The International Space Station is getting a makeover starting this week. On Friday, astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Terry Virts will conduct the first of a series of spacewalks to reconfigure the outside of the station to create two new docking ports, Discovery News reports. The new ports will provide parking spots for spacecraft that will be visiting in the near future—namely, the commercial space taxis being developed by SpaceX and Boeing.
In early March, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will enter the orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres. “We're going to see a whole new world,” says Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director. Eight years since its launch, and four years after visiting the second-largest object in the asteroid belt, Vesta, Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit two alien protoplanets in a single mission.
Early this morning, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, released images from the company's rocket landing attempt on Saturday. The photos show how the Falcon 9 rocket did indeed hit its intended landing platform in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And then it exploded.
In the ongoing effort to lower the cost of commercial spaceflight, private companies hope to conquer a facet of rocket design NASA hasn't fully explored yet: reusable rockets. Up until now, all space rockets have used disposable launch systems, meaning they're designed to launch only once, and afterward, their parts are never recovered. The Space Shuttle was mostly reusable, but it still required an expendable -- and pricey -- external tank for lift-off. If a truly reusable launch system can be achieved, such a rocket could dramatically lower the cost of getting to space, since manufacturers wouldn't need to replace their rockets after each liftoff.
In the wake of the explosion of Orbital Science’s Antares launch vehicle last week, many were quick to point fingers at the rocket’s main engine hardware. The Antares’ first-stage rocket engine is the Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-26, which is basically just a refurbished NK-33 - an engine made by the Soviets in the 1960s and 70s. Experts theorized that the five-decade-old engine design was most likely to blame for the destruction of the Antares, which exploded shortly after lifting off at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on October 28.
In 2004, I sat down in a flight simulator at Scaled Composites with test pilot and engineer Peter Siebold. He'd built the simulator—a precise replica of the cockpit in Scaled's radically unconventional SpaceShipOne (SS1). That ship was the predecessor of SpaceShipTwo (SS2), which broke apart over the Mojave Desert on Friday. Siebold was at the controls at the time of the accident, with Mike Alsbury as co-pilot