Big week for commercial space

Orbital's Cygnus space craft will be released for the ISS following its successful resupply mission. SpaceX and Blue Origin have launched scheduled. SpaceX is scheduled to launch the EUTELSAT/ABS mission today at 10:29am ET. Blue Origin has announced plans for another launch of its New Shepard vehicle on Friday -- which is a break from the previous launches, which were only announced after they took place.

SpaceX still struggling to get CRS-3 launched

The latest resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has been scrubbed again.  Scheduled to launch today, the SpaceX CRS-3 mission launch was scrubbed because of a  helium leak on the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage.

The next opportunity will be Friday, April 18th at 3:25 pm EDT (although the weather is iffy).

The mission was originally slated for Q4 of 2013, with many dates slipping due to a packed launch schedule at the cape, coupled with a slip in the ISS berthing schedule due to multiple planned space walks to fix the December 2013 cooling issue on the station.  These not only impacted SpaceX's resupply mission, but Orbital's Cygnus resupply mission launch as well.  The schedule was then scheduled for no sooner than February 7, which was also pushed back to March 1 - and then March 16.  These schedule slips were followed by several unsuccessful attempts, including:

March 16th - launch was postponed after static firing of the engines due to “open items” that "require additional time to remedy".  Speculation included potential contamination in the cargo bay.

March 30 - launch was scrubbed when an Air Force tracking radar - part of a network that tracks launches - went off line impacting the public safety requirements for launching.

April 14 - launch as scrubbed due to a helium leak that is slated to be fixed in time for the April 18th launch window.

Look at this NASASpaceflight.com article for a really good write up of all of the events impacting the CRS-3 mission schedule.  Note that while these delays are bothersome, they are not unusual.

The mission itself is worth the wait and something I've been looking forward to for many months.

The main cargo resupply mission (CRS) mission objective continues to be the more routine job of getting cargo to and from the ISS - if anything as complex as a space mission can be called routine.  There will also be a secondary payload of five CubeSats under the ELaNa program.  ELaNa  is a NASA program to provide launch opportunities for educational CubeSat missions, and this will be the fifth launch under that program.

But what I'm really looking forward to is the second attempt at a soft splashdown to further SpaceX's long term goal of developing a reusable rocket.  A controlled descent of the Falcon 9 rocket was first tried on the maiden flight of the Falcon 9 version 1.1 from the Vandenberg Air Force Base.   The expectations for a successful controlled decent on that flight were very, very low.  And they are not very hight for CRS-3, but SpaceX will be taking every opportunity to test out their evolving capability, and the new Falcon 9 sports landing gear (as seen below) leading me to believe that every Falcon 9 flight going forward will include a controlled descent test.

The same landing gear has been spotted on a new test vehicle being called Grasshopper 2 but the press.  If you've been following the Grasshopper project you will know that it is a test of controlled decent, performed on land in Texas.  If you re not familiar with Grasshopper you can read this to catchup (and see some great videos).  This new Grasshopper 2 test vehicle has landing gear that seems identical to the gear attached to the new Falcon 9 rocket.  This clearly indicates that SpaceX is going full speed ahead in developing it's reusable rocket capability - which could be a game changer in terms of launch costs.

Below is a picture of the new Grasshopper 2 test vehicle with the new landing gear.  The inset on the left shows the landing gear on the original Grasshopper.  Photo courtesy of this Redit post.

It is not clear if this gear is retractable like the gear on the Falcon 9.

Orbital Sciences completes the first launch of its Antares rocket

Orbital Sciences completed its first launch of the Antares rocket - as well as the first launch from its new facilities at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, VA.

The launch took place on April 21st at 5:00 PM local time (EDT).

This launch is the first step towards demonstrating Orbital's capability to resupply the International Space Station (ISS), for which it will use the company's Cygnus spacecraft.  Orbital Sciences is one of the two companies providing services under  NASA's Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, SpaceX being the other.

Once the Cygnus spacecraft has completed its demo missions, orbital will begin fulfilling its contract with NASA is for eight resupply missions, which are anticipated to start by the end of this year (2013).