Gordo – street drummer
An evening pause: Hat tip Rocco.
Year: 2016
Comet 67P/C-G’s active surface
Cool image time! The Rosetta science team today released a spectacular image, taken by Rosetta’s high resolution camera, of the surface of Comet 67P/C-G. A cropped version is above and below the fold. A cropped version of the full image, focusing in on the smooth and active area dubbed Imhotep, is above.
This smooth dusty terrain, which covers about 0.8 sq km, is etched with curvilinear features stretching hundreds of metres and which have been found to change in appearance over time. Many large boulders are also seen scattered within the smooth terrain, including the boulder Cheops in the foreground. Smaller but more numerous boulders are associated with exposed cliff faces and are most likely the product of erosion. In some debris falls, detailed analysis has revealed the presence of water ice.
I have also included, below the fold, a second close-up crop from this same image, showing the layered cliffs to the left of Imhotep as well as several mysterious as-yet not understood round features at the cliff’s base.
» Read more
Thirty Meter Telescope’s future in Hawaii in state’s hands
The coming dark age: The executive director of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Friday made it clear that the future of the project in Hawaii is waiting on the state government.
Ed Stone, the project’s executive director, said telescope officials don’t have enough information to decide. “We’re waiting now for the instructions from the courts through the Department of Land and Natural Resources … which they can convey to us what this new process needs to be, what the schedule is and then we can take it into account in deciding what we do next,” he said. “So we can’t really do anything until we have an idea what it is the state’s requiring to see if that’s going to be consistent with what we can do.”
State officials are not holding up the process, state Attorney General Doug Chin said in a statement. “On Dec. 29, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the circuit court to further remand to the Board of Land and Natural Resources so that a contested case hearing can be conducted,” he said. “As of today, the circuit court has not remanded the case. BLNR cannot take action or provide instructions to anyone until this happens.”
The excuse of Hawaii’s attorney general above is garbage. If the governor pushed, he could get the court to move. They are instead allowing the case to languish, which once again tells us that the sympathies of this liberal Democratic Party government lie entirely on the side of the protesters.
Blue Origin reflies and lands New Shepard again
The competition heats up: Blue Origin yesterday successfully re-flew its New Shepard booster, vertically landing it for the second time.
Data from the November mission matched our preflight predictions closely, which made preparations for today’s re-flight relatively straightforward. The team replaced the crew capsule parachutes, replaced the pyro igniters, conducted functional and avionics checkouts, and made several software improvements, including a noteworthy one. Rather than the vehicle translating to land at the exact center of the pad, it now initially targets the center, but then sets down at a position of convenience on the pad, prioritizing vehicle attitude ahead of precise lateral positioning. It’s like a pilot lining up a plane with the centerline of the runway. If the plane is a few feet off center as you get close, you don’t swerve at the last minute to ensure hitting the exact mid-point. You just land a few feet left or right of the centerline. Our Monte Carlo sims of New Shepard landings show this new strategy increases margins, improving the vehicle’s ability to reject disturbances created by low-altitude winds.
They are not clear whether the capsule was re-flown as well. They do say they intend to re-fly New Shepard many times in 2016, probably at an increasing rate. If so, I would say that the race to be the first to sell suborbital tickets to tourists is won by Blue Origin, and that Virgin Galactic and XCOR have been left in the dust.
I have embedded the company’s video below the fold of yesterday’s flight.
» Read more
Billy Joel – Travelin’ Prayer
An evening pause: Stick with it, as they finish slightly early and need to improvise a bit at the end to fill time.
Hat tip Kyle Kooy.
Europe kicks in money for Dream Chaser
The competition heats up: NASA’s decision to award Sierra Nevada a cargo contract has triggered a $36 million investment by the European Space Agency (ESA) to build a new docking unit for Dream Chaser at ISS.
Sierra Nevada Corp.’s win of a NASA contract to ferry cargo to the International Space Station will trigger a $36 million investment by the 22-nation European Space Agency following a cooperation agreement to be signed in the coming weeks, ESA said. Once the agreement is signed, ESA will begin work building the first flight model of the International Berthing and Docking Mechanism (IBDM), which Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser Cargo System will use to attach itself to the space station.
ESA said it would spend 33 million euros ($36 million) to complete the design of the IBDM and build a flight model for Dream Chaser’s first cargo run. Future IBDMs will be financed by Sierra Nevada, ESA said.
Trump: “Let’s get to be a little establishment.”
In attacking Ted Cruz today, presidential candidate Donald Trump revealed exactly why I really don’t trust him, and consider him no different than Bush, Dole, Bush, McCain, Romney, and all the other fake conservatives the Republican Party has been foisting on us for the last twenty years.
“You know what? There’s a point at which: Let’s get to be a little establishment,” Trump told the crowd at the South Point resort and casino. “We’ve got to get things done folks, OK? Believe me, don’t worry. We’re going to make such great deals.”
