Tag: freedom

It is simple: Conservatives don’t have the votes

2:53 pm

The Republican Party and its voters
The modern Republican Party and its voters

Many conservatives both in Congress and out have recently railed in fury at the compromises that House speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has made with the Democrats in order to pass large multi-billion dollar foreign aid bills to help the Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan protect their sovereignty and borders, while doing nothing to pass any bills to secure the American border at all.

That fury is best represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Georgia), who has filed a motion to vacate the speaker but as yet has not followed through to force a vote. She has repeatedly condemned his willingness to work to pass Democratic Party proposals while doing little to help Republicans get their bills passed.

The problem however for Johnson is the same one faced by the previous Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, as well as the Republican speaker before him, Paul Ryan, and the speaker before him, John Boehner. All struggled to get Republican proposals passed, and all failed. None could garner a majority strong enough, especially because the Democrats stood firm and united in opposition and many Republicans were actually more allied with the Democratic Party agenda. It is this same problem that Greene faces and is why she has not moved to force a vote for a new speaker.
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German rocket startup Hyimpulse’s first suborbital rocket arrives in Australia

9:32 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.

The German rocket startup Hyimpulse today announced that its first suborbital rocket, the SR75, had arrived in Australia for its planned first test launch.

On 28 February, Southern Launch, the commercial outfit that manages the Koonibba Test Range, revealed that a launch attempt of the suborbital SR75 rocket would occur between late April and early May. This likely gives the team little room for the unexpected as it prepares for launch.

Those launch dates depend on whether Australia’s government will issue the launch licenses on time. So far its ability to do so in a timely manner has been difficult if not impossible. For example, the rocket startup Gilmour, which wants to launch from Bowen at about the same time, has been waiting more than two years to get its approval, delaying its first orbital test launch by more than a year.

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On the left, certainty and violent passion; On the right, doubt and fearful timidity; This must change!

3:11 pm

What the left wants to destroy
What the left wants to destroy

“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” ― Winston S. Churchill

It is said that if you want to win a war, it is essential to know your enemy almost better than you know yourself, so that you know what will be required of you to win.

Americans, those who still believe in the Constitution and the basic values of our country — limited government and the right of each individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — routinely still think they are in the majority, that given a fair fight they will always win against the fascists of the left because the general public will immediately recognize the justice of the right’s cause.

This is not only a grave error, it is an error that Americans have been making for decades. Year by year since the 1960s Americans of all stripes have been unwilling to fight for right when it could have been easily won without bloodshed. Now bloodshed is almost certainly required, and the right continues to be unwilling to fight hard. Instead it still thinks its victories can be won easily, and so it is lazy about fighting those battles.

The left

To understand best why the right continues to lose, we first have to look closely at the left. As a movement, it has for decades been passionate and unwilling to compromise. Its leaders and followers are filled with certainty, and have been willing to do whatever is necessary to win.
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Update on SpaceX’s preparations for the 4th test flight of Superheavy/Starship

11:10 am

Link here. The article is definitely worth reading, as it tells us that SpaceX is pushing hard to be ready to launch in early May, as Musk has promised. The article also thinks SpaceX will be able to ramp up later launches to one every two months.

The article however is I think being naively optimistic about this timeline, because it naively assumes the FAA will quickly approve the launch licenses to meet that schedule. I guarantee the FAA won’t, as it has taken it one to four months after SpaceX was ready to launch to approve the licenses for the previous launches. The length of that approval process has shrunk each time, but FAA still made Space X wait each time, for no reason.

Making that schedule even more unlikely is SpaceX’s desire to do as many as nine test launches per year at Boca Chica. While the company could certainly do this, the environment reassessment issued in 2022 limits it to only five launches per year. It needs a waiver from the FAA and the Biden administration,
a waiver no one should expect considering the Biden administrations hostility to Musk.

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Slovenia signs Artemis Accords

10:58 am

NASA announced yesterday that Slovenia has become the 39th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining the American alliance for exploring the Moon and the solar system.

The alliance now includes these nations: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

As with all the recent announcements, the NASA press release now insists that the accords are designed to “reinforce and implement key obligations in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,” the exact opposite of the original goals of the accords. Rather than overvcome the Outer Space Treaty’s restriction on private property in space, the Biden administration is now using the accords to strengthen that restriction. To quote someone (Mussolini) whose policies the modern globalist world clearly admires, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

This could all change with different leadership in Washington, but whether the administrative state, led by the Democratic Party, will allow such a thing at this point in history is very questionable. And they appear aided in this totalitarian effort by a meek and largely ignorant American public.

