Year: 2023

China launches new three-man crew to its Tiangong-3 space station

9:02 am

The new colonial movement: China today successfully used its Long March 2F rocket to place a Shenzhou manned capsule into orbit, carrying a new three-man crew to its Tiangong-3 space station and lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

Though relatively little specific information about the crew’s mission has been revealed, it is expected they will do a six month mission, as have previous crews, and conduct spacewalks and maintenance on the station. Meanwhile, the present crew on board will spend about a week transferring duties to the new crew, and then return to Earth after completing its own six-month mission.

No word on where the Long March 2F first stage and its four side boosters crashed in the interior of China, all of which use toxic hypergolic fuels.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

76 SpaceX
48 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China 88 to 48 in successful launches, and the entire world combined 88 to 76. SpaceX by itself is now tied at 76 with the rest of the world (excluding American companies).

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October 25, 2023 Quick space links

3:25 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

  • Tiangong-3 solar panel hit by “small space debris”

    • According to this tweet, the damage was “predicted and controllable”, which really tells us nothing. All space stations in orbit experience micrometeorite hits, often very tiny. Anything larger is significant. If this impact was the latter they should release more information.

 

 

 

 

 

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The hull of Axiom’s first space station module nears completion

1:44 pm

The hull of Axiom’s first space station module is nearing completion, according to officials of the Italian company Thales Alenia Space that is building it.

“The first module shell is effectively completed,” Jason Aspiotis, Axiom’s director of in-space infrastructure and logistics, said at AIAA’s Ascend conference here on Oct. 23. “A lot of the subsystems that will populate the underlying structure–think about life support systems, avionics, propulsion, [guidance, navigation and control systems], power, communications, all that good stuff–we’re developing in a lab in Houston.” Hab One hatches have also been fabricated, tested and prepared for delivery to Thales Alenia Space to support Hab One pressure testing, the company says.

The first module is to be shipped to Houston by 2024 for final assembly and integration at Axiom Space’s factory at Ellington Airport. The company plans to launch the Hab One module in 2026.

Based on this news report, Axiom’s schedule has not experienced any further delays since it pushed back the launch from 2024 in June.

The article also says, almost as an aside, that ISS is planned for decommission “in 2031”, which is one year later than any previous report I’ve seen. I suspect this is correct, but is information that NASA really didn’t want revealed to the public as yet, as it had enough trouble convincing its international European and Japanese partners to stay on until 2030. Moreover, there remains serious concerns the older Russian modules themselves might fail before then, based on the number of stress fractures found in their hulls, so admitting NASA hopes to keep the station flying till ’31 will appear questionable at best.

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Swirling galactic-sized streams surrounding a pair of supermassive black holes

1:25 pm

Swirling galactic arms surrounding two supermassive black holes

Time for another galactic cool image! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was released today by the Gemini South ground-based telescope in Chile. It shows the streams of gas and stars that swirl around a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of this galaxy, located only 90 million light years away.

The image reveals vast swirling bands of interstellar dust and gas resembling freshly-spun cotton candy as they wrap around the merging cores of the progenitor galaxies. From the aftermath has emerged a scattered mix of active starburst regions and sedentary dust lanes encircling the system.

What is most noteworthy about NGC 7727 is undoubtedly its twin galactic nuclei, each of which houses a supermassive black hole, as confirmed by astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Astronomers now surmise the galaxy originated as a pair of spiral galaxies that became embroiled in a celestial dance about one billion years ago. Stars and nebulae spilled out and were pulled back together at the mercy of the black holes’ gravitational tug-of-war until the irregular tangled knots we see here were created.

The black holes themselves are 154 and 6.3 million solar masses respectively, and are presently about 1,600 light years apart. Scientists calculate that they will merge in about 250 million years. Each once formed the center of its own galaxy. Now both galaxies have merged, creating this three-dimensional whirlpool of arms.

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Boeing losses total almost a billion dollars this quarter

1:15 pm

The hits to Boeing keep coming: In addition to the $1.5 billion it has had to write-off because of problems with its Starliner capsule, Boeing is now reporting losses in the third quarter totaling almost a billion dollars, with half those losses coming from overruns on its fixed price contract to provide Air Force One to the U.S. government.

