Category Archives: Space Station

The Canadian-built robotic arms built for NASA's space shuttle fleet and the International Space Station are about to get two new siblings.

Last week, the Canadian Space Agency showed off the Next-Generation Canadarm (NGC) prototypes, which were unveiled after three years of development at Canadian company MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates. The mechanical limbs are the successors to the shuttle fleet's Canadarm and station's Canadarm2, which played pivotal rolls in the station's construction for more than a decade.

The CSA and MDA plan to use this technology to position Canada for newer space business opportunities in areas such as in-orbit refueling of satellites, said Gilles Leclerc, the agency's director-general of space exploration.

"We prepared all these new systems so that we will be well-positioned for the next thing in space," Leclerc said.

Space news from NBCNews.com

Sitcom's crewwent to great lengths toprovide a sense ofreality and make sure no one got hurt.

However, the Canadian government's $53.1 million contribution to the arm project (as well as supporting testbeds and simulators) has only brought them to the prototype stage so far. The arms will require more money for launch configurations and a ride to orbit.

Fuelling competition One of the prototype arms spans 49 feet (15 meters), the same length as the space station's Canadarm2. But the new arm is lighter and has two sections that telescope into each other. This makes it more suitable to fold up inside the smaller spacecraft of the future. [Photos: Building the International Space Station]

The other NGC prototype arm is a miniature, at 8.5 feet long (2.58 meters). Like the station's Dextre robot, which it is modeled after, it will be able to refuel satellites, grapple tools and manipulate items such as blankets that cover satellites.

Manufacturer MDA has spent several years touting the benefits of satellite refueling, which the company says would save money since satellites could be kept aloft longer if they can receive more fuel after launch.

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Canada unveils two new space 'Canadarms'

Howard Wolowitz is still in space.

The fictional aerospace engineer and Expedition 31 crew member was seen floating aboard the International Space Station (ISS) during last week's season premiere of the CBS hit television series " The Big Bang Theory." On this week's episode, airing Thursday night, Wolowitz is still off the planet, 250 miles (400 km) up.

Of course, he is not really on the space station. The real ISS Expedition 31 ended in July. Wolowitz, or rather actor Simon Helberg, was on a sound stage at the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, Calif.

His spacecraft surroundings never orbited the Earth, but they did play previous host to the Energizer Bunny for a Super Bowl commercial and were seen in the 2004 feature film, "The Day After Tomorrow."

But Helberg's, or rather Wolowitz's, crew did include a real life NASA astronaut, Mike Massimino, and, further blurring the lines between art and life, the fictional Expedition 31 crew patch that they wore on the show placed Wolowitz's and Massimino's names side-by-side. [ Photos: TV's "Big Bang Theory" Geek Chic ]

Behind the scenes, the job of delivering Wolowitz to the orbiting outpost didn't fall to a Russian rocket but rather to The Big Bang Theory's production designer John Shaffner, set decorator Ann Shea and their teams.

Scavenging for space parts As it turns out, you can rent a space station.

Last May, when the show's fifth season finale called for Wolowitz to launch onboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, Shaffner went looking for one.

"The first thing that we always do in this business is ask, 'Well, can we rent it? Did somebody make one first?' And unfortunately, we discovered that there weren't any Soyuz replicas to be found," Shaffner told collectSpace.com in an interview.

For the Soyuz, Shaffner and Shea received photos from NASA, turned to a Kansas museum to find dimensions, and scavenged parts from an aerospace junkyard in Los Angeles to piece together a realistic capsule. But in the course of his seeking out the spacecraft, Shaffner found a space station.

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How 'Big Bang's' Howard flew to space

The first of NASA's contracted cargo resupply flights to the International Space Station now has its own mission patch, courtesy of the company launching the spacecraft.

Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, revealed its insignia for the launch of its second Dragon capsule to the space station today (Oct. 4). The gumdrop-shape cargo craft is scheduled to liftoff atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday (Oct. 7) at 8:35 p.m. EDT (0035 Monday GMT) from Complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

The flight, referred to as Commercial Resupply Services-1 (CRS-1), is the first of a dozen resupply flights for which NASA is paying SpaceX $1.6 billion to fly. The mission follows a demonstration flight in May that made history as the first commercial spacecraft to berth with the station.

The CRS-1 mission patch, which borrows its shape from the Dragon capsule, shows the solar-powered spacecraft grappled by the space station's Canadarm2 robotic arm as it is being brought in to connect with the orbiting outpost's Harmony module. Below the Dragon capsule on the patch is the Earth.

Almost camouflaged with the patch's green-colored North American continent is a four leaf clover. The symbol for luck, the clover has become a regular feature on SpaceX's insignias since the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company's first successful Falcon 1 launch in September 2008. [Photos: SpaceX's Dragon Capsule Set for Cargo Run]

Based on pre-launch photos, the CRS-1 emblem does not appear on the Falcon 9 rocket or the Dragon capsule, but embroidered versions of the patch may fly to the space station and back as part of the mission's Official Flight Kit (OFK) of mementos to be presented to NASA and SpaceX team members for a job well done.

The OFK comprises only 17.6 pounds (8 kilograms) of the 882 pounds (400 kg) of hardware and supplies that the CRS-1 Dragon will deliver to the orbiting lab. Included in the pressurized cargo are food rations, crew clothing and more than 160 science experiments for NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

The CRS-1 mission will span 18 days before returning to a parachute-assisted ocean splashdown. Returning to Earth on the Dragon will be nearly 1,700 pounds (771 kg) of science experiment results, spent hardware and former crew members' spacesuit components.

SpaceX is one of two U.S. companies with contracts to provide unmanned resupply flights to the space station for NASA. The other firm, Orbital Sciences Corp., of Virginia, has a $1.9 billion contract for eight missions using its new Antares rocket and Cygnus spacecraft. The first Antares rocket was rolled out to its launch pad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Virginia coast on Oct. 1.

While SpaceX's Dragons are the first unpiloted spacecraft to visit the International Space Station, unmanned cargo ships from other countries continue to make deliveries to the orbiting complex. Russia's Progress spacecraft, ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATV) and the H-2 Transfer Vehicles (HTV) from JAXA round out the station's robotic resupply fleet.

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Space Station-Bound SpaceX Dragon Capsule Gets Mission Patch

Published October 04, 2012

Associated Press

May 25, 2012: View from the International Space Station of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft as the stations robotic arm moves Dragon into place for attachment to the station.NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida A private company is headed back to the International Space Station.

On Sunday night, SpaceX will try to launch another Dragon capsule full of food, clothes and science experiments for the astronauts at the space station. The company hopes to repeat the success of its test flight in May.

This is the California company's first official launch under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. The contract calls for 12 deliveries.

The U.S. space agency is counting on private business to help keep the space station stocked, now that its space shuttles are retired.

Rainy weather could keep the company's Falcon rocket grounded. Forecasters said Thursday there's a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions for the launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral.

SpaceX is run by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk.

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SpaceX plans historic flight to International Space Station Sunday

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- A private company is headed back to the International Space Station.

On Sunday night, SpaceX will attempt to launch another Dragon capsule full of food, clothes and science experiments for the astronauts at the space station. The company hopes to repeat the success of its test flight in May.

Rainy weather could keep the company's Falcon rocket grounded. Forecasters said Thursday there's a 60 percent chance of favorable conditions for the 8:35 p.m. launch from Cape Canaveral.

This is the California company's first official launch under a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. The contract calls for 12 deliveries.

The Dragon will spend a few weeks at the space station before being cut loose at the end of October with a full load of science experiments and old equipment. It will parachute into the Pacific.

Among the items going up and coming back on the Dragon are a dozen student experiments that flew aboard the SpaceX capsule in May, but were not properly activated by the station crew. NASA offered this second chance.

NASA is counting on private business to help keep the space station stocked, now that the shuttles are retired. The governments of Russia, Japan and Europe also provide periodic supply runs.

A second company, the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., hopes to launch its Antares rocket with a mockup capsule by the end of this year, out of Wallops Island. The first test flight to the space station, by Orbital Sciences, is targeted for early 2013.

SpaceX or Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is run by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, who's also the chief executive officer of the electric car-maker, Tesla Motors. He is working to modify the Dragon capsule in order to carry astronauts back and forth to the space station, within three to five years. Americans currently hitch rides on Russian rockets.

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SpaceX encore: 2nd private space station shipment

Howard Wolowitz is still in space.

The fictional aerospace engineer and Expedition 31 crew member was seen floating aboard the International Space Station (ISS) during last week's season premiere of the CBS hit television series "The Big Bang Theory." On this week's episode, airing tonight (Oct. 4), Wolowitz is still off the planet, 250 miles (400 km) up.

