Images Emerge of China's new Capsule

SpaceX had a Successful in-flight abort test for the Dragon V2

Reentry Pictures from the Boeing CST-100 Starliner at White Sands

A friend sent these to me.  Sadly, I couldn't be in NM to watch.

India Aims for First Human Spaceflight in December 2021 With Gaganyaan Capsule.

The Human Space Mission: Gaganyaan is targeted for December 2021. The Gaganyaan Programme has been approved by the Government of India. The design and configuration of major subsystem are finalized. The procurement and system/ subsystem realisation for tests and flight has commenced.

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Russia may Help With India's Gaganyaan Space Capsule

Glavkosmos JSC, part of Roscosmos State Space Corporation, and Human Space Flight Centre of Indian Space Research Organization (HSFC of ISRO) on Friday signed a contract to review a project to assess the possibility of using Russian flight equipment in life support systems and providing thermal regime for the manned spacecraft Gaganyaan.

Dmitry Loskutov, Director General of Glavkosmos, and Dr. Unnikrishnan Nair, Head of the HSFC, signed the contract. The signing ceremony was held in the presence of Deputy Director General for international cooperation of Roscosmos State Space Corporation Sergey Savelyev.

"We hope that the signing of this document and the implementation of its provisions will serve both the development of the Indian space program and manned space flights, and in general the further strengthening of good Russian-Indian relations," Loskutov said. "We will be glad to expand our cooperation."

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Boeing & SpaceX are Pushing to get Their Capsules Flying Test Flights This Year

Boeing expects to carry out a pad abort test for its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle in early November, followed by an uncrewed orbital flight test in mid-December, a company executive said Oct. 8.

During a panel session of the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight (ISPCS) here, John Mulholland, vice president and program manager for commercial programs for Boeing’s space exploration business unit, said the company was targeting a Dec. 17 launch of its Starliner vehicle on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 from Cape Canaveral.

That mission, called the Orbital Flight Test (OFT) by Boeing, will send the Starliner to the International Space Station, docking with the station and remaining there for about a week before undocking and landing at one of several locations in the western United States. Mulholland said that if the mission launches as currently scheduled, the landing would most likely be at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Boeing had planned to fly OFT earlier this year, but announced in April it was delaying the launch, then scheduled for May, until later in the summer because of a tight schedule and a conflict with another Atlas 5 launch.

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Is This China's Next Gen Space Capsule?

Pictures have emerged of what appears to be China's next generation space capsule.  It looks like the drawings I've seen, but...

SpaceX Crew Dragon Failed a Parachute Test

A test of parachutes for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft did not go as planned last month, NASA and SpaceX confirmed May 8.

During a hearing of the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee on NASA’s exploration plans, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) quizzed agency officials on the testing of parachutes for commercial crew vehicles, zeroing in on a specific, previously undisclosed test in April.

“Did SpaceX conduct, in April of 2019, a parachute test in Delamar Dry Lake, Nevada?” he asked. “What happened in that test?”

“The test was not satisfactory,” responded Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations and one of the witnesses at the hearing. “We did not get the results we wanted, but we learned some information that’s going to affect, potentially, future parachute designs.”

In that test, one of the four parachutes was “proactively failed” to demonstrate the “single-out” capability of the overall system. However, he said, “the three remaining chutes did not operate properly.” That caused a test sled to hit the ground faster than expected, damaging it.

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SpaceX to Launch Unmanned Test Flight of Dragon V2 Capsule Tomorrow

NASA managers have given their approval for SpaceX to proceed with an uncrewed test flight of its Crew Dragon spacecraft on March 2.

At the conclusion of a day-long flight readiness review at the Kennedy Space Center Feb. 22, NASA announced that it approved plans for SpaceX to fly a mission designated Demo-1, featuring its Crew Dragon spacecraft but without astronauts on board, to the International Space Station. The review featured more than 100 people from NASA and SpaceX, examining the readiness of both the spacecraft and the station to support the mission.

“It’s exciting to have set the launch for March 2nd,” Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said during a briefing late Feb. 22 at the Kennedy Space Center. “It’s great that we’re getting ready to go do this.”

The current schedule calls for a launch at 2:48 a.m. Eastern March 2, in an instantaneous launch window. The Falcon 9, lifting off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, will put the Crew Dragon into orbit. The spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the ISS one day later and remain there until March 8, when it will undock and splash down several hours later in the Atlantic Ocean.

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SpaceX to Launch First Commercial Crew Program Dragon V2 Capsule January 7th

NASA has set Jan. 7 as the date for the launch of the first commercial crew test flight, an uncrewed SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that will start a series of high-stakes missions over the next year.

In a Nov. 21 statement, NASA said the Falcon 9 launch of the Crew Dragon spacecraft on a mission designated Demo-1 is scheduled for Jan. 7 from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, the former Apollo and shuttle pad that SpaceX has renovated to support launches of its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles, in particular crewed Falcon 9 missions.

