Backup-Group Captain Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair seen during ISS Emergency Scenario Training. The Gaganyatris assigned for Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) have completed initial orientations for mission-related ground facility tours, initial overview of mission launch phases, SpaceX suit fit checks, and selected space food options.
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Friday (November 29, 2024) said that Indian astronauts Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla and Group Captain Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair who have have been selected for the upcoming Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) have completed the initial phase of training.

“Towards the goal of accomplishing a joint ISRO-NASA effort to the International Space Station, the two Gaganyatris (Prime-Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla and Backup-Group Captain Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair) assigned for Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) commenced their training in the U.S.A from first week of August, 2024. The initial phase of training has been completed successfully by the Gaganyatris,“ ISRO said. 

The space agency added that during this phase of training, the Gaganyatris have completed initial orientations for mission-related ground facility tours, initial overview of mission launch phases, SpaceX suit fit checks, and selected space food options.

“Furthermore, the training also included familiarisation sessions with the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and various onboard systems of the International Space Station, including photography from space, daily operations routine, and communication protocols. One of the important highlights of this phase was training for various types of emergencies in space, including medical emergencies,” ISRO said.

It further said that upcoming training will primarily address the remaining modules of the U.S. Orbital Segment of the space station along with training towards conducting scientific research experiments in microgravity environment during the mission. In addition, the crew will train and perform different mission scenarios in the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

The Nova-C lunar lander designed by aerospace company Intuitive Machines is displayed at the company’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, U.S., October 3, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Intuitive Machines said on Tuesday (September 18, 2024) it has bagged a navigation and communication services contract of up to $4.82 billion from NASA for missions in the near space region.

Shares of the space exploration company rose 52% to $8.21 in aftermarket trading and have more than doubled so far this year.

As part of the contract, which has a base period of five years with an additional five-year option period, Intuitive will deploy lunar relay satellites and provide communication and navigation services to aid NASA’s Artemis campaign.

The contract would see Intuitive debut its lunar satellite constellations that will enable enhanced data and transmission services as well as autonomous operations.

“We see the win today as significant validation towards Intuitive’s outlook and its ability to continue to win additional contracts,” said Andres Sheppard, senior analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald.

Under NASA’s Artemis program, the space agency aims to send commercial robot landers to the moon on science scouting missions and return astronauts to Earth’s natural satellite this decade.

NASA had paid Intuitive $118 million to build and fly Odysseus, which in February became the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon in half a century. The spacecraft, however, lost power and went dormant after a lopsided landing that hindered operations and scientific output.

Odysseus was also the first lunar landing ever by a commercially manufactured and operated space vehicle.

NASA is counting on a series of low-budget, private excursions to the moon to serve as pathfinders for missions carrying astronauts this decade. The plan allows financial room for failure and offers companies big incentives to succeed on a shoestring.

The space capsule program represents a tiny fraction of Boeing’s revenue, but carrying astronauts is a high-profile job — like Boeing’s work building Air Force One presidential jets. File
| Photo Credit: AP

NASA’s announcement on Saturday (August 24, 2024) that it won’t use a troubled Boeing capsule to return two stranded astronauts to Earth is a yet another setback for the struggling company, although the financial damage is likely to be less than the reputational harm.

Once a symbol of American engineering and technological prowess, Boeing has seen its reputation battered since two 737 Max airliners crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people. The safety of its products came under renewed scrutiny after a panel blew out of a Max during a flight this January.

And now NASA has decided that it is safer to keep the astronauts in space until February rather than risk using the Boeing Starliner capsule that delivered them to the international space station. The capsule has been plagued by problems with its propulsion system.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson said the decision to send the Boeing capsule back to Earth empty “is a result of a commitment to safety.” Boeing had insisted Starliner was safe based on recent tests of thrusters both in space and on the ground.

The space capsule program represents a tiny fraction of Boeing’s revenue, but carrying astronauts is a high-profile job — like Boeing’s work building Air Force One presidential jets.

“The whole thing is another black eye” for Boeing, aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia said. “It’s going to sting a little longer, but nothing they haven’t dealt with before.”

Boeing has lost more than $25 billion since 2018 as its aircraft-manufacturing business cratered after those crashes. For a time, the defence and space side of the company provided a partial cushion, posting strong profits and steady revenue through 2021.

