Year: 2023

Stratolaunch’s Roc airplane completes another test flight

9:31 pm

Stratolaunch today announced that it has successfully completed the third capture-carry test using its giant Roc airplane, carrying an engineering test version of its Talon vehicle, designed to do hypersonic flight tests for the Air Force.

The flight was the tenth for the company’s launch platform Roc and marks the beginning of routine flight operations in Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Western Range off California’s central coast. The flight, which lasted a total of five hours, performed risk reduction by practicing a variety of separation profiles and confirming telemetry between Roc and Talon-A vehicles and Vandenberg Space Force Base’s communication assets, assuring that back-up telemetry data collection will occur during future flight tests.

Pending results of post-flight data analysis, the team will progress toward a separation test in the coming weeks, enabling the company to perform its first hypersonic flight in 2023.

There is a lot of potential test capability for Roc and Talon, not just with hypersonic missiles and aircraft. If Stratolaunch succeeds in fulfilling this Air Force contract, it will likely garner a good amount of additional business.

0 comments

Lunar rover startup signs deal to send rover to the Moon using Starship

9:25 pm

The lunar rover startup Astrolab has signed a deal with SpaceX to send its FLEX rover to the Moon’s south pole region using a lunar lander version of Starship.

Jaret Matthews, founder and chief executive of Astrolab, said in an interview that the mission, which will include 1,000 kilograms of customer payloads, will be the first flight of the FLEX rover. It will be a rideshare payload on a Starship mission landing somewhere in the south polar region of the moon.

“Because our rover can traverse up to a couple thousand kilometers in a given year, we’re less sensitive to exactly where we land,” he said. “’It is definitely optimized for the south polar region because that’s fundamentally where we think that the bulk of the activity is going to be.”

The company unveiled a full scale prototype of its rover one year ago, when it made it clear it intended to compete for the rover contract in NASA’s Artemis program, competing against several big established players. Since then there has been little news. The story today sadly reeks to me of a lot of blarney. For example, the company has only 20 employees. Astrolab might have signed this deal, but I suspect it is a very tentative deal, easily canceled by either party at no cost.

0 comments

Update on MOXIE’s two years on Mars, producing oxygen

9:17 pm

Link here. MOXIE is a technology test instrument on the rover Perseverance that has proven it will be possible to practically produce sufficient oxygen from the Martian atmosphere to sustain a human colony.

The link provides a nice summary of everything the engineering team has accomplished since Perseverance landed in testing this technology. As I wrote in my December post about MOXIE’s achievements:

Based on these tests, MOXIE has unequivocally proven that future human explorers will not need to bring much oxygen with them, and will in fact have essentially an unlimited supply, on hand from the red planet itself. More important, MOXIE has also proven that the technology to obtain this oxygen already exists.

All we need to do is plant enough MOXIE trees on Mars.

0 comments

Midnight repost: The Democratic Party of thugs and goons

1:01 am

The indictment of Donald Trump this week on bogus charges by a local New York Democratic Party machine politician, done for entirely political reasons, once again illustrates the ugliness of that party. Seems therefore appropriate to repost this August 2022 essay. The only thing that has changed since then an increase in the aggressive, vicious, and violent nature of the Democrats and their allies in the various LBGQTBIBOC etc queer and bigoted identity movements. They are acting with ever greater impunity, while we certainly have not seen any clear evidence that the decent population of the United States has risen up in outrage. Instead, it increasingly appears they are bowing their heads in fear, and letting the bullies win.

It also appears that even if decent Americans finally now step up with outrage, it will be too little too late. For far too long they slept, and now they reap the whirlwind.

The Democratic Party of thugs and goons

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Will the Trump raid finally wake Americans up?

While the outrage and fury has only begun to rise over the unjustified raid of the home of former President Donald Trump yesterday by the FBI, ordered by Biden Justice Department with a warrant issued by an Obama-supporting judge with ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex operation, nothing about that raid was anything new or startling. For the past seven years, since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Democratic Party and its supporters have increasingly acted like Nazi storm-troopers, willing, able, and eager to crush their opponents at every opportunity, and to do so cruelly and with great viciousness.

I therefore ask, shouldn’t we have exhibited the same amount of rage and fury for the hundreds and hundreds of ordinary Americans these same thugs have harassed and ruined since 2016? Why did it take a raid on Trump to finally bring that rage to the forefront?

Two Americans committed suicide because of Biden administration persecution after they dared protest the questionable election of Joe Biden on January 6th. What about them?

Scores of conservative FBI agents in the past two years have been fired from their jobs, simply because they did not agree politically with the Democrats. What about them?

What about the arrest by the FBI of a Republican candidate for Michigan governor, simply because he had also protested on January 6th the questionable election of thug Joe Biden? Or the threats of violence and murder against Supreme Court justices by leftist Democratic Party allies?

