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      Starliner’s first commander: Don’t expect perfection on crew test flight

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 2 days ago - 00:19

    Technicians at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida prepare Boeing's Starliner spacecraft for fueling.

    Enlarge / Technicians at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida prepare Boeing's Starliner spacecraft for fueling. (credit: Boeing )

    HOUSTON—While it doesn't have the same relevance to public consciousness as safety problems with commercial airliners, a successful test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in May would be welcome news for the beleaguered aerospace company.

    This will be the first time the Starliner capsule flies into low-Earth orbit with humans aboard. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are in the final stages of training for the so-called Crew Flight Test (CFT), a milestone running seven years behind the schedule Boeing said it could achieve when it won a $4.2 billion commercial crew contract from NASA a decade ago.

    If schedules hold, Wilmore and Williams will take off inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket after midnight May 1, local time, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They will fly Starliner to the International Space Station for a stay of at least eight days, then return the capsule to a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned landing in the western United States, likely at White Sands, New Mexico.

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      A Soyuz crew launch suffers a rare abort seconds before liftoff

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · 7 days ago - 14:38

    Within minutes of Thursday's scrub, technicians were on the pad in Baikonur with the fully fueled rocket.

    Enlarge / Within minutes of Thursday's scrub, technicians were on the pad in Baikonur with the fully fueled rocket. (credit: NASA TV)

    On Thursday a crew of three people was due to launch on a Soyuz rocket, bound for the International Space Station.

    However, the launch scrubbed at about 20 seconds before the planned liftoff time, just before the sequence to ignite the rocket's engines was initiated, due to unspecified issues. Shortly after the abort, there were unconfirmed reports of an issue with the ground systems supporting the Soyuz rocket.

    The three people inside the Soyuz spacecraft, on top of the rocket, were NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus. This Soyuz MS-25 mission had been planned for a liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan, at 13:21 UTC (6:21 pm local time in Baikonur).

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      SpaceX’s workhorse launch pad now has the accoutrements for astronauts

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 20 March - 23:47

    SpaceX’s workhorse launch pad now has the accoutrements for astronauts

    Enlarge

    Upgrades at SpaceX's most-used launch pad in Florida will get a trial run Thursday with the liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon cargo ship heading for the International Space Station.

    SpaceX's Cargo Dragon spacecraft is set for launch at 4:55 pm EDT (20:55 UTC) Thursday from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This mission, known as CRS-30, is SpaceX's 30th resupply mission to the space station since 2012.

    The automated Dragon supply ship will take off on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, then head for a month-long stay at the International Space Station, where it will deliver more than 6,000 pounds of hardware, fresh food, and experiments for the lab's seven-person crew.

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      Thomas Stafford, who flew to the Moon and docked with Soyuz, dies at 93

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 19 March - 12:46

    Former NASA astronaut Thomas Stafford, a three-star Air Force general known for a historic handshake in space with a Soviet cosmonaut nearly 50 years ago, died Monday in Florida. He was 93.

    Stafford was perhaps the most accomplished astronaut of his era who never walked on the Moon. He flew in space four times, helping pilot the first rendezvous with another crewed spacecraft in orbit in 1966 and taking NASA's Apollo lunar landing craft on a final test run before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon in 1969.

    By his own account, one of the greatest moments in Stafford's career came in 1975, when he commanded the final Apollo mission—not to the Moon but to low-Earth orbit—and linked up with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Soviet cosmonauts. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) planted the seeds for a decades-long partnership in space between the United States and Russia, culminating in the International Space Station, where US and Russian crews still work together despite a collapse in relations back on Earth.

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      pubsub.blastersklan.com / slashdot · Tuesday, 19 March - 10:38 edit · 2 minutes

    The Associated Press reports on the passing of astronaut Thomas P. Stafford, the commander of a dress rehearsal flight for the 1969 moon landing and the first U.S.-Soviet space linkup. He was 93. From the report: Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two U.S. capsules in orbit. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma. Stafford was one of 24 NASA astronauts who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive. After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award. "Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the 'Father of Stealth,'" Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous 'Area 51' desert base that was the site of many UFO theories, but the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies. The Apollo 10 mission in May 1969 set the stage for Apollo 11's historic mission two months later. Stafford and Gene Cernan took the lunar lander nicknamed Snoopy within 9 miles (14 kilometers) of the moon's surface. Astronaut John Young stayed behind in the main spaceship dubbed Charlie Brown. "The most impressive sight, I think, that really changed your view of things is when you first see Earth," Stafford recalled in a 1997 oral history, talking about the view from lunar orbit. Then came the moon's far side: "The Earth disappears. There's this big black void." Apollo 10's return to Earth set the world's record for fastest speed by a crewed vehicle at 24,791 mph (39,897 kph). After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford, a one-star general at the time, was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. The two teams of space travelers even went to Disney World and rode Space Mountain together before going into orbit and joining ships. "We have capture," Stafford radioed in Russian as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft hooked up. His Russian counterpart, Alexei Leonov, responded in English: "Well done, Tom, it was a good show. I vote for you." [...] The 1975 mission included two days during which the five men worked together on experiments. After, the two teams toured the world together, meeting President Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. "It helped prove to the rest of the world that two completely opposite political systems could work together," Stafford recalled at a 30th anniversary gathering in 2005. Later, Stafford was a central part of discussions in the 1990s that brought Russia into the partnership building and operating the International Space Station.

    Read more of this story at Slashdot.

    Astronaut Thomas Stafford, Commander of Apollo 10, Dies At 93
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      La NASA va envoyer un message aux habitants d’Europa, lune de Jupiter

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Monday, 18 March - 07:30

    Plaque Nasa Clipper

    En octobre, la NASA lancera la mission Clipper vers l'une des lunes de Jupiter, Europa, embarquant un message de l'humanité à travers un artefact unique. Cette mission va explorer le potentiel habitable d'Europa et perpétuer la tradition d'envoyer des messages dans l'espace à l'adresse d'éventuels habitants.
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      Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save Voyager 1

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 15 March - 23:23

    Artist's illustration of the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

    Enlarge / Artist's illustration of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. (credit: Caltech/NASA-JPL)

    It's been four months since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft sent an intelligible signal back to Earth, and the problem has puzzled engineers tasked with supervising the probe exploring interstellar space.

    But there's a renewed optimism among the Voyager ground team based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. On March 1, engineers sent a command up to Voyager 1—more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth—to "gently prompt" one of the spacecraft's computers to try different sequences in its software package. This was the latest step in NASA's long-distance troubleshooting to try to isolate the cause of the problem preventing Voyager 1 from transmitting coherent telemetry data.

    Cracking the case

    Officials suspect a piece of corrupted memory inside the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of three main computers on the spacecraft, is the most likely culprit for the interruption in normal communication. Because Voyager 1 is so far away, it takes about 45 hours for engineers on the ground to know how the spacecraft reacted to their commands—the one-way light travel time is about 22.5 hours.

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      Voyager 1 : le « miracle » tant attendu est-il sur le point d’arriver ?

      news.movim.eu / JournalDuGeek · Friday, 15 March - 14:12

    Voyager 1

    La NASA était assez pessimistes par rapport à l'avenir de cette sonde légendaire, et estimait qu'il faudrait un sacré coup de pouce du destin pour la sauver... l'espoir vient peut-être de renaître grâce à l'éclair de génie d'un ingénieur.