[JSR] Jonathan's Space Report, No. 669

Jonathan McDowell jcm at planet4589.org
Wed Oct 24 09:31:50 EDT 2012


Jonathan's Space Report
No. 669                                            2012 Oct 24  Somerville, MA USA
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

International Space Station
----------------------------

Expedition 33 continues with commander Suni Williams, FE-4 Yuriy
Malenchenko and FE-6 Aki Hoshide; Soyuz TMA-06M (factory no. 707, ISS
flight 32S) was launched on Oct 23 with Oleg Novitskiy, Yevgeniy
Terelkin and Kevin Ford; the crew, callsign 'Kazbek', will become part
of Ex-33 when they arrive at the Station.

SpaceX's Dragon CRS-1 cargo ship reached the ISS on Oct 10 and was
captured by the SSRMS arm at 1056 UTC. Berthing at the Harmony
module was completed at 1303 UTC.

The five cubesats ejected from the JEM on Oct 4 have been cataloged as
1998-067CN to 1998-067CS; Mike Rupprecht DK3WN has identified three of them
so far using their radio signals. The cubesats went into space on the         
2012-038 (HTV-3) launch but USSTRATCOM, to whom the World Data
Center at GSFC has delegated the naming process, has elected to label all
ISS-associated objects with the Zarya module's launch number.

The Orbcomm OG2-1 satellite reentered at 0619 UTC on Oct 10 after 2 days
in space, probably over the NE Pacific west of Vancouver. An Orbcomm
press release states that they were able to test out the satellite's
systems before the reentry. The Falcon 9 second stage has also
reentered, and the three debris objects will probably come down in the
next day or two.

The ISS orbit was raised slightly on Oct 17 using the Zvezda module engines.


Galileo
-------

The IOV 3 and 4 in-orbit validation satellites for the Galileo
navigation system, Europe's analog to GPS, were orbited by a
Soyuz/Fregat from the Centre Spatial Guyanais on Oct 12. The two
satellites have been given the nicknames David and Sif in honor of two
young competition winners, Mr. David Markarjanc (b.2001) of the Czech
Republic and Ms. Sif Skov Christensen (b.2002) of Denmark. 

The Fregat-MT No. 1031 upper stage inserted the stack in a 202 x 23248 km x 56.0 deg
transfer orbit; after a second burn at 2149 UTC the two satellites were
ejected into circular orbit. The Soyuz-ST-B (Soyuz-2-1b) third stage
was on a suborbital trajectory and reentered over the Atlantic at about 1832 UTC.
On Oct 23 IOV-3 was in a 23215 x 23232 km x 55.3 deg orbit.

SJ-9
----

On Oct 14 China launched two technology satellites, SJ-9A and SJ-9B (Shi
Jian jiu hao A/B weixing) using a CZ-2C launch vehicle with an SMA solid
motor upper stage. The CZ-2C second stage ended up in a 260 x 674 km x
98.0 deg transfer orbit; the satellites are in a 623 x 650 km x 98.0
deg, 1029LTDN sun-synchronous orbit together with a small dual payload
adapter. The SMA stage seems to have made a pair of depletion burns to a
363 x 607 km x 98.1 deg disposal orbit. Two of the four second stage
motor separation covers have so far been cataloged, in 260 x 890 km
orbits.

The SJ-9 satellites carry technical experiments and will perform formation flying
exercises. They are under the control of the Zhonggou ziyuan weixing yingyong zhongxin
(China Resources Satellite Applications Center).

On Oct 19 SJ-9A began maneuvers, lowering its orbit to 619 x 644 km and then
returning to a 623 x 650 km orbit on Oct 22-23. 

Ekspress/Telkom
--------------

The upper stage from the failed Ekspress/Telkom launch, Briz-M No. 99532
(catalog 38746), disintegrated on Oct 16, presumably when residual
fuel and oxidizer came into contact, and generated an as-yet-unknown
quantity of orbital debris. The stage was in a 263 x 5012 km x 49.9 deg orbit.
None of the debris has yet been cataloged.

IS-23
-----

Intelsat's IS-23 satellite, an Orbital Star-2.4 model, was launched on
Oct 14 by a Proton/Briz-M from Baykonur.  The satellite will provide Ku
and C band communications services for the Americas, Europe and Africa
from 53W. This is the first Star-2 class satellite to be directly
inserted into geosynchronous orbit by its launch vehicle rather than
using liquid apogee burns from transfer orbit. On Oct 19 the
satellite was in a 25-hour, 36916 x 37239 km x 0.1 deg drift orbit;
by Oct 22 IS-23 had braked to a 24-hour, 35780 x 35948 km x 0.1 deg 
near-synchronous orbit drifting west over 50 deg W.

Launch Vehicle Statistics
--------------------------

The practice, of which I and others have long been guilty, of evaluating launch
vehicle reliability based on a simple pass/fail value for each launch is rather a
blunt instrument, as the recent Falcon 9 launch shows.

I have revised my launch tables (http://planet4589.org/space/lvdb/) 
to include an attempt at reasonably objective fractional success values for marginal cases. 
For pass/fail purposes I consider a score of 0.75 or less to be a failure; one could argue for 
lowering that boundary a little bit.