What about the effort by Biden’s labor board to shut down the conservative outlet The Federalist, simply because its founder sent out an anti-union joke?

What about the former Trump lawyer whose career was destroyed, simply because he was a former lawyer of Trump?

These stories are only a small sampling of the political abuses of power exercised by Democrats and the Biden administration time after time against their political opponents in just the last eighteen months. The list is long and painful to read.
» Read more

13 comments

Sponge terrain on Mars

11:44 am

Sponge terrain on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 11, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissnace Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists labeled this picture “Rocky Terrain.” Though this describes the overall sense of the full image, it fails to capture correctly the nature of this patch of ground at the center of the picture. As you can see, this patch of spongelike surface starts and ends abruptly. It appears that it is a layer on top of the surrounding terrain that has also been eroded aggressively since its placement.

The many craters on its surface seem to have come later, though as the crater size diminishes it becomes harder to separate the craters from the sponge holes. Moreover, some of the larger craters are distorted in shape, as if the impact hit material that was viscous and could flow somewhat.

The overview map below gives some context, but only some.
» Read more

3 comments

Spain’s government officially establishes a Spanish space agency

9:41 am

Spain’s Council of Ministers has voted to officially established a Spanish space agency, with operations beginning on March 7, 2023 with an initial budget of $753 million.

This announcement comes only a month before the private Spanish company, PLD, attempts its first suborbital launch from a Spanish spaceport of its Miura-1 rocket, its first stage designed to come back to Earth by parachute, recovered, and then reused. If successful the company hopes to then develop an orbital version.

The news from Europe increasing suggests that the members of the European Space Agency (ESA) are beginning to go their own way, relying less upon it. In addition to these developments in Spain, Germany now has three private companies developing rockets while Italy’s government has provided $308 million to its own Italian rocket company Avio. The United Kingdom meanwhile has had its own space agency for several years, is building several spaceports, and has been trying to develop its own space industry, with very mixed results. In addition, both Norway and Sweden are building spaceports for commercial operations.

ESA, while mouthing support for commercial space, has so far not done well in the past decade in transitioning from a government run, built, and owned operation to one owned by commercial companies. Its new Ariane-6 rocket, built and controlled by ArianeGroup but heavily managed by ESA, is still too expensive to compete with the new commercial rockets from the U.S. Nor does it appear ESA is moving very fast to fix this situation. It appears many people in Europe have recognized this state of affairs, and are looking for alternatives.

1 comment

Two launches by China

9:15 am

China's spaceports
China’s spaceports

China yesterday and today successfully completed two launches using two different rockets from two different spaceports.

First, a Long March 2D rocket yesterday launched a set of four satellites establishing a new constellation of radar satellites designed to measure the Earth’s surface topography. Lift off was from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the northeast of China. No word on where the rocket’s first stage crashed.

Next, a Long March 4C rocket today placed in orbit a classified military “remote-sensing” satellite, lifting off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in China’s northwest. Once again, no information was released on where the first and second stages of the rocket crashed to Earth.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

21 SpaceX
13 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads China 24 to 13 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 24 to 23. SpaceX now trails the entire world combined, including American companies, 26 to 21.

1 comment

Virgin Orbit shuts down

5:12 pm

Unable to secure new funding, the managers of Virgin Orbit have shuttered the company, possibly forever.

Virgin Orbit is ceasing operations “for the foreseeable future” after failing to secure a funding lifeline, CEO Dan Hart told employees during an all-hands meeting Thursday afternoon. The company will lay off nearly all of its workforce. “Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to secure the funding to provide a clear path for this company,” Hart said, according to audio of the 5 p.m. ET meeting obtained by CNBC.

The layoffs include all but 100 positions, about 85% of its workforce.

The company was killed because the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) took an extra six months approving a launch license, during which the company could launch nothing and thus make no money. Lacking revenue, it ran out of cash. If the company goes into bankruptcy, this detail is most intriguing:

Branson has first priority over Virgin Orbit’s assets, as the company raised $60 million in debt from the investment arm of Virgin Group.

In other words, Branson will be able to walk off with everything, and even resurrect the company as his own, for pennies on the dollar. If he does, I guarantee our bankrupt mainstream press will shower him with praise, calling him a hero.

8 comments

A bubbly cauldron on the surface of Mars

12:49 pm

A bubbly cauldron on the surface of Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 20, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a strange terrain of craters and mounds, with all the mounds having pits within them like volcanic calderas. In between the surface has a two-toned stippled look, as if two different materials are in the process of mixing.

My immediate impression was that of the bubbly surface of a vat of tomato sauce simmering. Or maybe the vile mixture created by the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which as they mix they chant:

First witch:
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

ALL:
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Of course, this is not a vat of witch’s brew or tomato sauce. It is the surface of the planet Mars, but an alien surface nonetheless.
» Read more

0 comments
1 … 147 148 149 150 151 … 196