NASA and the Private Sector - Page 51

The new little moon rover developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s Field Robotics Center has its eyes on the prize – the Google Lunar X Prize, to be exact.

The diminutive four-wheeled rover, named “Andy” after both Andrew Mellon and Andrew Carnegie – has a fair shot of winning the $30 million prize, especially since the university’s robotics center director, Willam Whittaker, already has experience in innovation and competiton. Whittaker and his team won the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, a $2 million competition to design a driverless car that could navigate through an urban obstacle course successfully. Whittaker’s successes there saw an explosion in autonomous ground vehicle research and development – and he’s hoping that lightning will strike twice with Andy.

Whittaker’s team is just one of 18 that’s competing for a shot to be the first automated rover to cruise across the lunar surface. The tasks little Andy faces are numerous – he needs to be launched into space, rendezvous with the moon, make a safe soft landing on its surface, and then trundle along for a minimum of 500 meters and send back a high-resolution video feed from the satellite. The deadline for the prize is the end of 2015, and Andy’s already got a spot reserved on an October flight on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has contracted with two private companies to explore the possibility of asteroid mining after the successful landing of the Rosetta spacecraft on a comet. Asteroid mining could provide spaceship fuel and life-sustaining water. Other materials from including such as titanium, iron, and nickel could aid in the creation of parts.

Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources Inc. are the two companies working with NASA, Tech Times reports. They currently conduct asteroid tracking and other space research.

Deep Space Industries is working on FireFlies, one-way satellites that the company will send to collect data on asteroids including size, shape, density, and composition. The Dragonfly is another spacecraft that will be used to bring back resources to Earth. Meanwhile, Planetary Resources will work on satellites for tracking and analysis. Their focus will be on near Earth objects as well as the development of telescopes specifically to track asteroids.

On November 26 2014 05:15 ShoCkeyy wrote:
That's what NASA is actually hoping for. I can't find the source right now, but NASA stated they rather use tax payers money to research and bring innovation to the U.S than have to spend it building billion dollar rockets. Especially with the funding NASA receives, I'd go that route too.

The patent for landing reusable rockets at sea owned by Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has been challenged by SpaceX, billionaire investor Elon Musk's space technology company.

SpaceX has been developing reusable rockets in large quantity and had not said anything about sea landing platform. Musk said in an interview in October that the company has 50% chances of landing a rocket on a floating platform in the next year and the entire floating platform was seen all set last week. This clears the reason behind the patent challenge.

The US Patent and Trademark Office's review board has not resolved the case yet. And today Blue Origin will answer the patent challenge of SpaceX. The decision regarding the matter will be taken next summer, as suggested by standard procedure.

Etrepreneur Elon Musk and his upstart company SpaceX are on the verge of upsetting a cozy and pricey military deal that for years has given two aerospace giants the exclusive right to launch the Air Force's most crucial satellites into orbit.

In recent years, those satellite launches have become so expensive under the Air Force's controversial contract with a joint venture owned by Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. that the missions now rank as the nation's fourth-most-costly weapons program.

Musk has said his company can perform a satellite launch for less than $100 million — a fraction of the price charged by the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture. The average cost for each launch using rockets from Boeing and Lockheed has soared to $420 million, according to a recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office.

To get a share of the business, Hawthorne-based SpaceX — short for Space Exploration Technologies Corp. — must prove it can reliably launch the military satellites, which can take years to build and are crucial to national security.

Air Force officials are in the final stages of a years-long, detailed review of the rocket company's launches and operations. A decision on whether to certify SpaceX for the launches, they said, is expected next month.

"This is huge," said Marco Caceres, senior analyst and director of space studies at Teal Group. "It would break up a monopoly and has the potential to save the taxpayer an awful lot of money."

Boeing and Lockheed have faced no competition for the rocket launches since 2006 when they formed a joint venture called United Launch Alliance.

SpaceX will test out new stabilizing fins that could help land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a floating barge in the Atlantic Ocean after liftoff on a space station resupply mission in mid-December, according to Elon Musk, the company’s billionaire leader.

Hoping to use an operational flight as an experiment to advance the company’s bid for a reusable rocket — a breakthrough that could change the landscape of the launch industry if perfected — SpaceX is finishing work on a ocean-going landing pad at a Louisiana shipyard.

The vessel could be used to wring out how to program rocket boosters to fly themselves back to the ground from the edge of space more than 50 miles up.

Musk posted a brief description of the barge, along with four “grid fins” to aerodynamically stabilize the rocket’s first stage during descent, to his Twitter page Saturday.

Dubbing the vessel an “autonomous spaceport drone ship,” Musk wrote the landing pad uses thrusters repurposed from a deep sea oil drilling rig to keep the barge within 3 meters — about 10 feet — of the correct position.

