Jonathan's Space Report No. 536

Jonathan's Space Report
No. 536 2004 Oct 16, Somerville,
MA.
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* Spaceship One

Scaled Composites' Spaceship One has made two more flights to space.
Flight 65L/16P took off from Mojave Airport's Runway 30 at 1411:37 UTC on
Sep 29. The White Knight carried the Spaceship One up to 14 km and
dropped it at 1509:53 UTC. Pilot Mike Melvill burned the rocket engine for
77 seconds, cutting it off following a series of unplanned rolls towards
the end of the burn. Spaceship One reached 1 km/s velocity and coasted
to a 102.9 km apogee, landing at 1534:04 UTC after 24m11s.

Flight 66L/17P took off at 1348:57 UTC on Oct 4, with drop at 1449:11
UTC. Pilot Brian Binnie burned the engine for 84 seconds and coasted to
an apogee of 112.1 km, landing back on Runway 30 at Mojave at 1513:07
UTC, a flight duration of 23m56s from drop to touchdown. With this
flight, Scaled Composites won the Ansari X-Prize competition, and no
further flights of Spaceship One are planned.

The other SpaceshipOne spaceflight was on Jun 21, with launch at 1450
UTC and landing at 1514 UTC. I don't have timings to the second for that
flight or the May 13 mesosphere flight - if anyone does, please forward
them.

* Soyuz TMA-5

On Oct 14, the Russian Federal Space Agency launched Soyuz-FG rocket
number 0112 carrying the Soyuz 11F732 No. 215 spaceship, Soyuz TMA-5,
on ISS mission 9S. The Soyuz TMA-5 crew are commander Salizhan Sharipov,
flight engineer-1 Leroy Chiao, and flight engineer-2 Yuriy Shargin.
Soyuz TMA-5 will dock with the International Space Station's Pirs module
on Oct 16, at which point NASA astronaut Chiao will take up his role as
ISS Expedition 10 Commander, Sharipov becomes Expedition 10 Flight
Engineer, and Shargin becomes Visting Crew 7 (EP-7) Flight Engineer (the
EP-7 crew consists of just one person!). The Expedition 9 crew of
Gennadiy Padalka and Michael Fincke will later return with the EP-7
crewmember Shargin on Soyuz TMA-4, currently docked to Zarya, while
Chiao and Sharipov take over the Station.

* Kosmos-2410

Russia launched Kosmos-2410 on Sep 24 from Plesetsk on a Soyuz-U rocket
into a 165 x 358 km x 67.1 deg orbit. The spacecraft's orbit decayed to
159 x 312 km by Oct 1, when it raised its orbit to 213 x 330 km. On Oct
15 the orbit was 206 x 304 km. The initial orbit is typical of Kobal't
(Yantar'-4KS2) reconnaissance satellites, but the later orbit is higher
than usual. This is consistent with press reports that the new satellite
is an improved Kobal't with a longer orbital lifetime. The spacecraft
was developed by the TsSKB-Progress design bureau and the Arsenal
production plant. The old version of the satellite had a main reentry
vehicle and two small SpK recoverable film capsules; it's not clear if
the new version carries extra capsules as originally planned in the mid
1990s. Another variant, the 17F12 Don, which had 8 small capsules and a
4 month duration, was last launched in 2003 from Baykonur and uses a
very similar orbit to Kosmos-2410; if it wasn't for the press reports
claiming this was a new vehicle, I would have identified this as the
first Plesetsk-launched Don mission.

* Kosmos-2408 and Kosmos-2409

Two Strela-3 military communications satellites were launched on Sep 23
into a 1470 x 1495 km x 82.5 deg orbit and given the designations
Kosmos-2408 and Kosmos-2409. These were the 127th and 128th Strela-3
satellites to be launched. Strela-3 missions launched from 1985 to 2001
went into lower 1400 x 1420 km orbits in groups of 6 aboard Tsiklon-3
rockets, but the switch to launching in pairs aboard Kosmos-3M rockets
in 2002 also saw a transition to the slightly higher orbit, with one
pair being launched each year.