The $482 million loss on the high-profile presidential plane was due to “higher estimated manufacturing costs related to engineering changes, labor instability and the resolution of supplier negotiations,” Boeing Chief Financial Officer Brian West said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call Wednesday.

Boeing has faced numerous problems with the VC-25B program, including shortages of workers and parts, that have delayed delivery of the first of two Air Force One jets until 2027. To date, the company has lost over $2.4 billion on the program, according to a company spokesperson. CEO Dave Calhoun said last year that Boeing should have never agreed to the fixed $3.9 billion price tag.

The second-largest contributor to losses for Boeing’s Defense, Space & Security (BDS) business was a satellite program that cost the company $315 million in the third quarter. The company wouldn’t identify the program, but West said the loss is “tied to customer considerations and higher estimated cost to deliver a highly innovative satellite constellation contract that we signed several years ago.” [emphasis mine]

Let me translate what CEO Calhoun was really saying in the highlighted sentence: “We want a blank check! Boeing is incapable of producing anything based upon a standard fixed price, and wants the federal government to go back to open-ended cost-plus contracts that put no limit to overruns and schedule delays.”

Whether Boeing gets that blank check or not really depends on Boeing. It is very possible our corrupt legislators in Congress — who think money grows on trees — will bring these cost-plus contract back, but I doubt Boeing will win many such contracts in the near future, based on its horrible performance on all levels technically. It needs to completely clean house, with major shake-ups in management and staff, as whoever is working there now is simply doing a terrible job.

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Has the tide actually turned?

12:53 pm

Winston Churchill, who recognized you can't negotiate with mass murderers
Winston Churchill, who understood you can never
negotiate with mass murderers

My essay yesterday on the present unstable world situation — sparked by the murderous attack by Hamas on Israel — opened with a noteably pessimistic conclusion:

In the past week, it seems more and more that appeasement is the watchword of the day.

I had come to this conclusion by citing two unfolding events, first Israel’s seemingly endless delays in initiating its promised invasion of Gaza to destroy Hamas, and second, the apparent decision by Republicans in the House of Representatives to choose as their pick for speaker Tom Emmer, the only man running who denied any voter tampering and election fraud in the 2020 election and who also had been a spokesman for an organization funded by George Soros, making him clearly an untrustworthy person to lead conservatives.

One day later there are signs that my pessimism might have been premature. First, the Republicans in the House finally came together today to elect a speaker, choosing Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), a man who appears not only wholly different than Emmer but in fact almost all Republican speakers since Newt Gingrich. Unlike the moderates of the past three decades, Johnson is a strongly conservative man (pro-life, opposes the queer agenda, skeptical of too much aid to the Ukraine). Maybe the best sense of his fighting spirit is gained from his comments in 2020, when he actually noted Nancy Pelosi’s violation of the law when she tore up the original of Donald Trump’s state of the union speech in January 2020.

Thus, Republican voters might finally have a speaker in the House who is more allied with their goals than the corrupt goals of the establishment based in Washington, DC. The battle itself over the speakership further suggests that the establishment itself is losing power over the Republican Party. In the end the only viable candidates that remained were all Trump supporters who had repeatedly opposed the endless continuing resolutions that the Republican leadership has forever given to its Democratic Party allies.

We shall see however. In matters of politics it always pays to never get too enthusiastic about any positive development, as for the past six decades the positive has too often quickly turned negative.

Next there is the situation in Israel. » Read more

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Perseverance looks ahead, beyond Jezero Crater

11:13 am

Perseverance looks ahead, beyond Jezero Crater
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, enhanced and annotated to post here, was taken on October 21, 2023 by one of the navigation cameras on the Mars rover Perseverance. As shown on the overview map to the right, it looks to the west, at the gap in the rim of Jezero crater, dubbed Neretva Vallis, through which the delta in the crater had once poured.

The blue dot marks the location of Perseverance. The green dot marks the location of Ingenuity, which suggests it is visible within the panorama. I have indicated two features on the panorama that could be the helicopter, but the resolution of this navigation camera image is not good enough to determine with certainty if either is the helicopter or simply a rock.

