Really Rocket Science

Who is this man?

He’s the man who’ll give India the moon, otherwise known as Mylswamy Annadurai, the recipient of the Hariom Ashram pretit Vikram Sarabhai Research Award for his outstanding Contributions to Systems Analysis and Space systems management(2004), and the recipient of a citation from ISRO for his contribution to the INSAT systems Mission management(2003) and Team Excellence award for his contribution to Indian Space Program (2007):

On the shoulders of the soft-spoken M Annadurai rests a mission that will make history for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and for India. The man, who has worked on a dozen ISRO missions, is now the project director of the most ambitious of missions of ISRO till date. Annadurai… is now preparing to send India’s first mission to the moon, Chandrayaan I.

The spacecraft, which will carry 11 payloads, of which five are from India and six from the US, Europe and Bulgaria, will be launched onboard the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle C11 (PSLV), with improved strap-on motors. On D-day (as of now, October 22), the PSLV’s lift-off will take India into the league of nations that have had a date with the moon, remotely. This could be just the warming up before an Indian lands on the moon.

Here’s a good illustration of the Chandrayaan I mission. Integration with the launch rocket has begun at Sriharikota Range (SHAR), and the launch is scheduled for the 22nd of this month:

At SHAR, the lunar probe will undergo a further series of electrical and mechanical checks, including those of its solar panels. It has already undergone preliminary thermal and vibration tests at the ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC) in Bangalore.

The upgraded version of the launch rocket PSLV-C11 will have a lift-off weight of 316 tonnes, and will be used to inject the 1,304-kg mass Chandrayaan-I into a 240 x 24,000 km orbit. Subsequently, the spacecraft’s own propulsion system will be used to position it in a 100-km polar orbit around the moon.

We’ll have more about the liftoff as the 22nd approaches.

Transporting a missile/rocket booster by semi. As the driver of that tractor, you’d think you’d be very well trained. You can never have too much training, as we read North Dakota’s Bismarck Tribune:

Cost to recover rocket booster: $5.6 million

By JAMES MacPHERSON
Associated Press Writer

The military says it cost $5.6 million to recover an overturned truck carrying an unarmed missile booster rocket in northwestern North Dakota.

The Air Force blamed "driver and safety observer error" for the July 31 incident. The truck carrying the booster for the unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile tipped over on a gravel road while being transported from the Minot Air Force Base to a launch facility 70 miles southwest. Two airmen were in the truck, which was accompanied by a security convoy.

"There were no injuries and the accident posed no danger to the public," the Air Force said in a statement.

The rocket booster and truck remained at the side of the road until Aug. 10, while investigators assessed the crash site.

Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Laurie A. Arellano said the recovery cost of $5.6 million included damage to the truck and its cargo.

"Inadequate gravel road training programs and the inability of 91st Missile Wing engineering personnel to accurately determine the safe load-bearing width of gravel roads along designated routes also contributed to the accident," the Air Force statement said.

The Air Force said the booster rocket is 66 feet long and weighs 75,000 pounds while the vehicle, trailer and rocket booster weighed more than 70 tons.

"While preparing to make a left turn, the driver and safety observer maneuvered the loaded tractor-trailer beyond the right edge of the reinforced gravel roadway and shoulder," the Air Force statement said.

"Basically, the procedure for large trucks is that they’re supposed to drive in the middle of the gravel road," Arellano said.

Arellano did not know Thursday if any airmen had been sanctioned.

They should have hired one of the drivers who race up Pike’s Peak in trucks. Take a look at this video clip:

SpaceX did it:

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) announces that Flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle has successfully launched and achieved Earth orbit. With this key milestone, Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.

"This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team," said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. "The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull’s-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake."

Falcon 1, designed from the ground up by SpaceX, lifted off at 4:15 p.m. (PDT) / 23:15 (UTC) from the Reagan Test Site (RTS) on Omelek Island at the U.S. Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific, about 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii.

Preliminary data indicates that Falcon 1 achieved an elliptical orbit of 500 km by 700 km, 9.2 degrees inclination—exactly as targeted.

Falcon 1 carried into orbit a payload mass simulator of approximately 165 kg (364 lbs), designed and built by SpaceX, specifically for this mission. Consisting of a hexagonal aluminum alloy chamber 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall, the payload remains attached to the second stage as it orbits Earth.

