Russia threatens to cancel Baikonur finance in 2016

Baikonur, an international spaceport, was built in 1955.

Russian Ministry of Finance are threatening to stop financing Baikonur cosmodrome in 2016, Izvestia newspaper reported Friday citing a source in Roscosmos.

An official from the Federal Space Agency was quoted as saying "In previous versions of draft budget for 2016 it was planned to allocate a $705 million (2.5 billion rubles) subsidy for Baikonur maintenance."

"The money was supposed to be spent on salaries and field maintenance. We asked for more. But when our representative in Ministry of Finance was shown the final draft there was zero."

According to the newspaper, this could mean the specialist teams at Baikonur will be left without financing.

The report also said that Ministry of Finance allegedly made the decision due to the construction of the new Vostochniy cosmodrome, which will now receive the money that previously went to Baikonur.

Baikonur, an international spaceport, was built in 1955. Russia leases Baikonur from Kazakhstan for $115 million annually. The current lease contract between the two countries expires in 2050.

Ariane 5 Launch Postponed At Least 20 Days

Following the anomaly detected on Friday July 1st during the launch attempt VA203, Arianespace has decided to replace the valve of the EPC (the main cryogenic stage), which did not function nominally.

In order to carry out this operation, the Ariane 5 ECA launch vehicle will be rolled back into the Final Assembly Building (BAF).

The valve's replacement and the ensuing operations should require approximately 20 days.

The ASTRA 1N and BSAT-3c/JCSAT-110R satellite payloads are maintained in fully safe conditions.

A date for a new launch attempt will be announced shortly

NASA Shuttle Endeavour Launch Postponed

No matter how much hype precedes a space launch—and there was plenty leading up to today's planned flight of the space shuttle Endeavour, what with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the Obama family in attendance—it takes just a small thing to shut down the whole show.

Today that thing was actually a pair of things—two heaters attached to an on-board supply of the hydrazine rocket fuel.

Hydrazine is a colourless, highly flammable gas that, when heated to about 500°F, can be used to power hydraulic systems, similar to the way steam turns the drive wheel of a riverboat.

In this case, the hydraulics are used to control the elevons, the flaps that allow the shuttle to pitch up and down during flight, according to astronaut Michael Foale, who reported moments after NASA announced that the launch was being scrubbed with just less than two and a half hours left in the countdown. It will take at least 48 hours to check out the systems and certify them ready for flight.

Even before the heaters went on the fritz, the launch was looking unlikely. That's not so much because of today's high winds and cloud cover at Cape Canaveral, but because the weather was even worse in France and Spain.

Every time a shuttle lifts off, flight rules require that the crew have a range of available landing sites and abort options in case something goes dangerously wrong.

The quickest and most straightforward maneuver is called a Return To Launch Site (RTLS) abort, in which the commander jettisons the solid fuel engines (which can't be shut down once they're lit), yaws back around so that the nose of the shuttle is pointed back to Florida, slowly throttles down the main engines and lands on a Canaveral runway.

If the problem occurs when the shuttle is out of range of Florida, the next best option is a Transoceanic Abort Landing (TAL), in which the crew flies the disabled ship across the Atlantic and touches down either at France's Istres Air Base or Spain's Zaragoza or Moron Air Base. (That last one, alas, is not a typo.)

With the European bases being hit by rain and winds, the launch would probably have been a no-go not matter what the state of the heaters was. (NASA says the forecast is 80% favorable for a Sunday launch.)

The penultimate abort scenario is known as Abort Once Around (AOA)—in which the shuttle has just enough velocity to stagger into a wobbly orbit but not enough to sustain it. After a single circuit of the planet, it comes home.

The last option after that is the Abort To Orbit; in this one, the shuttle can at least achieve a solid low-earth orbit. In many cases, that's the safest place for a balky ship to be, giving engineers and astronauts time to suss out the problem and plan for a safe, early reentry.

Today's scrub was the much less eventful get-out-of-the-spaceship-and-take-the-elevator-back-down-to-the-ground variety. It ain't sexy, but it's very reliable—and astronauts prefer it every time. - by Jeffrey Kluger

OBAMA to cancel NASA Moon mission

President Barack Obama is essentially grounding efforts to return astronauts to the moon and instead is sending Nasa in new directions with roughly six billion US dollars more, according to officials familiar with the plans.

A White House official confirmed published reports that when next week's budget is proposed, Nasa will get an additional 5.9 billion US dollars over five years.

Some of that money would extend the life of the International Space Station to 2020.

It would also be used to entice companies to build private spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station after the space shuttle retires, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The money in the President's budget is not enough to follow through with Nasa's plan for flights to the moon, which had been initiated by President George W Bush and has already cost 9.1 billion US dollars.

It all comes down to money. The six-year-old Bush plan sputtered when promised budget increases did not materialise. And now money is a big consideration in Nasa's latest shift in focus.
A new direction for Nasa has been on hold for several months while an independent commission studied options and the White House weighed them.

Mr Obama's choice will be made clear on Monday, when he releases his 2011 budget proposal.

Space policy scholar John Logsdon, who was on an Obama space campaign advisory committee, said Mr Obama is adopting the preferred option of a White House-appointed outside panel of experts last year. That concept includes reliance on a commercial spaceship, a space station that functions for five more years than planned, and a "flexible path" for human space exploration.

That might mean trips to a nearby asteroid, a Martian moon or a brief visit to the moon, instead of the Bush plan for a moon base by the end of the decade.