Year: 2022

SpaceX aiming to launch 52 times in 2022

9:31 am

According to NASA officials, SpaceX is hoping to complete as many as 52 launches in 2022, a pace of one launch per week.

The impressive figure was given during a virtual meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, or ASAP, which gives guidance to the space agency on how to maintain safety within its biggest programs. “NASA and SpaceX will have to be watchful during 2022 that they’re not victims of their success,” Sandy Magnus, a former NASA astronaut and member of the panel, said during the meeting. “There’s an ambitious 52-launch manifest for SpaceX over the course of the year. And that’s an incredible pace.”

Based on other sources, I had previously estimated a SpaceX manifest for ’22 to be 40 launches. That this new higher number comes from NASA’s corrupt safety panel, and was touted as a reason to raise questions about SpaceX, makes me suspicious of it.

Still, a launch pace by SpaceX of one launch per week is wholly possible. For one thing, the company needs to get a lot of Starlink satellites into orbit as quickly as possible. With its development of Starship blocked by government interference, it might have decided to up the pace of launches using Falcon 9.

Furthermore, because most of the rocket is reused, SpaceX has a far greater launch capacity. For every Falcon 9 it builds it gets ten or more launches from its first stage. This means SpaceX does not have to build as much to maintain a high launch pace.

As for the safety panel’s fears about such a pace, who cares? That safety panel has been consistently wrong about everything it has said about SpaceX and commercial space now for almost a decade. It is very likely wrong now. In a more rational world, NASA would have shut it down two years ago for doing such a bad job. Sadly, we no longer live in a rational world.

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A Chinese space plane?

9:17 am

One of China’s pseudo-companies, named Space Transportation, has now announced that it plans to build and launch a fully reusable suborbital space plane to be used for both space tourism and point-to-point transportation, with the first flight targeted for ’24.

Space Transportation announced last August that it had raised $46.3 million for its hypersonic space plane plans, and the company has recently been conducting a number of tests of its Tianxing 1 and Tianxing 2 vehicles. A 10th flight test was conducted on Jan. 23, followed by another test in collaboration with a combustion laboratory belonging to Tsinghua University.

Details about these test flight activities have been limited, possibly due to the sensitive nature of hypersonic-related technologies.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), China’s main space contractor, in 2020 and 2021 conducted highly secretive launch tests of suborbital and orbital vehicles from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center as part of a space plane development program. [emphasis mine]

It could very well be that the so-called Chinese super duper hypersonic military test flights that various anonymous and public officials in the U.S. military have claimed took place in the past few years were merely these ground tests by Space Transportation, ginned up to appear more dangerous and threatening.

If so, this fear-mongering by the American military community is somewhat shameful and dishonest, and in the long run is not the right way to go about its business. Their exaggeration of the threat leads to skepticism, which actually makes it more difficult to get their own hypersonic program funded.

Today’s story however is important. We must recognize that this attempt by China to apply hypersonic technology to commercial transportation applications is quite smart, and can eventually be dangerous to us. It will help stimulate development, which can then be applied to military applications.

It is also one of the rare times China has taken the lead in innovation. Except for one British rocket startup, as far as I know no western company is trying to develop hypersonic concepts for commercial purposes.

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ABL test explosion to delay 1st launch three months

2:36 pm

Capitalism in space: An explosion last week during a static fire test of the upper stage engine of ABL Space’s RS1 rocket test explosion will delay that rocket’s first launch by three months, according to company officials.

The incident took place in the seventh in a series of hot-fire tests of the stage in Mojave. The overall test campaign started in December with a series of fill-and-drain, cold flow and ignition tests, followed by the hot-fire tests. Piemont said that, at the time of the anomaly, at least five more tests were planned before the company completed the test campaign.

That upper stage was being tested ahead of the first RS1 launch from Kodiak Island, Alaska. “After some final engine design changes were identified last summer, we set an aggressive schedule to try to launch by the end of 2021,” Piemont said. “Our schedule slipped a bit in past few months, but our programs were converging towards a launch from Kodiak in February.”

It now appears the RS1 will not launch any earlier than May.

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Pushback: Blacklisted doctors opposed to present Biden/CDC/FDA policies testify to Congress

12:55 pm

Do not comply: A large group of highly qualified doctors and nurses, almost all of whom have been blacklisted, fired, suspended, or prevented from treating patients simply because either they opposed the COVID shot mandates or wished to treat their patients as they saw fit, testified on January 24, 2022 in Congress, describing in horrible detail the many times they were forced to watch as their patients died because their hospitals had forbidden them from providing the treatments they knew would work.

Below is a 38 minute-long video showing the most dramatic testimony during the five hour hearing. If you want to watch the full hearing, go here.
» Read more

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Scientists: Liquid surface water might have existed on Mars as recently as 2.3 billion years ago

10:00 am

Map showing locations of salt deposits
Click for full image.

Using orbital data from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), scientists have found salt deposits on Mars where nearby crater counts suggest that the salt water that once held these deposits could have evaporated away as recently as 2.3 billion years ago.

Using [MRO’s] cameras to create digital elevation maps, Leask and Ehlmann found that many of the salts were in depressions – once home to shallow ponds – on gently sloping volcanic plains. The scientists also found winding, dry channels nearby – former streams that once fed surface runoff (from the occasional melting of ice or permafrost) into these ponds. Crater counting and evidence of salts on top of volcanic terrain allowed them to date the deposits.

