Departures and Arrivals at the ISS

ATV-5 firing thrusters for maneuvering. 

The International Space Station has seen a flurry of cargo spaceships coming and going in the last week. On February 14th, the Georges Lemaître (ATV-5) undocked from the ISS and prepared for a fiery re-entry through the Earth's atmosphere on Sunday. This had been the 5th robotic European cargo spaceship to service the station, arriving in August 2014. Delivering over 2,600 kg of cargo, supplies, and propellant to the station, it had also been the heaviest spacecraft to fly into orbit with the Ariane rocket. DUring its stay at the station, it had activated its motors in November to push the ISS out of the way of a dangerous piece of debris (possibly from a Chinese space experiment). With its supplies removed, the spacious cargo area was filled with trash, broken items, and waste for burn up with the craft on Sunday.

Progress spacecraft head-on view. Solar panels extend to the sides, and communications and ranging equipment sticks out from the hull.

Progress 58, designated by the Russians as M-26M, blasted off on a SOyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Tuesday the 18th. Following a six-hour rapid ascent trajectory, the spacecraft rendezvoused with the station and docked at the Zvesda module a short time later. Docking took place at the same port just recently vacated by the ATV-5. Progress brings up about 2,300 kg of supplies, including water essential for the life support and running of the station. Expedition 42 crew members will begin unloading the spacecraft once atmosphere pressures and spacecraft systems have been checked out and normalized.

View of ISS from Progress spacecraft.

Progress 58 spotted from the ISS as it approached the station from below.

5th Dragon Cargo Ship Returns to Earth

Released from the Robotic Arm on the ISS, Dragon floats free to a safe point where it can fire thrusters. 

The fifth Dragon resupply mission to the International SPace Station (ISS) has come to a successful conclusion. In all, the Dragon space ships have made six stops at the ISS, but the first was a test mission. Of all the various cargo ships that service the station and its crew, Dragon is the only one that returns large quantities of used equipment and experiments back to the Earth for study. All the other robotic supply ships burn up during re-entry, and are usually loaded with trash or non-useable equipment.

SpaceX's Mission Control in California.

Early Tuesday afternoon, astronauts supervised the undocking of the craft from the Node 2 hatch. Using the robotic arm, they gently moved the craft away from the docking port and away from station modules and panels. The craft continued floating away as the arm gently released its grip at 2:09 p.m. Eastern time. Once the Dragon had floated to a designated safe distance from the station, ground flight controllers fired thrusters for three de-orbit burns that guided the spacecraft to a landing site in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California, splashdown occurring at about 7:44 p.m. Eastern. Awaiting them was SpaceX's recovery ship, where the craft was pulled from the water and is being taken back to Los Angeles followed by a trip to the Texas processing facility.

Dragon floats down to a watery landing.

Kennedy Space Center is Evolving!

Down it goes! The Shuttle Mate/De-mate structure is being disassembled the violent way.

As our space program moves from the Shuttle Era towards the era of SLS and Commercial Space, some structures must go in order to raise new, modern structures to support future launches. One such example is the Shuttle Mate/De-mate structure, located alongside the shuttle landing runway just across from the Apollo visitors center. With the end of the shuttle program, the device is not needed and will make room for new projects. During the shuttle program days, whenever the shuttle landed at the dry lakebed in the mojave at Edwards flight test center, it would be mated to the back of a specially-adapted 747 and then flown to the runway at Kennedy to be prepared for another mission.

The good old days. A space shuttle is lifted from the support struts on the shuttle carrier 747, having arrived from a shuttle landing at Edwards AFB in California.

Another part of the Shuttle Program was the USS Pegasus, a special barge large enough to haul the Shuttle External Tank by water from its factory in New Orleans, Louisiana to the Kennedy space Center in Florida. The Pegasus was the last barge from the fleet of barges used to move Saturn stages and shuttle external tanks down the Gulf Coast and around the Florida Keys to the Kennedy center docking port.