Also Read | Why NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, Sunita Williams may be in space until 2025

Since 2022, however, Boeing’s defence and space division has stumbled too, losing $6 billion — slightly more than the airplane side of the company in the same period.

The results have been dragged down by several fixed-price contracts for NASA and the Pentagon, including a deal to build new Air Force One presidential jets. Boeing has found itself on the hook as costs for those projects have risen far beyond the company’s estimates.

The company recorded a $1 billion loss from fixed-price government contracts in the second quarter alone, but the problem is not new.

“We have a couple of fixed-price development programs we have to just finish and never do them again,” then-CEO David Calhoun said last year. “Never do them again.”

In 2014, NASA awarded Boeing a $4.2 billion fixed-price contract to build a vehicle to carry astronauts to the International Space Station after the retirement of space shuttles, along with a $2.6 billion contract to SpaceX.

Boeing, with more than a century of building airplane and decades as a NASA contractor, was seen as the favourite. But Starliner suffered technical setbacks that caused it to cancel some test launches, fall behind schedule and go over budget. SpaceX won the race to ferry astronauts to the ISS, which it accomplished in 2020.

Boeing was finally ready to carry astronauts this year, and Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched aboard Starliner in early June for what was intended to be an 8-day stay in space. But thruster failures and helium leaks led NASA to park the vehicle at the space station while engineers debated how to return them to Earth.

The company said in a regulatory filing that the latest hitch with Starliner caused a $125 million loss through June 30, which pushed cumulative cost overruns on the program to more than $1.5 billion. “Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods,” Boeing said.

Mr. Aboulafia said Starliner’s impact on Boeing business and finances will be modest — “not really a needle-mover.” Even the $4.2 billion, multi-year NASA contract is a relatively small chunk of revenue for Boeing, which reported sales of $78 billion last year.

And Mr. Aboulafia believes Boeing will enjoy a grace period with customers like the government now that it is under new leadership, reducing the risk it will lose big contracts. NASA administrator Nelson said Saturday he was “100%” confident that the Starliner will fly with a crew again.

Robert “Kelly” Ortberg replaced Calhoun as CEO this month. Unlike the company’s recent chief executives, Ortberg is an outsider who previously led aerospace manufacturer Rockwell Collins, where he developed a reputation for walking among workers on factory floors and building ties to airline and government customers.

“They are transitioning from perhaps the worst executive leadership to some of the best,” Mr. Aboulafia said. “Given the regime change underway, I think people are going to give them some slack.”

Boeing’s defence division has recently won some huge contracts. It is lined up to provide Apache helicopters to foreign governments, sell 50 F-15 fighter jets to Israel as the bulk of a $20 billion deal, and build prototype surveillance planes for the Air Force under a $2.56 billion contract.

“Those are some strong tailwinds, but it’s going to take a while before they get (Boeing’s defence and space business) back to profitability,” Mr. Aboulafia said.

Collision with NASA spacecraft altered shape of asteroid Dimorphos.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

When NASA sent its DART spacecraft to slam into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, the U.S. space agency demonstrated that it was possible to change a celestial object’s trajectory, if needed, to protect Earth. It turns out that this collision changed not only the asteroid’s path but its shape as well.

The asteroid, which before the DART encounter looked like a ball that was a bit plump in the waist, now appears to be shaped more like a watermelon – or, technically, a triaxial ellipsoid, scientists said on Tuesday.

“The prevailing understanding is that Dimorphos is a loosely packed agglomeration of debris ranging from dust to gravel to boulders. Thus, its global strength is quite low, allowing deformation much more easily than for a solid monolithic body,” said Steve Chesley, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and a co-author of the study published in the Planetary Science Journal.

“The shape change was so dramatic because of its rubble-pile composition,” said JPL navigation engineer and study lead author Shantanu Naidu. “By measuring the pre- and post-impact orbit of Dimorphos, we were able to deduce the change in the shape of Dimorphos due to the DART impact.”

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Dimorphos is a moonlet of Didymos, which is defined as a near-Earth asteroid. The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission was a proof-of-principle mission using a spacecraft to apply kinetic force to nudge a celestial object that otherwise might be on a collision course with Earth. Dimorphos and Didymos do not pose an actual threat to Earth.

The spacecraft collided on Sept. 26, 2022, at about 14,000 miles per hour (22,530 kph) into Dimorphos, an asteroid that was about 560 feet (170 meters) wide, roughly 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth. Didymos has a diameter of about a half mile (780 meters).

