• Category Archives Space
  • Space Tourist Trips to the Moon May Fly on Recycled Spaceships

    Space tourists may soon be able to pay their own way to the moon onboard old Russian spacecraft retrofitted by a company based in the British Isles.

    The spaceflight firm Excalibur Almaz estimates that it can sell about 30 seats between 2015 and 2025, for $150 million each, aboard moon-bound missions on a Salyut-class space station driven by electric hall-effect thrusters.

    Excalibur Almaz founder and chief executive officer Art Dula estimates it will take 24 to 30 months to develop the remaining technology needed and to refurbish the ex-Soviet spacecraft and space stations the company already owns. It bought four 1970s-era Soviet Almaz program three-crew capsules and two Russian Salyut-class 63,800-pound (29,000 kilograms) space station pressure vessels.

    Declaring that he is ready to sell tickets and that a 50 percent return on investment could be achieved in three years, Dula told the Royal Aeronautical Society’s third European space tourism conference on June 19, “At $100 million to 150 million [per seat, we can sell] up to 29 seats in the next 10 years, and that is a conservative estimate. We [chose] not to use, for this presentation, the aggressive estimates.”

    Those conservative and aggressive estimates are from a market study entitled “Market analysis of commercial human orbital and circumlunar spaceflight” carried out for Excalibur Almaz by the management consultancy Futron. In 2009, Excalibur Almaz officials told SPACE.com the company’s first flight would be in 2013.

    The architecture for the lunar mission involves a Soviet Almaz Reusable Return Vehicle (RRV), which can carry three people, launched by a Soyuz-FG rocket. This rocket also launches Russia’s Soyuz manned capsule. The RRV weighs 6,600 pounds (3,000 kg) and has a habitable volume of 159 cubic feet (4.5 cubic meters). The lunar flight also uses a Salyut-class 63,800-pound (29,000 kg) space station that is launched by a Proton rocket. While Excalibur Almaz intends to use the Soyuz-FG and Proton initially, Dula did not rule out using other rockets, including Space Exploration Technologies’ (SpaceX) Falcon 9 in the future. Dula said Excalibur Almaz would wait for the Falcon 9 to accumulate enough flights that it became feasible to insure the space station module aboard the rocket.

    “Our customers are private expedition members and I think it is fundamentally different to tourism,” Dula said. “What we are offering [with the lunar flight] is more like expeditions.”

    Once in orbit, the station and RRV will dock and the station’s propulsion system, which is a group of electric hall-effect thrusters, propels the stack out to the moon. Excalibur Almaz is in talks with Natick, Mass.-based Busek Space Propulsion to develop the hall-effect thrusters needed. Dula described an electric system for the station module that would use up to 100,000 watts of power for its thrusters. If a solar or cosmic radiation event threatened a flight’s crew and passengers, the company could run power through “electrical lines around the station and keep most of the charged articles away — protons you can keep out with an electrical field.” He also said the station would have a refuge area crew and passengers could use to protect against radiation storms.

    In addition to electric thrusters to propel a space station to the moon, Excalibur Almaz must pay for the development of digital flight-control computers, life support systems and an in-space propulsion system. Dula indicated that his company has spent about $150 million on the in-orbit space propulsion module.

    “The cost is say $250 million; we already have much of the nonrecurring expense [engineering research and development] paid for this,” he said. This propulsion system is based on the European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle’s propulsion module. EADS Astrium is a contractor for Excalibur Almaz. Another contractor is Russian military and industrial joint stock company Mashinostroyenia.

    Full article: http://www.space.com/16367-private-moon-missions-excalibur-almaz.html


  • Asteroid hunters want to launch private telescope

    In a bold plan unveiled Thursday, the group of former NASA employees wants to launch its own space telescope to spot and track small and mid-sized space rocks capable of wiping out a city or continent. They could sound early warnings if a rogue asteroid appeared headed toward our planet.

    So far, the idea from the B612 Foundation is on paper only.