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Blue Origin completes delivery of the two BE-4 engines for ULA’s second Vulcan launch

10:04 am

Blue Origin this week completed delivery of the two BE-4 engines needed for the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, presently scheduled for sometime this fall.

That launch was originally targeting an April launch, but according to official announcements has been delayed until the fall because final ground testing of its payload, Sierra Space’s Tenacity mini-shuttle, is not complete. It appears that Blue Origin also contributed to that delay, as it is now obvious that its engines were not available as planned in time for that April launch.

This delay also raises questions about Blue Origin’s ability to ramp up BE-4 engine production to meet the needs of ULA’s Vulcan rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Both have large launch contracts with Amazon to launch its Kuiper constellation, while ULA also has almost as many contracts with the U.S. military. To meet those contracts, Blue Origin will have to produce several hundred BE-4 engines yearly in the very near future. Right now it appears it can only produce about one per year.

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FAA to now require that reentry spacecraft get landing license before launch

4:05 pm

We’re here to help you! The FAA is now going to require that any company planning to launch a payload or spacecraft into orbit to get both its launch and landing licenses before launch, in order to avoid the situation that occurred last year when Varda launched its capsule and then had difficulties getting its landing license approved due to red-tape confusion between government agencies.

In a notice published in the Federal Register April 17, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation announced it will no longer approve the launch of spacecraft designed to reenter unless they already have a reentry license. The office said that it will, going forward, check that a spacecraft designed to return to Earth has a reentry license as part of the standard payload review process.

In the notice, the FAA said that decision was linked to safety concerns of allowing spacecraft to launch without approvals to return. “Unlike typical payloads designed to operate in outer space, a reentry vehicle has primary components that are designed to withstand reentry substantially intact and therefore have a near-guaranteed ground impact as a result of either a controlled reentry or a random reentry,” it states.

While this seems to fall directly under the FAA’s basic authority, to make sure launches and landings pose no risk to the general public, I guarantee it is also going to slow the growth of the new space manufacture industry. I fear that with time approvals will be delayed, some so much that companies will go bankrupt waiting for approval. The FAA will never be able to guarantee perfection in this matter, and as bureaucrats tend to be cautious, expect it to increasingly oppose re-entries by new companies.

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites

3:48 pm

Bunny march on! SpaceX today successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

41 SpaceX
15 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 47 to 27, while SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 41 to 33.

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Rocket startup Orbex raises another $16.7 million in private investment capital

9:28 am

The British rocket startup Orbex has raised another $16.7 million in private investment capital, bringing the total it has raised now to over $100 million.

It remains unclear when the company’s Prime rocket will complete its first launch. It now says it will have its rocket and launch facility at the Sutherland spaceport ready by the end of this year, but it had previously hoped to launch the rocket in 2023. It appears that goal failed because the spaceport could not get either the spaceport license or its own launch license approved by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). Those licenses have still not been issued, even though the applications had been submitted in Feburary 2022, more than two years ago.

Those delays by the CAA probably explains why the company has had four different CEO’s in the past year. Though the fault of the delays lies with the government, others have had to take the blame. Meanwhile, company officials now state that it is now exploring using other launch sites, including its own near the equator.

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SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites; but with streaming issues

2:43 pm

SpaceX today succeeded in launching another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. However, after stage separation and the ignition of the upper stage, with the rocket operating normally, the live stream from X suddenly went down. The problem was not with the rocket, as all feeds from both stages disappeared, with the entire live stream going blank.

The first stage was on its twelfth launch. SpaceX has now confirmed that it landed successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The company has also confirmed as successful orbital insertion.

This was SpaceX’s 40th launch so far in 2024, all successful. To get some perspective on the company’s continuing and spectacular success, the entire United States could not achieve that many launches in any year from 1969 through 2019, and in 2020 it merely matched this number (because SpaceX that year launched 25 times). And SpaceX has done it this in only three and a half months. Based on this pace, its goal of 150 launches in 2024 appears increasingly possible.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

40 SpaceX
15 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 46 to 27, while SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 40 to 33.

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Sweden signs Artemis Accords

9:55 am

Sweden yesterday became the 38th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, one day after Switzerland had officially signed.

