The next crew is on its way to the ISS!

Soyuz MS-06 launched today!  And actually, by the time I’m writing this, they’re at the ISS, docked and preparing to board.  Here’s the spectacular nighttime launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome:

On board are Alexander Misurkin, Mark Vande Hei, Joe Acaba.  They are expected to stay in space until late February.

More rockets: the 40th PSLV, and a Soyuz from Plesetsk

First off, India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle has completed its fortieth launch.  It placed Cartosat 2E (an Earth observation spacecraft), NIUSAT (a student-designed agricultural mapping satellite), and 29 nanosatellites successfully into Earth orbit.  One extra twist for this mission was a new function of the upper stage: it was restarted three times during the flight, demostrating the ability to place payloads into a variety of orbits.  With the explosion of interest in smallsats, such a capability will have enormous competitive value.  Underlining the competitive nature of this market, many of the smallsats flown on this mission were originally scheduled to fly on other rockets: some were meant to fly on a Falcon 9 that was delayed due to last year’s mishap and consequent flight reshuffling, and others were originally slated for the Dnepr rocket, which is now in limbo thanks to deteriorating relations between its Russian and Ukrainian partners.  It speaks to the fact that the current market prizes flexibility and rapid flight availability, and India has been deliberately and shrewdly positioning themselves to capture this sort of business.  The spaceflight game is changing.

Meanwhile, much farther north, Russia launched a Soyuz rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome.  The payload is classified, and so is almost certainly a spy satellite.  The high-latitude launch complex is primarily of interest for spacecraft going into mapping orbits.  Outside observers speculate that the payload (designated Kosmos 2519) is the first of the 14F150 Napryazhenie satellite series, which are believed to be geodetic mapping satellites designed to carefully map the Earth’s gravitational field.  From a military perspective, the primary value would be in more precise targeting of ballistic missiles, which are at the mercy of tiny fluctuations in the gravitational field as they coast to their targets, although it’s possible it could be used for other sorts of intelligence.  The NASA-operated GRACE spacecraft have been used to measure the drawdown of aquifers, for instance, so there are probably other applications one can come up with which have a more specific military or reconnaissance function.

This was a very different looking Soyuz rocket, flying as a naked core stage, lacking the conical strap-on boosters that give the vehicle its distinctive appearance.  And it had another interesting detail: the engines were NK-33s, surplus from the N-1 mega-rocket program in the 1960s and 1970s.  NK-33 has a somewhat mixed track record; although the manufacturer denied fault, the engines were implicated in the loss of an Orbital Science Antares rocket and its Cygnus payload “Deke Slayton” from Wallops Island in Virginia a few years ago.  But it performed fine for this mission.

Soyuz MS-02 Launch Delayed

Soyuz MS-02 has been undergoing preflight processing at Baikonur Cosmodrome, and the three crewmen (Sergey Ryzhikov, Andrey Borisenko, and Shane Kimbrough) had flown to Baikonur to begin preflight activities pending launch on Friday.  However, the launch has now officially been delayed indefinitely, and the three have flown back to Star City, outside Moscow.  The spacecraft, s/n 732, was encapsulated in its payload fairing and returned to its vertical position for additional fit checks prior to integration with the Soyuz-FG rocket.  However, during those tests a short circuit was detected.  The short apparently was caused during encapsulation, since the spacecraft had passed testing prior, but unfortunately it will not be possible to locate the short without removing the fairing.  This alone sets the schedule back.  Roscosmos has estimated that if the short turns out to be in the orbital module, it will take weeks to fix, but if it’s in the service module, it could take months.  In that case, they’d likely go to plan B and start processing spacecraft s/n 733 for the Soyuz MS-02 mission, and buy a little more time to get 732 fixed and ready to fly as Soyuz MS-03.

The ISS currently is on a skeleton crew, as the current crew of three awaits the next inbound Soyuz crew.  There is no timetable yet for when that will change.  It does underscore the need for a second crew transfer method, but neither CST-100 or Dragon is likely to be ready before 2018.

(reference: Anatoly Zak’s RussianSpaceWeb blog)

What does a used Proton rocket look like?

