Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Russia tonight successfully used its Soyuz-2 rocket to launch a new Progress freighter to ISS, lifting off from its Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
57 SpaceX
36 China
12 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India
In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 65 to 36. It also leads the entire world combined, 65 to 59. SpaceX by itself is still in a neck-in-neck race with the rest of the world (excluding American companies), now trailing 57 to 59 in successful launches.
An evening pause: Some automotive racecar history from before WWII, showing cars then capable of going more than 250 miles per hour.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Here we go again! When the first panic over COVID arrived in 2020 and government thugs and their leftist minions in the culture began demanding that everyone wear a mask, I wrote the following:
It apparently has not been enough that they have successfully destroyed a thriving economy, put millions out of work, destroyed the airline, entertainment, sports, and restaurant industries, over a disease that, at best is nothing more than a slight blip in the overall death rate, and at worst will be comparable to similar past epidemics that we lived through without government-imposed panic or economic disaster.
No, destroying millions of lives has not been enough. They need to do more. They need to find more ways to squelch our freedom, nullify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and, to paraphrase Orwell, stamp a boot down on our faces, forever.
And in this case, they mean to do this, almost literally.
They are now beginning to demand that we wear masks at all times in public, in the mindless and stupid belief that this will somehow stop COVID-19 from spreading.
I also declared unequivocally that I would not wear a mask, “and if you demand it of me you will have a revolution on your hands.”
» Read more
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
My heart be still!
Scheduled for August 24, 2023 at 11:30 am New Zealand time, which is equivalent to 7:30 pm (Eastern) on August 23, 2023.
Interesting but also unintentionally hilarious, as the company posted this yesterday, but that assembly line has been shut down for weeks and the company is no longer focused on building rockets.
These images were taken after Vikram separated from its propulsion unit, and demonstrated that it could orient itself accurately and the camera was working.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as “The tip of Cerberus Fossae,” a thousand-mile-long crack in the surface of Mars formed when the ground was pulled apart by underground forces.
If you look closely at the picture’s right edge, you can see that beyond the end of the fissure it actually continues but appears filled with material. In the full picture this however is the end of the crack. Beyond this point the ground is as smooth and as generally featureless as seen within the picture itself, and as also shown in this MRO context camera view of the same area.
Cerberus Fossae is actually three parallel cracks, with this the northernmost one. The eastern tip of the middle crack was previously highlighted in a cool image in July 2022.
» Read more
A private spaceport proposed for the desert west of Las Vegas has signed a deal with launch startup company to wants to use a 747 to launch reusable rockets.
Robert Lauer, director of Las Vegas Spaceport, announced a partnership with O-G Launch, a company headed by Robert Feierbach. Feierbach’s company aims to be a part of the commercial space industry by launching satellites from recyclable rockets deployed from large jets.
Terms of the partnership were not disclosed, but it is expected that companies seeking to deploy satellites would use O-G Launch aircraft starting from the Las Vegas Spaceport to launch a satellite-bearing rocket from 40,000 feet.
To put it mildly, this project is hardly a spaceport. It is planned as a casino, a resort, and a flight school with a runway. O-G helps give it the appearance of a spaceport by allowing it to claim orbital launches will take place there. Whether O-G ever takes off is another thing entirely. Its presence as part of the project, however, provides great PR for attracting customers to the proposed resort/casino.
Sierra Space announced yesterday that — as part of its private space station module dubbed LIFE — it is partnering with Redwire to install a commercial biotech lab in the module.
The hardware includes equipment that Redwire has previously developed for the International Space Station, such as the Advanced Space Experiment Processor, which hosts biotech experiments. A particular focus will be on crystallization experiments, using the microgravity environment to grow larger crystals that can then be studied to determine their structure for pharmaceutical applications.
The companies did not disclose terms of the contract other than that Redwire will start delivering hardware in the fourth quarter of this year. Gold said that the companies will also partner on business development to identify customers for using the experiment platform.
The target date for the launch of LIFE is presently 2026, though it was not revealed when Redwire’s equipment would be installed.
What struck me about this deal is the shrinking mention of Blue Origin. Originally that company was listed as one of the major players in building this private space station, dubbed Orbital Reef, in which LIFE is only the first module. In the past year however its participation seems less and less significant in every subsequent press release. It appears to still be part of the project, but it is Sierra Space that is leading the effort, and appears to be making things happen.