 Here’s the video:

Noah Schactman brings light to a very interesting perspective: how this impacts launch costs and who controls entry into space. This could be a real game-changer:

Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is promising to cut that $10,000-per-pound price in half. No wonder the Air Force has committed more than $100 million to the company, founded by PayPal’s Elon Musk. Darpa has made major investments, as well. "The military now has a stick to poke and prod the traditional big launch providers (Boeing and Lockheed Martin) into actually being competitive and saving the taxpayer money instead of just sucking off the government teat," former Air Force space officer Brian Weeden tells Danger Room.

But that stick only gets sharp if SpaceX can pull off the launch trick more than once. The company’s first three efforts were disasters. And there’s no guarantee the next three won’t be disasters, too. "Musk will need 20 or so launches before he knows how reliable his technology is — and how much it really costs," Hoffman wrote. And even if Musk can get these relatively-simple, relatively-small Falcon 1 rocket launches together, the real test will be whether the heavier, farther-reaching Falcon 9s will work out as planned.

It’s not just American launch costs that could go down. The next SpaceX rocket is supposed to carry a Malaysian reconaissance satellite into orbit. "This could be the beginning of a general diffusion of on-orbit capability of all sorts and a loss of U.S. ability to call the shots in space," says long time satellite-watcher (and former CIA officer) Allen Thomson.

1,500 miles south of Hawaii, from a converted oil rig, over a vast, dark Pacific Ocean. Suddenly, a huge Ukrainian rocket launches a multi-million dollar spacecraft built by Space Systems/Loral.

The report, via the AP and SignOnSanDeigo.com:

A Zenit-3SL rocket carrying the Galaxy 19 satellite blasted off at 2:28 a.m. PDT and spacecraft separation occurred just over an hour later after reaching orbit, the company said in a Webcast of the launch.

“It’s what we call a very boring launch, which is very good,” said Kjell Karlsen, Sea Launch president and general manager. “It was right on target.”

The satellite is intended to serve Intelsat customers in the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Sea Launch is a partnership of Chicago-based Boeing Co., RSC-Energia of Russia, Aker ASA of Norway and SDO Yuzhnoye/PO Yuzhmash of Ukraine.

Here’s the video…

Telesat’s Nimiq 4 satellite was launched by International Launch Services over the weekend, which is already fully leased to Bell TV.

The news, via RIA Novosti:

The rocket was successfully launched from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan at 01:48 Moscow time (21:48 GMT)

"The Nimiq-4 satellite was successfully orbited," a source in the Khrunichev State Research and Production Center said.

The contract to launch the satellite was signed last April by Canada’s satellite communications company Telesat and International Launch Services (ILS), a U.S.-Russian joint venture with exclusive rights for worldwide commercial sales and mission management of satellite launches on Russia’s Proton rockets. Since 1996, ILS has carried out 47 commercial launches of Proton rockets.

Nimiq-4 was build by Astrium, a subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS), to provide high definition television (HDTV) in North America. The satellite has a life span of 15 years.

Here’s the video highlight:

You can watch the full broadcast here.

The GeoEye-1 satellite – the world’s highest resolution, commercial Earth-imaging satellite – was launched on Saturday.

You’ll soon be able to check out the satellite’s images for yourself:

ars technica In return for undisclosed terms, Google got two considerations: its logo on the side of the launch vehicle, and exclusive use of the mapping images that the satellite produces.

The satellite maker, General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, says the GeoEye-1 cost $500 Million to build and launch and its imaging services could be sold for anything from environmental mapping to agriculture and defense. Funding for the project came from commercial satellite company GeoEye and the Defense Department’s National Geospacial-Intelligence Agency

Inmarsat CEO Andrew Sukawaty said it best:

The Inmarsat-4s are the world’s most sophisticated commercial network for mobile voice and data services, and the successful launch of the third I-4 allows us to complete the global coverage for our broadband services. Once the third I-4 is operational, Inmarsat will have the only fully-funded next-generation network for mobile satellite services.

Very cool mission: complete global coverage from 3 satellites, for land, air or sea.  Oh, and so many spot beams:

Each I-4 can generate 19 wide beams and more than 200 narrow spot beams. These can quickly be reconfigured and focused anywhere on Earth to provide extra capacity where needed.