CEDAR PARK, TEXAS—Former SpaceX engineer Tom Markusic has brought Firefly Space Systems to the outskirts of Austin to make rockets and chew bubblegum, and he’s all out of gum. Standing in the vast field on the outskirts of the Texas state capital watching Markusic flitting between clusters of workers welding together test stand equipment, it's easy to get caught up in the man’s vision of democratizing access to space—a vision of filling that vault of empty sky above our heads with countless twinkling lights.

That’s the genesis of the company name: Firefly Space Systems. It isn’t named after the TV show, as many people commonly assume. Rather, Markusic says the name came to him one evening while sitting on his back porch, watching fireflies dance in the air over his lawn. One day, he believes, that’s what the sky above Earth will look like—filled with spacecraft ferrying people to Mars, in a journey as commonplace as going to the store might be today.

But to get to Mars—really, to get anywhere at all—we’ve first got to make it easy for people and equipment to claw their way up out of Earth’s gravity. After all, as the Heinlein quote on Firefly’s website explains, "When you’re in low Earth orbit, you’re halfway to everywhere." Making that first hundred miles easy and affordable is what Markusic wants to do.

Firefly is a "new space" company, a term that differentiates it and its contemporaries, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, from "old space" stalwarts like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. "Old space" companies built Apollo and the Space Shuttle and the ISS, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the ossified "old space" model of multi-decade government contract work and hidebound development and accounting practices doesn’t own access to orbit anymore. We’re entering the "new space" era where small agile companies stand on the shoulders of the slow-moving giants and send not just billion-dollar government payloads and multi-PhD-equipped astronauts into orbit, but cheap small payloads and possibly even tourists.

But before Firefly gets around to sending people into orbit—something Markusic says is on the long-term roadmap—the company is first focusing on building its first launch vehicle, the Firefly Alpha (styled as the "Firefly α," using the Greek letter). The design of that rocket is what made Ars gravitate toward exploring Firefly’s story in the first place: rather than walking down more traditional rocketry paths, the Alpha will be constructed from composites and will use a methane-fueled plugged autogenously pressurized aerospike engine.

That’s a technological mouthful, but it’s not that hard to understand—especially with the benefit of Markusic’s whiteboard explanation. (In addition to being Firefly’s CEO, Markusic was a former director at SpaceX and holds a PhD from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.) We’ll take it piece by piece.

First, there’s the composite rocket body. Rather than casting and welding its rockets out of hunks of steel and aluminum and titanium, Firefly plans to weave launch vehicles out of carbon fiber, which will have two distinct advantages. First, the material will be lighter than metal, and weight is a precious commodity in a launch vehicle. Every gram of a rocket’s structure brings with it a cost in fuel. Second, the strength of the composite body lets Firefly use autogenous—that is, self-pressurizing—engines.

Engine pressurization isn’t an immediately obvious requirement for a layperson to grasp, but it’s a requirement nonetheless. To make a rocket burn fuel, you have to get that fuel from the tank to the combustion chamber. Pushing the fuel out of the tank requires exerting pressure that exceeds the pressure in the combustion chamber (the "chamber pressure"). Traditionally, this pressure is exerted by some combination of mechanical pumps pulling on the fuel and also by pumping an inert gas, like helium, into the part of the fuel tank not occupied by fuel. As more fuel is expended, more pressurized gas is pumped in, keeping the fuel under the appropriate amount of pressure. At the end of the burn, you wind up with a tank of pressurized helium (and some residual propellant), which must then be dumped.

On December 04 2014 06:39 zobz wrote:
On SpaceX's patent problems:

Intellectual property law is essentially important to any market economy, but its proper role is narrow and specific. That is to protect the rights of a man to his own invention, and to encourage the practice of inventing thereby, in the same way that protection of physical property rights encourages production, by guaranteeing the individual's chance to benefit from his own work as is his right.

That said, intellectual property law improperly and irrationally defined and enforced can do the opposite: allow one man to prevent, by force, another man from benefiting from his own work; and thereby discourage productivity. This is just the same as a law which arbitrarily gives a man the authority to seize the physical property of another man at his whim, without his consent.

If this patent on landing retrievable spacecraft at sea is actually legitimate, then let SpaceX pay for the privilege. If it is as ridiculous as some obviously biased reports would make it sound, then let it be overruled. It is a matter for legal experts, which I am not. In any case, what is most important is that either favour, or disfavour towards the persons, companies or industries in question not be allowed to drive the discussion. The long-term prosperity, and the immediate moral standing of any society absolutely depends upon its unerring respect for individual rights. The compromise of rights for the promotion of a scientific endeavor cannot be justified either morally or practically.

Today's attempt to launch Orion EFT-1 has been scrubbed today after continuing issues with ground winds - and then with fill and drain valves on the Delta IV Heavy Launch vehicle. There were also issues with battery levels on the rocket's video system. The plan seems to be to try again tomorrow with a 7:05 am ET launch time.