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Shut down space programs, delayed launches, more delayed launches and all new rockets! That are also delayed. On your Spacevidcast Daily for May 5th, 2010.

Obama has appointed U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden to lead a new task force in order to try and find a way to best spend $40 million dollars. Allow me to suggest a small donation of $5 million by Gary and Charles to Spacevidcast if I may. That $40 million was actually promised by President Obama at his April 15th Speech at Kennedy Space Center. While the President is INCREASING NASA’s budget, he is still slashing Constellation, assuming his plan is passed by Congress. This slash will unroot many native Floridians who work on NASA’s Human Space Flight program. When this year winds down we will no longer have a space shuttle program. Since Constellation is canceled, we won’t have a replacement program either. That’s going to displace a lot of people. This $40 million dollars is slated to help train the current workforce so they can find jobs outside of their current area of expertise, as well as keep the space based economy in Florida from collapsing. The due date for the task force’s homework assignment is August 15th of this year. It will not be graded on a curve.

Remember that Galaxy 15 zombiesat we talked about yesterday? They tried one last hail mary to try and get the satellite to shut down and go dark. Alas, this final attempt failed as well. It is now up to SES World Skies to try and keep the Intelsat run Galaxy 15 from causing a blackout of their own AMC-11. This will be a difficult to impossible task of moving the AMC-11 satellite while still maintaining its proper place in orbit. All the while they will need to ensure that they don’t cross the streams!

Lets head back over to Kennedy Space Center where the SpaceX built Falcon 9 rocket sits ready to launch. And by ready I mean completely grounded by the Air Force. While the rocket itself is ready, the Flight Termination System has not yet approved. The FTS is designed to destroy the rocket in case SpaceX loses control and it endangers the range or crew. Falcon 9 has a No Earlier Than launch date of May 16th, 2010 but that doesn’t mean it will actually launch then, that just means it can’t launch BEFORE then. SpaceX is required to give a date to the space center, and that’s what they did. Hopes are that we’ll see the Falcon 9 lift off for its maiden voyage mid May, but rumors say that we’re out until at least June. Originally we were supposed to see a launch on November 29th, 2009. That got delayed to Feburary 9th, 2010 which was in turn delayed to March 3rd, which was delayed to March 8th which has now been delayed to May 16th. Still slated for 2010 is the launch of the Falcon 9 heavy and Dragon capsule. Of course, the Air Force has to let them FLY first!

US space programs are not the only ones with issues. India has delayed their first commercial launch of 2010 due to a problem with their rocket. During a pre-launch test ISRO scientists saw an unexpected pressure drop in the second stage. The PSLV rocket is cool in that every other stage alternates between solid and liquid fuels. So the first stage is solid, the second stage is liquid, the third stage is solid again and the forth stage is liquid. Kinda neat. While the drop is pressure was minor, they are a bit jumpy as on April 15th an ISRO rocket decided that it wanted to take a quick swim in the sea rather than float around in outer space. Little known fact, space based payloads such as satellites don’t like to get wet.

And it seems that Arianespace is meeting a similar fate to that of India. The first flight of the Ariane 5 for 2010 was postponed back in April of this year and now it looks like the shiny new vehicle built for Arianespace will be delayed as well. Known as Vega this new rocket was supposed to enter service in 2010 giving the space program a fleet of three different rocket designs. Vega is designed to take small payloads to orbit. It has no strap on boosters and three solid rocket stages. Oh, and that delayed mission from April we mentioned… Yeah, that still has not launched. No ETA.

In all fairness to all of these companies, yes, it really is rocket science.

Speaking of delays… Should we be talking about the scheduled May 14th launch of STS-132 in this episode or would that just be jinx it? Because STS-132…