- Physics: Metamaterials
- Eclipses, Equinoxes, and Solstices and Earth Perihelion and Aphelion
- Space Exploration
- Human spaceflight launches and returns, 2013
Orbital Sciences Corp. entered the ISS supply business with the first flights of its Antares launcher and Cygnus resupply craft. These were also the first space station launches to use the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport next to NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Virginia. A test flight on April 21 carried a mock-up of the Cygnus 1 supply craft and three miniature cubesats. The second flight on September 18 orbited the first Cygnus craft carrying 700 kg (1,500 lb) of noncritical food and spare equipment. It missed its first rendezvous with the ISS because of a software problem and had to wait until the Soyuz TMA-10M spacecraft carrying a crew of three arrived. On September 29 it approached, was grappled by the ISS’s robot arm, and berthed. The first official resupply mission, with 550 kg (1,200 lb) of cargo, was scheduled for January 2014.
The other commercial supplier to the ISS was SpaceX, which sent one resupply mission, on March 1. SpaceX debuted its new version of its Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s first launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on September 29. The engines were the more-powerful, less-complex Merlin 1D. The design was a step toward recovering the first stage for reuse, with the first launch making an initial demonstration. After engine cutoff and jettison, the stage reoriented itself and restarted three engines for a controlled descent. The stage spun faster than the attitude-control system could handle, which sloshed propellant out of the inlets and caused uneven combustion, leading to vehicle breakup. SpaceX hoped to have stages return to the launch site in 2014 and land vertically on four legs, a technology that it was developing with its Grasshopper test vehicle, which by mid-October had completed eight flight tests since late 2012.
Japan’s new Epsilon launcher succeeded on its first sortie on September 14, orbiting the 20-cm (8-in) Hisaki (“Beyond the Sun”) telescope to study how the solar wind affects the atmospheres of Venus and Mars. The Epsilon was designed to replace the older M-5 with a system requiring greatly reduced launch teams and faster pad preparation.
A Proton launcher, Russia’s heavy-lift workhorse, failed on July 2 almost immediately after liftoff when the vehicle went out of control. Investigators determined that one set of sensors in the guidance package had been installed upside down, which raised issues about quality control and launch team skills.
Sea Launch suffered a failure on February 1 when a Zenit-3SL vehicle tumbled into the sea less than a minute after launch. An investigation identified what may have been a one-off failure in an otherwise reliable hydraulic pump that steered the first-stage engines. Sea Launch had had 10 successes since its last failure in 2007 and an overall record of 31 successes in 35 launches.
India’s attempt to launch its eighth Geostationary Space Launch Vehicle (GSLV) was scrubbed on August 19 when an upper stage started leaking less than two hours before liftoff. The GSLV had had four failures, two successes, and one partial success since it was introduced in 2001. A reliable indigenous-built vehicle would allow India to place up to 2,500 kg (5,500 lb) in geostationary orbit and to compete with large countries in the lucrative communications satellite launch business.