The competition heats up: An Air Force official today said that, based on its ongoing experience with SpaceX during the investigation of its September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion, they do not expect any change in SpaceX’s certification that allows it to bid on Air Force satellite contracts.
The Air Force official also noted that the damage to the launchpad was “moderate” and was “definitely repairable.”
The competition heats up: ULA today announced a new system for shortening the time from a customer’s initial launch contract to the actual launch of their payload.
The priorities of all of our customers include ensuring their spacecraft launches on schedule, securing the soonest possible manifest date and completing the mission with 100 percent success,” said Tory Bruno, ULA CEO and president. “To address these priorities, we have been working on this offering for more than a year, which allows our customers to launch in as few as three months from placing their order.”
It is very clear that this new system was inspired by the competition with SpaceX. It is also pretty obvious that they are making the announcement now in the hope they can grab some of SpaceX’s customers who are once again faced with delays because of the September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion. It is also likely that SpaceX is pushing to get its next launch off by November in an effort to beat back ULA’s effort here.
Ain’t competition wonderful? It is so good, it will even get us to the stars.
The competition heats up: Despite the admitted difficulty of its investigation into its September 1 Falcon 9 launchpad explosion, SpaceX today said that they are aiming to resume launches as soon as November.
“We’re anticipating getting back to flight — being down for about three months — and getting back to flight in the November time frame,” Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said Tuesday at an event in Paris. “We’ll obviously take another look at the rocket, focus on the ground systems.”
They have not said yet what payload they will launch, though it is clear that first launch will not be the Falcon Heavy demo launch, which has now been rescheduled for the 1st quarter fo 2017.
The uncertainty of science: The Gaia science team today released the space telescope’s first results, providing precise location data for more than a billion stars.
The indication from this catalog that the Milky Way is larger than previously measured is really only the start. Astronomers will now use it to quantify a lot of other work.
Because of a software issue, since last night I have been unable to access my webpage and could therefore not post anything new. In addition, one commenter emailed me to say he was having troubles posting as well.
Shane at amixa has finally fixed the problem. Expect a lot of posts in the next hour.
Embedded below the fold. Tonight was a special double podcast, lasting almost 40 minutes. The first segment looks at the September 1 SpaceX launchpad situation, the second segment looks at Blue Origin and its new proposed rocket, the third segment looks at the state of Virgin Galactic and the Russian space industry as well as the Mars rovers, and the last segment looks at Mars, the Moon, earthquakes, and the coming end of Rosetta.
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Finding out what’s in it: A new GAO investigation has found that, like its previous reports in 2014 and 2015, it is remarkably easy for fictitious applicants to get approved for both Obamacare and the large subsidizes that go with it.
Our undercover testing for the 2016 coverage year found that the eligibility determination and enrollment processes of the federal and state marketplaces we reviewed remain vulnerable to fraud, as we previously reported for the 2014 and 2015 coverage years. For each of our 15 fictitious applications, the marketplaces approved coverage, including for 6 fictitious applicants who had previously obtained subsidized coverage but did not file the required federal income-tax returns. Although IRS provides information to marketplaces on whether health-care applicants have filed required returns, the federal Marketplace and our selected state marketplace allowed applicants to instead attest that they had filed returns, saying the IRS information was not sufficiently current. The marketplaces we reviewed also relaxed documentation standards or extended deadlines for filing required documentation. After initial approval, all but one of our fictitious enrollees maintained subsidized coverage, even though we sent fictitious documents, or no documents, to resolve application inconsistencies. [emphasis in original]
This report is actually less a condemnation of Obamacare and more a condemnation of the completely incompetent and failed state of the entire federal bureaucracy. They can’t get this job right, but in truth, they pretty much can’t get any job right.
Obviously, we should therefore do what the Democrats propose and give the federal government and its bureaucracy more power and responsibility. That will surely fix things!
An evening pause: Performed by the Boston Pops orchestra.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime. As Phil noted to me, “The audience seems to love it.” I think many of them had seen the film, and when they heard that first note couldn’t help feeling a deep down bit of squeamish nervousness about what it signified.
Finding out what’s in it: New Jersey’s Obamacare co-op has been taken over by the state and will fold in 2017.
As noted at the link, “that leaves just six of the original 23 Obamacare co-ops in operation next year.”
In other words, Obamacare is steadily going bankrupt, and in the process it is bankrupting the health insurance business. Before the law, it was possible for individuals to buy at a somewhat reasonable price a catastrophic insurance plan that would cover you in case of disaster but required you to pay for most of your routine health care costs. Obamacare outlawed those plans (obviously, someone was lying when he said you could keep your plan if you liked it). The result however is that everyone is forced to buy at very unreasonable prices the equivalent of those same plans, since both premiums and deductibles have risen so much that everyone now has to pay for routine health care costs.
Obviously, this means we should all vote for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, because they more than anyone else know how to solve the problem they created. Obviously, voting for the Republicans, who predicted this disaster in great detail and with remarkable accuracy, would be a mistake, a clear demonstration of racism or something. And we wouldn’t want to be called racist by Democrats, would we?
I have decided to continue my Mars rover updates, and make them a regular mid-week feature here on Behind the Black. This is the first.
For the overall context of Curiosity’s travels, see this post, Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater.
Since my last updates here and here, Curiosity has moved south through the gap between buttes to exit the Murray Butte area. The initial slopes of Mount Sharp lie ahead, an open road with no apparent rough terrain to slow travel.
Doing science however does slow travel, and for good reason. Once through the gap the science team decided to swung the rover west and up against the base of the gap’s western butte, rather than immediately head south to climb the mountain. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image below, cropped and reduced, illustrates this path.
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In the heat of competition: Doug Messier has written an excellent essay today raising some serious questions about SpaceX and its methods of operation.
The issues he raises go the heart of the company’s future. Moreover, he notes the unusual nature of the September 1 launchpad explosion that, unless explained, threatens the company business model.
The rarity of a satellite launch vehicle exploding during fueling had people racking their brains and scouring the Internet to find out the last time something like this happened. At least in the United States, that turned out to be more than 50 years ago when rocketry was in its infancy and accidents were much more frequent.
The lack of any modern precedents and the speed of the accident — Musk tweeted that engineers were reviewing around 3,000 channels of telemetry and video data that cover only 35-55 milliseconds — are making the investigation challenging. Musk has said it is the most difficult of the six failure investigations the company has conducted since it was founded in 2002.
Messier also takes a close look at SpaceX’s overall approach to innovation and development, and notes its unusual and somewhat risky nature.
Read it all. It provides valuable information for anyone who wants to understand honestly the state of the American launch industry.
The competition heats up: Virgin Galactic on Monday announced that it has signed a four-launch contract with Sky and Space Global, using its LauncherOne smallsat air-launched rocket.
They hope to launch by 2018. I’ll make a prediction: LauncherOne will complete its first commercial launch before SpaceShipOne.
