NASA ISS SpaceX: Inside the Dragon

 

The hatch between the newly arrived SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and the Harmony module of the International Space Station was opened by NASA Astronaut Don Pettit at 5:53 am EDT as the station flew 253 miles above Auckland, New Zealand. 

The hatch opening begins four days of operations to upload more than 1,000 pounds of cargo from the first commercial spacecraft to visit the space station and reload it with experiments and cargo for a return trip to Earth. It is scheduled for splashdown several hundred miles west of California on May 31.

Wearing protective masks and goggles, as is customary for the opening of a hatch to any newly arrived vehicle at the station, Pettit entered the Dragon with Station Commander Oleg Kononenko.

The goggles and masks will be removed once the station atmosphere has had a chance to mix air with the air inside the Dragon itself. A crew news conference will air on NASA TV at 11:25 a.m.

SpaceX Progress Update for Media - YouTube

Mission milestones of the first commercial spaceflight to visit the International Space Station are recapped at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas.

NASA ISS: SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft berths with ISS - Video Gallery

The SpaceX Dragon capsule is berthed to the Earth-facing port of the International Space Station's Harmony module at 12:02 p.m. EDT, May 25, 2012.

Neil Armstrong Grants a Rare and Unique Interview

Neil Armstrong is considered a great symbol of human achievement since he was the first man to walk on the moon.

Despite that unique and prestigious honour, Neil Armstrong kept a private life and rarely gave interviews.

Recently, he granted a rare and unique interview to a very unusual group: the Certified Practicing Accountants (CPA) of Australia.

Alex Malley, the chief executive officer of CPA Australia, was the one who conducted the interview and Mr Armstrong disclosed some very interesting information ranging from the time that he was flying fighter planes during the Korean War to the very popular topic of the first landing on the moon.

Prior to that interview, Neil Armstrong's wife, Carol, had disclosed that he used to receive at least 10 interview requests per month but he did not give permission to these requests because he felt that he had already said everything in previous interviews.

In his latest four-part interview, Mr Armstrong recalled some interesting stories about the first expedition to the moon.

He shared his thoughts about the trip, stating that "I should say I thought we had a 90 per cent chance of getting back to Earth on that flight, but only a 50-50 chance of making a successful landing on the first attempt."

He also added that the original landing site was a "very bad location" and he needed to manually control it to have a safe landing.

His exact words were: "It was on the side of a large crater, about 100 or 150 metres in diameter, with very steep slopes covered with very large boulders - not a good place to land at all. It was a very bad location.

So, I took over manually and flew it like a helicopter out to the west, got into a smoother area with not so many rocks, found a level area and was able to get it down there safely before we ran out of fuel."

Mr Armstrong also disclosed his thoughts about the future of NASA as it is likened to a "shuttlecock" between Congress and the Obama administration.

He remarked that "NASA has been one of the most successful public investments in motivating students to do well and achieve all they can achieve.

It's sad that we are turning the program in a direction where it will reduce the amount of motivation and stimulation it provides to young people. And that's a major concern to me."

NASA ISS: SpaceX Dragon docks with ISS

The SpaceX Dragon unmanned spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station today, Friday 25, 2012, setting a milestone never before realized in spaceflight.

That milestone being that in a mere ten years, a private company began operations and developed a capsule and launch system that has now sent the same reverberations throughout the world as the beginning of the great space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The race now, however, is different. This time the race is about free enterprise and while SpaceX is the early starter in this race there are others who are following behind.

The other entrants in the new commercial space race include such notables as Orbital Sciences, Virgin Galactic, Sierra Nevada, Alliant Techsystems and Boeing, which through its various adopted companies, including the former McDonnell Douglas, has been a major player under the former paradigm of government sponsored spaceflight.

The goal in this new environment is not geopolitical competition but rather free market competition.

However, as this new era is thrust upon us, the issues of space policy and space law enter with them.