On that mission, the Crew Dragon spacecraft, also known as Dragon 2, will fly a mission to the International Space Station to test the vehicle’s systems. It will be the first orbital flight for the vehicle, and will not carry astronauts.

If that flight is successful, it will be followed in June by a crewed test flight, called Demo-2, where NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will fly the Crew Dragon to the ISS. Between Demo-1 and Demo-2, SpaceX plans to perform an in-flight abort test where a Crew Dragon will use its abort system to jettison from a Falcon 9 vehicle after liftoff.

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China to Begin Flight Tests of Next Gen Capsule in 2019

China will perform a first test flight of a full-scale 20-metric ton model of a successor to its Shenzhou spacecraft for human spaceflight next year, a senior official at the craft’s designer said last week.

The next-generation crewed spacecraft will be the payload for the first flight of the Long March 5B launch vehicle, a variant of the Long March 5 and designed for lofting large modules of the planned Chinese Space Station (CSS) into low Earth orbit.

In 2016, China use the first flight of the Long March 7 medium-lift rocket to launch a scale model of a new return module to test re-entry and landing profile for new spacecraft.

“The full model will be tested next year,” Li Ming, vice president of the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), told SpaceNews, and confirmed the mission would include the full spacecraft including re-entry and orbital modules.

“The key issue is to test the new shape and reusable technologies. This capsule will be reused after recovery from space,” Li Ming said at the International Astronautical Congress, held Oct. 1-5 in Bremen, Germany.

The test of the spacecraft will not include environmental controls or systems required to support astronauts, but focus on testing avionics, separation events, heat shielding, parachutes and recovery operations, similar to the mission profile NASA’s Orion flew in 2014 when a Delta 4 heavy rocket sent the unmanned capsule 5,800 kilometers above the Earth to test re-entry systems.

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Japan to Demonstrate Experiment Return Capsule on Next ISS Resupply Mission

In the mission of HTV7 (“KOUNOTORI 7”), after completing the re-supply mission to ISS, HTV7 will demonstrate the novel technology for recovering experiment samples from ISS, which Japan has not obtained up until now, by taking advantage of the opportunity of re-entry into Earth with the HTV Small Re-entry Capsule (HSRC) that will be loaded on the HTV for the first time ever.

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Hole in Soyuz Capsule Caused by Drill During Production

A story in the normally authoritative RIA Novosti website says that the leak in the orbital module of a Soyuz transport docked to the International Space Station was caused by a worker who mistakenly drilled a hole through the hull during production, not by a debris strike as originally believed.

The story says the worker patched the hole with glue. However, the glue was apparently sucked out into the vacuum of space, causing a small leak that lowered the atmospheric pressure on the space station that houses six people.

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PM Modi Announces Indian Manned Spaceflight Attempt in 2022

As part of his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Modi announced India will attempt their first manned spaceflight in 2022. There is almost no detail about what is planned. We can make some conjectures though.

We know based on their recent pad abort test that India will be using a more tradition capsule. This will be like most of the current spacefaring nations, the current Russian Soyuz (and dubiously coming Federation), the coming American Orion, Starliner and Dragon and the Chinese Shenzhou. The outliers are the American DreamChaser and the possible Chinese spaceplane coming circa 2022. The capsule will almost certainly launch on the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle III rocket: the initial suborbital test of the rocket carried a test capsule to reentry and recovery technologies.

There's little information on the life support equipment or thruster tests, but given if the Soviet Union and United States of the 1960s could develop this stuff very rapidly, I imagine the rest India hasn't talked about publicly (or I have missed) should be relatively easy to do. India could very well make this deadline.

The bigger problem for India is India: they have a very slow development cycle. The Tejas fighter makes the F-35 development cycle seem speedy. Their indigenous carrier and nuclear sub programs have been going on for 40 years and almost made it to the point of finishing their first examples. If they can cut through the red tape, then India can get this done: they have plenty of very smart people. It's the red tape that seems to be so impressively painful there that will cause them to miss this deadline, not their technical capabilities.

India Successfully Tested a Pad Abort for its Developing Space Capsule

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Thursday successfully conducted a pad abort test (PAT) on its experimental crew escape system (CES).

The successful test on the technology demonstrator brought ISRO a step closer to its ambitious and yet-to-be-named future manned mission – the Human Spaceflight Programme (HSP).

ISRO said PAT was the first in a series of tests to qualify the CES, which is an ‘emergency measure to pull the crew module along with the astronauts to a safe distance from the launch vehicle, in the event of a launch anomaly.’

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2nd link.

Older Background Info:

India will take another step forward with its human spaceflight program Thursday, when ISRO tests the crew escape system for its crew capsule in an emergency pad abort situation. The test will last about 220 seconds, beginning during a two-hour window that opens at 06:00 local time (00:30 UTC).

While the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has not made manned space missions one of their highest priorities, the agency has been quietly proceeding with work on a capsule that would launch atop the GSLV Mk.III rocket and carry a crew of two into orbit.