* AMC-15

The Americom-15 communications satellite for SES Americom was launched
on Oct 14 by International Launch Services on a Krunichev Proton-M with
a Briz-M upper stage. The 4021 kg satellite, a Lockheed Martin/Sunnyvale
A2100 has Ku-band and Ka-band transponders. The Briz-M entered a 173 km
circular orbit, then made a long 38-minute burn to an 890 x 35765 km x 49
deg
transfer orbit and jettisoned the DTB auxiliary fuel tank. A third burn
at 0358 UTC on Oct 15 put the payload in a high perigee geostationary
transfer orbit of 7132 x 35780 km x 18.6 deg. AMC-15 will use its own
engine to circularize the orbit.

The uprated Proton-M rocket has now made six flights, each with the Briz-M
upper stage:

Proton-M 53501 2001 Apr 7 Ekran-M Briz-M 88503
Proton-M 53502 2002 Dec 29 Nimiq 2 Briz-M 88504
Proton-M 53503 2004 Mar 15 Eutelsat W3A Briz-M 88507
Proton-M 53506 2004 Jun 16 Intelsat 10-02 Briz-M 88509
Proton-M 53507 2004 Aug 4 Amazonas Briz-M 88508
Proton-M 53508 2004 Oct 14 AMC-15 Briz-M 88510

* SMART-1

ESA's SMART-1 probe went through its second lunar resonance at a
distance of about 100000 km on Sep 15, and on Oct 1 was in a 63581 x
286254 km x 12.5 deg orbit. Its third lunar resonance was on Oct 12, and
lunar capture is scheduled for Nov 15.


* FSW 19/20

The 20th Chinese FSW recoverable satellite to reach orbit was launched on
Sep 27 by a CZ-2D
rocket. Meanwhile, the 19th FSW, launched on Aug 29 by a CZ-2C, returned its
recovery capsule to China
at 2355 UTC on Sep 24. FSW 20 was launched into a 205 x 297 km x 63.0 orbit
and raised its
apogee the next day to 206 x 320 km. In comparison, FSW 19 was in a 167 x
553 km x 63.0 deg
orbit; analysts have assumed both are FSW type 3 (JB-4) models, but I'm not
sure - perhaps
one is a leftover FSW-2 model.

* Thiruvananthapuram - my latest vacation

A few kilometers north of the city of Thiruvanathapuram in Kerala,
former seat of the rajas of Travancore, is the small beachside village
of Thumba. It was here in 1963 that a small church, founded by Francis
Xavier in the 1540s but rebuilt in the early 1900s, was converted to the
first headquarters of INCOSPAR, later the Indian Space Research
Organization. A small concrete pad on the beach was used for the first
suborbital space launch from India on 1963 Nov 21, a NASA Nike Apache
sounding rocket which reached 208 km. This site near the geomagnetic
equator became TERLS, the Thumba Equatorial Range Launch Station, and is
still regularly used today for low altitude rocket launches like the
Rohini-200 middle atmosphere sounder, which reaches about 75 km. The
concrete pad has one active "Universal" launcher, as well as a Russian
M-100 rocket launcher retired in 1993 and in storage at the edge of the
pad. An older French PARCA launcher from the 1960s lies rusting to the
side, and a new pad and launcher for larger RH-300 and RH-560 rockets,
used in a 1993 campaign, is in a hangar about 200 meters to the north,
and the control center is a few hundred meters to the south. Lauches are
made on azimuth 235 degrees out over the Arabian sea. The Vikram
Sarabhai Space Centre, which designs India's civilian rockets, is a few
kilometers inland, while orbital launches are made from the opposite
coast at the Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sriharikota island. Many
thanks to the ISRO team for giving me a great tour of the TERLS site.


Table of Recent Launches
-----------------------

Date UT Name Launch Vehicle Site Mission
INTL.

DES.

Sep 6 1053 'Ofeq-6 Shaviyt Palmachim Imaging
F01
Sep 8 2314 SJ-6A ) CZ-4B Taiyuan Science
35A
SJ-6B ) Science
35B
Sep 20 1031 EDUSAT GSLV SDSC Comms
36A
Sep 23 1507 Kosmos-2408 ) Kosmos-3M Plesetsk Comms
37A
Kosmos-2409 ) Comms
37B
Sep 24 1650 Kosmos-2410 Soyuz-U Plesetsk LC16 Imaging
38A
Sep 27 0800 FSW 20 CZ-2D Jiuquan Imaging?
39A
Oct 14 0306 Soyuz TMA-5 Soyuz-FG Baykonur LC1/5 Spaceship
40A
Oct 14 2123 AMC 15 Proton-M/Briz-M Baykonur LC200/39 Comms
41A


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Jacques :-)

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