At 05:38 GMT on Thursday 23rd May, Ecuador’s first and only satellite collided with the fuel tank of an S14 Soviet rocket, which was launched in 1985. Luckily, the satellite in question, named “Pegaso”, was only a CubeSat, with a mass of only 1.2 kg, so the amount of extra space debris generated was minimal, but it still provides an [...]
Focus
Opinion: MarsOne Not the Way to Go
By David Gobby The American Idol-style audition process for those who want to take part in the proposed MarsOne project to build a human outpost on Mars will provide a great laboratory for the study of human systems. To Dr. Raye Kass, an adviser to the project and a Concordia University professor of applied human sciences who wrote about it [...]
SNC’s Dream Chaser at Dryden for Runway and Flight Tests
Dream Chaser, the crewed orbital and suborbital vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing lifting-body vehicle, has been delivered to NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California as of May 15. The vehicle, being developed by Sierra Nevada Corporation’s (SNC) Space Systems, will undergo a series of tests on its flight and runway landing system. “This will be the first full scale flight test [...]
Crew of Bion M1 Found Dead upon Landing
The Russian Space zoo capsule Bion M1 landed in early morning on Sunday, May 19, near Orenburg, Southern Russia, about 750 kilometers southeast of Moscow. Even though the reentry and landing had proceeded more or less as planned, it was reported that all 8 Mongolian gerbils and most of the 45 mice present onboard the capsule were found dead. Russian news agency [...]
The Plan to Save Skylab
By Ben Evans This article continues the history recounted in Part 1: The Fateful Launch of Skylab The month of May 1973 quickly turned from one of euphoria into, potentially, one of the darkest in NASA’s history. After closing out its Apollo lunar landing program in spectacular style, the space agency turned to the launch of the Skylab orbital station, a [...]
Growing Plants in Lunar, Martian Soil
For long duration missions on the Moon and Mars, growing food on site will be advantageous, saving overall mass to be carried for the mission. The question is: Can we grow plants on Moon and Mars like we do here on Earth? Ecologist Wieger Wamelink at Alterra Wageningen UR plans to find out. Wamelink has proposed to study feasibility of plant growth in [...]
The Unpredictable End of Skylab
Putting all the information together, one might think Skylab’s destiny was to test NASA’s nerves and crisis management ability. Whereas the launch and onset of operations 40 years ago showed how dedicated NASA was to solving all the faults and glitches that threatened the project from the start, the final episodes of the station’s life were marked with planning and scheduling errors and [...]
The Dreams and Reality of Zambia’s Space Program
It’s not only the rich and powerful who have ambitious dreams of space exploration, as was recently illuminated by a project of Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel. Scraping the depths of the internet in a quest for a quirky, unbelievable story, she came across an article about a grade-school teacher in Zambia who, in 1964, established a makeshift Academy of [...]
Bion-M1 Reflection: Why Do We Still Need to Send Animals to Space?
On April 19, a Russian Soyuz rocket, launched from the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carried into orbit an atypical satellite – space capsule Bion-M1. This 2,450 kg space zoo is currently accommodating 45 mice, 8 gerbils, 15 geckos, and samples of plants and microorganisms. It orbits at an altitude of more than 575 kilometers and will stay in space for [...]
The Fateful Launch of Skylab
By Ben Evans Four decades ago this week, America almost lost its first space station. On the morning of 14 May 1973, the last in a generation of Saturn V boosters sat on Pad 39A, ready for its journey into space. Visually, it was quite distinct from its predecessors, possessing two stages, instead of three, and in place of what would [...]