Like this, apparently:

That’s the first stage of the Proton-M that launched Intelsat 31 to geosynchronous transfer orbit on June 9.  It impacted in Kazakhstan, but considerably short of the expected impact zone, which is why it wasn’t found for a while.  The Proton launch was technically successful, in that the payload was delivered to an adequate orbit, but that orbit was a bit slower than intended, and the Briz-M upper stage had to fire abnormally long to compensate for a shortened second-stage burn.  Telemetry indicates that the second stage yaw control engine shut down shortly before the end of the programmed burn, causing the remaining engines to expend extra propellant to maintain the proper trajectory, which in turn caused the stage as a whole to burn out prematurely.  But the fact that the first stage fell short suggests something went wrong in the first stage as well.  Engineers have been looking at the recovered debris and the telemetry ever since the launch, and International Launch Services has announced that the launch of EchoStar 21, scheduled for August 29, will be delayed to sometime in October to give engineers more time to evaluate the anomaly and determine whether there is any risk with proceeding.

Proton has had something of a checkered history, and its image never fully recovered from a string of accidents a few years ago.  It’s the cheapest launch vehicle in its weight class, which keeps it popular for geosynchronous commsats too large for Falcon 9 (which has nevertheless been eating into its market share).  But its a hazardous vehicle, powered by toxic unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine (UDMH) and furiously corrosive nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4), a hypergolic combination (that is, the two chemicals will ignite spontaneously upon contact with one another).  Watch also during launch videos for red smoke — that’s unused nitrogen tetroxide.  This, as you might imagine, is part of why Kazakhstan isn’t entirely thrilled about hosting Baikonur Cosmodrome anymore — and why Russia is working to get away from Proton with heavier variants of the kerosene-fueled Angara.  But in the meantime, this remains a very important part of the global rocket inventory, able to put massive commercial payloads into orbit at very competitive rates.

Progress MS-03 heads to the ISS

After the successful first flight of the Soyuz MS series spacecraft, Progress’ third MS-series spacecraft has followed it uphill.  Soyuz and Progress share a considerable amount of engineering, so Progress is often used as the testbed for what will go into the crewed Soyuz, allowing them to test new technologies unmanned without wasting a spacecraft.  As such, the launch sequence is nearly identical — the only visible difference is the lack of an escape tower and grid fins on the spacecraft, which will never undergo an in-flight abort; it would be abandoned to its fate instead.

SCRUB: First Vostochny launch, “Mikhailo Lomonosov” and Aist 2D aboard Soyuz 2

Soyuz is an immensely reliable rocket with a remarkable legacy going back to the R-7 missile of the 1960s.  It seems inconceivable that this week we’ve seen two scrubs due to technical faults with Soyuz, but we have.  One was the Sentinel 1B launch from Kourou, which replaced a faulty component, recycled the countdown, and successfully flew yesterday morning.  The other stands ready to baptize the new Vostochny Cosmodrome with fire.  Liftoff was expected today, but a fault of some sort was detected by the onboard computers, which commanded the abort in the final phase of the countdown.  Now, this isn’t actually the same model as the one in Kourou; this is the most modern of the Soyuz family, Soyuz 2.1a, with a Volga upper stage.  It is almost certainly coincidence.  For most rockets, this would not be surprising; it is a testament to the reliability of the Soyuz system that this is worth noting.

In any case, the Mikhailo Lomosonov gamma-ray observatory, the Aist 2D earth-observing satellite, and a student-built Cubesat await a new launch attempt, hopefully as early as tomorrow.  Cross your fingers!

Rocket Launch Catchup: Long March 3B, Zenit 3, Proton, Soyuz TMA-19M, PSLV

It’s been a busy week in rocketry!

China

December 9, China placed the Chinasat 1C communications satellite into orbit during a spectacular nighttime launch of the Long March 3B from Xichang space center.

Russia

Russia, meanwhile, had a typically busy time, with three launches.  First off on December 11 was what could end up being the final Zenit launch if Russia doesn’t resolve its issues with Ukraine, as that’s where Zenit is made.  It placed the Elektro-L 2 weather satellite into orbit for the Russian government, launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome (with musical accompaniment in this video clip):

The very next day, they launched a Proton rocket carrying a Russian military communications satellite of undisclosed function, but which experts believe is the second element of the Garpun data relay constellation, which serves a role similar to NASA’s TDRSS constellation.  I could not find a video of the launch, but I did find this one showing rollout of the vehicle.

And then yesterday Baikonur hosted a third launch, and easily the most anticipated of the week: the Soyuz TMA-19M launch, which delivered Yuri Malenchenko (Russia), Timothy Kopra (USA), and Timothy Peake (United Kingdom) to the ISS.  Launch and rendezvous were flawless, but final docking ran into a hiccup and Malenchenko completed the docking manually.  Peake, who is making his first spaceflight, is the first British astronaut in space actually under the auspices of the British government (via its membership in ESA); previous British astronauts have had to emigrate to the US and join NASA first (Michael Foale), or buy Soyuz seats with private funds.

