Author Archives: roamingfirehydrant

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield posted links to three videos that he made with the Mythbusters, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. The first two involve celebrity chefs David Chang and Traci Des Jardins trying to jazz up the MRE-like space food. Pretty sure there’s no shrimp cocktail MRE, though a quick search tells me there is a jambalaya with ham and shrimp.

Traci must have learned that you can’t really mix food in space, not without making a mess. This one is a little easier on Cdr. Hadfield.

Once dinner is over, it’s time to relax and play some games.

So I hope you enjoyed all that, but this is really leading up to me sharing this story and photo. I was at JSC in the summer of 2006. After work, I was invited to hang out with my kind JSC friends at one of the local watering holes known to be frequented by astronauts. Sure enough, there was a group of astronauts having a little get-together. We waited until the party broke up then asked them if they would mind posing for pictures. Hadfield, as I recall, was not particularly happy but not rude, either.

Thank you for putting up with us groupies, Commander.

The second of Kepler’s four reaction wheels — devices that allow the observatory to maintain its position in space — has failed, depriving Kepler of the ability to lock precisely onto its 150,000-plus target stars, NASA officials announced Wednesday (May 15).

But mission engineers are not conceding that Kepler’s planet-hunting days have come to an end, vowing to try their best to recover the failed reaction wheels over the coming weeks.

via Can NASA's Planet-Hunting Kepler Mission Be Saved? | Alien Planets | Space.com.

We can’t go out there and fix it like we did with Hubble – at the moment, it’s 40 million miles away.

Today’s update indicated that there’s some troubleshooting to do and some tests to see if the first failed reaction wheel might come back online. The scientists also said that they still have two years’ worth of data to sift through. Kepler was launched in March 2009 and has significantly changed what we know about planets around other stars. Exoplanets are far more common that previously thought, and more are rocky planets like ours rather than gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn.

What a busy weekend. Saturday, Tom Marshburn and Chris Cassidy completed a nearly spur-of-the-moment spacewalk to successfully swap out a pump and repair a coolant leak. Yesterday Chris Hadfield handed over command of the International Space Station to Pavel Vinogradov. Hadfield, Marshburn and Roman Romanenko will be undocking later today and landing tonight in Kazakhstan.

I’m sorry to see Hadfield leave ISS. Hadfield truly made the most of social media in relaying photos, videos, and sounds, sharing space with those of us stuck on the ground. I hadn’t heard the sounds of ISS before, so it’s one thing to see the report of bearing problems of one of the pumps and quite another to hear the racket it makes. (Plus the toilet sounds like a vacuum cleaner.) Between Twitter and Facebook, Hadfield had over a million followers. I hope he continues generating that interest in space when he’s back on the ground.

CTV put together a nice post of Hadfield’s greatest hits. For a finale, Hadfield’s son Evan produced this video:

Prayers for the safe landing of the crew of Expedition 35.

Watch it now at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn of NASA have removed the 260-pound pump controller box that may be the source of an ammonia leak from the P6 truss of the International Space Station and replaced it with a spare. Looks like it’s going very well.

UPDATE: pics here

Sounding Rockets Launch from the Marshall Islands

Red and white vapor clouds filled the skies over the Marshall Islands as part of NASA’s Equatorial Vortex Experiment (EVEX). The red cloud was formed by the release of lithium vapor and the white tracer clouds were formed by the release of trimethyl aluminum (TMA). These clouds allowed scientists on the ground from various locations in the Marshall Islands to observe the neutral winds in the ionosphere.

via NASA – Sounding Rockets Launch from the Marshall Islands.

At Marshall Space Flight Center, a relatively simple technology developed to smooth potentially dangerous vibrations in NASA’s defunct Ares I crew launch vehicle is finding its way into the wider world as a way to steady buildings, aircraft, ships and other structures reacting to winds, waves and even earthquakes. The passive approach uses the weight of a liquid coupled to a structure to dampen shaking, swaying, fluttering and other oscillations.

via NASA Technology Stabilizes All Kinds Of Structures.

The article says “opponents of a government-owned orbital crew vehicle seized on the thrust-oscillation issue as ammunition in their successful efforts to kill the project”, which I think is misleading. There were a series of judgments made on Ares – SSME changed to a single J-2X, which cut the upper stage thrust by more than half, then adding the fifth segment to the SRB to make up for the loss – that led to the thrust oscillation problem. Having a lower-thrust, lighter-weight upper stage put its natural frequency in the range of the dynamic forces from the booster. It wasn’t “opponents of a government-owned orbital crew vehicle” that killed Ares, because we still have Orion/Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle work. The killers were problems of their own making, combined with management’s refusal to listen to their technical people, major cost overruns and the WORST preliminary design review I’ve ever seen.

Glad to see something good has come out of it.

The Great Moonbuggy Race is on again at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. You can watch live on Ustream http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-msfc or follow @MOONBUGGYRACE on Twitter. Hope they get lots of races finished today, because tomorrow looks like rain.