In other words, expect from Trump (who still is essentially an old-fashioned liberal Democrat) the same kind of horrible budget and political deals we been getting from the Republican leadership for the six years — doing nothing to stop the Democratic Party’s leftwing agenda.
Trump criticized Cruz for being “strident”, thus preventing him from compromising with the Washington leadership. To that I say, “Amen!,” and loudly. The time has come for some real stridency, not the verbal fake stridency of Trump, who sometimes sounds like a tough guy but in the end is going to endorse everything the Democrats have been pushing, albeit in a less radical way.
Once again, I must add, that should Trump be the Republican candidate, I will still vote for him. Trump is not the radical leftwing ideologue that is Sanders. Nor is he corrupt like Clinton. He will at least act to delay the worst leftwing policies, thus delaying the final collapse slightly. And delay is still good in this context, as it will give us an opportunity to right the ship later before it sinks.
Angara at Vostochny trimmed
Due to cuts in the Russian government’s ten-year plan for aerospace, the number of Angara launchpads at the new Vostochny spaceport has been slashed in half, with construction delayed as well.
On January 20, 2016, Roskosmos officials admitted that budget cuts at the end of 2015 required to drop plans to build one of the two launch pads for Angara rockets in Vostochny. Previously, the Russian space officials claimed that a dual launch complex for the Angara was absolutely necessary to support the four-launch scenario of the lunar expeditions relying on the Angara-5V rocket. The beginning of the construction of the remaining single pad was now delayed from 2016 to 2017.
Based on all the different reports I’ve read, they have also eliminated in the 10-year plan all lunar missions and the construction of a new space station. Essentially, their budget can only barely sustain what they are already doing. Like NASA, they have too large a labor force — jobs maintained for pork barrel reasons rather than actually accomplishing anything — that makes it impossible for them to afford anything new.
Orion: construction in slow motion
Today NASA announced completion of the welding of the next Orion capsule, a job that this story said took about three months to do 7 welds. The story also noted this:
After putting on the finished touches, NASA plans to ship the vehicle to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) aboard NASA’s Super Guppy airplane on or about Feb. 1. At KSC, engineers working inside the Neil Armstrong Operation and Checkout Building (O & C) will spend the next two years outfitting Orion for launch in late 2018 by installing all the systems and subsystems for its inaugural flight to the Moon and back.
Overall this is the third Orion capsule that NASA has built, following the Ground Test Article (GTA), which did not fly, and the EFT-1 capsule which successfully launched just over one year ago on Dec. 5, 2014. [emphasis mine]
Three months to do 7 welds. Two years to outfit a capsule. Wow! At that pace they might launch before the end of the century.
Seriously, this is an absurdly slow work pace, illustrating the wasteful nature of the SLS/Orion program. Orion’s budget these days is about $1 billion per year, with a total cost expected to reach $17 billion by the time the fourth capsule is built and launched in 2023, for a project first proposed in 2004.
In other words, it will take NASA and Lockheed Martin almost 20 years to build four capsules for the cost of $17 billion. That is absurd. Compare it to commercial space: The entire budget for all the commercial crew contracts, including both cargo contracts and the manned contract, is about half that, and will produce four different vehicles, all of which will be built and flying by 2019 at the latest. And in the case of Dragon and Cygnus, more than a dozen capsules have already flown.
Is there no one in Washington with the brain power to read these numbers and come to a rational decision about SLS/Orion? It costs too much and isn’t getting us into space. Moreover, at its pace and cost it isn’t doing anything to help the American aerospace industry. Better for Congress to put money into other things, or save it entirely and reduce the deficit and thus not waste it on this pork barrel garbage.
Unfortunately, our elected officials today not only don’t have brains, too many of them are downright corrupt. They prefer to bankrupt the nation for their own petty gain rather than do things that might help the nation grow.
Video of Dragon/SuperDraco engine test
The competition heats up: SpaceX today released a video of a five second test they did in November of the SuperDraco thrusters attached to their Dragon capsule.
I have embedded the video below the fold. This test, which took place on a test stand with the capsule hanging from a crane cable, was part of their work to develop a launch abort capability for the manned version of Dragon. The thrusters will also be used eventually to make possible vertical land landings of the capsule.
» Read more
Thursday’s Batchelor podcast
Below the fold is Thursday’s Batchelor podcast. This time the focus was mostly on science, including a discussion of the data tampering of climate data that I think is going on in NOAA and NASA.
» Read more
FAA flight restrictions suggest upcoming New Shepard flight
The competition heats up: New temporary FAA flight restrictions scheduled for January 22 and 23 in the area where Blue Origin does its test flights suggest that the company is about to do another New Shepard test.
It is likely that they will re-fly the booster that they successfully landed in their November 23 flight.