Orbital Sciences: Antares Rocket & Cygnus Spacecraft Explained - Infographic

Credit: Space.com 

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Virginia-based Orbital Sciences holds a $1.9 billion NASA contract to make eight unmanned supply runs to the International Space Station with its Antares rocket and Cygnus cargo ferry.

Antares Launcher
The two-stage Antares launch vehicle burns liquid oxygen (LOX) and kerosene (RP-1). The rocket's height overall is 131 feet (40 meters). Its liftoff weight is 530,000 pounds (240,000 kilograms). The Antares rocket was originally called Taurus 2.

Cygnus Cargo Tanker
The Cygnus pressurized cargo module can carry up to 5,952 pounds (2,700 kg) of payload to the International Space Station.

At the rear of Cygnus is a service module containing avionics, power, communications and command and control hardware. On the outside of the service module are twin fixed-wing gallium arsenide solar arrays capable of putting out 3.5 kilowatts of electricity.

Future Cygnus spacecraft will be enhanced with a larger pressurized cargo module and lightweight solar panels.

ILS Forced to Lower Launch Prices in wake of Failures

International Launch Services (ILS) on March 18 said it has been forced to reduce prices in the wake of its December failure in order to accommodate customers paying higher insurance premiums to use ILS’s Proton heavy-lift rocket.

ILS said it hopes that its prices will recover as the Reston, Va.-based company proceeds with six planned launches between March and August and re-establishes its credibility among customers.

In a press briefing here during the Satellite 2013 conference, ILS President Philip R. Slack said the three failures of Russian Proton rockets in the past two years has caused insurers to bump up their rates for commercial Proton launches.

“A year ago we were within one-quarter or one-half a point of Ariane,” Slack said of ILS’s principal competitor, Arianespace of Europe.

“We would be a couple of points higher today. We obviously needed to respond to market pressure. We expect to be able to bring those rates back down with seven Proton launches in the next six months.”

The Russian Proton rocket is returning to flight with commercial Mexican satellite fleet operator Satmex’s Satmex 8 satellite.

The launch is scheduled for March 27 from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Following Satmex 8 is the scheduled mid-April launch of Canadian fleet operator Telesat’s Anik G1.

Proton will continue launching once a month through August.

Slack declined to disclose the order of the following launches.

Slack said the failure review board organized by ILS after the December failure, which met following a Russian government review, featured 15 ILS customers, three insurance underwriters and three industry experts.

Global insurance underwriters were briefed recently in Reston and London.

“Customer confidence is returning,” Slack said. “We need a string of launch successes, and we think when this happens Proton will win back the confidence of the market.”

The Proton vehicle has launched an average 10 times per year for the past several years. Slack said it should return to that rate this year.

The December failure — which put a Russian telecommunications satellite into a bad orbit, reducing the satellite’s service life --- forced ILS to a slow start this year.

Slack said that despite this, 2013 “should be a decent year for both launches and orders. We are hoping for five or six orders this year.”

Slack and John L. Palme, ILS’s vice president for programs and operations, said Proton prime contractor and ILS owner Khrunichev Space Center of Moscow, has embarked on a year-long quality-improvement program to bring the Breeze-M upper stage’s demonstrated reliability nearer to its theoretical reliability.

Several recent Proton failures have been laid to issues related to the Breeze-M stage.

Khrunichev has also begun development of a 5-meter-diameter fairing for Proton, a feature offered on competitor Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket, and by Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s (SpaceX) Falcon 9 rocket, scheduled to begin making commercial flights later this year.

The larger Proton fairing is scheduled to be ready for flight in the second half of 2016, Slack said.

Khrunichev is also finishing what it calls the Phase 4 performance enhancement of Proton, which will increase the maximum weight of a satellite it can carry to geostationary transfer orbit to 6,350 kilograms, a 200-kilogram increase.

Liberty completes commercial crew development agreement with NASA

ATK (NYSE: ATK), the company leading the development of the Liberty commercial spacecraft, has been successful in reaching the last milestone under the company's unfunded Space Act Agreement (SAA) with NASA for the Commercial Crew Development Program (CCDev-2).

The Liberty Rocket is a commercial crew space system with ATK as main contractor.

Astrium-EADS and Lockheed Martin also serve as sub-contractors.