Barge unloading facility at Kennedy Space Center. Picture taken during Apollo Program days.

Pegasus with an external tank on the way to KSC.

Pegasus will now receive an extension to its hull and hangar to accommodate the new core stages of the SLS rocket. The core stage is almost 60 feet longer and 250 tons heavier than the shuttle external tanks. The stages will be built at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, Louisiana, and transported to the KSC in several trips. You can read a lot more about the construction at NASAspacelight.com.

Pegasus undergoing a growth spurt.

Launch Complexes are also going through modifications. Pad 39A, from which most of the manned Apollo missions lifted off to the Moon or Earth orbit, is now under contract to SpaceX. The pad is being modified with a new gantry and tower system that will launch the Falcon 9 (and Dragon cargo spacecraft) and Falcon Heavy rockets. Future manned Falcon flights with the Dragon 2 capsule will also launch from Pad39A.

View of Launch Complex 39. Pad39A is in foreground, Pad39B in the back. Taken during the shuttle era. Both tower systems have been torn down and new construction is taking place.

Pad39B is being prepared for the new SLS heavy rocket system. Currently, the pad is being torn down to the concrete trench and a new flame exhaust trench will be put in place.

Deconstruction of the current flame exhaust trench at Pad39B. The blast from the SLS engines will be much more powerful than the shuttle's engines and boosters.

50 Years Ago: Gemini GT-2 Test Flight

Mission GT-2 lifts off from Pad LC-19, on January 19, 1965.

Recently, on December 5, 2014 we watched the successful test of the Orion space capsule which will be part of NASA's heavy lift SLS rocket system. Fifty years ago, on January 19, 1964, NASA tested the Gemini capsule in a similar mission profile using the unmanned GT-2 test capsule on a Titan rocket. The sub-orbital flight was designed to fling the capsule into space and test the heat shield as it made a fiery re-entry through the atmosphere. That's exactly what the recent Orion flight was designed to do.

Remote- controlled picture of superheated plasma trailing the capsule as it re-enters the atmosphere.

The flight was a total success. The equipment aboard the capsule included an automatic sequencer designed to send signals at precise moments to fire the second stage, separate the capsule, jettison the storage section behind the capsule, orient the capsule for re-entry, and activate the parachutes. The capsule flew through an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, landing 2127 miles downrange, and splashdown occurred about 52 miles from the recovery aircraft carrier, the USS Lake Champlain.

GT-2 capsule arrives in Cape Canaveral. It has been placed on the equipment storage section (The white cone segments under the capsule).

The capsule was never intended to be manned. Instead, it was packed with early forms of computerized sequencers and test measuring devices to study the effects that re-entry physics would play on the structure of the craft and the simulated astronauts. This capsule eventually would become the first spacecraft to fly in space twice! For the Air Force's Manned-Orbital-Laboratory program (MOL), a hatch would be placed through the heat shield so that an astronaut could leave the cockpit and enter a spy-instrument control section that would be placed behind the capsule.

GT-2 on display at the Air Force Space and Missile Museum at Cape Canaveral. I took this picture on my last visit to Cape Canaveral. The capsule wears the US Air Force insignia that was painted on it for its mission in 1966. It was jam-packed with equipment, no room for even a little astronaut in there!

Another view of the capsule. The entire craft is covered with a protective plastic shield to preserve it. 

Not my picture. Another view that shows the hatch placed after mission GT-2.

NASA print of the launch of the mission. The gantry portion of the tower is lying down in the foreground.

Just before the flight. The gantry portion of the tower is lowered down before blast-off.

Near Miss Asteroid had its own moon

Radar image of Asteroid 2004 BL86 with its small satellite.

