TMA-10 #4

I'm not too sure what I could possibly said about this afternoon docking .... now I'm just waiting for the hi-res pictures taken from the ISS to come down and be posted on the Gallery. If you missed the live coverage, Space-multimedia (again) have a video recording of it, and off the hatch opening (with cheesy exchanges between the crew members and their family!).

If I may, I'll hijack this post for a little update on the [Censured] project for Orbiter. As I reached the Communication section of the document I have been preparing, I'll be focusing on that for a while as our SDK doesn't support that yet .... Perfect excuse for some R&D time :-) Now, the key is that we're about some realism .. for example, we shouldn't expect a radio message sent by a spacecraft to be received by a ground station which is on the opposite side of the Earth. At least for the time period that interest us ...

TMA-10 #3

Somehow when I woke-up Saturday morning, I was planning on making a day of that Soyuz launch ... but in reality the coverage on NASA TV is pretty slim .... it start one hour or so before the launch and stop few minute after the orbit insertion .... nothing anywhere close to what's provided for a Shuttle launch ... Which isn't really a surprise for a veteran of armchair rocket launches like myself ;-)

The liftoff and ride went smoothly as usual, except for a longer than usual first motion. I'm no specialist, but it appeared to me (and also to other folks from the IRC channel #space) that the rocket took longer than usual to lift from the pad ... As there's no mention of any possible issue on the official sites, maybe it was normal? Who knows .... In any case, if you have missed the launch, a video of it is available from Space-multimedia.

Docking is happening in a couple of hours, I'll be following it (of course).

TMA-10 #2

So you may want to make note of it, the launch (of TMA-10) is scheduled for 10:31am PST this coming Saturday (April 7th). As this is getting closer by the minutes, it is a good idea to keep an eye on the Expedition 15 gallery. Usually they post some high-res images of the mating of the rocket as well as its transportation to the launch pad (here's an example from Expedition 14). Of course the launch will be LIVE on NASA TV :-)

TMA-10

I forgot to mention in my post yesterday that with the launch of the Soyuz TMA-10 (Expedition 15 + Charles Simonyi) nearing, there's on Energia web site some pictures (as usual) of the Soyuz preparation (link, link, link and link). It's great that they post some pictures, but I wishs they offered something a bit better than the low res (by modern standard) 640x426 ... I may have complained about that before, no? :-) Yeah I thought so .... Well, with a flight every 6 months it's likely that, with my weak memory, I won't remember what I wrote during the previous TMA launch ;-)

Replayed relocation

The Soyuz that the current ISS crew used to get to the ISS close to 6 months ago was relocated (by the same crew + Suni) yesterday. I, for once, missed the event live but hopefully the whole thing (I beleive) is available (47mb) from Space-Multimedia. These guys are really life-savers ;-) The video have some really nice shots, that's one 20 minutes investment you won't regret.

Now, I'm wondering if the crew took any pictures during the "flight" and if so, will they be posted on the usual expedition gallery? Hmm ... well in fact, to be honest I don't care too much for picture of the ISS ... I'll be more interested by pictures of the Soyuz ... but as the whole ISS' crew was on that Soyuz no one was taking pictures from the ISS ... oh well.

In case you missed it, Suzy has resumed her Russian space program blog. Be sure to check it out weekly (at least) for some good commentaries and links.

Spacewalk envy

With all the EVA action on-going right now, it's no doubt that I suddenly feel the urge to do some in Orbiter. In fact that's could be a good supplement to my testing of the contact detection and handling I have been working on lately :-) Back in July of this year (following another ISS EVA) I was already mumbling some about the kind of EVA we wanted to be able to perform in our Soyuz addon. However, as we don't have yet the required meshes to simulate the Yastreb suit used for the EVA between Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5, we will have to temporary borrow an EVA mesh from another addon. Now, I'm weighting the pro and cons of doing it. It looks like my partner in crime (castorp) isn't sure that we need yet another distraction at this point. He might be right ... even if this is yet another engineering test, it still involve a fair amount of work to get going ...

STS-116 imagery gallery just got updated with 3 magnificents pictures of the Soyuz TMA and Progress spacecraft docked to the station, check them out!

Союз sighting!

Here ya go! A Soyuz (and a Progress) finally visible on NASA TV :-) So you see, these pages haven't really turned into yet another Shuttle's lover blog ;-) Oh, speaking of TV, NASA have made available an High Definition (HD) version of the launch video. It well worth the bandwidth (222mb for the biggest one). I hope they'll offer more of these during the mission (docking in HD will be sweet!) :-)