The first unmanned test flights are forecast to begin in 2014, with crewed flights being planned for 2015. Liberty hopes it will be able to take NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) from 2016 onwards.

The Program Status Review (PSR) was the milestone in the Commercial Crew Development Program (CCDev-2) in which the Liberty team submitted a detailed progress report to NASA.

This included a flight test plan, system safety review, software status, system requirements and the integrated master schedule. ATK have previously completed five milestones.

Read the full article here: Liberty agreement with NASA

NASA New Super Guppy plane

A NASA T-38 and the Super Guppy at the "Wings over Houston" airshow


The NASA Super Guppy at the "Wings over Houston" airshow

NASA Commits To Building Heavy lift Rocket

NASA has finally revealed its design for the agency’s next-generation heavy-lift rocket to carry astronauts on future deep space missions.

The agency announced Sept. 14 that the Space Launch System (SLS) will include hardware and technology that are legacies from the space shuttle and now-defunct Constellation programs.

The $10 billion booster will use liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel, and will have solid-rocket boosters for initial tests flights, agency officials said.

“The next chapter of America’s space exploration story is being written today,” NASA Administrator and former space shuttle astronaut Charles Bolden said during a news briefing held today in Washington to unveil the new rocket design.

“In combination with the crew capsule already in development, extension of activities on the International Space Station, fresh focus on new technologies, the new Space Launch System is key to implementing the plan laid out by President Obama and Congress in the bipartisan 2010 NASA Authorization Act.”

Using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel will enable NASA to reduce costs and leverage experience and existing technology in the field, Bolden explained.

Initial designs depict five solid-rocket boosters on either side of the SLS core, and early test flights will make use of this hardware. However, Bolden said the agency will ultimately hold a competition to replace these side-strapped boosters with more advanced designs or liquid-fueled rockets. 

The booster will have the capacity to lift 70 metric tons into space and will be the most powerful rocket since the Saturn 5 carried NASA astronauts to the Moon.

The SLS rocket’s first test flight is targeted for the end of 2017, with additional flights to follow, Bolden announced. Bolden was joined for the announcement by U.S. Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who have both been steadfast SLS supporters.

US Rely on Russian Soyuz Progress programme to support ISS crew

Progress, a Russian cargo spacecraft, Progress M-06M, lifted off toward the International Space Station at 19:35 Moscow time [15:35 GMT] on Wednesday, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.

It was launched from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan on a Soyuz-U booster rocket. It separated 10 minutes later and successfully entered the designated orbit.

The space freighter will deliver fuel, oxygen, scientific equipment and video and photo equipment to the ISS, as well as food, water and personal items for the crew.

The spaceship is to dock with the space station on July 2 at 20:55 Moscow time [16:55 GMT].

Preparations have already been made for the module's arrival. In early June, Russia's Mission Control readjusted the ISS orbit, raising it by 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) to ensure the best conditions for the docking of the Soyuz TMA-19 manned spacecraft and the Progress M-06M.

On Monday, the ISS crew moved the Soyuz TMA-19, which docked with the Zvezda module on June 18, to the Rassvet research module in a 24-minute maneuver to make room for the Progress M-06M.

Russian Monopoly on Space Uplift to ISS has increased financial impact on NASA, ESA and partners

Russia, which is set to hold a monopoly on flights to the international space station (ISS), wants to charge more for rides on its Soyuz rocket, the space agency head said Tuesday.

"At a meeting of the space agency chiefs in Tokyo, I want to discuss the maintenance of transport to the station," Roskomos head Anatoly Perminov was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

"We have an agreement until 2012 that Russia will be responsible for this. But after that? Excuse me but the prices should be absolutely different then!"

When NASA retires its long-serving shuttle fleet as planned later this year, the United States and other countries will be wholly dependent on Russia to fly the station's six-man crew to and from orbit.

NASA has signed a deal worth 306 million dollars (224 million euros) with Roskomos for six rides to the ISS in 2012 and 2013, or a charge of 51 million dollars per US astronaut.

But with space now limited aboard the Soyuz rocket, Russia looks set to curb its lucrative space tourism service, for which it had charged cosmos-crazed tycoons 35 million dollars (28 million euros) for the ultimate adventure.

The floating ISS research station was to be closed in 2015 and ditched in ocean like its predecessor the Russian Mir station, but the 16 countries involved are in talks to extend the station's life to 2020.