Category Archives: Space Station

A picture by Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers from the International Space Station shows southern lights between Antarctica and Australia.

MOSCOW (AP) The Russian space program's Mission Control Center says it will move the International Space Station into a different orbit to avoid possible collision with a fragment of debris.

Mission Control Center spokeswoman Nadyezhda Zavyalova said the Russian Zvevda module will fire booster rockets to carry out the operation Thursday at 07:22 a.m. Moscow time (0322 GMT).

[READ: International Space Station Nearly Struck by Space Junk]

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.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Space Station to Move to Avoid Debris

There appears to be support within NASA to position astronauts at an Earth-moon libration point to bolster the space agency's 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 Earth's 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 agency's 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, NASA's 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 considering deep-space station on moon

MOSCOW (AP) 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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Space station in no need to move to avoid debris

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 2000. 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.

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Singer Sarah Brightman Outbids NASA for Space Tourist's Seat

A private rocket NASA is counting on to make robotic cargo flights to the International Space Station achieved a key milestone today (Oct. 1), as its first stage rolled out to its Virginia launchpad for the first time.

The first stage of Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket arrived today at its pad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), which is located at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in eastern Virginia. The move marks the beginning of on-pad preparations for a series of important trials with Antares that will take place over the next few months, Orbital officials said.

The company aims to perform hot-fire tests of the first stage in four or five weeks, followed by Antares' first test flight about a month later. If all goes well, Antares will then launch Orbital's unmanned Cygnus capsule on a demonstration mission to the space station, officials said.

"MARS has completed construction and testing operations on its launch complex at Wallops Island, the first all-new large-scale liquid-fuel launch site to be built in the U.S. in decades," Orbital president and CEO David Thompson said in a statement.[Gallery: Orbital's Cygnus Spacecraft & Antares Rocket]

The hot-fire operation will demonstrate the readiness of Antares' first stage and launch pad fueling systems to support the upcoming flights.The test involves firing the rocket's dual AJ26 engines which will be held down on the pad for about 30 seconds, generating a combined total thrust of 680,000 pounds (308,000 kilograms), officials said.

Antares is slated to blast off on its maiden journey about a month after the hot-fire test, carring a Cygnus mass simulator whose instruments will gather data about the flight. The rocket will also carry and deploy four minuscule "picosatellites" during the mission, officials said.

Finally, Antares will carry Cygnus aloft on a demonstration mission to the orbiting lab. The capsule will autonomously rendezvous and berth with the space station, delivering about 1,210 pounds (550 kg) of supplies. On its way back down to Earth, Cygnus will carry 2,200 pounds (1,000 kg) of disposal cargo from the station, officials said.

If all goes well with these three tests, Antares and Cygnus will be ready to begin making bona fide supply runs to the space station for NASA. Virginia-based Orbital holds a $1.9 billion contract to launch eight such unmanned flights.

NASA also signed a $1.6 billion deal with California-based SpaceX, which is slated to launch the first of its 12 unmanned supply flights to the station this Sunday (Oct. 7). This past May, SpaceX's Dragon capsule aced its demonstration mission, becoming the first private vehicle ever to dock with the $100 billion orbiting complex.

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New Private Rocket Arrives at Virginia Launch Pad for Tests

NASA's proposal to build a small space station at the Earth Moon Lagrange Point-2, which is where the gravity of the Earth and moon cancel out 38,000 miles from the far side of the moon, is coming under some criticism.

The EMLP-2 station proposal

According to the Orlando Sentinel, NASA officials made a presentation to the White House for a space station to be built at the EMLP-2 point using left over International Space Station modules. The station would be serviced by the Orion Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle launched by the heavy lift Space Launch System. A near term purpose for the EMLP-2 station would be for astronauts to teleoperate robotic explorers on the lunar surface, with one mission mentioned a lunar sample return. Later the station could be used as a way station and refueling depot to support deep space missions, to the asteroids and eventually to Mars.

Problems with the EMLP-2 station

The Orlando Sentinel suggests that there are two problems with the NASA proposal. First, because of the great distance the station would be from Earth, problems of resupply and even rescue in case of disaster would be more difficult than with the ISS in low Earth orbit. Also, since the station would be beyond Earth's magnetic field, radiation shielding would be a major issue.

EMLP-2 station a make work project

Paul Spudis, a planetary geologist who writes frequently on space issues, offers a critique of the near term stated purpose of the EMLP-2 station. He suggests that positioning astronauts 38,000 miles from the moon would provide little if any advantage to controllers on Earth where it comes to teleoperating robots on the lunar surface. Spudis suggests that such a station would make sense if it were part of a larger cislunar transportation infrastructure that included a fuel depot supplied, by preference, by rocket fuel refined from lunar ice known to lay in the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's north and south poles.