The alliance now includes the following nations: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

The press release once again focuses on “reinforcing” the Outer Space Treaty, rather than using the accords to get around that treaty’s limitations of private property. More and more it appears the Biden administration and the global community wants to use this alliance not to encourage the establishment of a legal framework for private ownership, but to retain that power within the governments involved.

As I said last week, “Under these circumstances, I wonder why China and Russia haven’t signed on as well.”

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites with 1st stage on record-setting 20th flight

7:44 pm

The bunny flies again! SpaceX tonight successfully launched 23 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its 20th flight, a new record for a Falcon 9 first stage, landing successfully on a droneship in the Atlantic. At this moment SpaceX is beginning to collect a fleet of Falcon 9 first stage boosters that have flown almost as much as NASA’s space shuttle fleet, which flew as follows:

Discovery 39 flights
Atlantis 33 flights
Columbia: 28 flights
Endeavour 25 flights
Challenger: 10 flights

At present SpaceX has one booster with 20 flights, and two with 19, and I think one with 18. It will take a lot more launches to catch up, but it certainly appears possible for at least a few of these Falcon 9 stages to exceed the shuttle numbers.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

39 SpaceX
14 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 45 to 26, while SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 39 to 32.

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Amazon: First operational launch of Kuiper satellites delayed

9:38 am

Though Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy, in his annual letter to shareholders yesterday, touted the Kuiper internet constellation’s profit potential, he also implied that the planned first launch of operational satellites has been delayed.

When Project Kuiper’s first two prototype satellites were launched last October for testing, Amazon said that its first production-grade satellites were on track for launch in the first half of 2024, and that it expected broadband service to be in beta testing with selected customers by the end of the year.

Today, Jassy put a slightly different spin on that schedule. “We’re on track to launch our first production satellites in 2024,” he wrote in his letter. “We’ve still got a long way to go, but are encouraged by our progress.”

Later in a television interview Jassy was more blunt, stating that the first operational satellites will not be ready until “the second half of ’24”, with the service becoming available “in the next year or so.”

The company’s incredibly slow roll-out of this constellation puts it at a significant disadvantage. Both it and Starlink were announced at about the same time, but Starlink already has several thousand satellites in orbit, has been operational for several years, and has almost three million customers signed on. It has gotten all the low-hanging fruit. Amazon will either have to convince those customers to switch — generally a difficult thing to do — or find new customers that have so far been less inclined to buy such satellite services.

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Swiss company tests three-legged hopper for asteroid exploration on zero-G airplane

9:26 am

SpaceHopper in flight
SpaceHopper in flight

A Swiss company, ETH Zurich, has successfully tested the ability of an unmanned three-legged hopper, designed to explore asteroids by hoping in the light gravity, to orient itself using its legs by flying on a zero-G airplane.

The picture to the right is a screen capture from the video embedded below.

All nine leg motors [three per leg] work together to launch the SpaceHopper high off the asteroid’s surface when jumping. As the robot is subsequently in flight, it maintains its upright orientation by selectively extending or withdrawing its legs to shift its center of mass as needed. Upon landing, its legs flex to absorb impact and to keep the bot from falling over.

During zero-G on the airplane flights the hopper successfully jumped, then used its legs to correctly orient itself afterward.

Developing this hopper was initially a student project, and its success has gotten it upgraded, still led by those students.
» Read more

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Switzerland to sign Artemis Accords

8:56 am

NASA revealed today that Switzerland will become the 37th nation to sign the Artemis Accords in an official ceremony on April 15, 2024.

With this signing, these are the members of the American alliance: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

The NASA press release is revealing about the goals of this alliance, under the Biden administration, both by what it says and what it does not say:

The Artemis Accords reinforce the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as well as the commitment by the United States and partner nations to the Registration Convention, the Rescue and Return Agreement, as well as best practices and norms of responsible behavior that NASA and its partners have supported, including the public release of scientific data.

When established by the Trump administration, the accords were not intended to “reinforce the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.” The accords were intended to create an alliance that would have the political clout to overcome that treaty’s limitations on establishing a private property legal framework in space. Right now the treaty seriously impairs investiment because no company has any assurance it will own any piece of ground it occupies.

The press announcement makes no mention of private enterprise, and implies that the Biden administration is aggressively working to eliminate that goal, and instead use the accords as a way to strengthen government control in space.

Under these circumstances, I wonder why China and Russia haven’t signed on as well.

