Elon Musk: After three month hiatus, SpaceX will return to flight in December

Image Credit: Reuters

  05 Nov 2016 , 11:05

SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Friday his space launch company is aiming to return its rockets to flight in mid-December following a launch pad accident two months ago.

During an interview with CNBC, Musk said investigators had figured out why a Falcon 9 rocket burst into flames on 1 September as it was being fueled for a routine, preflight test.

The accident destroyed a $200 million Israeli communications satellite and grounded the Falcon 9 fleet for the second time in 14 months.

The cause of the accident was a fueling system issue that inadvertently produced solid oxygen inside the rocket’s upper stage tank. The oxygen then reacted with a carbon composite bottle containing liquid helium that sits inside the oxygen tank, triggering an explosion.

“I think we’ve gotten to the bottom of the problem,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc. He added that the issue had never been encountered in the history of rocketry.

Musk did not specify what mission would launch next, nor whether SpaceX would fly from a new launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, or from its West Coast site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

SpaceX’s primary launch pad, located just south of Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, was damaged in the Sept. 1 accident. SpaceX has declined to release details on the extent of damage.

The company has a backlog of about 70 missions, worth more than $10 billion.

Also on Friday, NASA and Orbital ATK Inc said Orbital’s next cargo run to the International Space Station would use the heavier-lift Atlas 5 rocket, made by United Launch Alliance, rather than Orbital’s Antares booster. The switch will allow NASA to fly an extra 660 pounds (300 kg) of cargo to the station while SpaceX returns to flight.

NASA hired Orbital and SpaceX to fly cargo to the station after the shuttles were retired in 2011.

Terms of Orbital’s contract with United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co, were not released. The launch is targeted for early 2017, NASA said.

Reuters

Schiaparelli lander to attempt a dangerous landing on Mars

Image: ISRO

  19 Oct 2016 , 09:35

The search for life on Mars may take a giant leap on Wednesday when a space lander is due to touch down on the red planet in Europe’s first attempt to land a craft there since the Beagle 2’s “heroic failure” more than a decade ago. The disc-shaped 577-kg (1,272 lb) Schiaparelli lander, which will test technologies for a rover due to follow in 2020, is expected to enter Mars’s atmosphere at a speed of nearly 21,000 km (13,049 miles) per hour at 1442 GMT.

It will use a parachute and thrusters to slow down before touching down on the planet’s surface only six minutes later. The lander is named for Giovanni Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer who in 1877 began mapping the topography of Mars, extending study of what are now known as the planet’s canals, a mistranslation of the Italian word canali, or channels.

Schiaparelli is part of the European-Russian ExoMars program, which will search for signs of past and present life on Mars and represents only the second European attempt to land a craft on the red planet, after Britain’s Beagle 2 was ejected from the Mars Express spacecraft in 2003 but never made contact after failing to deploy its solar panels upon landing.

At the time it was dubbed “a heroic failure”. Landing on Mars, Earth’s neighbor some 35 million miles (56 million km) away, is

SpaceX investigation into rocket explosion considering all possibilities

By Shawn Knight on October 3, 2016, 6:30 PM

SpaceX last month suffered a pretty serious setback when one of its Falcon 9 rocketsexploded on the launch pad during a routine pre-launch test at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

A week or so later, SpaceX chief Elon Musk revealed on Twitter that the accident was turning out to be one of the most difficult and complex failures they’ve ever dealt with. In hopes of determining what went wrong, Musk asked the public to submit any footage they may have taken to aid in the investigation.

Musk at that time said they hadn’t ruled out the possibility that a foreign object may have caused the explosion and according to a recent report from The Washington Post, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Post, citing three industry officials with knowledge of the matter, claims SpaceX had still images from a video that seemingly showed an odd shadow followed by a white spot on the roof of a building roughly a mile away with a clear line of sight to the launch pad. The building in question is currently being leased by SpaceX rival United Launch Alliance (ULA).

As the story goes, a SpaceX employee visited the facility two weeks after the explosion to further look into the matter. The visit was said to be cordial with SpaceX simply wanting to investigate all leads but ULA denied them access and instead contacted the Air Force (which is helping SpaceX with the investigation).

The Air Force investigators found nothing of interest on the ULA building’s roof, the Post reports.