Hey Aggie, Puerto Rico is well-represented here. This is Teodoro Aguilar Mora Team 1, racing just a few minutes ago. Unofficial time was great – 3 minutes, 20 seconds, so they might win back-to-back titles.

UPDATE: Well, I picked the winner. Teodoro Aguilar Mora Team 1 won first place in the high school division with an official time of 3:24. Second and third place went to Jupiter High School Team 1 and Team 2, respectively, of Jupiter, Fla. The winner in the college division was University of Puerto Rico-Humacao, second place was the International Space Education Institute, “Team Russia,” Leipzig, Germany, and third place was Middle Tennessee State University Team 1 from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Bevill State Community College Team I from Sumiton, Alabama won the Crash and Burn award for most spectacular vehicle breakdown, which was a sideways flip on the “lava flow” obstacle. The Rookie Awards for fastest course completion by a new race team went to Escuela Superior Rafaelina E. Lebron Flores High School of Puerto Rico and North Dakota State University from Fargo, ND.

It was mentioned on the Ustream video that Puerto Rico has its own round of competition and the winners come here, and the experience shows.

Can’t wait to hear the stories from the pit crew volunteers. One team didn’t have brakes on their vehicle because “it’s a race, and we don’t want to slow down!” Another team admitted they should have been sponsored by Duct Tape. :)

Liftoff is set for 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT) today. The live webcast will begin at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT).

Link to Livestream video at http://www.space.com/17933-nasa-television-webcasts-live-space-tv.html

Launch is from Wallops Island, so perhaps our alert readers along the mid-Atlantic coast may see it.

BUMPED AND UPDATED: Let’s try that yet again – today, Sunday the 21st at 5 p.m. EDT. Same Livestream link should work.

Congratulations on a successful launch!

Back in 2006, NASA started the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, or COTS, to spur commercial development of launch vehicles and alternatives to the Space Shuttle. It is tied to the Commercial Resupply Program, but if I understand it correctly, COTS is the vehicle, and CRP is cargo and crew. This was narrowed down to two companies, SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler (RpK). RpK couldn’t get enough private funding and dropped out. Orbital Sciences then won the second round of contract bidding. SpaceX has had several successful launches of their Falcon 9 vehicle and two resupply missions to ISS with their Dragon capsule. Orbital Sciences has developed their Antares launch vehicle, which rolled out to the Wallops Island launchpad last week.

There were a lot of delays in getting Wallops Island, a.k.a. Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) ready. I wrote about the launch pad delays in January 2012. According to this article, two launch vehicles sat in the warehouse while the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority punted to the state Department of Transportation to finish the job, and there’s still some mods to be made that can afford to wait until after launch. Antares will launch from the same pad as the Conestoga flights. There is a second launch pad, which has been used for Orbital Sciences’ Minotaur rockets.
Here’s another pic of the rocket, raised and ready for launch.

They are launching an instrumented mass simulator instead of their Cygnus capsule for this first time, due to launch no earlier than April 17. The first Antares flight with Cygnus should be later this year.
I assume the launch will be livestreamed, and I will post a link when that happens.

Nice how this solar array on the Russian Zvezda catches the sunlight. (click to embiggen)

And yeah, I started looking for meteoroid/space debris impacts.  Habit.

Some astronauts have a gift for being able to share what it’s like in space. Alan Bean painted moonscapes from his Apollo experiences. Jerry Linenger shared letters to his son while stationed aboard the Mir. Don Pettit had his Saturday Science videos. Now, we have ISS commander Chris Hadfield, who has really excelled at social media, tweeting pics from space like this:

chatting with another spaceship captain

and inspiring kids on Reddit’s Ask Me Anything. Zen Pencils turned Hadfield’s words into an awesome cartoon.

Kudos and thanks to Australian artist Gavin Aung Than for capturing that inspiration perfectly.

I waffled on whether to post this or not, but XBrad said, “Hurry up already!”

There is a huge amount of research being performed on the International Space Station, and the ISS Science website has been sharing some of the success stories. One is the electrically conductive coating used on the SpaceX Dragon capsule, so this was published when the resupply ship was released and splashed down 225 miles west of Baja California a couple of days ago. That article links to this video (warning: autoplay).

I can’t listen to it, because I think I sound weird. I am grateful that the video crew did not include the footage of me laughing as one of my co-workers walked like an Egyptian and made faces at me through the lab window.

After a delay due to weather, it now looks like the Dragon spacecraft will be leaving the International Space Station and landing tomorrow.

You can watch the release on Space.com

Dragon is wrapping up its second contracted cargo run to the space station for NASA. The capsule launched on March 1 and arrived at the orbiting lab two days later after overcoming an unexpected thruster malfunction.

The Dragon capsule delivered about 1,200 pounds (1,210 kilograms) of supplies to the space station and will return about 2,670 pounds (1,210 kg) of equipment, hardware and scientific experiments when it returns Tuesday.

Also, submitted without comment.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/dragon_coating.html

I wonder sometimes how much food for space borrows from MREs.