The project’s most high-profile test came three and a half years ago, when the Crew Module Atmospheric Reentry Experiment (CARE) successfully demonstrated that the spacecraft could withstand the rigors of atmospheric reentry.

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The Russian Space Program Could be in for a Dark Ages

These are not the best of times for the Russian space industry. Due to budgetary reasons, Roscosmos has reduced the number of cosmonauts on the International Space Station from three to two. Because of technical problems with its rockets and cost pressure from SpaceX, the country's once-lucrative commercial launch industry is fading. And soon, conditions may worsen.

As soon as next year, the United States plans to stop paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Russia for Soyuz seats, because it is developing its own transport to the space station. And the European Space Agency has signaled that it will stop launching Russian Soyuz rockets from its French Guiana-based spaceport in the early 2020s.

Russian space editor Andrei Borisov has captured the fading zeitgeist of the Russian space program in a lengthy article on the new leader of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, and the changes he has proposed. "The 'Russian Space' Rogozin is trying to create reminds one of the Dark Ages in Europe," Borisov writes on Lenta.Ru, where he serves as editor of science and technology. "In it, there is no place for modernization, there is only the mission of survival."

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2nd link (in Russian).

As a symptom, the next gen crewed Russian Federatsiya space capsule has been making glacial progress at best:

The Russian Federatsiya project – which is preparing the path for the launch of a new crewed spacecraft – passed a major milestone when it recently entered aerodynamic testing. The tests involved a model of the future spaceship and its Launch Abort System (LAS) fitted with numerous pressure sensors. Another milestone was achieved when work on the interior of the spacecraft was conducted, as noted by Roscosmos in recent days.

The development path for this new spacecraft – which is also referenced as “Federation” in its English translation – began in February 2009, when Roscosmos issued a solicitation for a spaceship intended for Lunar manned missions.

They called it PPTS (Prospective Piloted Transport System), which was also known as the Future Manned Transportation System.

Two companies participated in the tender: GKNPTs Khrunichev, the builder of the Proton launcher, and RKK Energiya, which has provided Soyuz spaceships for almost fifty years.

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Airbus is Completing the First Orion Service Module

Airbus Defence and Space is in the home stretch of work to ship the first European Service Module (ESM) to its Florida launch site for integration with the rest of the hardware for NASA’s Orion spacecraft. When fully assembled and tested, Orion will be launched on the Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) test flight to orbit the Moon and return.

ESM-1 is now undergoing subsystem functional testing at its Assembly, Integration, and Testing (AIT) facility in Bremen, Germany, following completion of most hardware that can be installed on-site. Also known as Flight Model-1 (FM-1), the module will be flown to the Kennedy Space Center this summer to begin the sequence of steps to put together the full Orion spacecraft.

As FM-1 nears completion, Flight Model-2 (FM-2) has joined its sister module in the clean room at Bremen to begin its AIT flow. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are also working with prime contractor Airbus on beginning construction of ESM hardware for subsequent modules this summer.

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Commercial Crew Launches Schedule Slip

The next generation of American spacecraft and rockets that will launch astronauts to the International Space Station are nearing the final stages of development and evaluation. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program will return human spaceflight launches to U.S. soil, providing reliable and cost-effective access to low-Earth orbit on systems that meet our safety and mission requirements.

[...]

Targeted Test Flight Dates:

Boeing Orbital Flight Test: August 2018

Boeing Crew Flight Test: November 2018

SpaceX Demonstration Mission 1: April 2018

SpaceX Demonstration Mission 2 (crewed): August 2018

Editor’s Note: Note the careful wording of this latest press release: “most recent publicly releasable dates.” So, how far are the latest slips? Here is where they were in July.

Previous Targeted Test Flight & Milestone Dates (July 20, 2017):

Boeing Orbital Flight Test: June 2018

Boeing Crew Flight Test: August 2018

Boeing Operational Readiness Review: September 2018

Certification Review: October 2018

SpaceX Demonstration Mission 1: February 2018

SpaceX Demonstration Mission 2 (crewed): June 2018

SpaceX Operational Readiness Review: August 2018

Certification Review: September 2018

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Boeing Unveiled its Spacesuits for Passengers on its CST-100 Starliner Capsule

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SpaceX Delays First Crewed Dragon Flight

SpaceX has delayed by several months a pair of test flights of its Crew Dragon spacecraft being developed for NASA’s commercial crew program, in part because of a Falcon 9 pad explosion in September.

A revised schedule released by NASA Dec. 12 stated that an uncrewed test flight of the spacecraft, previously scheduled for May 2017, is now planned for November 2017. A crewed test flight, carrying two NASA astronauts, has been delayed from August 2017 to May 2018.

The NASA statement did not give a reason for the revised schedule other than it reflected a “fourth quarter update” from SpaceX. Kathy Lueders, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at a Nov. 14 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee that schedules are formally changed at quarterly review meetings with commercial crew companies, and that at the time the fourth quarter meeting with SpaceX, the first since the pad explosion, had not yet taken place.

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