Year: 2023

November 20, 2023 Quick space links

3:57 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

  • Boeing today celebrates 25 years of ISS operations

    • The picture shows the first module, Russian-built Zarya, the completion of which was paid for by American taxpayers. One wonders if its condition is as bad now as Russia’s other early module, Zvezda.

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Musk: Starship/Superheavy launchpad essentially undamaged after launch

12:37 pm

Superheavy launchpad post launch
Click for original image.

In a tweet posted only a short time ago, Elon Musk announced that the redesigned and rebuilt Boca Chica launchpad experienced little or no damage during the launch of Superheavy/Starship on November 18, 2023.

Just inspected the Starship launch pad and it is in great condition!

No refurbishment needed to the water-cooled steel plate for next launch.

Congrats to @Spacex team & contractors for engineering & building such a robust system so rapidly!

Musk included the picture to the right in the tweet, showing the essentially undamaged launchpad pad. A close looks suggests there was some damage to the rear pillar near the top, but overall it appears the next launch could occur here very quickly.

Musk of course is wrong about who he credits for redesigning and rebuilding this launchpad. The real credit must go to the FAA bureaucrats who led the investigation and must have clearly guided those SpaceX engineers and contractors. To expect private citizens to think for themselves and come up with such difficult engineering without supervision from government paper-pushers in Washington is unreasonable and unfair. Maybe the Biden Justice Department should consider another lawsuit against Musk, this time for spreading more disinformation!

Moreover, who cares that the launchpad deluge system worked exactly as planned? We must allow Fish & Wildlife to spend several months now to investigate this launch — as well as write a long report of many words — to make sure that deluge of water did not harm any of the wildlife that lives on this barrier island, which has a water table of essentially zero and is flooded regularly and repeatedly by storms over time.

Anyone who disagrees is clearly a bigoted racist who wants to harm little children!

11 comments

Jan 6th tapes prove Biden prosecutors knowingly falsified the charges that caused Matthew Perna to kill himself

12:11 pm

Matthew Perna, dead because he expressed his opinion
Matthew Perna, essentially murdered by the Biden Justice Department

They’re coming for you next: Thirty-seven-year-old Matthew Perna came to Washington DC on January 6, 2021 to peacefully protest Joe Biden’s election. During those protests, Perna admitted he entered the Capitol through a door that had been opened by others (possibly government security police themselves). While inside he said he had walked through the building for a few minutes, didn’t touch or damage anything, and simply stayed within the normal walking path for visitors as he took pictures.

For this “criminal activity,” Biden prosecutors at the Department of Justice had charged him with multiple crimes, including a felony for committing terrorism that could have resulted in a twenty-year prison sentence. While Perna was willing to accept a trespassing misdemeanor — he recognized he had entered a closed facility without clear authority — the felony for terrorism crushed him. He knew the January 6th trials were imposing the harshest penalties. He knew the prosecutors and judges were not taking reasonable plea deals. And he knew that even if he agreed to a deal, the best he could expect would still be many months or even years in prison.

This unjust fate was something he could not face. On February 25, 2022 he killed himself.

Biden prosecutors immediately thereafter dropped the trumped-up charges against him, admitting that the felony charge itself would likely have been dropped during trial.

In other words, the government not only rubbed salt in the wounds of his family, it admitted openly that its charges against Perna were a sham to begin with.

We now have visual proof that Perna was innocent, and that proof was in the hands of federal prosecutors from day one.
» Read more

30 comments

Webb: Needles scattered near the center of the Milky Way

9:14 am

Needles in space
Click for original image.

Scientists today released a new false-color infrared image taken by the Webb Space Telescope of a region about 300 light years from the center of the Milky Way, dubbed Sagittarius-C. That picture is to the right, cropped, reduced and sharpened to post here. The blue or cyan regions are ionized hydrogen clouds, and with this image were revealed to be much more extensive than expected. The orange blob near the center is a densely packed cluster of protostars, the starlight blocked by the cloud of material.

The most interesting feature however are the needle-like structures within that ionized hydrogen, oriented in all directions in a manner that looks completely random. Though such needles have been seen previously, the data here is far more detailed, and might eventually help astronomers figure out what the heck these features are and what caused them.