EMLP-2 station a plot to justify Orion/SLS

John Strickland, a space advocate and a member of the National Space Society Board of Directors, suggests in the Space Review that building what is in effect a smaller version of the ISS at an Earth Moon Lagrange Point is a scheme by NASA to justify the expense of the Orion and Space Launch System. Currently Orion/SLS have a limited number of destinations. Without a lander, astronauts cannot access the lunar surface. Without a long duration habitation module, astronauts cannot visit Earth-approaching asteroids. A station in empty space in the cislunar system is about the only place that the Orion/SLS can go.

Strickland, like Spudis, favors a space station at one of the EMLPs if it could serve as a fuel depot. But he suggests that building such a space station is pointless until reusable launch vehicles and space craft are developed to service such a facility and take advantage of its capabilities to explore further into the solar system.

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NASA Plan to Build Space Station Beyond the Moon Criticized

A private rocket poised to launch its first official cargo delivery run to the International Space Station performed a major engine test this weekend, setting the stage for its planned Oct. 7 liftoff.

The Falcon 9 rocket fired up its nine Merlin engines on Saturday (Sept. 29) for just two seconds during a full dress rehearsal at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station ahead of the upcoming flight by Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX).

"During the static fire test today, SpaceX engineers ran through all countdown processes as though it were launch day," SpaceX officials wrote in an update Saturday. "Post static fire, SpaceX will conduct a thorough review of all data, and the Dragon spacecraft will be mated to Falcon 9 in preparation for next Sunday's targeted launch."

The Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to launch an unmanned Dragon space capsule (also built by SpaceX) on Sunday at 8:35 p.m. EDT (0035 Oct. 8 GMT). If all goes well, the spacecraft should arrive at the International Space Station on Oct. 10, where it will be grappled by a robotic arm controlled by astronauts and attached to a docking port.

The mission follows a similar demonstration flight to the station in May by SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. But Sunday's launch will kick off the company's first official cargo flight for NASA under a $1.6 billion deal that includes 12 such missions. [Photos: SpaceX's 1st Dragon Flight to Space Station]

The Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX is one of two U.S. spaceflight companies with contracts to provide robotic cargo flights to the International 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 rolled out to its launch pad on the Virginia coast today (Oct. 1).

With the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet in 2011, the space agency is relying on new privately built spacecraft to ferry American astronauts and cargo to and from low-Earth orbit. The unmanned resupply flights are the first stage of that plan, which also includes purchasing seats for U.S. astronauts on private space taxis once they become available.

SpaceX is one of several companies also seeking to launch astronauts into space for NASA. The company plans to use a crewed variant of its Dragon capsule for the job.

The upcoming Falcon 9 launch will be the fourth flight of the booster for SpaceX and the third flight of a Dragon spacecraft. The Dragon capsule made its first test flight in December 2010, which was followed by a successful round trip to the International Space Station earlier this year during SpaceX's demonstration flight in May.

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Private SpaceX Rocket Test-Fires Engines for Space Station Trip

HOUSTON A veteran Russian cosmonauts cynical and bitter words about the dire state of the Russian space industry seemed to spell his own careers abrupt end after his return to Earth from the International Space Station. But within a week, his unprecedented public criticism was echoed and elaborated on by Russia's top space officials.

Perhaps telling the truth is catching on in Moscow, but perhaps it's already almost too late to save the Russian space industry. Over the past two years, program leadership has appeared powerless to stop a series of embarrassing failures in spacecraft launchings and flight operations that have cast the future of the entire program in doubt.

At the traditional Russian post-landing press conference on Sept. 21, cosmonaut Gennady Padalka complained about the "spartan" conditions aboard the Russian side of the station, especially as compared with the American side. The conditions were cold, noisy, overstuffed with equipment, and cramped each Russian had about one-seventh the living space that the American astronauts had. "All of this gives serious inconvenience in the operation of the Russian segment," he said.

Padalka compared the living conditions to the mass housing thrown together in the 1960s by Nikita Khrushchev housing where many Russian city dwellers still reside. The apartment building is called a "khrushchevka," a bitter word play on both the late Soviet leader's name and on its root meaning, "beetle" (as in "bug house"). As the cosmonaut explained to reporters, he had spent his last three missions totaling about two years in duration aboard a "small-scale khrushchevka."

Padalka found the idea of spending an entire year in space, as has been proposed, to be completely unacceptable without major improvements in crew comfort.

Out-of-date equipment The equipment, he continued, was reliable and safe but was decades out of date. "Nothing has been done in the 20 years since the foundation of the new Russia," he complained. The Russian space technology is technologically bankrupt and "morally exhausted." It was, he told reporters, "frozen in the last century."

He contrasted those conditions with the spaciousness and modernity of the American modules, and praised the advanced technology he saw there: the robotics experiment ("As always, still under study in Russia") and SpaceX's commercial spacecraft docking, for example.

In recent months, top Russian government officials have argued over exactly how deep the problems go within the Russian space industry. For some, it is a "systemic" crisis due to aging equipment and workers, avoidance of the industry by bright young engineers, and too much reliance on potentially biased "self-checking" of delivered hardware. Other officials deny any industry-wide weakness and attribute the public humiliations to localized problems.

Padalka didnt care about the origin of the crisis, just that he was at the "point of the spear" where the consequences were sharpest. "Maybe its not a systemic crisis," he said, "but nonetheless, a crisis exists, and it is being felt."

He may have felt nearly alone in space, and perhaps speaking out the way he did made him feel even more alone in Moscow. But he wasnt alone for long.

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Russians face up to their space crisis

An unmanned European cargo ship the size of a double-decker bus undocked from the International Space Station Friday, ending a six-month delivery flight to the orbiting lab.

The robotic Automated Transfer Vehicle 3 (ATV-3), with its four X-wing-like solar arrays unfurled, cast off from the space station Friday as the two spacecraft sailed 255 miles (410 kilometers) over western Kazakhstan in Asia. The cargo ship's undocking occurred at 5:44 p.m. EDT (2144 GMT).

The space departure occurred three days later than planned due to delays, first by a computer glitch and later by space junk near the space station.

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But Friday, the ATV-3 spacecraft, which is named the Edoardo Almadi after the famed late Italian physicist of the same name, made a flawless departure from the station. It will spend the next few days orbiting Earth before being intentionally destroyed on Tuesday by burning up in Earth's atmosphereover the Pacific Ocean. [Photos: Europe's Robotic ATV Spaceships]

"Today, everything has worked to perfection," NASA spokesman Rob Navias said during the agency's live broadcast of the undocking.

The ATV-3 spacecraft was built by the European Space Agency and delivered 7.2 tons of food, water and other vital supplies to astronauts aboard the International Space Station when it launched in March from a South American spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The ATV-3 spent 184 linked to the space station before being packed with trash and other unneeded items for its eventual fiery demise in Earth's atmosphere.

The ATV-3 is ESA's third unmanned cargo ship mission to visit the space station, which is also supplied by robotic cargo ships from Japan and Russia. In the United States, NASA has contracted two companies SpaceX of Hawthorne, Calif., and Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. to provide unmanned cargo delivery flights to the station. The first official flight by SpaceX is scheduled to launch on Oct. 7, when the company

The ATV craft are huge cylinders 32 feet long (10 meters) and nearly 15 feet wide (4.5 m) and may be visible by observers on Earth as a bright moving light in the night sky, weather permitting. The ATV-3, like the International Space Station, can be spotted if you know where to look.

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Huge cargo ship undocks from space station

Two pieces of space junk whizzed by the International Space Station this week but posed no threat to the orbiting laboratory or its three-person crew, NASA officials say.

The space debris --a chunk of an old Russian Cosmos satellite and leftover chunk of an Indian rocket --made back-to-back flybys of the space station Thursday and Friday (Sept. 27 and 28). The Russian Cosmos satellite debris made its closest approach to the space station on Thursday at 10:42 a.m. EDT, with the Indian rocket remnant making its close pass Friday at 1:47 a.m. EDT.

Initially, NASA and its Russian partners planned to move the space station clear of the incoming debris by firing the rocket thrusters on a European cargo ship. But more observations of the orbital debris found the space junk fragments would not creep too close for comfort when they zoomed by, NASA officials said.

"Additional tracking Wednesday night of both the Cosmos satellite debris and the Indian rocket body debris resulted in a high degree of confidence that neither object would pose any possibility of a conjunction with the International Space Station and a debris avoidance maneuver scheduled for Thursday morning was cancelled by the flight control team at Mission Control," NASA officials said in an update Thursday. [Space Junk Photos & Cleanup Concepts]

NASA and its partners typically move the space station if there is a high probability of space junk passing inside a safety perimeter shaped like a pizza box that extends around the orbiting lap. This red zone extends about a half-mile above and below the station, and about 15 miles around the football-field size space lab.

Planning for the possibility of a space junk avoidance maneuver forced space station controllers to delay the undocking of the European cargo ship that would have performed the move. The departure of the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle 3 (ATV-3) was originally scheduled for Tuesday (Sept. 25), but failed to undock due to a computer glitch that has since been resolved.

The ATV-3 spacecraft, which is named Edoardo Almadi to honor the late Italian physicist of the same name, is now scheduled to undock on Friday afternoon at 5:46 p.m. EDT, NASA officials said.

Space junk has been a growing threat for astronauts on the International Space Station and satellites in orbit. The U.S. military's Space Surveillance Network and NASA regularly track about 20,000 pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth.

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Copyright 2012 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Back-to-back near-misses on space station