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Rocket startup Relativity foregoes bidding on present round of military launch contracts

10:01 am

The rocket startup Relativity has decided not to bid on the present round of National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 contracts, saying the first launch of its new Terran-R rocket will not occur until 2026, well after those contracts are going to be awarded and flown.

Relativity was initially aiming to compete for the first round of NSSL Phase 3 contracts expected to be awarded later this year. However, the California-based company’s new Terran R rocket won’t fly until 2026 at the earliest, which falls outside the timeframe for this year’s NSSL Phase 3 awards. “We’ve been fairly transparent with our schedule over the last year and have continued to hit our milestones,” Joshua Brost, chief revenue officer at Relativity Space, told SpaceNews. “We’re very comfortable about on-ramping to NSSL in the future, likely next year as we approach that 12 months from initial launch.”

Relativity, after completing one partly successful launch of its smaller Terran-1 rocket in 2023, abandoned further development on that rocket in order to focus on its larger Terran-R. That decision however put it out of the launch market for years. I have always wondered if that decision was partly influenced by the increased launch regulation of the FAA in the past two years, which has caused the launches of new American rockets to almost cease. It might have realized getting Terran-1 launched again would be difficult and waste valuable company time and resources. Better to take a break on the hope that by 2026, the regulatory atmosphere might have improved.

Furthermore, Relativity uses very sophisticated 3D technology to build its rockets, an asset whose value on the market is maybe much greater than its rockets. It could be that Relativity is exploring this avenue at the moment, and we might find it never resumes launches.

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Russia and SpaceX complete launches

9:08 am

Early today both Russia and SpaceX completed rocket launches.

First, Russia after several scrubs for technical reasons successfully completed a test launch of the largest configuration of its Angara rocket, the Angara-A5. It was the first launch of Angara-A5 from its far east spaceport Vostochny, and the first test launch of this rocket confiruration since 2014. Development had stalled for many years due to a major design issue revealed in 2019.

This launch establishes several important benchmarks for Russia’s space program. This rocket is essential for its goal of building a new space station, and the launch from Vostochny gives Russia as stronger backup to Baikonur in Kazakhstan, where long-term access is becoming problematic.

SpaceX then followed, with a launch of a military weather satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its third flight, landing successfully back at Vandenberg.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

38 SpaceX
14 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined 44 to 26, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 38 to 32.

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Activists file lawsuit to prevent land swap at Boca Chica

2:51 pm

The same collection of activists who have been waging lawfare against SpaceX’s Boca Chica rocket facility have now filed a new lawsuit, this time against the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission (TPWD) in order to block an approved land swap that gives SpaceX 43 acres of a Boca Chica state park in exchange for receiving 477 acres nearby.

The South Texas Environmental Justice Network, the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, and Save RGV banded together for a lawsuit filed in the District Court of Travis County on April 3. The suit alleges that Texas Parks and Wildlife violated statutory requirements for the proposal, including the requirement to consider alternatives to giving away public park land; the requirement to ensure the minimization of harm to the public park land; and the requirement to consider the best interests of the local community and TPWD.

These jokers represent very few people in south Texas. Worse, the so-called “Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas” was in Mexico, not Texas, when it existed. The corporation that exists now is a front for filing these lawsuits, taking advantage of the numerous DEI regulations that now exist to favor such minorities.

That the commission approved the swap unanimously, despite heavy pressure from these groups, illustrates the larger support in Texas for what SpaceX is doing. Expect the Texas courts to endorse that support as well. All these suits will do is delay, delay, delay.

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Rocket Lab to refly a recovered first stage

2:31 pm

Electron 1st stage floating in the water

Rocket Lab today announced that a first stage used on a launch in January and recovered successfully from the ocean, as shown to the right, has now been moved into its normal production line for preparation for a reflight on an upcoming launch.

The stage was successfully launched and recovered as part of the ‘Four of a Kind’ mission on 31 January 2024 and has already passed more acceptance tests than any other recovered Electron stage, including:

  • Tank pressurization test – a process that filled the carbon composite tank with inert gas and held it in excess of maximum operating pressure for more than 20x longer than the standard Electron flight duration
  • Helium leak check – a stringent process that determines there are no leaks in the tank
  • Carbon fiber structural testing – including ultrasonic assessment and other non-destructive tests to confirm no delamination of the carbon composite tank fibers.

The stage will now undergo final fit out and rigorous qualification and acceptance testing to the same standard as a brand-new Electron tank to determine the recovered stage’s suitability for reflight.