For launches with a single payload, or multiple equal-priority payloads, I give:
 - full success                   1.00
 - orbit usable but not nominal   0.75
 - orbit but not a usable one     0.40
 - payload failed to separate     0.25  (even if good orbit)
 - orbit not reached              0.00  (or reentry after circa 1 orbit)

For missions with primary (P) and secondary (S) payloads, a rough scaling
to give the P 3 times the weight of S -
 - full success                   1.00
 - S off-nominal orbit            0.95
 - S unusable orbit               0.85
 - S failed to sep                0.75
 - P off-nominal orbit            0.55
 - P unusable orbit               0.30
 - P failed to separate           0.10

There's still some subjectivity here, and I've allowed myself to assign intermediate values,
e.g. when an orbit is only slightly off-nominal. Now obviously scores of 0.40 or less
are going to mean an unhappy customer, but I think it's still worth distinguishing from complete
failure to orbit a it usually indicates a vehicle which is 'close' to working in contrast
to some vehicles which never make it beyond first or second stage burn (I'm looking at you,
North Korea...). For Earth escape missions stranded in LEO, I've kept a 0 (complete failure) score.

Here are the proposed scores assigned so far that differ from 0.0 and 1.0:
 0.25  96-061 Pegasus
 0.40  63-021 Thor Agena; 67-032 Proton; 76-062,76-088, 80-031, 86-075,90-055 Molniya, 78-119, 95-052 Kosmos,
       84-120, 04-052 Tsiklon, 91-051 Pegasus, 95-U01 Mu-3S-II, 96-048 CZ-3, 80-043 Atlas,
       99-017, 99-023 Titan, 99-024 Delta 3, 06-006, 08-011, 11-045, 12-044 Proton/Briz, 11-005 Rokot
 0.45  04-050 Delta 4H  (primary payload medium-bad orbit, secondary failed to orbit)
 0.50  01-029 Ariane 5/V142
 0.75  97-057 PSLV, 97-066 Ariane 502, 07-027 Atlas V/NROL-30, 09-029 Soyuz/Meridian
 0.80  00-048 Delta 3, 01-015 GSLV  (somewhat off-nominal orbit)
 0.85  12-054 Falcon 9  (primary perfect, secondary unusable)

I haven't done a throrough scrub of the database, particularly the older launches - let me know
what you think. Note that I don't count PAM and IUS payloads on Shuttle as part of the launch vehicle.
There's a whole other discussion to be had about measuring each stage instead of the LV
as a whole, and measuring upper stage and apogee motor reliability - but that is not this discussion:
the question of integrated launch vehicle reliability comes up often enough to be worth doing better.

Orbital Launch Stats 2012 to Date
---------------------------------

Total 60 attempts:
Russia 18, US 14, China 14, France/ESA 7, India 2, Japan 2, Iran 1 + 1 fail, North Korea 1 fail

Sea Launch counted as US, Soyuz/CSG counted as France, so for country of LV manufacture it's
Russia/Ukraine 21, China 14, US 12, Europe 6, India 2, Japan 2, Iran 2, NK 1. Orbital's Antares
and South Korea's Naro will make it even tougher to construct meaningful nation-based statistics,
since they have Russian-built first stages.


Table of Recent (orbital) Launches 
 ----------------------------------
Date UT       Name            Launch Vehicle  Site            Mission    INTL.  
                                                                          DES.
Oct  4 1210   GPS SVN65          Delta 4M+(4,2)    Canaveral SLC37B  Navsat    53A
Oct  4 1437   RAIKO    )                           ISS Kibo, LEO     Tech      98-067CN
              We Wish  )                                             Tech      98-067CS
Oct  4 1544   F-1      )                           ISS Kibo, LEO     Tech      98-067CR
              Niwaka   )                                             Tech      98-067CP
              TechEdSat)                                             Tech      98-067CQ
Oct  8 0035   Dragon CRS-1 )     Falcon 9          Canaveral SLC40   Cargo     54A
              Orbcomm OG2-1)                                         Comms     54B
Oct 12 1815   Galileo IOV-3 )    Soyuz ST-B        Kourou ELS        Navsat    55A
              Galileo IOV-4 )                                        Navsat    55B
Oct 14 0325   Shi Jian 9 A )     Chang Zheng 2C    Taiyuan           Tech      56A
              Shi Jian 9 B )                                         Tech      56B
Oct 14 0837   Intelsat IS-23     Proton-M/Briz-M   Baykonur LC81/24  Comms     57A
Oct 23 1051   Soyuz TMA-06M      Soyuz-FG          Baykonur LC31     Spaceship 58A

Table of Recent (suborbital) Launches
----------------------------------

Date UT     Payload/Flt Name  Launch Vehicle  Site                   Mission    Apogee/km


Oct  4 0337   RV               Prithvi 2          Chandipur           Op.Test      100?
Oct  5 0555   RV               Dhanush            Ship, Chandipur     Op.Test      100?
Oct 19        RV               Volna            K-433 sub, S. Okhotsk Op.Test     1000?
Oct 19 0912   RV               Topol              Plesetsk            Op.Test     1000?

.-------------------------------------------------------------------------.
|  Jonathan McDowell                 |  phone : (617) 495-7176            |
|  Somerville MA 02143               |  inter : planet4589 at gmail       |
|  USA                               |          jcm at cfa.harvard.edu       |
|                                                                         |
| JSR: http://www.planet4589.org/jsr.html                                 |
| Back issues:  http://www.planet4589.org/space/jsr/back                  |
| Subscribe/unsub: http://www.planet4589.org/mailman/listinfo/jsr         |
'-------------------------------------------------------------------------'   



More information about the JSR mailing list