The current regime of space law developed in the late 1960s to 1970s dealt with the paradigm of government sponsored spaceflight, but did not foresee the advent of commercial actors in the mix.

The looming question is whether the first generation of international space law will be able to accommodate the paradigm of commercial space.

If the first generation of space law is insufficient, can that deficiency be met with a new international treaty specifically addressing commercial spaceflight or will the laws of commercial spaceflight be made by a mix of domestic regulation and customary international law.

Space policy of many nations will also be affected by the new era of commercial spaceflight. While the United States’ National Space Policy specifically includes commercial spaceflight, other space faring nations such as the Russian Federation and the Oppressive People’s Republic of China have yet to fully absorb the impact that commercial spaceflight will have on their space programs and space policies. In particular, China will be most affected by this new paradigm.

Tackling Space Debris With Nanobots And Lasers

Three students of the Institute of Science and Technology at Klawad in Haryana, India have proposed a revolutionary method to tackle space debris.

In a paper entitled Space Debris and its Mitigation published in the Moon Miners’ Manifesto India quarterly, Sourabh Kaushal and Nishant Arora propose the use of decayable material when manufacturing space machines, and nanobots that collect these machines upon decay.

The work has also earned the team – which includes a third student Niraj Pachpnde – acclaim from space experts like V. Adimurthy, Dean (R&D) of ISRO’s Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, and Priyankar Bandhopadhyay, a space debris expert at ISRO.

According to the eight-page paper, fragmentation debris accounts for 42 percent of space debris; break up of satellites, unused fuel, dead batteries and rocket bodies 17 percent; mission-related debris 19 percent; and non-functional spacecraft 22 percent.

“These objects consist of everything from spent rocket stages and defunct satellites to explosion and collision fragments… As the orbits of these objects may overlie the trajectory of spacecraft, debris is a potential collision risk,” they explain.

The method proposed in this paper involves a mesh made out of carbon nanotubes that acts as a touch screen. When debris brushes onto the screen, nanobots placed at specific coordinates collect the particles for storage.

Another proposal by the team involves the use of a laser which could either vaporize or redirect space debris back to earth. The laser could be installed on the International Space Station, they suggest.

The authors also recommend the creation of huge orbit junkyards surrounding the space station for additional shielding. The paper says that the possibility of using space debris for energy production can also be explored.

Approximately 15,000 pieces of space debris in earth’s orbit are larger than the detection limit of three inches, the paper says, meaning that there are probably millions or even billions of smaller pieces of space debris that remain undetected.

“Despite the size of these objects, they all have the potential to be mortal because of the speed that they are traveling, especially since most of the debris are traveling hundreds or thousands of kilometers per hour,” they write.

Quoting a study, the paper states that the debris amount was placed at 5,000 objects in 1981. By late 1990, it was thought that the majority of 28,000 launched objects had already decayed and about 8,500 remained in orbit.

By 2005 this figure had been adjusted upward to 13,000 objects and in 2006 it went up to 19,000.

Nearly 12 percent of catalogued space debris consists of objects discarded during normal satellite deployment and operation, the paper says. Explosions in higher orbits are one of the main causes of space debris, while space walks also generate some debris.

“For example, Sunita Williams of STS-116 lost a camera during extra vehicular activity. Lost equipment include garbage bags, gloves, and tool kits,” the authors write.

The full article can be found at: Kaushal S et al. (2012) Space debris and its mitigation.

SpaceX in transit past ISS - NASA Video

The SpaceX Dragon capsule closes in on the International Space Station for a series of tests to clear it for its final rendezvous and grapple.

Early this morning, Dragon's thrusters fired, bringing the vehicle 2.4 kilometers below the International Space Station. The vehicle completed two key tests at that distance.

Dragon demonstrated its Relative GPS and established a communications link with the International Space Station using CUCU. Astronauts commanded on Dragon's strobe light to confirm the link worked.