saturday [20 Sep 2008, CA time], as expected, and no major issues came up. However, after a detailed analysis of data, we decided to replace a component in the 2nd stage engine LOX supply line. There is a good chance we would be ok flying as is, but we are being extremely cautious.
This adds a few extra days to the schedule, so the updated launch window estimate is now Sept 28th through Oct 1st [CA time].
So if they hold to that schedule, the fourth Falcon 1 launch attempt could be early next week.
I just discovered, via the latest Carnival of Space, that Bruce Cordell and some other folks have started a web-site/blog devoted to space and space colonization, called Twenty-First Century Waves.
There’s a new Falcon on the launch pad (not a permalink). Here’s hoping for a successful flight this week.
Ben Bova has a piece in the Naples News that could have been written thirty years ago. In fact, it’s exactly like stuff that he (and I) wrote thirty years ago. The only difference is that I have experienced the past thirty years, whereas he seems to be stuck in a seventies time warp, and I’ve gotten a lot more sober about the prospects for a lot of the orbital activities that were always just around the corner, and probably always will be:
An orbital habitat needn’t be a retirement center, though. Space offers some interesting advantages for manufacturing metal alloys, pharmaceuticals, electronics components and other products. For example, in zero-gravity it’s much easier to mix liquids.
Think of mixing a salad dressing. On Earth, no matter how hard you stir, the heavier elements sink to the bottom of the bowl. In zero G there are no heavier elements: they’re all weightless. And you don’t even need a bowl! Liquids form spherical shapes, whether they’re droplets of water or industrial-sized balls of molten metals.
Metallurgists have predicted that it should be possible in orbit to produce steel alloys that are much stronger, yet much lighter, than any alloys produced on Earth. This is because the molten elements can mix much more thoroughly, and gaseous impurities in the mix can percolate out and into space.
Imagine automobiles built of orbital steel. They’d be much stronger than ordinary cars, yet lighter and more fuel-efficient. There’s a market to aim for.
Moreover, in space you get energy practically for free. Sunlight can be focused with mirrors to produce furnace-hot temperatures. Or electricity, from solarvoltaic cells. Without spending a penny for fuel.
The clean, “containerless” environment of orbital space could allow production of ultrapure pharmaceuticals and electronics components, among other things.
Orbital facilities, then, would probably consist of zero-G sections where manufacturing work is done, and low-G areas where people live.
There would also be a good deal of scientific research done in orbital facilities. For one thing, an orbiting habitat would be an ideal place to conduct long-term studies of how the human body reacts to prolonged living in low gravity. Industrial researchers will seek new ways to utilize the low gravity, clean environment and free energy to produce new products, preferably products that cannot be manufactured on Earth, with its heavy gravity, germ-laden environment and high energy costs.
Cars made of “orbital steel”?
Please.
But I guess there’s always a fresh market for this kind of overhyped boosterism. I think that it actively hurts the cause of space activism, because people in the know know how unrealistic a lot of it is, and it just hurts the credibility of proponents like Ben Bova.
Is the ISS itself causing the Soyuz entry failures?
…the Soyuz used to fly long duration missions to the space station flawlessly for years. So what changed in the last two flights? Some bad parts out of the same lot?
A unique confluence of circumstances being investigated appears to be at fault. The space station has grown in size considerably since those first early long duration flights that the Soyuz so flawlessly serviced. It is a bit larger now with all the new modules the Emperor has sent aloft for our friends. As such it makes quite a target for training gangly military officers on ground based radars around the world. It has also become quite a source of electromagnetic energy itself, with all the radios and such from all the international partners blasting their messages back to the homelands.
Did you hear the recent news about cell phones in your pocket causing your little reproductive agents to slow down or become ineffective? The same thing may be at work when the cacophony of EMI on the space station envelops the Soyuz separation pyros and causes them to become inert.
If true, it raises some interesting issues. Is there something intrinsic in the Soyuz design, or pyro design, that causes this effect? Or is it a problem for pyros on any lifeboat that we put up there? Do they need to make it possible to change them out on orbit (if this capability isn’t already there), and keep them in a shielded box until they have to go home? Of course, this would slow things down in an emergency, if they had to get away immediately.
The problem of a space station lifeboat is a much tougher one than people realize (which is why I’ve always opposed it, at least if such a thing is defined as a device that gets you all the way to earth if there’s a problem on the station). You simply can’t trust hardware that has been sitting dormant for months in the space environment to work reliably when you need it to (at least not at our current level of experience with space operations).
This is also the reason that we couldn’t use an Orbiter for a lifeboat, even if we had enough of them that taking one out of the processing flow wouldn’t have a severe impact on turnaround times. We can’t know for sure if it can survive six months on orbit, even with power and support from the ISS, and have the reliability needed to safely come home.
That’s why I’ve always advocated a robust space transportation infrastructure that is always being exercised (e.g., multiple co-orbiting facilities with different purposes, and space tugs/crew modules for transit from one to the other). It provides redundancy, and reliability, and obviates the need to abandon a single space station to take people all the way back to earth in the event of a problem.