No actual launch date has been set. The company first wants to complete its final testing. If successful and the stage flies again, Rocket Lab will join a very elite club, becoming only the second entity anywhere — after SpaceX capable of reusing a significant part of its rockets. That capability will allow it to drop prices, and better compete.

This success also underlines the lack of creativity from more than a half century of managers and rocket engineers, who repeatedly insisted such reuse was impractical, or impossible. The idea of recovering a stage from the ocean and reusing it was considered crazy, so no one ever tried it. Rocket Lab is about to prove more than a half century of managers and rocket engineers wrong.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites

11:41 pm

The bunny never stops! SpaceX tonight successfully launched 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its second flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

37 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 43 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 37 to 31.

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ULA completes last Delta-4 Heavy launch

10:06 am

Delta-4 Heavy on its last launch
Delta-4 Heavy on its last launch

ULA today successfully completed the last Delta-4 launch, the Delta-4 Heavy version — the most powerful — lifting off from Cape Canaveral and placing a National Reconnaissance Office surveillance satellite into orbit.

From this point on ULA will rely on its new Vulcan-Centaur and Atlas-5 rockets, though production of the Atlas-5 has ceased. When the remaining Atlas-5s are flown, the Vulcan-Centaur in its many iterations will become the company’s mainstay rocket. All this might change depending on who buys ULA. If Blue Origin buys the company, the mix will be more complex, as that company is developing its own New Glenn rocket.

This was ULA’s second launch in 2024, so there is no change to the leader board in the 2024 launch race:

36 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 42 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 36 to 31.

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Turkey to join China’s lunar base program

9:02 am

Turkey yesterday announced that it is applying to join China’s program to build a lunar base on the Moon, dubbed the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), becoming the ninth nation in that partnership.

Those nations are Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela. In addition, another nine academic organizations of one kind or another have signed on.

Interestingly, Turkey’s government apparently decided to partner with China after it flew its own astronaut on Axiom’s AX-3 mission to ISS in January, flying in a SpaceX Dragon capsule launched by SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Previously it had also signed a deal with Sierra Space to participate in both its Dream Chaser and Orbital Reef station.

This new agreement suggests the present instability of international politics has forced it to go to its very powerful neighbors. Or maybe Turkey is signing on with everyone, attempting to burn the candle at both ends.

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New startup to launch a new design for inflatable modules

8:50 am

A new startup, dubbed Max Space, is presently building a test inflatable module it hopes to fly on a SpaceX launch in 2025, testing its new design for inflatable modules that it says is safer and more easily scalable.

Max Space is taking a different technical approach to earlier systems that used a bi-directional “basket weave” fabric structure. “When you start making fibers go in two different directions, 90 degrees apart, the result is you don’t know how much load is going in one direction or the other,” said Maxim de Jong, co-founder and chief technology officer of Max Space, whose past work included development of [Bigelow’s private] Genesis 1 and 2 [orbital modules]. That requires additional material to ensure sufficient margins of safety and also makes it difficult to scale up designs to larger volumes. “Every scale-up is a point design and has to be revalidated,” he said.

Max Space is pursuing a technology called an ultra-high-performance vessel created by de Jong that distributes loads in one direction, a design that he credited to a “totally accidental discovery” while working on other concepts. That reduces the uncertainty in safety margins, which has been demonstrated in tests where modules burst at pressures within 10% of predicted levels. “The predictability is great and the scalability is great,” he said.

According to the company, this design will allow it to quickly build modules with as much as a thousand cubic meters volume, matching ISS in a single module, and able to launch on a single Falcon 9.

The company is not planning its own station. Instead, it simply wishes to be a provider of modules to the other American space stations, four of which are presently being built. It also is offering its modules as potential fuel depots as well as in-orbit storage faciliites.

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What are Israel’s strategic military goals with its latest pull back from Gaza?

12:33 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Even the Arabs recognize these facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Over the weekend numerous news reports announced that Israel had suddenly pulled almost all its troops out of the Gaza strip, apparently abandoning its plan to finish off the last four battalions of Hamas that were hiding out in the southern town of Rafah.

Despite denials by Israel’s military and the Netanyahu government, on the surface it appeared Israel had bowed to pressure from the Biden administration to cancel its invasion of Rafah and instead break off its military offense against Hamas.