DART’s collision, which sent rocky debris from the asteroid flying into space, also changed the orbital path that Dimorphos takes around Didymos – making it elliptical instead of circular – and its orbital period, the time it takes to complete a single orbit, the scientists said. It now takes Dimorphos 11 hours, 22 minutes and 3 seconds to complete an orbit, 33 minutes and 15 seconds less than before the impact, they found.

Scientists had previously disclosed that the asteroid’s orbit had changed, with the new study offering the most precise readings yet on that.

Chesley said the asteroid’s orbital period continued to decay slowly in the weeks after the impact.

“We believe that this is due to the fact that loose debris in the system continues to leak out and carries angular momentum with it, thus necessarily contracting the orbit,” Chesley added. Angular momentum refers to how much a rotating object’s mass is distributed around its axis and how quickly it is spinning.

Dimorphos’ average orbital distance from Didymos is now about 3,780 feet (1,152 meters), roughly 120 feet (37 meters) less than before the impact, the study found.

The researchers based their conclusions on the shape and orbit of Dimorphos on observations from ground-based telescopes of how sunlight reflecting off the surfaces of the two asteroids changed over time, data from radio waves bouncing off the asteroids and images DART obtained during its rendezvous.

More information is expected in the near future about the two asteroids. The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft is due to launch in October and reach them in late 2026 to check things out.

“We are anxiously awaiting the arrival of ESA’s Hera spacecraft, when we will be able to compare our modeled shape with that obtained from Hera imagery. We will also learn how much the orbit has changed since we last observed it in 2023,” Chesley said.

Nasa’s space shuttle operated in low-Earth orbit for 30 years before its retirement in 2011. However, the US space agency’s replacement for this vehicle, Orion, returned to the conical capsule design familiar from the Apollo missions. This was because Nasa intended that this newer craft be used for exploring targets in deep space, such as the Moon.

But in recent years, we have seen a return of the spaceplane design. Since 2010, the US Space Force (and formerly the US Air Force) has been launching a robotic spaceplane called the X-37B into low Earth orbit on classified missions. China has its own military spaceplane called Shenlong.

This year could see a test flight of the company Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser – the first commercial spaceplane capable of orbital flight. If all goes well, the vehicle could be used to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) with cargo and, eventually, crew.

Spaceplanes can fly or glide in the Earth’s atmosphere and land on runways rather than using parachutes to land in water or flat ground like capsules. They’re also more manoeuvrable as the spacecraft reenters the atmosphere, increasing the area of the Earth’s surface where landing is possible from a specific re-entry point.

Spaceplanes also allow a gentler but longer flight path during re-entry and a softer landing, which is easier on crew and cargo than capsules, which can land with a thump. A runway also allows ground support crews and infrastructure to be ready at the landing location.

Cost and complexity

But spaceplanes are more complex and heavier than an equivalent capsule. The winged body shape poses a particular challenge for designing thermal protection systems (TPS) – the heat-resistant materials that protect the craft from scorching temperatures on re-entry. These additional costs mean it’s impractical to design a spaceplane for a single flight. They need to be used again and again to be viable.

There has been interest in spaceplanes from the earliest days of human spaceflight. A military spaceplane project called Dyna-Soar was started in the US in 1957, then cancelled just after construction started. The vehicle was sophisticated for its time, built using a metal alloy that is able to withstand high temperatures and featuring a heat shield on the front that could be detached after it returned from space, so that the pilot could see clearly as he was landing.

The space shuttle, which entered service in 1981, was the first operational spaceplane. It was supposed to launch more often than it did and have greater reusability but it turned out that extensive refurbishment was required between launches. It did, however, demonstrate the ability to return astronauts and large cargo from orbit.

Other space agencies invested in the 1980s and 1990s, in Europe, with the Hermes spaceplane, and Japan, with the HOPE vehicle. Both programmes were cancelled in large part because of cost. The Soviet Union developed its own shuttle-like vehicle called Buran, which successfully flew to space once in 1988. The programme was cancelled after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Feeling the heat

Spaceplanes have specific requirements for the final part of their journeys – as they return from space. During atmospheric re-entry, they are heated to over one thousand degrees Celsius as they travel at hypersonic speeds of over seven kilometres per second – more than 20 times the speed of sound. A blunt nose design (where the edge of the spacecraft is rounded) is an ideal shape because it reduces build-up of heat at the foremost part of the vehicle.

