Another Soyuz Rocket Launch Fails

Russia's recent poor launch record has continued with yet another Soyuz rocket failure.

This time, a Soyuz-2 vehicle failed to put a communications satellite into orbit after lifting away from the country's Plesetsk spaceport.

Debris is said to have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and crashed to the ground.

In August, a Soyuz failure on a mission to resupply the space station led to a six-week suspension of flights.

Friday's rocket was carrying a Meridian-5 satellite, designed to provide communication between ships, planes and coastal stations on the ground, according to RIA Novosti.

t was a Soyuz-2.1b, the most modern version of the rocket that has been in service in various forms since the 1960s.

The failure is said to have occurred seven minutes into the flight. Sources being quoted by the Russian media talk of an anomaly in the rocket's third stage.

"The satellite failed to go into its orbit. A state commission will investigate the causes of the accident," the spokesman of Russia's space forces, Alexei Zolotukhin, was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

August's botched launch involved a Soyuz-U. An inquiry into that incident eventually traced the problem to a blocked fuel line, again in the third stage of the vehicle.

But the U and 2.1b Soyuz variants use different engines in this segment of the rocket, so no immediate parallels between the two incidents can be drawn.

Friday's failure now puts a major question mark against the next Soyuz launch, scheduled for 28 December from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This flight is intended to put in orbit six satellites for the Globalstar satellite phone company.

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And it will raise concern again among the partners on the International Space Station (ISS) that there may be systemic problems in the Russian launch sector.

Following the retirement of the American space shuttle in July, the Soyuz rocket is the only means of getting astronauts and cosmonauts to the ISS. August's failure saw manned flights stand down even longer than the six weeks for unmanned Soyuz rockets, and the hiatus put a severe strain on the operation of the space station.

Russia has experienced a number of launch mishaps in the past 13 months.

On 18 August, the week before the loss of the space station mission, a Proton vehicle failed to put a communications satellite in its proper orbit.

Back on 1 February, a Rokot launch also underperformed with a similar outcome.

And on 5 December last year, a Proton carrying three navigation spacecraft fell into the Pacific Ocean. This particular failure is widely believed to have contributed to the decision of the Russian government to replace the then space agency chief, Anatoly Perminov.

Vladimir Popovkin took over as the head of Roscosmos in April.

The rocket failures come on top of the loss of Phobos-Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary mission in decades. It became stuck in Earth orbit after its launch in November and will probably fall back to Earth next month.

Environment Clean Generations

Power in Storage

That’s a lot of power under one roof! For the first time in… well, ever… all fifteen Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) are together inside NASA’s Engine Shop at Kennedy Space Center. They will be prepped for shipment to Stennis Space Center in Mississippi where they’ll become part of the propulsion used on NASA’s next generation heavy-lift rocket: the Space Launch System.

The engines, built by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, are each 14 feet (4.2 meters) long & 7.5 feet (2.3 meters) in diameter at the end of its nozzle, and weighs approximately 7,000 lbs (3175 kg).

Each engine is capable of generating a force of nearly 400,000 pounds (lbf) of thrust at liftoff, and consumes 350 gallons (1,340 liters) of fuel per second. They are engineered to burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, creating exhaust composed primarily of water vapor.

The engines will be incorporated into the Space Launch System (SLS), which is designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle – also currently in development – as well as serve as backup for commercial and international transportation to the ISS. By utilizing current technology and adapting it for future needs, NASA will be able to make the next leap in human spaceflight and space exploration – while getting the most “bang” out of the taxpayers’ bucks.

“NASA has been making steady progress toward realizing the president’s goal of deep space exploration, while doing so in a more affordable way. We have been driving down the costs on the Space Launch System and Orion contracts by adopting new ways of doing business and project hundreds of millions of dollars of savings each year.” 
–  NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver

While it’s sad to see these amazing machines removed from the shuttles, it’s good to know that they still have plenty of life left in them and will soon once again be able to take people into orbit and beyond!

by "environment clean generations"

Rocket Nozzle Could Be Repurposed To Efficiently Capture CO2

From Rockets, Carbon-cleaning Tech By pressurizing coal plant emissions and running them through high-speed rocket nozzles, engineers think power plants could cheaply scrub carbon dioxide from exhaust. NASA

 

It's not exactly rocket science, but the same company that builds the rocket boosters that launch the Space Shuttles into orbit has a novel idea for bringing down the cost of carbon capture. Aerospace and defense company ATK wants to pressurize the exhaust emissions from such high-carbon polluters as coal-powered electrical generators and run it through rocket nozzles that will freeze the CO₂ into dry ice, causing it to fall out of exhaust gasses.

 

Such a process could replace the chemical processes used to scrub CO₂ from gas emissions. Those chemicals make up a large part of the expense of scrubbing carbon dioxide form emissions -- a full 80 percent of the cost per kilowatt hour of electricity produced at a coal plant, ATK's vice president tells Discovery News. A rocket nozzle approach could reduce that to more like 30 percent.

 

The science is pretty simple: when you pressurize something like coal plant emissions and then run them through a high-speed aerodynamic accelerator nozzle, the gasses will compress and then expand rapidly on the other side of the nozzle. That rapid expansion can cause some molecules to freeze. In the case of water vapor, the gas would turn to regular water ice. In the case of CO₂-laden coal emissions, the carbon dioxide should freeze into dry ice -- at least in theory -- allowing it to be culled from the other gases for sequestration or other uses. 

 

Considering that coal plants make up for more than a third of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, the ability to effectively pull CO₂ out of coal emissions could restore coal's place as a viable alternative to foreign oil and as a cleaner bridge to a renewable energy future. Of course, the technology has to work first. ATK wants to get it working smoothly in the lab within 14 months and have a pilot program for the technology installed on a working power plant shortly thereafter.
 

 by "environment clean generations"