But then, the track record of Blue Origin is to not make things happen. It could very well be that events are once again overtaking it. Sierra Space can’t wait for Blue Origin to slowly get its act together. It is finding ways to get things done, even if that means Blue Origin gets left behind.
Capitalism in space: In what is a landmark deal indicating the complete shift by the military from building its own satellites to letting private enterprise do it, the Space Development Agency (SDA) of the Space Force yesterday announced it has awarded Lockeheed Martin and Northrop Grumman each a contract to build and operate 36 satellites.
The 72 satellites will make up a portion of SDA’s network known as Tranche 2 Transport Layer. SDA is building a large constellation called the proliferated warfighter space architecture that includes a Transport Layer of interconnected communications satellites and a Tracking Layer of missile-detection and warning sensor satellites. Northrop Grumman’s contract for 36 satellites is worth approximately $733 million. The agreement with Lockheed Martin, also for 36 satellites, is worth $816 million, SDA said.
What makes this contract different than previous military satellite contracts is that the military will do relatively little design. It has released the basic specifications, and is asking private enterprise to do the work for it. It is a customer, not a builder. When the military attempted its own design and construction, the job would take sometimes a decade or more, cost many billions (with cost overruns), and often failed. This new constellation is targeting a 2026 launch, only two years from now.
The constellation will also be more robust than the gold-plated giant satellites the military would build previously. Rather than rely on a single do-it-all satellite which is easy to take out, the constellation has many satellites, and can easily compensate if one or even a few are damaged or destroyed.
This shift was one of the fundamental reasons the military wanted to create a separate Space Force. As part of the Air Force the office politics within that branch of the military had been impossible to make this shift. Too many managers in the Air Force liked building big gold-plated satellites. Once the Space Force took over those managers were taken out of the equation.
Russian engineers have pinpointed the approximate crash site of Luna-25 on the Moon as the 42-mile-wide crater Pontecoulant G, located at about 59 degrees south latitude, 66 east longitude.
Researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics have simulated the trajectory of the Luna-25 mission, figuring out where and when it crashed into the moon’s surface, the institute said in a statement on Telegram. “The mathematical modeling of the trajectory of the Luna-25 spacecraft, carried out by experts from the Ballistic Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, made it possible to determine the time and place of its collision with the moon,” the statement reads.
According to the institute, the spacecraft fell into the 42-kilometer Pontecoulant G crater in the southern hemisphere of the moon at 2:58 p.m. Moscow time on August 19.
The planned landing site, in Boguslawsky Crater at 73 degrees south latitude and 43 degrees east longitude, was many miles away.
Using a Falcon 9 rocket with a first stage making its 15th flight, SpaceX early this morning launched 21 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage landed successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific. SpaceX now has two first stages that have flown 16 times, and one that has flown 15 times. Those 47 flights like reduced the launch cost of those launches by about 70%. Since no other rocket company can do this, SpaceX can pocket the profits since it isn’t forced to lower prices as much as it would if it had some real competition.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
57 SpaceX
36 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India
In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 65 to 36. It also leads the entire world combined, 65 to 58. SpaceX by itself remains in a neck-in-neck race with the rest of the world (excluding American companies), trailing 57 to 58 in successful launches.
I have two long radio appearances tomorrow, for those who prefer the audio format.
First, the second part of the long interview I did with Robert Pratt will be aired on Pratt on Texas at 5pm (Central). You can listen to the live stream here. The topic was blacklisting and the ugly desire of the left in the U.S. to silence debate and squelch its opposition through the use of force.
Second, I will make another appearance on the Space Show with David Livingston. The show will begin at 7 pm (Pacific), and will almost certainly last more than the planned 90 minutes. The live stream can be found here. Please consider calling in with your questions and comments. They are truly appreciated, and help make for a more lively show.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
The launch is scheduled for 6:08 pm (Pacific) on August 23, 2023.
Many of these systems I suspect will be taken over by India’s private commercial space sector as it slowly takes over the space business from ISRO.
This startup is only one example of the India’s commercial space sector that is beginning to pick up steam.
The launch is scheduled for 3:49 am (Eastern) on August 25, 2023. It is the first in SpaceX’s extended contract with NASA, and is likely one that either Boeing would have gotten or would have split with SpaceX if Starliner was flying. No Starliner, and SpaceX gets all the money.
When the table of contents of the most recent issue of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Geophysical Research Letters was released on August 16, 2023, I could not help noticing it contained a string of papers repeatedly showing that the models used to prove the coming fire of global warming continue to remain untrustworthy and unreliable. All of the following papers indicated biases and uncertainties of both climate models as well as the data they used, and each did so in their titles:
All of these papers considered the models valid for future research, and were instead focused on refining and increasing the accuracy of the models. All however showed once again how little we should trust these models.
What makes the publication of these papers significant is that it was the AGU that published them, even though the AGU has a decidedly biased editorial policy in favor of global warming. Despite the AGU’s insistence that “realistic and continually improving computer simulations of the global climate predict that global temperatures will continue to rise as a result of past and future greenhouse gas emissions,” it still cannot avoid publishing papers that repeatedly disprove that conclusion.
» Read more
The assembly sequence for Axiom’s space station while attached to ISS.
Click for original image.
Axiom announced today that in its most recent round of funding it raised an additional $350 million in private investment capital, almost tripling the private capital it has obtained in total.
Axiom Space announced today that it secured $350 million in its Series-C round of growth funding, lifting the total funds raised to over $505 million from investors and achieving more than $2.2 billion in customer contracts.
To date, Aljazira Capital and Boryung Co., Ltd., have anchored the round, paired with support from an array of diverse backers that include deep-tech venture capital funds and strategic brand partners, positioning Axiom Space as second to SpaceX for the most amount of money raised by a private space company in 2023, based on available pitchbook data.
The press release also reaffirms the company’s planned schedule for its space station project, with the first module launching and attaching to ISS in 2026. The graphic shows the assembly sequence, with the rear docking port the one linked to ISS. When assembly reaches the stage of the fourth image it will then be able to separate from ISS and fly independently in 2031. That last number however is one year later than NASA’s previous predictions for the retirement of ISS, suggesting Axiom knows something NASA has not yet told us.
Hat tip to Jay, BtB’s stringer.
Click for original image.
Of all many cool images I’ve posted, today might take the cake (pun intended) for the best illustration of the alien nature of Mars. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists simply label as “flow features.”
I personally don’t see any obvious flow features in the full image, unless one wants to call the brain terrain that covers this entire plain a flow feature. Brain terrain is a feature unique to Mars whose origin remains a mystery to geologists. As noted by scientists in captioned MRO image in 2019:
You are staring at one of the unsolved mysteries on Mars. This surface texture of interconnected ridges and troughs, referred to as “brain terrain” is found throughout the mid-latitude regions of Mars.
…This bizarrely textured terrain may be directly related to the water-ice that lies beneath the surface. One hypothesis is that when the buried water-ice sublimates (changes from a solid to a gas), it forms the troughs in the ice. The formation of these features might be an active process that is slowly occurring since HiRISE [MRO’s high resolution camera] has yet to detect significant changes in these terrains.
The wedding cake inside the small crater to the upper right only adds to the alienness of this terrain.
» Read more
Click for interactive map.
After separating from its Chandrayaan-3 propulsion module on August 17, 2023, India’s Vikram lunar lander has been slowly making orbital adjustments in preparation for its landing attempt on August 23rd.
I have embedded the live stream of that landing attempt below. As it is scheduled for 6:04 pm (India time), in India, in the U.S. that landing will occur in the early morning hours of August 23rd.
Following the failed crash on the Moon of Russia’s lunar lander Luna-25 yesterday, this landing attempt is likely to garner a lot more interest. It is also India’s second attempt, having failed in 2019 when its Vikram lander ran out of fuel before landing and crashed.
» Read more
China yesterday used its Long March 4C rocket to put what that country’s state-run press calls an “Earth observation satellite” into orbit, lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the interior.
No word on whether the rocket’s first stage crash landed near habitable areas, as China’s disposable first stages often do.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
56 SpaceX
36 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India
American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 64 to 36 in the national rankings, while the entire world combined 64 to 58. SpaceX alone now trails the entire world (excluding American companies) 56 to 58.
During its last major orbital burn, Luna-25’s engines apparently fired for longer than planned so that, instead of placing it into a lower orbit, the spacecraft was de-orbited and sent crashing onto the lunar surface.
The Russian space agency noted that all measures regarding the location of the spacecraft and establishing communications with it on August 19 and 20 yielded zero results. “Preliminary analysis results suggest that a deviation between the actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion maneuver led the Luna-25 spacecraft to enter an undesignated orbit and it ceased to exist following a collision with the surface of the Moon,” Roscosmos stated.
This is a tragedy for Russia, as this mission hoped to re-establish it as one of the major players in the exploration of the solar system. Instead, we once again have a data point suggesting significant quality control problems within Russia’s aerospace industry. Its misplaced focus on providing government jobs rather than actually building and quickly flying spacecraft and rockets results too often in failure.
Though it is in lunar orbit, Russia’s Luna-25 lander today was unable to perform an engine burn as planned to place it in its final orbit for landing.
“Today, in accordance with the flight program of the Luna-25 probe, at 2:10 p.m. Moscow time, a command was issued to the probe to enter the pre-landing orbit. During the operation an emergency occurred on the space probe that did not allow it to perform the maneuver in accordance with the required parameters,” Roscosmos said.
Engineers are analyzing the issue, but no other information was released.
This issue could simply be the spacecraft’s computer aborted the engine burn because it sensed something not right, and that after some correction another burn can follow later. Under this circumstance the landing attempt would simply be delayed.
It is also possible something happened during that engine burn, and the spacecraft is either in an incorrect orbit, or might even be lost entirely. Stay tuned.
A attack by hackers against the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii on August 1, 2023 has forced the National Science Foundation (NSF) to shut down all the telescopes it operates.
NOIRLab, the NSF-run coordinating center for ground-based astronomy, first announced the detection of an apparent cyberattack on its Gemini North telescope in Hilo, Hawaii, in a 1 August press release. Whatever happened may have placed the instrument in physical jeopardy. “Quick reactions by the NOIRLab cyber security team and observing teams prevented damage to the observatory,” the center’s release said.
In response to the incident, NOIRLab powered down all operations at the International Gemini Observatory, which runs the Hilo telescope and its twin, Gemini South, on Cerro Pachón mountain in Chile. (The latter was already offline for a planned outage.) Together, the two 8.1-meter telescopes have revealed vast swaths of celestial wonders—from the birth of supernovae to the closest known black hole to Earth.
Normally, NOIRLab’s computer systems let astronomers remotely operate a variety of other optical ground-based telescopes. But on 9 August the center announced it had also disconnected its computer network from the Mid-Scale Observatories (MSO) network on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachon in Chile. This action additionally made remote observations impossible at the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter and SOAR telescopes. NOIRLab has stopped observations at eight other affiliated telescopes in Chile as well.
The attack has shut down ten telescopes entirely, some of which are the largest in the world, while other telescopes are operating but only allowing in-person operations.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
An evening pause: None of course were ever built. Most were government concepts that would have cost a fortune and never considered profit as a motive. The last concept is the wildest, and uses exploding nuclear bombs to propel it.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
Today’s essay will in a sense be part two of an essay I wrote earlier this week, entitled “We are becoming a nation of barbarians”. Then, I tried to show the decay in the western civilization by describing the accepted — almost encouraged — crudeness of modern language. While public cursing could easily be consider only a small and trivial issue, I think the increased use of obscene language in normal discourse is equivalent to the “broken windows theory” of psychology, which posits that minor visible signs of disorder and misbehavior encourage further and worse disorder and misbehavior, eventually leading to collapse.
Today I’d like to instead give some examples of the much more civilized nature of popular entertainment from only a half century ago, in order to contrast this with the present. To do this I will cite just four movie examples, and challenge everyone today who is a passionate fan of modern films to watch them (all of which are available for free on the internet) and recognize the differences that I will describe. If you like movies, you will enjoy the experience, but I warn you, modern popular entertainment films do not compare well with these mid-twentieth century pop movies.
» Read more
Click for original image.
While the images being sent to us from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) repeatedly show features that appear convincingly like glaciers, the data is also beginning to tantalize us with evidence of the endless glacial cycles that have occurred on Mars.
The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 27, 2023 by MRO’s high resolution camera. The red dot in the inset of the overview map above shows the location, the western flanks of an apron that surrounds a 3,800-foot-high mesa in the chaos region Deuteronilus Mensae, the western end of the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip of chaos regions I dub glacier country, because every image seems to show some form of glacial feature.
Today’s picture is no different. The apron shown here drops the last 1,000 feet of the mesa’s total 3,800-foot height, during which it shows dozens of what the scientists label “parallel lines.” These lines likely reveal the layers of glacial ice in this apron, with the older layers larger and more extensive. Apparently, with each growth cycle the glacier obtained less snow from the atmosphere, so the more recent layers grew less.
In other words, the amount of water on Mars has been declining with time.
Untangling these numerous layers will undoubtedly give us a remarkably detailed history of Mars entire geological history. Unfortunately, that untangling cannot happen until we have boots on the ground, on Mars, able to drill core samples from many different places.
In a short statement reported in the local Shetland press, the under-construction Saxavord spaceport in Scotland has apparently laid off some construction workers, claiming it has done so “because the project was so far ahead of schedule.”
The statement however also alluded to the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which must issue a launch license before any launches can occur.
SaxaVord Spaceport said: “SaxaVord continues to have excellent dialogue with the authorities and is fully expecting to receiving its spaceport licence very soon from the Civil Aviation Authority. We are looking forward to hosting vertical rocket launches in the coming months.”
The application for this launch license was submitted in November 2022. It appears that the CAA still needs a year or more to approve any launch license, a slow and endless process that if not corrected will make launches from the United Kingdom completely unprofitable.
Saxavord had hoped to get its first launch off this year, by fall. It now appears that will not happen.
The red dot marks ELA’s location, on the north coast of Australia.
Australia’s first commercial spaceport, Equatorial Launch Australia (ELA), has signed a multi-launch contract with a South Korean startup rocket company, Innospace, with the first launch targeting April 2025.
Though Innospace successfully launched a suborbital test flight in March, it has not yet launched a rocket to orbit. Meanwhile, ELA is negotiating with a number of other rocket companies, but it also appears it is having problems with the administrative state in the U.S.
The South Korean company is first off the blocks as it is not subject to the strict technological transfer regulations applied by the United States.
[ELA’s CEO Michael] Jones says delays to the signing of a Technological Safeguards Agreement (TSA) between Canberra and Washington is holding up several potential US customers. “We’re still waiting with bated breath for the TSA, despite a bilateral announcement by Biden and Albanese in Japan in early June that the deal was done and dusted,” he explains. “We were all expecting it to be released by the end of the financial year and the process of being endorsed by Parliament begun”.
A pattern of delay and intransigence in Washington, blocking commercial space, does seem to be developing since Joe Biden took over as president.
Click for interactive map. Zeeman is located on the lower left.
Russia’s state-run press today issued the first picture taken by Luna-25 after entering lunar orbit two days ago. That picture, to the right and cropped and reoriented to post here, shows part of Zeeman Crater at 75 degrees south latitude and 135 degrees west, on the far side of the Moon. From the TASS announcement:
“The Luna-25 spacecraft, flying in a circular orbit as the Moon’s artificial satellite, has taken pictures of the lunar surface with television cameras of the STS-L system. The image, taken today at 08:23 Moscow time, shows the southern polar crater Zeeman on the far side of the Moon. The coordinates of the crater center are 75 degrees south and 135 degrees west,” the state corporation said. Roscosmos said the Zeeman crater is of great interest to researchers. Its rim rises eight kilometers above its relatively flat floor.
The picture shows Zeeman’s southern rim to the left, with its pockmarked crater floor to the right. The crater the lander is targeting, Broguslawsky Crater, sits in the opposite hemisphere of Zeeman, slightly closer to the south pole but on the Moon’s near side.
I appeared today for about 45 minutes with Robert Pratt as part of his Pratt on Texas podcast, discussing a whole range of blacklists stories with him. We also talked about my most recent book, Conscious Choice, which if you are a fan of my work and have not yet read it you need to buy it now! No more delays or procrastination! You have your orders.
This is part one of a two part interview, the second half of which Pratt plans to post this coming week.
That podcast is embedded below. It can also be listened to here.
» Read more