Of course, he is not really on the space station. The real ISS Expedition 31 ended in July. Wolowitz, or rather actor Simon Helberg, was on a sound stage at the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, Calif.

His spacecraft surroundings never orbited the Earth, but they did play previous host to the Energizer Bunny for a Super Bowl commercial and were seen in the 2004 feature film, "The Day After Tomorrow."

But Helberg's, or rather Wolowitz's crew did include a real life NASA astronaut, Mike Massimino, and, further blurring the lines between art and life, the fictional Expedition 31 crew patch that they wore on the show placed Wolowitz's and Massimino's names side-by-side. [Photos: TV's "Big Bang Theory" Geek Chic]

Behind the scenes, the job of delivering Wolowitz to the orbiting outpost didn't fall to a Russian rocket but rather to The Big Bang Theory's production designer John Shaffner, set decorator Ann Shea and their teams.

Scavenging for space parts

As it turns out, you can rent a space station.

Last May, when the show's fifth season finale called for Wolowitz to launch onboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, Shaffner went looking for one.

"The first thing that we always do in this business is ask, 'Well, can we rent it? Did somebody make one first?' And unfortunately, we discovered that there weren't any Soyuz replicas to be found," Shaffner told collectSPACE.com in an interview.

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How 'The Big Bang Theory' Sent Howard Wolowitz to Space

MOSCOW Russia's Mission Control Center said Wednesday it dropped an earlier plan to move the International Space Station into a different orbit to avoid possible collision with space debris after additional calculations showed that there was no such threat.

Mission Control Center said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies that a fragment of space debris would fly by too far to pose any danger to the space outpost, so a plan to fire booster rockets to carry out the maneuver on Thursday at 07:22 a.m. Moscow time (0322 GMT) was canceled.

The space station performs evasive maneuvers when the likelihood of a collision exceeds one in 10,000.

NASA estimates that more than 21,000 fragments of orbital debris larger than 10 centimeters (3.9 inches) are stuck in earth's orbit, and experts worry that orbiting junk is becoming a growing problem for the space industry.

There are six astronauts -- three Russians, two Americans and one from Japan -- onboard the orbiting laboratory.

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International Space Station safe from orbiting space debris

The first 12-month mission to the International Space Station may launch in 2015, according to Russian media reports.

Under the plan, two astronauts one Russian and one American would blast off in March 2015 on an experimental endurance mission that's twice as long as current space station stays, officials with Russia's Federal Space Agency (known as Roscosmos) said Tuesday (Oct. 3).

"The principal decision has been made, and we just have to coordinate the formalities," said Alexei Krasnov, head of manned space missions at Roscosmos, according to Russian news agency Ria Novosti. "If the mission proves to be effective, we will discuss sending year-long missions to ISS on a permanent basis."

Krasnov added that the space station's partner agencies have already devised a scientific program for the long-duration mission, Ria Novosti reported. [Most Extreme Human Spaceflight Records]

Krasnov did not name the two astronauts who will launch on the marathon mission in the Ria Novosti report. Russia's Interfax news agency reported in August, however, that the NASA crewmember will likely be Peggy Whitson, who stepped down recently as the agency's chief astronaut in order to rejoin its active spaceflying ranks.

Would You Sign Up for a Years-Long Space Mission?

A year-long stay aboard the orbiting lab could help lay the groundwork for manned missions beyond low-Earth orbit, by allowing scientists to study how long-term spaceflight affects the human body.

That objective may be of great interest to NASA, which is currently working to send astronauts to destinations in deep space. In 2010, President Barack Obama directed the agency to get people to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s.

According to some mission concepts, a manned roundtrip journey to Mars would take about two years to complete.

While nobody has yet resided aboard the International Space Station for a complete year, such a long orbital stay is not unprecedented. Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, a medical doctor, lived aboard Russia's Mir space station for 438 consecutive days during a mission that began in January 1994 and ended in March 1995.

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1st Year-Long Space Station Mission May Launch in 2015: Reports

What's a rich space tourist to do? If you want to fly in space, seats are harder to find than a flight out of Chicago's O'Hare airport during a blizzard. So your only option is to bump an astronaut from a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft going to the International Space Station.

