Really Rocket Science

Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports that RocketPlane Kistler and SpaceX are trying to gain the right to test rockets at the Australian Defense Department site in Woomera, South Australia. Attracted by the size (about as large as England) and remoteness of the location, the Kistler and SpaceX hope to use the site to do test launches of the rockets NASA International Space Station.

Military history buffs will remember the Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA) as the largest land-based testing range in the world and the site of much of Australia and the U.K.’s nuclear (and otherwise) missile testing throughout the cold war. The WPA, which is still in use today for weapons testing, was also the location of many of European Launcher Development Organization (ELDO)‘s EUROPA rocket launches (one waiting to be launched is seen above) and NASA’s Island Lagoon Deep Space Tracking Station throughout the 1960s.

In addition to being a site with a great history, Woomera seems to have some good site-seeing opportunities and be just as beautiful as much of the rest of the Outback.

Daisuke Enomoto (a.k.a. Dice-K), a former executive at LiveDoor, Japan’s leading internet service provider and web portal, had to cancel his plans to fly with two Russian cosmonauts in a on Expedition 14 to the International Space Station, which was set to lift off on Sept. 14, 2006.

Russian Federal Space Agency Spokesmen Igor Panarin said that Enomoto "was deemed not ready to fly for exclusively medical reasons," but also hinted that the he might be able to join a later mission in the future. Had Enomoto gone on the flight, he would have been the world’s third space tourist and the first, self-funded tourist from Japan and Asia. According to Wikipedia, television journalist Toyohiro Akiyama who flew on Soyuz TM-11 in 1990 was the first Japanese or Asian space tourist, although, because the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) funded the trip, he is more prevelantly regarded as the world’s first space business traveller.

Enomoto’s most likely replacement would be Iranian-born U.S. businesswoman Anousheh Ansari, President, Founder, and CEO of telecom technologies inc. If she makes this flight, Ansari would be the first female space tourist; if she does not, a third Russian cosmonaut will most likely take the open seat.

AP:

The name of the new vehicle that NASA hopes will take astronauts back to the moon was supposed to be hush-hush until next week.

But apparently U.S. astronaut Jeff Williams, floating 220 miles above Earth at the international space station, didn’t get the memo.

Williams, through no fault of his own, let it slip Tuesday that the new vehicle’s name is Orion.

"We’ve been calling it the crew exploration vehicle for several years, but today it has a name — Orion," Williams said, taping a message in advance for the space agency that was transmitted accidentally over space-to-ground radio.

NASA planned to reveal the new name Aug. 31, when the space agency also announces which contractor will build the vehicle. Competing for the award are Lockheed Martin and a team made up of Northrop Grumman and Boeing.

You just can’t keep a secret these days. 

"For more than three years, the International Space Station has floated half-built above the Earth. Maintained by a skeleton crew, the station — an assemblage of modules and girders — has not come close to its stated goal of becoming a world-class research outpost," the New York Times reports.

But the long break in building out the International Space Station— a result of the grounding of the space shuttle fleet following the Columbia disaster— is about to come to an end:

Since the project began in late 1998 with the joining of two American and Russian modules, the United States and 15 other nations have slowly put together a structure that weighs more than 400,000 pounds, with a habitable volume of almost 15,000 cubic feet. When completed, it is to weigh almost a million pounds and have a cabin volume of more than 33,000 cubic feet, larger than a typical five-bedroom house.

Getting to that goal will require some of the most difficult shuttle missions ever mounted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, starting with the Atlantis’s launching from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla [next Sunday]. The shuttle and its crew of six will haul a 30,000-pound, 45-foot truss segment to the station, delicately remove it from the cargo bay and install it during three spacewalks by two teams of astronauts….

NASA has allotted about 15 flights to complete the project before the shuttles are retired in 2010. The next four missions will carry other massive truss segments to extend the station’s central girder to more than 350 feet. The girder will eventually support four huge sets of solar-power arrays, batteries and heat-dispensing radiators.

The additional truss segments, which will increase the mass of the station by 40 tons, will also include 10-foot-wide rotary joints shaped like wagon wheels that will allow the solar arrays to track the sun for optimum power as the station moves in orbit. The Atlantis is delivering the second array, joining one put on the station in 2000.

You can learn more about the International Space Station here. 

Sea Launch launched the Koreasat 5 satellite last night from a converted oil platform in the Pacific Ocean, 1500 miles south of Hawaii. Named after the Korean national flower, Mugunghwa, the satellite will be replacing Koreasat 2. Incidently, the number 4 was skipped when naming this satelite (4 is a very unlucky number in Korea; its pronunciation is similar to the pronunciation of the Chinese character for Death). The satellite itself has a very interesting payload.

Steve Pearlstein had an interesting column in Friday’s Washington Post regarding the changing fortunes of Intelsat and its famous headquarters in Washington, D.C.:

Time was when Intelsat was something of a metaphor for business in Washington, a government-backed enterprise that put the city at the center of the global satellite industry. Its futuristic office building on Connecticut Avenue was meant to symbolize Intelsat’s technological prowess and financial reliability.

Today, Intelsat is still something of a metaphor, but for a very different business environment. Its official headquarters is in Bermuda, its building is for sale, some operations are moving to Atlanta, and its debt is rated as junk. Intelsat’s prospects are now tied up as much with financial engineering as with the other kind.

All this is the result of transactions by private equity firms that took Intelsat from a government enterprise to a private company and merged it with Comsat, PanAmSat and parts of Loral, among others. But in the process, they have also loaded Intelsat with more than $11 billion in debt and drained much of the company’s equity value.