    Such an effort would cost upward of several hundred million dollars. Behind the nonprofit are a space shuttle astronaut, Apollo 9 astronaut, former Mars czar, deep space mission manager and other non-NASA types.

    Asteroids are leftovers from the formation of the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. Most reside in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but some get nudged into Earth’s neighborhood.

    NASA and a network of astronomers routinely scan the skies for these near-Earth objects. They’ve found 90 percent of the biggest threats — asteroids that are considered major killers. Scientists believe one such asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

    But the group thinks more attention should be paid to the estimated half a million smaller asteroids — similar in size to the one that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles (2,071 square kilometers) of forest.

    “We know these objects are out there, and we can do something to prevent them” from hitting Earth, said former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who helped establish the foundation a decade ago.

    Asteroids are getting attention lately. NASA turned down a return to the moon in favor of a manned landing on an asteroid. Last month, Planetary Resources Inc., a company founded by space entrepreneurs, announced plans to extract precious metals from asteroids within a decade.

    Full article: http://phys.org/news/2012-06-asteroid-hunters-private-telescope.html


  • Huge Mars Rover’s Landing Will Be ‘7 Minutes of Terror’

    In just six weeks, NASA’s next Mars rover will attempt an unprecedented landing on the Red Planet that will have mission engineers on the edge of their seats with excitement and worry.

    The 1-ton Curiosity rover — the centerpiece of NASA’s $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission — is due to touch down inside the Red Planet’s Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5. But it won’t be easy.

    “Entry, descent and landing, also known as EDL, is referred to as the ’seven minutes of terror,’” EDL engineer Tom Rivellini, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., said in a recent JPL video.

    “We’ve got literally seven minutes to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars, going from 13,000 miles per hour to zero in perfect sequence, perfect choreography, perfect timing,” Rivellini added. “And the computer has to do it all by itself, with no help from the ground. If any one thing doesn’t work just right, it’s game over.”

    Curiosity’s landing will likely be more anxiety-inducing than most planetary touchdowns. The robot is too big to land cushioned by airbags like previous Red Planet rovers, so researchers had to come up with an entirely new method.

    They settled on a rocket-powered sky crane, which will lower Curiosity to the Martian surface on cables before flying off to crash-land on purpose a safe distance away.

    “When people look at it, it looks crazy,” EDL engineer Adam Steltzner, also of JPL, said in the video. “That’s a very natural thing. Sometimes when we look at it, it looks crazy. It is the result of reasoned engineering thought, but it still looks crazy.”

    On the night of Aug. 5, the MSL spacecraft will hit the Martian atmosphere going about 13,000 mph (21,000 kph). As it barrels through the Red Planet air, MSL’s heat shield will literally glow, reaching temperatures of about 2,900 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius).

    The relatively thin Martian atmosphere will slow MSL down to only 1,000 mph (1,600 kph) or so, Rivellini said. So the spacecraft will also deploy a parachute, one that can withstand 65,000 pounds (29,500 kilograms) of force despite weighing just 100 pounds (45 kg) itself.

    But even the parachute won’t be enough.

    “This big huge parachute that we’ve got, it’ll only slow us down to about 200 miles per hour,” Rivellini said. “And that’s not slow enough to land. So we have no choice, but we’ve got to cut it off and then come down on rockets.”

    The rockets can’t fire all the way to the ground, however, or they’d raise a huge dust cloud that could damage the rover’s instruments and mechanisms, researchers said. To avoid such a ruckus, Curiosity will be lowered to the Martian surface on 21-foot-long (6.4 meters) cables. When the rover is safely down, the cables will be released and the rocket-propelled sky crane will fly off so it doesn’t crash into Curiosity.

    The 14-minute communications lag between Earth and Mars means that the MSL team won’t be getting real-time updates about the rover’s perilous journey.

    “When we first get word that we’ve touched the top of the atmosphere, the vehicle has been alive, or dead, on the surface for at least seven minutes,” Steltzner said.

    Full article: http://www.space.com/16296-curiosity-mars-rover-landing-terror.html