A spacecraft this powerful is a biggie:

Each satellite can digitally form more than 200 spot beams. More power and spectrum can be allocated to certain beams to cope with the fluctuations in traffic. An on-board digital signal processor routes the signals to the different beams, acting like a switchboard in the sky: any signal uplink can be routed to any mobile downlink beam and vice versa.

All three satellites are identical and interchangeable – their coverage is programmable and can be reconfigured in orbit. They are based on the E3000 version of Astrium’s outstandly successful Eurostar satellite platform series, and equipped with electric propulsion system. Their 45m-long solar array generates 14 kW of electrical power at beginning of life and the spacecraft weighs approximately 5,950 kg at launch. The main body is 7 metres high and the unfurlable antenna reflector has a diameter of about 10 metres.

Here’s the launch video:

This Thursday, August 14, 2008, an Ariane 5 rocket is scheduled to lift the SES Americom AMC-21 communications satellite into orbit from the European Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

The satellite will operate from the 125 degrees West orbital position after it is launched by Arianespace.

From the press release: 

Thales Alenia Space served as the prime contractor and communications payload supplier of the Star-2 spacecraft that was designed, built, integrated and tested by Orbital Sciences Corporation (NYSE: ORB). 

AMC-21 was designed and built for advanced telecommunications, mobile applications and TV broadcasting with coverage of the 50 U.S. states, as well as Southern Canada, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.  Featuring 24 active 36 MHz transponders, the 2500 kg spacecraft has a 15-year design life.

The launch window for AMC-21 is from 5:44 p.m. to 6:35 p.m., local time in Kourou, French Guiana (4:44 p.m. to 5:35 p.m. in New York; or 8:44 p.m. to 9:35 p.m. GMT; or 10:44 p.m. to 11:35 p.m. in Paris; or 5:44 a.m. to 6:35 a.m. in Tokyo, etc.). You’ll also be able to watch the launch on the web here. 

Going along for the ride with AMC-21 will be the Superbird-7 satellite for Space Communications Corporation of Japan. 

Thursday’s launch is just one of many for the satcom industry over the coming months, though the Orbital spacecraft set to launch on August 21st has been delayed, as Measat-3 is being sent back to the United States for repairs, which is a true bummer for the 25 kids who were getting set to watch the launch.

We’ll bring you updates on the launches as they happen. 

On Saturday, StarTrek’s James Doohan – “Scotty” – made his last space mission. The actor’s ashes went up in Space X’s Falcon 1 rocket, never to return. He was joined by the remains of real-life astronaut Gordon Cooper.

But wait, this isn’t the first post-mortem space mission that the two have made together. Last year, James Doohan and Gordon Cooper’s ashes made a similar journey.

This lost rocket is the third unsuccessful attempt by Space X, which is owned by PayPal founder Elon Musk. Musk is one of many entrepreneurs trying to build a private space industry. This latest failure is a setback, to be sure. But don’t count Musk out:

The most important message I’d like to send right now is that SpaceX will not skip a beat in execution going forward. We have flight four of Falcon 1 almost ready for flight and flight five right behind that. I have also given the go ahead to begin fabrication of flight six…There should be absolutely zero question that SpaceX will prevail in reaching orbit and demonstrating reliable space transport. For my part, I will never give up and I mean never.

Yes, that’s the title from a memorable 1966 movie, a comedy. That’s also the title of an Agence France-Presse bulletin issued earlier today that begins with "The Russian are coming…"

The Guiana Space Centre (CSG) is girding for a new era when it will host Russian rockets and Russian engineers who just a short while ago were Europe’s space rivals.

For 40 years, this base on the coast of French Guiana was the prestigious symbol of French, and then European, ambitions in space.

On Sunday, a freighter is due to dock in Cayenne bearing a first consignment of 150 containers of equipment to fit out a launch pad at CSG where, from the second half of 2009, the first "European" Soyuz is scheduled to blast into space.

Nothing funny about the space business — very serious business indeed. This might be the beginning of greater cooperation in space, especially the business side. Launching commercial spacecraft is big business, costing anywhere from $80 to $100 million or more for heavy-lift launches. Satcom operators need access to reliable launch service providers, and if they could increase capacity.

The Russians are coming — to chessboxing, too. "Chessboxing?" That’s right: it’s a new sport. Brains and brawn. Just like the rocket launch business.

Here’s the CNN report…

And one from Ukrainian television…