I suspect things are much more complicated, and could instead be — as some Israel officials claimed — a tactical maneuver intended to make that military invasion of Rafah more effective while reducing the large number of civilian deaths anticipated because of the more than a million Gazan refugees that have been crammed into that southern city.

The nature of the withdrawal reveals much about its goal:
» Read more

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SpaceX launches 11 commercial payloads

6:00 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched 11 commercial payloads into orbit, as the first of what it calls its Bandwagon series, designed to provide launch ssatellites to medium inclination Earth orbits. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, its first stage completing its fourteenth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

36 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 41 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 36 to 30.

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Musk provides update to his Boca Chica crew

11:50 am

The candidate landing zone on Mars for Starship
The candidate landing zone on Mars for Starship

Elon Musk yesterday gave a 44-minute update on Starship/Superheavy to his team in Boca Chica, outlining what he now expects in the next two years as well as in the next two decades.

You can watch his presentation here. Musk began by once again describing his fundamental goal behind the company, to make the human race multi-planetary, for its own survival, and that Mars is at this time the best choice for doing so. He then provided some details about the on-going development of Starship/Superheavy:

  • SpaceX will be ready to launch 4th test flight in early May
  • There is an 80-90% chance they will attempt a tower landing of Superheavy, caught by its chopstick arms, by the end of this year
  • Starship will require at least two precision ocean landings before they attempt a tower landing
  • To provide tower redundancy for these test landings, by next year they will have 2 towers at Boca Chica, 2 at Cape Canaveral, with Cape Canaveral operational by next year
  • In 2024 they hope to build 6 Superheavys and Starships for test flights
  • By 2025 they plan to test full refueling of Starship in orbit
  • The third iteration of Starship/Superheavy will be capable of placing 200 tons in orbit
  • That third iteration will cost less to launch than Falcon 1, $2-3 million
  • To make a base on Mars self-sufficient quickly, he anticipates sending large fleets of Starships every two years, everytime the flight window to Mars opens.
  • The preferred landing sites will be in the low mid-latitudes, 30-40 degrees, with elevations two kilometers below the Martian “sea level”, to take advantage of a thick atmosphere.
  • If all goes as planned, Musk expects SpaceX to establish a Mars colony in about two decades

That next-to-last bullet point fits perfectly with the region north of Amazonis Planitia, as shown on the map above, where SpaceX has requested numerous images from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is two kilometers below the “sea level” of Mars. It is at a latitude either on or close to 40 degrees north latitude. It is a region that orbital data says has lots of very near-surface ice. And it is flat, making those first landings relatively safe.

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SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites, with 6 capable of direct-to-cell service

9:34 pm

The beat goes on: SpaceX tonight launched another 22 Starlink satellites, six of which were capable of direct-to-cell service. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg, with its first stage completing its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

35 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 40 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 35 to 30.

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Varda quickly raises $90 million after completing its first orbital manufacturing mission

2:18 pm

As expect, Varda announced yesterday that it raised $90 million in investment capital following the publication of the results of its first orbital manufacturing mission, where its returnable capsule was used to produce test pharmaceuticals in space that cannot be made on Earth.

Varda announced April 5 it raised a Series B round led by venture firm Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. The company has raised $145 million to date. The funding round comes on the heels of the successful conclusion of its first demonstration mission, W-1, on Feb. 21 when the company’s capsule landed at the Utah Test and Training Range. The capsule had been part of a spacecraft launched in June 2023 to test the ability to produce pharmaceuticals in microgravity.

The new funding will allow Varda to scale up production of spacecraft that take advantage of microgravity to produce pharmaceuticals that are not possible or cost-effective to make on the ground.

The company already has a second returnable capsule scheduled for launch this summer on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket.

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Mitsubishi joins private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station

8:24 am

The Japanese big space company Mitsubishi has now joined the private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station for NASA, teaming up with Voyager Space and Airbus.

At this moment it appears that Voyager, the lead company in this station, is attempting to capture the international market that up to now has been part of ISS. Airbus gets it direct access to European companies and the Europeans Space Agency (ESA). Mitsubishi now gets it direct access to Japanese government financing.

The other stations being built with NASA financing, Axiom and Orbital Reef, so far seem more focused on getting American business, as is Vast’s Haven-1 station, being built entirely from private funds.

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SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites

7:47 am

Like an Energizer bunny: SpaceX last night successfully placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its 14th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

34 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 39 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 34 to 30. SpaceX also has another launch scheduled for tonight.

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