Posted on April 28, 2008, at 9:12 am .
UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA PRESS RELEASE
We’ve all heard about the space missions that are DOA when NASA engineers lose touch with the spacecraft or lander. In other cases, some critical system fails and the mission is compromised.
Both are maddening scenarios because the spacecraft probably could be easily fixed if engineers could just get their hands on the hardware for a few minutes.
Ali Akoglu and his students at The University of Arizona are working on hybrid hardware/software systems that one day might use machine intelligence to allow the spacecraft to heal themselves.
Akoglu, an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, is using Field Programmable Gate Arrays, or FPGA, to build these self-healing systems. FPGAs combine software and hardware to produce flexible systems that can be reconfigured at the chip level.
Continue reading ‘Spacecraft: Heal Thyself’
Posted on April 28, 2008, at 12:03 am .
Brian Turner of the Kansas City Space Pirates – one of the groups competing in the Space Elevator Games – will be a guest on Late Night with Conan O’Brien on Friday, May 2. The late night funny man will interview Turner about space elevators, according to the Space Elevator Games blog. So, tune in or set your TiVo.
Posted on April 27, 2008, at 11:54 pm .
The German Mars Society has completed final testing on its MIRIAM balloon prototype in advance of a planned June 14 suborbital launch from the ESRANGE rocket facility near Kiruna, Sweden.
“MIRIAM is a flight test within the ARCHIMEDES atmospheric sounding probe for Mars project, and tests the full inflation and subsequent entry of an atmospheric entry balloon (“ballute”) here on Earth. It is jointly developed by The Mars Society Germany and several institutes of the University of the Federal Armed Forces of Germany in Munich.”
MIRIAM will be launched by a REXUS4 sounding rocket managed and built by the DLR Moraba group of Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.
Posted on April 27, 2008, at 11:32 pm .
The Virginia General Assembly has approved the The 21st Century Capital Improvement Program, a bond program which among other things will provide funding for improvements to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island. The commonwealth is trying to attract commercial space companies to the facility.
I’ve looked at the actual bill, but I wasn’t able to figure out how much money would be devoted to the project. I may have missed it, or this could be something that will be determined later. The plan – which enjoys bipartisan support – needs approval from the Virginia Senate before it can be sent to Gov. Tim Kaine for signature.
Posted on April 27, 2008, at 10:23 pm .
The Space Prizes blog has an account of a podcast given by X Prize Founder Peter Diamandis as part of the Stanford Entrepreneurs program. Diamandis said the foundation plans to expand into the following areas:
- deep sea exploration to map the ocean floor
- a cancer cure prize with Lance Armstrong
- doubling or tripling the human lifespan
The X Prize Foundation also is considering “My X Prize” competitions that would allow local groups to develop their own prize concepts.
Posted on April 27, 2008, at 8:49 pm .
Some interesting on-going discussions over at SpacePolitics.com….
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has picked up the endorsement of a major aerospace union, International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE).
With a crucial Puerto Rico primary looming on June 1, Hillary Clinton is trying to save the Arecibo Observatory so it can continue to be used for radio astronomy and blown up in James Bond movies. (Probably more the former than the latter; what are the chances that a future Bond villain will launch another death star into orbit? Actually….pretty damn good, come to think of it.)
Down on Florida’s Space Coast, Republican Representative Tom Feeny and his Democratic challenger, Suzanne Kosmas, are fighting over who can best represent the region in Congress. What will the denizens of KSC decide?
Meanwhile, current members of Congress are fretting over the decision to retire the space shuttle in 2010 now that the Russian Soyuz has suffered its second Tower of Terror landing in a row. They don’t seem convinced by the Russian space chief Anatoly Perminov’s belief that we should simply limit the number of women aboard the space station. That’s definitely a sign of progress in at least one country….
Posted on April 27, 2008, at 8:04 pm .
The late, great Peter Finch as Howard Beale in “Network.”
If you’re like me, you’re sick and tired of these !#$~! snakes on this !#$! air….
Oops. Wrong movie.
You are probably fed up with the high cost of space travel. I mean, it’s like two million dollars a day. Probably more now. Who can afford that? Other than billionaires. And they can afford anything.
Even if you could go, you’d end up get crammed elbow-to-elbow into a little seat in a tiny Soyuz capsule for two days, peeing into a tube, eating reconstituted food, and hoping the video of your bout with space sickness doesn’t end up as Number 1 on YouTube. It’s a lot of put up with for the vacation of a lifetime.