The big hunk of rock that zipped by the Earth yesterday morning turns out to have had its own little moon. NASA's Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California took some great radar pictures of the Near-Earth-Orbiting (NEO) asteroids as it made its closest approach to Earth at about 745,000 miles away. That's a little over three times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Scientists made good measurements of the asteroid, its moon, and the orbital path around the Sun. The asteroid itself is about 1,100 feet across and the little satellite rock is about 230 feet across. Its current path won't bring it around to us again for a couple hundred years.

SO what was the Emergency on the ISS?

Expedition 42 patch.

There is a very good reason why astronauts spend a lot of their time on maintenance procedures. SPacecraft and space stations like the ISS are very complex machines, with thousands and thousands of parts, some of which wear out and break. These machines also use a lot of important but dangerous chemicals, gases, and fluids to maintain the life-support and propulsion (or station-keeping) systems. On January 14, one of those systems gave NASA a problem.

Mission Control engineers confer on how best to handle the situation.

At the beginning of the astronaut's workday, alarms sounded in the US modules indicating a possible ammonia leak. Ammonia is used to regulate the temperature of the ISS. Leaking ammonia gas could kill the astronauts. Earlier expeditions had replaced one of the ammonia units located outside the station. It's still possible for ammonia to get inside the station, because some of the cooling loops traverse the interior.

InterFace Heat Exchanger (IFHX). Image from NASAspaceflight.com.

While it was possible that there could have been a false indicator signal, safety procedures were followed and the astronauts immediately put the US modules into a safe mode while they donned oxygen masks. Then the crew evacuated to the Russian segments of the station while ground engineers worked with the astronauts to analyze the fault. It was thought that perhaps ammonia was leaking into the station from one of 10 IFHX units. The InterFace HEat Exchange units route ammonia through loops into and out of the station in order to transfer heat to colder areas and then transfer the coolant back into the station. The heat exchangers themselves can be replaced during a spacewalk, but the coolant loops could be more difficult. 

In the end, it turns out that the fault WAS a bad indicator, and after a day of investigation Mission Control gave the green light for astronauts to re-enter the US modules and begin resetting for continued work. NASAspaceflight.com reported that the astronauts had already been ahead of schedule on removing items from the Dragon supply ship, so no important operations were delayed.

SpaceX Launch Success and Failure

Dragon (center) docked at the US Harmony module on the ISS. NASA pic.

SpaceX conducted another successful mission to send the unmanned Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon blasted off from Cape Canaveral's  Launch Complex 40 in Florida, lifting off at 4:47 a.m. Eastern time. It was originally scheduled to launch last Tuesday, but a small mechanical problem. After a two and a half minute ascent, the first stage separated and the second stage propelled the Dragon into orbit.

Current configuration of spacecraft docked with the ISS. NASA illustration. Parked spaceships represent American (Dragon), European (ATV), and Russian (Progress) unmanned cargo ships and two Russian manned spacecraft (Soyuz).

The Dragon was carefully maneuvered through orbiting thrusters to rendezvous with the ISS, where astronauts used a robotic arm to grapple the craft and pull it to the docking hatch, where docking was achieved just after 6 a.m. Mountain time this morning. Astronauts will carefully equalize the pressures in the craft and the iSS and will later begin unloading cargo and supplies. Meanwhile, ground engineers from SpaceX will be checking out the craft's systems and reviewing flight performance. You can read a very detailed account of the launch and docking at NASAspaceflight.com.

SpaceX illustration of the Falcon 9 first stage in powered descent.

Although the flight of the Dragon went well, the return of the Falcon 9 first stage did not end well. This flight was also an experiment by SpaceX, in which the first stage would slow descent and use landing engines to soft land on the pad of a specially constructed SpaceX recovery ship out in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX has had several successful test flights where the stage returned to a land based pad in Texas, extending landing legs and touching down softly on the pad. This was to be a first attempt to do so on the recovery ship. However, the stage made its approach a bit too fast and ended up being severely wrecked on the ship pad. SpaceX will analyze the attempt and make new corrections and try again at a later date.