Posted June 16, 2010 5:58 PM
By David Todd
While many space experts and pundits (including the Ascend space team) noted the high risk of failure that maiden flights usually have to face (in excess of 50%), and while even Space X’s CEO Elon Musk, equated the first launch of the Falcon 9 to ‘Russian Roulette’, in the end, the launch vehicle’s first flight successfully achieved orbit on 4th June.
Posted April 30, 2010 3:33 PM
By David Todd
As the UK General Election approaches, David Todd has tried to analyse what each party would do for space if they won the election (or even just hold the balance of power).
Posted September 14, 2009 12:03 PM
By David Todd
NASA has become famous in recent years for spending a lot of money on a space project and then scrapping it before it comes to fruition. In some cases this was the wrong choice. However in some cases it made the right call. It is the amount of money wasted that is the problem. For example some US$2 billion was wasted on the X-33 suborbital aerospace plane – the final death knell being a failure of its new composite fuel tank in a test. Before that US$1 billion was wasted on the NASP – National Aerospace Plane – a technology that was never going to work. Sadder loses were the Orbital Space Plane – a mini-shuttle that could have been the answer to NASA’s current space vehicle shortfall (some US$2 billion was spent on that). A further US$3 billion has been spent on Ares 1 with little to show except technical problems. There were other less expensive but still wasteful projects including rocket engines that were never built and projects investigating reusable vehicles. But as the White House considers whether to scrap the Ares I & V launch vehicle elements of its manned Project Constellation plans, those that remember those cost-cut-driven decisions of the past will be fretting about the future. But are they right this time?
While the Government of the United Kingdom would like to have a British astronaut land on the Moon as part of NASA’s Project Constellation, they now find themselves too cash strapped to invest. But do not fret. In a world exclusive, Ascend can reveal that there is already a Union Jack (more correctly known as the Union Flag) on the Moon. This is not because, like the plot of the 1964 film treatment of H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, some Victorian British astronauts got there first. Actually, it is due to a British engineer cheekily sneaking a bit of ‘Union Jack’ graffiti onto Apollo 11’s experimental equipment.
Like father like son is an old saying and sometimes sons follow their fathers into their professions. Millionaire computer games designer, Richard Garriott, has now followed his father into becoming an astronaut as he was launched to the International Space Station on SOYUZ TMA-13 on 12th October. But while his crewmates U.S. astronaut Mike Fincke, Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov of the flight from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan did not have to pay for the pleasure, Garriot is reported to have paid around US$30 million for his ten days in orbit.
Richard Garriot’s father, Owen Garriott, was a NASA astronaut from 1965 to 1986. During this period he carried out two space missions: one to America’s first space station SKYLAB in 1973 and one on a Shuttle SpaceLab mission in 1983. But while there has been a lot in the press about Garriott being the first second generation "astronaut" to fly in space, this is not actually true. In fact, the first second generation spaceman was already in orbit when Richard Garriott was launched. The current commander of the International Space Station, Cosmonaut Sergey Aleksandrovich Volkov, is the son of Cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, who joined Russia’s cosmonaut corps in 1978 and retired in 1998. During that time the older Volkov carried out three space missions,SOYUZ T-14 in 1985, SOYUZ TM-7 in 1988 and SOYUZ TM-13 in 1991.
Sergey Volkov and Richard Garriott along with cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko are expected to return to Earth on SOYUZ TMA-12 on 23rd October. And their proud fathers are expected to be close by to greet their boys home.