Even so, the expected temperatures experienced by the craft can still be as high as 1600°C, necessitating a thermal protection system on the outside of the vehicle. The space shuttle TPS included ceramic tiles that were especially heat resistant and a reinforced carbon-carbon matrix that was capable of withstanding temperatures as high as 2400°C.

The loss of the Columbia shuttle during re-entry in 2003, causing the deaths of seven astronauts, was the result of a breach in the TPS on the leading edge of the wing. This resulted from a piece of insulating foam flying off the shuttle’s external tank during Columbia’s launch and hitting the wing.

This foam issue was recurrent with the shuttle because of the way it launched on the side of the external propellant tank. But newer spaceplane designs will fly atop conventional rockets, where falling foam isn’t a problem.

An effective TPS remains vital for the future success of spaceplanes, as are systems that monitor the TPS performance in real time.

Current vehicles

There are currently two operating spaceplanes, one Chinese and one American, that can reach orbit. Little information is available on China’s Shenlong, but the US military’s X-37B is better known. Weighing close to five tonnes at launch, the nine metre-long, uncrewed vehicle is launched using a conventional rocket and lands autonomously on a runway at the end of its mission.

The X-37B’s TPS uses tiles similar to the shuttle over the lower surface with a lower-cost alternative to reinforced carbon-carbon called Tufroc, developed for the X37B, on the nose and leading edges.

They should soon be joined by Dream Chaser, which the company developed to carry both cargo and astronauts. Still, Nasa wants to prove its safety before carrying people by using it to carry cargo to the space station first. A key capability is the ability to return comparatively fragile cargo to the surface because of a softer landing. The tiles that protect Dream Chaser are made from silica, and each has a unique shape matched to the area on the vehicle they are designed to protect.

Future developments

There is continued interest in spaceplanes because of their ability to return crew and cargo to a runway. The demand for this capability is limited now. But if the costs of launching to space continue falling and an expansion of industry in space raises demand, they will become an increasingly viable alternative to capsules.

Longer term, there is also potential for spaceplanes capable of reaching orbit after taking off from a runway. The challenges of developing these single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicles is considerable. However, concepts such as the Skylon vehicle are leading to technical developments that could eventually support development of an SSTO craft.

For the foreseeable future, spaceplanes look promising for the following reasons: new design techniques, improved materials for the TPS, advanced computer modelling and simulation tools for optimising different aspects of design and flight parameters and continuous improvements in propulsion systems.

Given that several governments, space agencies, and private companies worldwide are investing heavily in spaceplane research and development, we could see a future where flights with these vehicles become routine.

A Russian science lab at the International Space Station [File]
| Photo Credit: NASA/AP

Coolant leaked from a backup line at the International Space Station, Russian officials said Monday, adding that there was no risk to the crew or the outpost.

Russian space agency Roscosmos said that coolant leaked from an external backup radiator for Russia’s new science lab. The lab’s main thermal control system was working normally, the agency emphasised.

“The crew and the station aren’t in any danger,” Roscosmos said.

NASA confirmed that there is no threat to the station’s crew of seven and that operations are continuing as usual.

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Roscosmos said engineers were investigating the cause of the leak. The incident follows recent coolant leaks from Russian spacecraft parked at the station. Those leaks were blamed on tiny meteoroids.

The lab — named Nauku, which means science — arrived at the space station in July 2021.

Last December, coolant leaked from a Soyuz crew capsule docked to the station, and another similar leak from a Progress supply ship was discovered in February. A Russian investigation concluded that those leaks likely resulted from hits by tiny meteoroids, not manufacturing flaws.

The Soyuz leak resulted in an extended stay for NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and his two Russian crewmates, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, who spent 371 days in orbit instead of six months. A replacement capsule was sent to the station for their ride home.

The space station, which has served as a symbol of post-Cold War international cooperation, is now one of the last remaining areas of cooperation between Russia and the West amid the tensions over Moscow’s military action in Ukraine. NASA and its partners hope to continue operating the orbiting outpost until 2030.

Current residents are: NASA’s astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara, the European Space Agency’s Andreas Mogensen, Russian cosmonauts Konstantin Borisov, Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa.