NASA and the Private Sector - Page 104

GUADALAJARA, Mexico – SpaceX isn’t the only billionaire-backed company that’s planning to go to Mars: Blue Origin, the space venture created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is also taking aim at Mars, the moon and other deep-space destinations.

Those missions are implied in Bezos’ long-term vision of having millions of people living and working in space, Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson said today at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara.

One small step toward that goal is due to come next week, when Blue Origin puts its suborbital New Shepard spaceship through its most challenging flight test yet at the company’s launch site in West Texas.

The Mars angle came up when an audience member asked Meyerson about a much larger rocket, the New Armstrong, which is only now on the drawing boards at Blue Origin’s headquarters south of Seattle.

New Shepard is named after the late astronaut Alan Shepard, who took NASA’s first suborbital space trip in 1961. New Armstrong takes its name from the late Neil Armstrong, who took humanity’s first walk on the moon’s surface eight years later.

When the questioner asked about the significance of the name, and whether Blue Origin had any plans to go to Mars, Meyerson answered in the context of Bezos’ vision.

“When we have millions of people living and working in space, we want them to be able to go to lots of destinations,” he said. “Mars would be one of them. The moon would be another. New Armstrong is really designed for that long-term vision.”

Meyerson added that “this is a vision that will take decades to achieve.”

GUADALAJARA, Mexico — Even as he rolled out an ambitious program of heavy-lift rockets and spacecraft to send people to Mars, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said Sept. 27 his top near-term priority is to complete a “vexing and difficult” investigation into the Falcon 9 pad explosion early this month.

Speaking at a press conference after his address during the International Astronautical Congress here where he announced plans to start sending people to Mars as soon as 2024, Musk said the most likely reasons for the Sept. 1 explosion that destroyed a Falcon 9 and its satellite payload have been ruled out.

“We’ve eliminated all of the obvious possibilities” for the anomaly, he said. “So what remains are less probable.” Musk didn’t discuss what those less probable options might include.

SpaceX’s last update into the explosion, released Sept. 23, said the explosion was most likely triggered by a “large breach” in the helium system that pressurizes the liquid oxygen tank in the rocket’s second stage. What caused that breach, though, remains under investigation.

Musk was clearly puzzled by the accident. “It’s the most vexing and difficult thing,” he said of the failure.

He emphasized that finding the cause of the explosion and returning the Falcon to flight was the company’s top priority. “It would be incorrect to say that it is anything other than our absolute top priority to establish what went wrong there,” he said of the failure investigation.

Musk, in his earlier speech at the conference, praised teams that worked seven days a week to complete a large composite propellant tank and perform the first test firing of a Raptor engine, two key technical components of the giant booster and spacecraft that would send people to Mars. However, he emphasized that effort is using less than five percent of the company’s resources.

Rosetta has completed its final manoeuvre and is now on a collision course with Comet 67P/C-G.

A small thruster burn starting 20:48:11 UTC and lasting 208 seconds has set the craft on course towards its final destination.

The spacecraft's navigation cameras will soon take a set of five images to confirm that the spacecraft is on target, and to refine the predicted impact time.

These are expected to be downlinked by 0300 UT / 0500 CEST and we therefore expect that the next report, with the updated time and at least one of those NAVCAM images, will be around 0400 UT / 0600 CEST.

In his talk today, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk presented a number of very interesting and useful ideas. I don't think they are practical in the form he presented them, but with a little modification, they could be made practical and very powerful. He's right on the mark about using methane/oxygen propellant, which can be made on Mars and about making the spacecraft reusable and refillable on orbit.

The key thing I would change is his plan to send the whole trans-Mars propulsion system all the way to Mars and back. Doing that means it can only be used once every four years. Instead he should stage off of it just short of Earth escape. Then it would loop around back to aero-brake into Earth orbit in a week, while the payload habitat craft with just a very small propulsion system for landing would fly on to the Red Planet.

Used this way, the big Earth escape propulsion system could be used five times every launch window, instead of once every other launch window, effectively increasing its delivery capacity by a factor of ten. Alternatively, it could deliver the same payload with a system one-tenth the size, which is what I would do.

So instead of needing a 500 ton launch capability, he could send the same number of people to Mars every opportunity with a 50 ton launcher, which is what Falcon Heavy will be able to do. Done in this manner, such a transportation system could be implemented much sooner, possibly before the next decade is out, making settlement of Mars a real possibility for our time.

BEAM, the new expandable module attached to the International Space Station, was opened up today for tests and equipment checks. The Expedition 49 crew also explored eating right in space, adapting to new technology and studied a variety of other life science and physics research.

Flight Engineer Kate Rubins opened up and entered the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module this afternoon. She temporarily installed gear inside BEAM for a test to measure the loads and vibrations the module experiences. Rubins started her day with a performance test on a mobile tablet device then videotaped her observations of the living conditions aboard the space station.