March 7 News Items

Rocket Plane Roulette (Source: SpaceDaily.com)
There is a big problem with the nascent space tourism industry that most of its supporters are glossing over: Safety. The romantic half of my brain would really like to see these businesses succeed and prosper, but the rational half tells me that they are heading for a series of fatal accidents that will be financial and public relations disasters. One reason for the dismal safety record of rocket-powered suborbital test planes is that these aircraft combine four incompatible technologies. During ascent, the rocketplane is a ballistic missile; at apogee it is a spacecraft; on descent it is a reentry vehicle; on approach and landing it is a glider. The result is a nightmare of complexity in which parts essential for one phase of flight are useless or even dangerous in the other phases.

Most of today's potential rocketplane builders are tiny startup firms with weak technical staffs and dubious design concepts. One firm is planning to use the DC-X design which crashed, exploded, or caught fire on 25% of its flights; another is converting a subsonic business jet; a third has hired the most incompetent aircraft design team of the Cold War (Myashischev). Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites is the only established aerospace company working in this field. But SpaceShip1 suffered serious problems on all of its flights above 100km and was retired after only 3 such flights. Clearly Rutan didn't think that it was safe enough to fly passengers instead of sandbags - or even safe enough to make a few more proving flights to explore the economics of SpaceShip2.

Some safety problems could be fixed by a simple FAA regulation. But the rocketplane promoters lobbied the US Congress into passing a law that greatly restricts regulation of their industry until 2012. Tourist rocketplanes will operate in the kind of regulatory vacuum that existed in the barnstorming era of aviation. The promoters seem to have forgotten about the huge number of people killed in that era, and the numerous airlines that failed financially or were taken over by governments. Any ordinary aircraft has completed thousands of test flights before the FAA certifies it to carry passengers. But airliners are much cheaper to operate than rocketplanes and developed by huge corporate consortia with vastly deeper pockets than most of the players in the space tourism industry. Visit http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Rocket_Plane_Roulette_999.html to view the article.

Russia Questions U.S. About Missile Defense System (Source: AIA)
Russia's top diplomat on Tuesday said the U.S. has not adequately answered questions about its plans to build parts of its missile defense system in former Soviet satellite states. The U.S. has said it needs the system to defend against potential attacks from countries such as Iran, not Russia.

Aerospace Industry is Booming (Source: AIA)
The U.S. aerospace industry was highly successful in 2006, with total deliveries estimated at more than $184 billion. While sales increased across the board for nearly all product and customer categories, the civil aircraft sector surged 21 percent. The AIA Aerospace Research Center projects aerospace industry sales will grow to more than $195 billion in 2007, as purchases by the military and the space sector increase slightly while commercial aircraft, engines and parts deliveries rise by 15 percent. See more 2006 industry statistics at http://www.aia-aerospace.org/stats/yr_ender/yr_ender.cfm.

Spacehab's Astrotech Subsidiary Awarded $3 Million Contract (Source: SpaceRef.com)
Astrotech Space Operations has been awarded a one-year contract extension for payload processing services by United Launch Alliance (ULA). The contract is valued at $3.3 million for support of Atlas missions during the one-year period. Through the extension, Astrotech will continue to provide payload processing services and specialized facilities for ULA's Atlas expendable launch vehicle program from Astrotech's bi-coastal locations - Titusville, Florida and Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), California. The original contract included the period of December 31, 1999 through December 31, 2006 with four one-year option periods for 2007 - 2010.

Launch Pad Damage Delays Delta 4 Flight (Source: Florida Today)
The planned April 1 launch of a Delta 4-Heavy rocket and a missile warning satellite is being delayed because of damage done at its launch pad during a recent countdown dress rehearsal. The United Launch Alliance rocket and its payload -- a Defense Support Program spacecraft -- are not expected to fly before mid-April. The mission was postponed after two structural cracks were discovered in the metallic launch table beneath the rocket at Launch Complex 37 at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport. The cracks were found after a so-called Wet Dress Rehearsal -- a propellant loading test and practice countdown.

Atlas 5 Rolls Out For Launch (Source: Florida Today)
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was rolled out of its assembly building at the Cape Canaveral Spaceport to the pad at Launch Complex 41. The Atlas 5 is scheduled to blast off during a launch window that will extend from 9:37 p.m. to 11:42 p.m. Thursday. Its payload: six experimental military satellites designed to test advanced defense technologies.

Arianespace Prepares to Launch British, Indian Satellites (Source: The Hindu)
Arianespace said that it has placed British military and Indian communication satellites on a rocket scheduled to launch into space this weekend. The British Defense Ministry's Skynet 5A military communcations satellite and India's Insat 4B civil communications satellite will lift off on Saturday evening from the Guiana Space Centre in Kouou, French Guiana. The launch was delayed by one day to complete a review of the Ariane-5 ECA launcher.

Aquatic Robotic Diver Could Aid Europa Exploration (Source: Space.com)
It’s robotic, aquatic and ramping up for a long, deep dive, all to test technology that could one day allow its autonomous descendants plunging into alien waters believed to sit beneath the icy crust of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The autonomous underwater vehicle Deep Phreatic Thermal eXplorer (DEPTHX) will begin a second round of dives this week to explore the depths of La Pilita, a 377-foot (115-meter) deep geothermal sinkhole in Mexico. They follow a series of successful tests dives to shakedown the vehicle’s autonomous navigation and mapping capabilities, researchers said.

The research is part of a $5 million NASA study to develop technology that could one day allow a waterborne explorer to probe the vast unknown ocean though to lurk beneath the miles-thick crust of ice covering Europa. The cracked, icy Jovian moon has been billed one of the solar systems’ best hunting grounds for extraterrestrial organisms.

Congress to Review NASA Probe Report (Source: Orlando Sentinel)
White House officials have agreed to release a confidential report by April 2 that details a federal investigation of NASA Inspector General Robert Cobb, congressional sources said. The decision comes after more than two months of wrangling between Congress and an oversight group on whether federal lawmakers could have access to the longstanding Cobb probe. Launched last year after complaints to the office of U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., the inquiry reportedly was completed by the end of last summer and examines dozens of allegations against Cobb in his role as inspector general.

However, a White House oversight group still has not decided what, if any, action to recommend. Some of the complaints accuse Cobb of stifling investigations, mistreating employees and maintaining more than the traditional arms-length relationship he was supposed to have with top officials of the agency he was supposed to monitor.