And if you have the latest version of Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer, you can see the view from a viewing location away from the pad in 360 video, courtesy of BBC News.  Makes you feel like you’re there!

India

Rounding out the week so far and cementing a very eastern hemisphere bias to the launch schedule is India, whose PSLV out of Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sriharikota Island successfully placed six Singaporean satellites into space at once, the largest being TeLEOS 1, an Earth observation satellite; the other five were small university-developed payloads.

Next Up:

Next are China’s Long March 2B, set to place the Dark Matter Particle Explorer into orbit tomorrow, a dual-payload Galileo launch by Soyuz, the Falcon 9 return-to-flight with Orbcomm payloads, a Progress launch, another Proton, and probably also the Gaofen 4 geosynchronous Earth observation satellite, before the year ends.

A weekend of rocket launches!

I’ve been offline for a bit due to busy home schedules, so here are a pile of rocket launch videos to make up for it!

Friday, Proton launched Turksat 4B, a commercial Turkish commsat, from Baikonur Cosmodrome:

Same day, China sent up APSTAR-9, a commercial Chinese commsat, from Xichang aboard a Long March 3B.  This is a very lovely amateur video of the launch:

Also, SpaceX has selected their return-to-flight mission: in accordance with their incremental approach, the RTF mission will be a low-risk Orbcomm flight that doesn’t require the upper stage to relight.  The flight will be in about a month or so.

Lotsa launches in Asia: Long March, GSLV, and Proton return to flight

It was a surprisingly busy week in spaceflight, with three launches from Asia.  The first was a surprise launch of a Long March 4C from Taiyuan Launch Center in northern China on Thursday, placing a surveillance satellite into orbit.  China ordinarily does not announce military launches.  The payload is designated Yaogan 27.

Later that day, a GSLV Mark 2 rocket blasted off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, India.  This was the third all-domestic flight, with an Indian-built cryogenic upper stage, and the second succesful one.  The payload was an Indian geosynchronous commsat, GSAT 6, and telemetry indicates it has deployed its solar arrays and is active.  GSLV has had a difficult break-in period, but with back-to-back successes, ISRO is ready to declare the Mark 2 operational.

And then Proton rounded out the week from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, making a triumphant return to flight after the May 16 accident that destroyed a Mexican commsat.  This flight was completely successful, delivering the Boeing-built Inmarsat 5 F3 spacecraft to geosynchronous transfer orbit for Inmarsat of London.  This will be the latest element in Inmarsat’s Global Xpress Ka-band mobile communications network.

Next rocket on deck is Monday’s Atlas V launch for the US Navy, and then after that is Wednesday’s scheduled manned Soyuz launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome to begin the forty-fourth Soyuz flight to the International Space station.

Russian rocket mishaps solved?

The investigation went deeper than previous ones, since the previous hadn’t actually resulted in any improvement, and what they found was surprising to me.  It wasn’t just quality control issues in manufacturing, as had previously been suspected; there are honest-to-gosh design defects in both the Briz-M upper stage for the Proton, and the upper stage of the Soyuz 2-1a.

The Soyuz 2-1a is a new model of the venerable R-7 family.  Being quite new, it’s perhaps unsurprising there’s a problem, but what’s interesting is that the design flaw only shows up with the Progress as payload.  (Presumably, it could also happen with Soyuz, which shares its service module entirely with Progress.)  This explains why it never had a problem on any of its other flights, but the defect must be fixed before it can carry Soyuz or Progress into orbit.

The Proton defect is a bit more worrisome, because it’s been in the system for decades without anyone noticing — despite multiple failures with similar characteristics and multiple investigations.  A small vernier engine used for steering the vehicle during third stage flight has a design defect which makes it extremely easy to unbalance.  And when it becomes unbalanced, it experiences increasingly violent vibrations until it undergoes what rocket scientists dryly refer to as an “unscheduled disassembly”.  The good news is that existing engines can be reworked with a different rotor shaft in their turbopumps to prevent the problem happening again.  Also, it’s back to flight now, having been cleared for all non-Progress/Soyuz flights, placing a military satellite (possibly a Kobalt or Persona spy satellite) into orbit:

So, good on you, Russia, for finding these defects!  Hopefully the design change and rework will do the trick, and keep Proton flying safely.  Alternately, I’d be happy with them replacing it; Proton’s one of the last flying launch vehicles to use hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide in the first stage.  Nasty stuff to release into the atmosphere.