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28 October 2008
More Ares I Development Problems: Is it Really That Bad?
There's been a lot of bad news surrounding the development of the Constellation Program of late. We've had news of general design flaws, rebelling NASA engineers, failed parachute tests, budget overruns, vibrational issues and job losses. Now we have a new one to add to the mix, the Ares I launch vehicle could bump into [...]
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09 October 2008
NASA Does Space-Age Archaeology, Uncovering Apollo Heatshields to Help with Orion
NASA scientists currently working on the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle had the rare opportunity to unpack a little piece of history. A visit to Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum led them to uncover crates containing the heat shields used during the development of the Apollo Program, some 35 years ago. The shielding has [...]
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29 August 2008
NASA is Making Preliminary Plans to Extend Shuttle Launches Beyond 2010
According to an internal email, NASA staff have been instructed to initiate a study into extending the operational lifetime of the Shuttle to bridge the 5-year gap between planned Shuttle retirement and Constellation commencement. In an apparent U-turn in the US space agency's policy, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has ordered a feasibility study to assess [...]
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21 August 2008
Ares V Rocket Could Crush Kennedy's Crawlerway: Will Cost Billions to Upgrade
There's a big problem with Kennedy Space Center playing host to the Constellation Program: The heavy-lift rocket, Ares V, may be too heavy for the infrastructure to cope with. The crawlerway is a 40 year old road designed for the Saturn V (Apollo Program) crawler-transporters and is currently used to carry the Shuttle up to [...]
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20 August 2008
NASA Releases Images and Video of Orion Failed Parachute Test
As previously reported on the Universe Today, recent parachute test-drops for the Constellation Project have brought mixed results. The Ares I drogue parachute test appeared to perform flawlessly on July 24th, but the July 31st Orion test drop was a different story. Very early on in the parachute test, the "programmer parachute" (the first small [...]
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19 August 2008
NASA to Install "Shock Absorbers" to Mitigate Thrust Oscillation
NASA will add a system engineers equated to shock absorbers to Ares 1 rockets to reduce significant vibrations that could shake Orion spacecraft and astronaut crews during early stages of the flight. Earlier, engineers had determined that at about 115 seconds into the flight, the Ares rocket would vibrate for about 5 seconds, enough [...]
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21 July 2008
NASA's Use of Cadavers to Test the Orion Capsule
NASA is debating whether the new Orion capsule should land in the water, like Apollo, or on land, similar to how the Russian Soyuz capsule returns to Earth. To help them determine the potential for human injuries with each possible landing scenario, NASA has used human cadavers during their tests. At first, this [...]
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17 July 2008
Problems Surface For Constellation Program
On the heels of news about NASA engineers who feel the Constellation program is using the wrong kind of rockets comes word that efforts to build the spacecraft which will replace the shuttle and return astronauts to the moon is running behind and over-budget. NASA Watch published a leaked internal NASA document showing the [...]
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15 July 2008
The "Other" Moon Rocket Some NASA Engineers Believe is Better Than Ares
There's a group of NASA engineers who believe NASA is making a mistake with its new Constellation program to return to the moon, which will use the new Ares rockets for launches starting in 2014. Constellation is an all new program which requires everything to be built from the ground up. The group [...]
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12 June 2008
The Latest in Space Fashion from NASA
NASA unveiled a new design of spacesuits for the Constellation program today. Astronauts will be donning the new suits on the first flights of the Orion spaceship, scheduled for 2015, on trips to the International Space Station, with additional EVA suits ready for the first missions to the moon, scheduled for 2020. The [...]
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13 May 2008
Lower Gravity Will Help Lunar Dust Get Deep Into Astronaut Lungs
Dusting the house might be a chore here on Earth, but when astronauts return to the Moon, they'll need to be neat freaks. Their lives might depend on it! According to researchers at the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, the health of lunar astronauts will depend on how well they can keep the fine lunar [...]
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03 April 2008
Report: Constellation Program Has Serious Issues
NASA is facing some serious problems, and whether these problems are perception or truth remains to be seen. A government report presented at a congressional hearing on April 3 says NASA’s Constellation Program faces severe problems and the new spacecraft might never work as intended. The Government Accountability Office, which calls itself “the [...]
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02 April 2008
Jobs Eliminated as Shuttle Program Transitions to Constellation
As the space shuttle program winds down and NASA transitions to the new Constellation program, more than 8,000 NASA contractor jobs in the manned space program could be eliminated after 2010, the U.S. space agency said at a press briefing on April 1, 2008. A NASA report sent to Congress predicts that between [...]
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10 December 2007
Water or Land: The Orion Landing Choice
Work is progressing on designing the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), the next generation of NASA spacecraft that will take humans to the International Space Station, back to the Moon, and hopefully on to Mars. But one major question about the spacecraft has yet to be answered. On returning to Earth, will [...]
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