June 27, 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold. After John and I finished interviewing Iridium CEO Matt Desch for 10 minutes, we then followed with our normal 20 minute podcast, covering the news for the last week.
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Year: 2017
June 27, 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast with Iridium CEO Matt Desch
Embedded below the fold. This podcast is a bit different, in that John and I essentially interviewed the CEO of Iridium, asking him questions about the company and their launch contracts with SpaceX. I was especially interested in Desch’s earlier statements saying that Iridium is negotiating with SpaceX about using used first stages, but wanted any use to be accompanied by an acceleration of its launch schedule.
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George Michael & Wham Careless Whisper
An evening pause: Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine still leads race with Aerojet Rocketdyne
Capitalism in space: An independent assessment of the development work being done by Blue Origin and Aeroject Rocketdyne on their competing rocket engines says that Blue Origin is still in the lead by two years, despite a testing incident in May.
The article also outlines how the present Air Force budget includes language that would prevent the Air Force from financing any part of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, other than the money presently being spent to subsidize Aeroject Rocketdyne’s AR-4 engine.
SpaceX to try another launch on Sunday
Capitalism in space: SpaceX is aiming for another launch on July 2 in Florida, only 9 days after their last launch there.
That will make three launches in nine days.
Meanwhile, in an interview on The Space Show with David Livingston, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell revealed that, after this year’s planned demo launch of the Falcon Heavy, they plan two commercial launches of the rocket in 2018.
That means the Falcon Heavy will have flown at least three times before SLS even comes close to its first test flight.
US military tests laser weapon fired from helicopter
Life imitates science fiction: The U.S. Army and Raytheon have successfully tested the use of a laser weapon, fired from an Apache helicopter.
The U.S. Army and Raytheon have completed a flight test of a high-energy laser system on an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter that was deemed successful, according to a Raytheon statement Monday.
The recent test at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, “marks the first time that a fully integrated laser system successfully engaged and fired on a target from a rotary-wing aircraft over a wide variety of flight regimes, altitudes and air speeds,” the company said. Raytheon said the test achieved all primary and secondary goals that show a high-energy laser, or HEL, on an attack helicopter can provide high-resolution, multiband targeting sensor performance and beam propagation.
I especially like the name they have given the system: HEL.
Orbital motion of a binary black hole detected for the first time
Astronomers have for the first time measured the orbital motion of two supermassive black holes that orbit each other.
Based on the initial data, the two black holes appear to orbit each other every 30,000 years. Eventually, they will spiral into each other, merge, and in the process produce ripples in the surrounding gravitational field that will be detectable by future gravitational wave detectors.
Luxembourg offers prizes for new space business proposals
Capitalism in space: Luxembourg yesterday announced that it will award two prizes, worth a total of 430,000 Euros, for new innovative space business ideas.
The call for submissions covers the full chain for exploiting space resources, from searching for minerals, mining and selling the processed product.The proposals should include a long-term view for developing space resources and be able to generate an economic return in the short and medium term.
The first award is a €400,000 prize to support a study under the Luxembourg national space program managed by the ESA. The second, for €30,000, is for early-stage projects and offers an investing campaign on www.spacestarters.com.
The ministry will support both award winners by offering workspace for the companies.
It sounds like they will entertain practically any ideas put forth. The deadline to submit is September 8, with the award announcement made in November.
Success of test mission paves way for orbiting gravitational wave detector
The success of LISA Pathfinder during the past year to test the technology for building an orbiting gravitational wave detector has now made it possible for Europe to approve construction of the full scale telescope, set to launch in the 2030s.
The LISA Pathfinder mission, launched in late 2015, beat its precision target by a factor of 1,000 and quieted critics who have doubted its potential, says project scientist Paul McNamara, an astrophysicist at ESA in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. “This is not the impossible task that some people believed it was.”
Currently set to fly in 2034, the full-scale Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be the space analogue of the Laser Interfero-meter Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), two machines in the United States — each with a pair of 4-kilometre-long arms — that first detected the ripples by ‘hearing’ the merger of two black holes. LISA’s three probes will fly in a triangle, millions of kilometres apart, making the mission sensitive to much longer gravitational waves, such as the ripples produced by the collisions of even larger black holes.
The article also notes that the European Space Agency also approved two other large missions, one to launch in 2022 and go the moons of Jupiter, another an X-ray observatory that will launch in 2028.
The academic community weighs in on Outer Space Treaty
Link here. They recognize the problem the Outer Space Treaty creates for property rights, but not surprisingly have trouble touching on the heart of the problem, that the treaty forbids the establishment of any nation’s laws on any territory in space.
Hertzfeld points out that the industry needs policies that address for-profit operations in space, particularly activities that will be managed or operated by the private sector. Until now, he says, most private sector activities have been narrow, but that could change as companies become more involved with satellites and in spaceflight. “How do you deal with property rights in space?” he said. “Ownership of these natural resources, mineral resources, up there? How do you deal with approaching satellites that are perhaps owned by someone else, particularly if it’s another nation’s satellite? How do you deal with debris that could cause accidents?”
“There are lots and lots of questions in how you do this internationally, because other nations are involved. These are the issues that are not clearly defined right now.”
Von der Dunk adds that there are still many countries that have no, or only a limited, national space law program. As a result, he says, in the implementation of the Outer Space Treaty, a divergence has grown that has led to gaps, inconsistencies and overlaps in domestic oversight. “Ideally, at the international level it would be good to have some form of harmonization at least of the approaches, noting that of course every sovereign state may have some individual idiosyncratic elements to deal with, but that idea has never moved beyond the stage of academic discussion,” von der Dunk said. “Sovereign states are not willing to comply with any serious effort to make this happen.”
I would love to know what “some form of harmonization” means.
Nonetheless, that this article was published in a major media outlet, which asked these academics about this issue, is once again evidence that people are finally recognizing the problems posed by the Outer Space Treaty, and are beginning to discuss ways for dealing with it.
Climate scientists once again claim ozone layer is threatened
Crying wolf! New research by climate scientists suggests that the Earth’s ozone layer is once again threatened by modern human technology.
Industrial emissions of a chemical commonly used in solvents, paint removers, and the production of pharmaceuticals have doubled in the past few years, researchers have found, which could slow the healing of the ozone layer over Antarctica anywhere between 5 and 30 years—or even longer if levels continue to rise.
The findings are “frightening” and “a big deal,” says Robyn Schofield, an environmental scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved with the work.
They might be right, but why should anyone believe them? The climate field has been spouting doomsday predictions about global warming and sea level rise now for more than 20 years, none of which have come true. As far as I can tell, this might be more of the same thing.
Worse, it might not, but by not being honest with so many other climate predictions the field has lost all political credibility, a great tragedy for them and for all of science. It will take decades, if ever, for them to recover that credibility.
Joe Bonamassa & Tina Guo – Woke Up Dreaming
A evening pause: Man, I get tired just watching them play.
Hat tip John Jossy.