Past data has suggested that if liquid surface water had existed on Mars, it was gone by three billion years ago.

You can read the scientists’ research paper here.. The maps to the right, figure two from the paper, shows the locations of discovered salt deposits, almost all of which are in the Martian southern cratered highlands of Mars.

Is there uncertainty in these results? My regular readers know that the answer is of course yes. The biggest problem for these Mars researchers is that, despite the surface evidence that liquid water should have once flowed on the surface of Mars, no scientist has yet come up with a satisfactory model of Mars’ past climate that would have made that possible. The planet was either too cold or had too thin an atmosphere, based on other data. And getting it warmer or with a thicker atmosphere involves inventing any number of scenarios that are all questionable, based on what is presently known.

There is also the increasing evidence that glaciers of ice, not water, might have carved those winding, dry channels. If so, many of the assumptions that liquid water existed might simply be wrong, or incomplete. The scientists who wrote this report recognize this importance of ice on Mars, and note in their abstract that

…we think that the water source came from surface runoff, rather than deep groundwater welling up to the surface. The small amounts of water required are most likely from occasional melting of ice.

As always, more data is needed, with the most useful data that will clarify these conclusions being that gathered by future colonists on the surface of Mars itself.

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Russia schedules July 23rd for launch of its first unmanned lunar lander in decades

9:37 am

The new colonial movement: The Russia design bureau that is building Luna-25, Russia’s first unmanned lunar lander since the 1970s, has announced that it is targeting July 23, 2022 for launch.

The lunar mission will be launched atop a Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with a Fregat booster from the Vostochny spaceport in the Russian Far East. Under the lunar project, the Luna-25 automatic station will be launched for studies in the area of the lunar south pole. The lander is set to touch down in the area of the Boguslawsky crater.

Boguslawsky crater is about 125 miles from the nearest known permanently shadowed craters, and about 250 miles north of the south pole. It is thus not landing in what is presently thought to be the most valuable real estate on the Moon because of the possible presence of water ice, though there might be other resources at Boguslawsky that interest the Russians.

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New Arianespace Vega-C rocket being prepared for first launch in April

9:22 am

Engineers in French Guiana are now preparing all the components of the first Vega-C rocket, built by the Italian company Avio, for its first launch in April.

Vega-C is an upgraded version of the Vega rocket and is currently set to launch no earlier than April 2022. The rocket will feature improved first and second stage solid rocket motors, an upgraded liquid-fueled AVUM+ upper stage, and usher in an era of propulsion system commonality between the Vega and Ariane rocket lines.

At the moment they are modifying the Vega launchpad and building a new mission control center. Once completed in March they will stack the rocket.

Vega-C, like its predecessor, is powered by solid rockets, which Avio believes can be competitive with reusable rockets, at least for the next decade or so. Arianespace also hopes to lower costs by using the exact same solid rocket boosters on both Vega-C and its new Ariane 6 rocket. Vega-C’s first stage, using a P120C solid rocket motor, is also used as side boosters on Ariane 6.

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China tests space junk removal robot in geosynchronous orbit

9:08 am

China has apparently used a space junk removal robot to tug a defunct Chinese satellite out of geosynchronous orbit, thus opening that slot for future satellites.

Ground tracking by ExoAnalytic Solutions found that the robot, dubbed SJ-21, apparently docked with the defunct satellite on January 22nd. Since then:

In an email to Breaking Defense this afternoon, Flewelling [of ExoAnalytic] said the latest tracking data gathered earlier today from ExoAnalytic’s telescopes show the SJ-21 separating from the Compass G2, leaving the latter in the eccentric “super-graveyard drift orbit.” SJ-21 now has moved back to a near-GEO orbit.

The orbit places the defunct satellite in an orbit above the geosynchronous orbit satellites use, but in an orbit that is not typical.

This work is comparable to what the Japanese/American company Astroscale is presently testing in low Earth orbit, though it appears far more sophisticated. In fact, based on what SJ-21 has done so far, it appears China is far ahead of everyone else in developing in-orbit robotic servicing capabilities.

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Astroscale stops orbital capture demo after detecting “anomalous spacecraft conditions”

5:22 pm

Capitalism in space: Astroscale has halted an ambitious demonstration in-orbit of its magnetic capture technology when its engineers detected “anomalous spacecraft conditions.”

The demo involved a client satellite (posing as space junk) and a separate robot. Both were equipped with Astroscale’s magnetic capture device. A test in August had successfully separated the two units by a small distance, and then demonstrated that the magnetic capture device could grab the client satellite.

In the on-going but paused demo the robot was to separate, fly a distance away, and then use its autonomous programming to rendezvous with the client and then recapture it again. It successfully separated but that’s when the anomalies were detected. Engineers are now reviewing the data to see if they correct these issues and then proceed with the rest of the demo.

If successful Astroscale would demonstrate that their magnetic capture system works, thus giving them a strong selling point to have satellite companies buy it and install it on their satellites. Then, when the satellite was no longer needed Astroscale could send a robot up, capture it, and then de-orbit it safely.

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