Space Update 16/7/2014

Quick Space Update =D

 

AITC installs Wombat XL

Close to (my) home, Australia is finally moving along in the space industry with our first satellite testing facility at the Australian National University! The last time I was there they didn't have the Wombat vacuum tank in the big testing room. Let's see if I can upload a picture of what I saw (great view!): on second thought, he's some pics from the AITC from when we toured there!

The room where the Wombat XL Space Simulation Facility now sits

Dang, that view (Canberra's pretty!)

Crane in the clean room

Clean room

soon-to-be vibration platform

Sometimes moving images around is so difficult, even in this WYSIWYG blogger editor I would rather LaTeX. (html layout formatting is horrible imho)
ANU hopes to test their HDLT plasma thruster there. (Past research students in the group have said their previous conclusions were "need bigger vacuum chamber", so here it is! =P)

SpaceX launches 6 OrbComm satellites, gets aproval for Texas private launch site, and passes 3 flights EELV requirement

100% mission success. Reusability testing was good (again) up until splashdown.

Flight 10 of Falcon 9 was good. All six ORBCOMM satellites deployed on target.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2014

Rocket booster reentry, landing burn & leg deploy were good, but lost hull integrity right after splashdown (aka kaboom)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2014

Detailed review of rocket telemetry needed to tell if due to initial splashdown or subsequent tip over and body slam
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2014

They got approval for their first private spaceflight facility. It even has a wiki page! This allows SpaceX to"provide SpaceX an exclusive launch site that would allow the company to accommodate its launch manifest and meet tight launch windows." Especially that rapid reusability time - land on your own launchpad, recover, reintegrate, refuel, launch without worrying about range clearance blocking you because it'd be planned already.

Also, USAF certifies SpaceX's Falcon9 3 successful flights, amid the legal battles they have had.

UK Spaceport and user roundup

Astronomy Agregator does a good UK Spaceport and reusable/SSTO/Sub-orbital round-up of the Spaceport's users and critique.
Speaking of my favourite space outlets (apart from the big ones like NASAspaceflight, spaceflightnow, space.com) I haven't been on AA or ParabolicArc or Spacevidcast in a while. I'll be happy to get back into it! =)
Spacevidcast's new show is now called TMRO ("tomorrow") and are on Patreon, so support them, because they do really great weekly shows!

Space Games

Space genre games have seen a resurgence, imho in no small part due to Star Citizen's rocketing success, and a lot of them are on Linux =D Here's updates from the biggest 2 (and my personal favourites) space games!

CIG at RSI.com on StarCitizen surpasses $48 million in funding and has almost 500k Star Citizens at time of writing! All the stretchgoals!! It doesn't look like we'll get the bagel carrier mentioned in an old WMH episode xP but we do get complete alien languages with the hiring of linguists!!!

Kerbal Space program is releasing 0.24 soon and has prepped this FAQ for us. After the NASA-partnered 0.23.5 Asteroid Redirect Mission update (with a stock asteroid grapler/claw), this is a welcome update with funds, reputation and contract functionality to further enhance the career mode! No longer will you build with unlimited money and have no repercussions of killed kerbonauts! =P I hope those interstellar mods and life support, real communication link, KOS and MFD mods still work ... Would love to do a full mission in first person!


Hurray for indies and startups! (All news items today have had a connection to this theme). Especially newspace! =)