More information on Intelsat’s financial woes can be found here and here. Yet regardless of Intelsat’s financial outlook, the future in Washington won’t quite be the same if the Intelsat building — long a Connecticut Avenue landmark and a must-see for futurists touring the nation’s capital– gets renamed.

Unless, of course, you purchase it in our honor and rename it, say, the Sebadoh Building. (This might be the company with the listing.)

More photos: Check out this arial photo as well as this "blast from the past" photo of John Andrews with a model of the proposed building back in 1980.

As we reported last week, SeaLaunch is set to lift the Koreasat-5 communications satellite from its launch facility in the Pacific this evening.

The Korea Times reports: 

KT, South Korea’s largest fixedline and broadband operator, said Monday that it will send its fourth commercial satellite into orbit from the Pacific Ocean this week, marking the nation’s first satellite launch from the open sea.

The Koreasat-5 will be launched at 12:27 p.m. Tuesday [8:27 p.m. U.S. Pacific time on Monday evening] from an area south of Hawaii. The launch will be controlled by an assembly and command ship and a launch platform ship, KT said.

The satellite will replace the Koreasat-2 satellite in providing wireless communications and broadcasting services, the company said.

Unlike previous KT satellites that helped telecommunications in local areas, the Koreasat- 5 will cover other Asian countries, including Japan, China, the Philippines and Taiwan.

The satellite will start its service after four months of testing, it added.

 The SeaLaunch Mission page can be found here.

Here’s a true story. A few weeks ago, my gas grill was stolen from my backyard. I went outside one Friday afternoon with a spatula and some burgers and — there was nothing there.

I can’t say I was disappointed that the grill was gone. There was a certain satisfaction knowing that whoever had taken the thing had some arduous scrubbing ahead of them if they wanted to remove several years’ worth of crispy cheese and hamburger fragments that had ossified onto the grill. Losing the grill to theft, I reasoned,  had at least spared me from that long-avoided chore.

But replacing the grill did present me with another problem — that ancient dilemma that has plagued mankind for, oh, three generations now:

Gas, or charcoal? 

But now I learn that there is a new, third option for outdoor cooking: solar. A group of smart cookies from the Durango Renewable Energy Group have crafted a solar cooker made from a recycled satellite dish.

Reports have it that this fine addition to any suburban patio will bake cookies in under 15 minutes. Instructions on how you can create your own solar oven using mirrors (or a "cheaper" and lower-powered version using aluminum foil) can be found here.

My decision on how best to replace my grill has been further complicated by a neighbor who swears that the fourth option for grilling is pretty much the greatest invention in human history. I’m dubious about his assertion, and the clouds today raise my doubts about crafting my own solar cooker.

Which leaves me, metaphorically at least, still holding that spatula and a plate of uncooked burgers and wondering: gas, charcoal, solar, or George? 

Doug Lung points to more evidence of the transformation of the media landscape. OfCom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries, has released The Telecommunications Market 2006 report. Lung summarizes:

The 293-page report contains some interesting findings about trends in the communications industry, including TV broadcasting, and consumer usage of, and attitudes to, various communications services. One conclusion reached was that a new "networked generation" is turning away from TV, radio and newspapers in favor of online services, downloadable content such as Podcasts and participation in online communities.

In a result that’s sure to concern traditional TV broadcasters, the report found that on average 16- to 24-year-olds in the United Kingdom spend one hour less per day watching television than the average television viewer. Their radio listening is lower too, by an average of 15 minutes per day compared to the wider population. One bright spot, however, is that among all groups, TV viewing increased slightly, by 11 minutes per week.

Digital television, consisting of both satellite and terrestrial Freeview channels, is growing in popularity. Freeview households spend more time watching digital-only channels than any of the five main public broadcasting channels, but the public service broadcasters’ own digital-only channels are gaining audience, with total viewing increasing nearly 6 percent between 2001 and 2005. Free TV remains popular and Freeview was the main driver of multichannel TV growth, adding 2.0 million homes in the 12 months ending March 2006. The report said there are now 7.1 million homes in the U.K. in which the main set receives digital terrestrial TV.

While the TV broadcasting model in the U.K. is quite different from that in the U.S., it is interesting to see that subscription revenues in 2005 were up by 8.5 percent to 3.9 billion pounds ($7.3 billon) for all pay TV services, exceeding commercial television advertising revenue in 2005 by almost 10 percent. Overall TV industry revenues increased 4 percent in 2005 compared with 2004.

A PDF of the key points of the report can be seen here.
 

According to survey results recently released by J.D. Power and Associates, you’re more likely to be satisfied with satellite than cable television. As Multichanel News points out, DirecTV and EchoStar Communications did extreamly well in customer satisfaction throughout the country, while the nation’s largest cable provider, Comcast, ranked below average in every region in the United States. Steve Donehue reports:

"J.D. ranked DirecTV as the best pay TV company overall, with the direct-broadcast satellite provider receiving the top rankings in overall satisfaction; performance and reliability; cost of service; billing; image; offerings and promotions; and customer service."

But it wasn’t all bad news for cable companies. According to the same J.D. survey, digital cable penetration rose by 11% since last year, with 41% of all cable using households using the digital option. Moreover, while the average satellite bill has risen $3 over the past year — to nearly $61 — the average cable bill has dropped a $1 since 2005 to $58 a month, a change most likely due to the bundling of television, voice, and internet services modern cable companies are able to provide.