Well, if you’re mad as hell about not being able to afford these minor inconveniences, you don’t have to take it any more. Instead, you can sign the MarsDrive Petition for Inexpensive Space Access, which is pretty much what it sounds like. The group is hoping to get more than a million signatures and “submit it to government bodies like U.S Congress, the E.U and various other nations with space aspirations. We will also present it to large private sector companies and investment organizations at this point.”
Frankly, I’m not sure how useful petitions like these are, but it will probably do some good and doesn’t take much time to sign. And you can channel your inner Howard Beale. Or Samuel L. Jackson. Either way, it would probably be quite cathartic.
Posted on April 27, 2008, at 7:30 pm .
MarsDrive has an interview with space tourist and entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari. She described her flight to the International Space Station, waxed enthusiastically about the future of space tourism, and called on governments to loosen regulations on space tourism companies.
“Cost is definitely an inhibitor at this time,” Ansari admits. “We need established, sustainable businesses in the private industry using space flights to bring down the per flight cost.
“Also the regulatory and insurance requirements is another hindrance for the industry. I think we need new technology to be able to lower the cost of orbital flights. There should be greater collaboration between private industries and the regulatory bodies to be able to come up industry friendly regulation that will at the same time encourage passenger safety,” she added.
Most of her comments make sense, but the regulatory one is curious. At least in the United States, it seems that the commercial space industry has gotten more or less everything it has wanted from the industry friendly, anti-regulation Bush Administration and several states vying for its business.
Continue reading ‘Ansari: Space Tourism Regs Not “Industry Friendly” Enough’
Posted on April 27, 2008, at 2:11 pm .
Four brief updates on developments in the UK, courtesy of Rocketeers.co.uk….
UK-based Worldview Spaceflight is offering astronaut training in collaboration with Rocketplane Global. “We can offer the full package, from trainee to astronaut, Worldview will take you through every step of your training and your eventual spaceflight in 2010,” Worldview says. Rocketplane, based in Oklahoma, will apparently fly from bases in Europe.
The N-prize is offering a £9,999.99 prize to any group capable launching a satellite between 9.99 and 19.99 grams into orbit for no more than £999.99. The spacecraft must complete at least 9 orbits in order to win the prize, which seems awkwardly named (to American ears, anyway). The “N” stands for “Nanosatellite” or “Negligible Resources,” BTW.
The Space ’08 conference will be held at the Barbican Conference Centre in London on 4th September 2008. The conference “will identify and examine the key rationales” of the British National Space Centre’s Civil Space Strategy 2008-2012.
ESA will conduct the Space Station Design Workshop in collaboration with the Institute of Space Systems of the Universitaet Stuttgart on July 13-18, 2008. The event – held at ESTEC, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands – is open to university students (up to Masters level or equivalent) from ESA member states. The ESA website has more information.
Posted on April 27, 2008, at 1:27 pm .
Below is an excerpt from a GAO Report titled, “NASA: Challenges in Completing and Sustaining the International Space Station,” that was presented to Congress last week. The except offers a succinct explanation of NASA’s COTS program and the challenges it faces over the next few years. As you will see, GAO is not real optimistic…
“NASA is working with the commercial space sector through its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to develop and produce vehicles that can take equipment and crew to and from the space station. NASA expects that these vehicles will be ready for cargo use in 2010 and crew use in 2012. However, these vehicles have yet to be successfully launched into orbit, and some NASA officials have acknowledged that their development schedules leave little room for the unexpected.
“Under the COTS program, NASA has pledged $500 million to promote commercial opportunities for space transportation vehicles. Using Space Act agreements instead of traditional contracting mechanisms, NASA will make payments to companies based on the achievement of key milestones during the development of their vehicles. These agreements are both funded and unfunded. For the two funded agreements that have been reached, NASA stated that the commercial suppliers for space transportation services will have customers outside of ISS, including NASA’s Constellation program, which plans to send humans back to the moon and eventually Mars. The COTS program will occur in phases. In the first phase companies will demonstrate the vehicle launch and docking capabilities with the ISS. The second phase is the procurement of services for transportation of cargo and crew to the ISS, which is scheduled to begin sometime in the 2010 time frame.
Continue reading ‘Construction Ahead: Expect Delays’
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