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SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites

8:40 am

The beat goes on: SpaceX early this morning launched another 22 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandeberg in California.

The first stage completed its 15th flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

85 SpaceX
52 China
14 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China 97 to 52 in successful launches, and the entire world combined 97 to 81. SpaceX by itself is now leads the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 85 to 81.

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SaxaVord spaceport on Shetland Islands experiencing funding/regulatory problems

9:27 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea,
updated to include Esrange spaceport in Sweden.

According to a report in the British press today, construction of the SaxaVord spaceport on the Shetland Islands has stopped because of lack of funds.

Shetland-based DITT declined to comment but sources have confirmed its bills have not been paid. A source said: “This is a huge construction project and you need to have the money to complete it.

…“DITT’s bills stopped being paid and so the company had no choice but to stop work until things are resolved. It would be great to see rockets blasting off into outer space from Shetland, but at the moment it seems more pie in the sky.”

This lack of work was noted in August by a local Shetland new source. It is now three months later and the work stoppage still continues.

The article also noted this comment from a SaxaVord official: “SaxaVord continues to have excellent dialogue with the authorities and is fully expecting to receive its spaceport licence very soon from the Civil Aviation Authority [CAA].” That license application however was submitted in November 2022, one full year ago. Apparently the CAA is doing the same to SaxaVord that it did to Virgin Orbit. With Virgin Orbit the CAA delayed issuing its launch permit by more than six months, during which the company could do no launches, make no money, and eventually went bankrupt when that launch failed and it no longer had the resources to recover.

Now the CAA is twiddling its thumbs for so long in issuing SaxaVord its spaceport license that launch business is shifting elsewhere and the spaceport is beginning to run short of cash. In January spaceport officials had predicted the first launch there would occur by the fall of this year. The fall is now passing and there is no sign of any launch soon, with construction halted.

Expect the business that was originally intended for the two British spaceports in Scotland to increasingly shift elsewhere. The spaceports at Andoya in Norway and Esrange in Sweden have an opportunity to pick up some business.

17 comments

SpaceX successfully launches Superheavy and Starship

6:57 am

Superheavy & Starship, on their way
Note how all 33 Superheavy engines are firing.

SpaceX this morning successfully launched its Superheavy/Starship heavy lift rocket into its test orbit.

The test flight achieved far more than the first test in April. First, during the entire flight of Superheavy all 33 Raptor-2 engines fired normally. None cut out prematurely. Then at very risky hot fire stage separation — where the second stage (Starship) ignited prior to separation from Superheavy — the correct number of engines shut down, Starship’s engines fired, and Superheavy successfully separated and began its maneuvers for a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

At that point mission controllers issued the self-destruct command to destroy Superheavy. Though it appeared that the stage was struggling to flip for its controlled return to Earth, it is also very likely that mission controllers wanted to test that flight termination system after its not perfect performance on the first test flight. Then, the self-destruct command did not activate the instant the command was given, being delayed by about 40 seconds. This time it appeared it worked as planned.
» Read more

71 comments

SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites

10:15 pm

While everyone is focused on the Starship/Superheavy launch scheduled for tomorrow at 7 am (Central) at Boca Chica, SpaceX tonight launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed it eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

84 SpaceX
52 China
14 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China 96 to 52 in successful launches, and the entire world combined 96 to 81. SpaceX by itself is now leads the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 84 to 81.

6 comments

November 17, 2023 Quick space links

3:15 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

5 comments

The southernmost extent of Mars’ youngest lava flood event

12:51 pm

The southernmost edge of Mars' youngest lava event
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 24, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Labeled “flow margin in Elysium Planitia,” it shows the very edge of what scientists believe was the most recent large lava event on Mars, dubbed the Athabasca Valles, that is thought to have occurred only 600 million years ago. In only a matter of weeks the fast flowing lava covered a region about the size of Great Britain. What we see here is the southernmost edge of that flow, with the smooth terrain on the west an older lava flood plain, covered by the new flood lava from Athabasca on the east.

The polygon cracks likely indicate cracks that formed during the hardening process (like the polygon cracks in drying mud). Hot lava then pushed up from below to form the ridges. It is also possible the ridges are what scientists call “wrinkle ridges,” formed when material shrinks during the drying process.
» Read more

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