UPDATE: Capsule has successfully splashed down and it recovery is underway, with no issues so far apparently.
SpaceX’s Endurance capsule has undocked from ISS, carrying a four-person crew with a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico planned for 9:02 pm (Eastern).
The live stream will go live at 8 pm (Eastern), which I have embedded below the fold.
» Read more
I have embedded below the live stream of the first launch attempt of Relativity’s Terran-1 rocket, presently scheduled with a three hour launch window that opens at 1:00 pm (Eastern). The live stream will go live at noon.
The first launch of a new rocket is exceedingly challenging, and almost never succeeds. The key however is the data obtained that can be used to make the next launch attempt a success.
A lot rides on this launch. Relativity already has obtained $1.2 billion in launch contracts plus more than $1 billion in private investment capital, despite having never launched anything. Moreover, the Terran-1 rocket is really a prototype for its larger Terran-R rocket, which is intended to compete directly for the larger payloads that companies like SpaceX and ULA launch.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
An evening pause: Performed live 1968.
Hat tip Judd Clark, who notes, “Nice piece of poetry at the beginning.”
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
The payloads and (it appears) the upper stage is not yet stacked. The plan is to do some propellant loading tests.
The launch had been planned for the first quarter of this year, but no launch date as yet has been set.
According to the company’s webpage, the rocket, dubbed Miura-1, is suborbital and will be recovered for resuse by parachute after splashing down in the ocean.
They hope to launch in the second quarter of 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
Nicoletta-Solas testifying to Congress
They’re coming for you next: Nicoletta Solas, a Rhode Island mother of a 5-year-old, was harassed by her school board and sued by the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teacher’s union in the nation, for simply requesting her child’s kindergarten curriculum. As she stated bluntly during her testimony at House hearing on March 2, 2023,
If you ask questions about public education, they will come after you. … My school district and my teachers’ union didn’t want to just hide the curriculum from me, they wanted to ruin my life.
Below is video of her full testimony. All she wanted to know was whether the school would be teaching queer theory to her 5-year-old. The ugly and vicious response to this request, by the school, the school board, and the NEA, is striking.
» Read more
Click for original image.
Click for interactive map.
Though the science team has not, as of this posting, added the flight to Ingenuity’s flight log, according to the interactive map showing the positions of both Ingenuity and Perseverance on Mars, the helicopter completed its 47th flight yesterday as planned.
An annotated version of that map is to the right. The larger green dot marks Ingenuity’s new position. The smaller green dot marks its position when the panorama above was taken on February 27, 2023, capturing the helicopter in the distance (as indicated by the arrow). The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by that panorama. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position.
The flight’s planned distance was to go 1,410 feet to the southwest and “image science targets along the way.” As the helicopter also flew above Perseverance’s planned route, as indicated by the red dotted line, it also provided the rover team information about the ground Perseverance will travel along the way. Since the terrain here is generally not very rough, the information is not critical for route-picking. It might however spot some geological feature that bears a closer look that would not have been noticed by the rover alone.
In releasing its proposed federal budget for 2024 with many major spending increases, the Biden administration has also proposed a significant increase in NASA’s budget. the third year in a row it has done so.
The shortened summary version of the Biden budget proposal [pdf] covers its proposals for NASA in two pages, with the most important proposals as follows:
The last two items will likely be money offered to many new commercial startups.
Though we can expect some resistance by the Republican House to most of the budget increases in the overall Biden budget proposal, expect Congress to rubber stamp the NASA increases, as it has done routinely in recent years. Congress might shift or reject some of these ideas, but generally, when all is said and done, it will only make superficial changes. NASA will likely more money.
The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on March 8, 2023 approved five bills affecting the FCC and how it operates.
The first bill [pdf], Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act, is the most significant, as it appears to try to establish legal limitations and rules specifically designed to address the FCC’s recent effort to expand its power and regulatory authority beyond what its legal authority allows. While most of the bill’s language appears to allow the FCC to do what it wants (including limiting or regulating future space stations and setting lifetime limits on all orbiting spacecraft), it also insists that licenses be approved quickly and adds this caveat:
[T]he Commission may not establish performance objectives that conflict with any standard practice adopted by the Secretary of Commerce.
In other words, the FCC cannot grab the regulatory responsibilities of other agencies, especially the Commerce Department, where Congress in recent years has been trying to shift most commercial regulatory authority.
Nonetheless, this bill appears to mostly endorse the FCC ‘s power grab.
The bills still have to be approved by the full committee, then approved by the full House, then approved by the Senate, and then signed by the president.
According to unnamed sources in the Russian press, Roscosmos officials are considering bringing the Soyuz capsule launched on February 23rd to ISS back to Earth in June rather than September, while moving up the launch of the next Soyuz manned mission.
As noted by space journalist Anatoly Zak:
The existence of such plans indicated that specialists had still been concerned about the possibility of a critical leak in the thermal control system of the fresh crew vehicle similar to those that hit two previous transport ships. Such change in schedule would also debunk the official explanation of previous two accidents by Roskosmos and NASA as caused by meteors rather than production defects.
The two previous coolant leaks occurred about three months after launch. Bringing the Soyuz home in June would get it home in about three and a half months, suggesting the Russians are no longer confident their Soyuz and Progress spacecraft can withstand six months in space.
If this plan is adopted it will also put less strain on the crew slated to come home on that Soyuz. Their mission has been planned for six months. Extending it to a full year without any prior preparation risks serious health issues.
China today used its Long March 4C rocket to launch two Earth observation satellites from one of its interior spaceports.
No word on whether the expendable first stage landed near habitable areas. In related news the upper stage of a Long March 2D rocket, launched in June 2022, burned up over Texas on March 8, 2023. Such upper stage uncontrolled de-orbits are not unusual, and the effort by this news outlet to make a big deal about it is just politics. Unlike the lower stages of China’s rockets that hit the ground right after launch, it is very unlikely any pieces reached the surface, and any that did were small and posed a small risk.
The 2023 launch race:
16 SpaceX
8 China
3 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India
American private enterprise still leads China 17 to 8 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 17 to 13. SpaceX alone still leads the entire world, including American companies, 16 to 14.
An evening pause: Seems to me, this expresses perfectly the level of thoughtfulness seen in many hard rock music videos, only it does it more honestly.
Hat tip Gene Shipp.
