NASA thread with Flight

[Anonymous No.9622247]

I've returned after a long period of absence. To put it politely, I strongly dislike government Contracting, and hope to hear good news from a few private industries I've put in applications for. In the mean time, I'm doing Network administration for an ISP.
So let's get the thread started with some good old fashioned ISS updates.
Soyuz 54S docked successfully on the 23rd with the hatch opening a few hours later.
Station Acceleration Measurement System (SAMS) Loss of Health and Status – The SAMS Control Unit lost health and status data for 5 hours on the 22nd, and could not be recovered by a ground commanded reboot. Crew intervention to perform a hard reboot was successful. Data was not recorded during this outage, but no science impacts have been identified during the affected timeframe. The SAMS Control Unit is located in Express Rack 1 (LAB1O2), with acceleration sensors distributed in multiple modules.
That said, there is movement concerning the Orion. RS-25 production should be resuming in a short amount of time. Currently, the slated number are 2 RS-25s per year, but realistically, they will have to increase the production amount to at least 4 a year in order for the program to be viable long term.
The Ground Test team completed the first draft of the Test Report for the Integrated Habitat Test in iPAS, conducted in Sept. The Ground Test team also described the products and services developed to execute the test, in the areas of Test Architecture, Simulation, and Visualization. The draft will be edited and reviewed by the team, and completed by Dec 31.

Hypervelocity shots on ALON began this week at WSTF. A preliminary comparison between the response of the ALON to Fused Silica to the high-velocity impact (HVI) (same shot parameters), is that the damage on the ALON is much more compact. Since the ALON is a ceramic crystalline structure and the glass is amorphous, the resulting craters are distinctly different in morphology.

[Flight No.9622287]

Forgot my own name...

Anyways, I wasn't too surprised when we got another new direction for Space Policy.
What I would like to see is Space Policy which has achieveable goals within a single administration. Otherwise in about 2 some odd years at the very least, we will be back here discussing yet another new space goal that people want to achieve.

Oddly enough, 10 years ago I made the same exact demand I am currently making: Pick a policy path and stick to it.

[Flight No.9622308]

Bright side of the current administrations chaos though is that the NASA budget did get a boost with the omnibus spending bill despite the administrations desire to reduce spending. Most enjoyably for me is the Manned space flight portion.
NASA’s exploration programs also win additional funding in the bill, with the omnibus providing $2.15 billion for SLS and $1.35 billion for Orion, the same levels as in both the House and Senate bills but above the original request.

[Anonymous No.9622683]

I like that we are getting increases in space funding for national security programs. The air force is changing it's approach to space, but slowly. I read that alot of higher ups are resisting because changes could cost them their jobs. But no matter what happens, it's good to see that the space sector is growing on all fronts (civil, national security, commercial). Other countries are seeing their space sectors grow too, which is also good.

[Flight No.9624304]

>>9622683
I guess my only real gripe with the whole matter is that while there's been growth, when it comes to actual programs, the pace of progress overall has become glacially slow.