ABC News has learned that singer Sarah Brightman, of "Phantom of the Opera" fame, will be the next tourist in space, sometime in 2014 or 2015. To get her seat she had to pay the Russian space agency more than the $51 million NASA budgets on average to send its astronauts to the station.

To maintain its presence in orbit when Soyuz seats are limited, NASA had to agree to commit at least one of its astronauts to spend a year in space, instead of the six months they currently stay. Brightman's trip will be announced in Moscow on Oct. 10.

NASA says a year in space has great medical research benefits. Astronauts spending just six months on the space station in the past have suffered from radiation exposure, muscle mass loss, decreased bone density, and vision problems. The research from a year on the space station will help NASA plan for long flights to Mars or an asteroid. It does mean an astronaut will get booted from a flight to adjust for one less seat.

When the space shuttle quit flying last year, it created a conundrum for companies like Space Adventures, whose business -- sending rich tourists into space -- depended upon the resources of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. Roscosmos is the only space agency willing to send tourists to space. NASA won't do it, and now they don't have a spacecraft anyway so it's a moot point.

Don't have $50 million to spare? There is a budget option: $200,000 for a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic' s SpaceshipTwo, which should start commercial flights in a couple of years. SpaceShipTwo is designed to be a six-passenger, two-pilot craft, flying to the edge of space. The flight will be short -- just six minutes of weightlessness, but passengers will be able to unbuckle and float around the cabin. If you have $1 million to spare, you can book one trip for yourself and a few friends.

Boeing would like to get into the space tourism business as well, partnering with Space Adventures at some point to launch from Florida.

Space Adventures offers ten days on the International Space Station, in low Earth orbit, with great views and not-so-great accommodations. But there is zero gravity, which means you get to do somersaults and float as much as you want. For a singer like Sarah Brightman, who thrilled the world when she starred in "Phantom of the Opera," the inspiration should be out of this world.

Rumors flew earlier this week when author J.K. Rowling told an audience in England she had once been offered a seat on a space shuttle for a couple of million dollars. NASA quickly scotched that story.

Space Adventures has flown seven tourists into space since 2001. Clients have paid from $22 million to $35 million in the past, but the limited number of Soyuz seats drove the price to more than $50 million. After all, if NASA is willing to pay $51 million, Russia doesn't need to sell the seat at half price.

Link:
Space Tourist Outbids NASA for Flight

There appears to be support within NASA to position astronauts at an Earth-moon libration point to bolster the space agencys plans of pushing beyond low-Earth orbit with its Orion spacecraft design.

Anchoring hardware and a crew at the Earth-moon L2 "gateway" would offer many benefits, advocates say. One of them is building on multinational cooperation honed at the International Space Station (ISS).

Under review is use of Russian-supplied hardware at the L2 point, according to insiders contacted by SPACE.com. Surplus space shuttle gear and ISS-flight-ready spares are also in the mix.

Regarding the use of Russian space hardware, both the Multipurpose Laboratory Module and the Scientific-Power Module are new modules being developed in Russia. Both will add new capabilities to the ISS. A proposal on the table seeks to use a similar Russian-provided Scientific-Power Module in cislunar space as a base of operations for exploration missions. [Gallery: Visions of Deep-Space Station Missions]

NASA space planners have been sketching out an exploration strategy that would make use of the Lagrange points. For one, by exploring and working beyond the Earths radiation belts, more can be learned about space radiation protection. Additionally, the Lagrange points provide unique perspectives of the moon, sun and Earth. Sojourns to the Earth-moon L2 would take humans farther than they have ever been from Earth.

Done deal?

A recent Orlando Sentinel newspaper story kick-started the perception that NASA officials have picked a leading candidate for the agencys next major mission: creation of a "gateway spacecraft" parked at the Earth-moon libration point 2, also known as EML-2.

Indeed, NASA has spotlighted the fact that, as crewed missions extend farther from Earth and for longer periods of time, they will require new capabilities to enable safe and sustainable habitation and exploration.

As reported by SPACE.com earlier this year, a Feb. 3 memo from William Gerstenmaier, NASAs associate administrator for human exploration and operations, noted that a team would be formed to develop a cohesive plan for exploring the EML-2 spot in space.

Libration points, also known as Lagrangian points, are places in space where the combined gravitational pull of two large masses roughly balance each other out, allowing spacecraft to essentially "park" there.

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NASA Mulls Deep-Space Station on Moon's Far Side