Beyond the gap can be seen several small mountains, a hint at the generally rough terrain that sits to the west of Jezero that Perseverance will eventually enter and explore. This region is also an area where orbital images suggest a wide variety of minerals, making it a potentially valuable mining location for future Martian settlers.

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A dance of three galaxies

10:40 am

Three galaxies merging
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Though it appears to show two galaxies interacting with each other, other spectroscopic data proves there are actually three large galaxies in the picture. From the caption:

The two clearly defined galaxies are NGC 7733 (smaller, lower right) and NGC 7734 (larger, upper left). The third galaxy is currently referred to as NGC 7733N, and can actually be spotted in this picture if you look carefully at the upper arm of NGC 7733, where there is a visually notable knot-like structure, glowing with a different colour to the arm and obscured by dark dust. This could easily pass as part of NGC 7733, but analysis of the velocities (speed, but also considering direction) involved in the galaxy shows that this knot has a considerable additional redshift, meaning that it is very likely its own entity and not part of NGC 7733.

All three galaxies are quite close to each other, which means they are in the long process of merging together into one larger galaxy.

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SpaceX gets ESA contract to launch up to four of its Galileo GPS-type satellites

9:41 am

The European Space Agency (ESA) this week announced that it has awarded SpaceX a launch contract to put up to four of its Galileo GPS-type satellites into orbit. Though the deal is signed, approval must still be obtained by ESA’s members and executive commission.

This will be the first time SpaceX will launch any ESA satellites, and the first time in fifteen years that a Galileo satellite will launch outside of Arianespace operations. Previously the Russians had done a number of Galileo launches, using its Soyuz-2 rocket launching out of Arianespace’s French Guiana spaceport, but that partnership ended with Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.

For the ESA the situation is even worse. It needs SpaceX to launch its satellites because at present it doesn’t have any of its own rockets to do it. The Ariane-5 is retired, and the new Ariane-6 (meant to replace it) is long delayed, and will not have its first test launch until next year, at the earliest. The Vega-C (too small for Galileo anyway) is also grounded due to design defects in the nozzle of its upper stage, while the Vega rocket it replaces has only one more launch before its own retirement.

Much like the Axiom-UK deal posted below, the American commercial space industry is once again making money from others, solely due to the capabilities developed in the past decade due to competition and freedom.

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Axiom signs deal with the United Kingdom to fly all British mission

9:30 am

The space agency of the United Kingdom today announced that it has signed a deal with Axiom to fly an manned mission in space, with four astronauts spending up to two weeks in space (likely in a SpaceX Dragon capsule).

The flight, estimated to cost around £200 million, is being organized in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), though all the astronauts will be British. The announced commander, Tim Peake, spent six months on ISS in 2015, and has come out of retirement to do the flight.

It is also unclear at this moment whether it will fly to ISS, or simply remain in orbit. In fact, few specific details have yet been released.

The bottom line however is that the new American space industry is going to make money from Britain’s desire to be a space power. Seems like a good deal to me.

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No Starship/Superheavy launch likely until January?

9:13 am

No Starship test launch until 2024
SpaceX is ready but the federal government says “No!”

We’re from the government and we’re here to help! In describing the effort of Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to help SpaceX prod the federal bureaucracy into approving a new launch license for the company’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, space writer Mark Whittington included this significant but not previously mentioned tidbit that might help us predict when Fish & Wildlife (FWS) might finally give its okay for a launch:

The FWS has as long as 135 days to complete its review.

Let’s review the situation to understand what this tidbit means. At present it appears the FAA is ready to issue a launch licence, having closed its own investigation into the April Starship/Superheavy test flight on September 8, 2023.

At the time the FAA however was very clear: No launch license until Fish & Wildlife gave its environmental approval as well. Never before had this environmental agency had veto power over launches, but under the Biden administration it now has it.

Though Fish & Wildlife could have begun its own investigation in April, and met the 135-day deadline to give its approval for a launch the same time as the FAA, in September, it now appears that it did not start its clock ticking until after the FAA closed its work. If so, it appears Fish & Wildlife has until early January to complete its investigation.

Since FWS admitted in April, right after the failed test launch of Starship/Superheavy, that it caused no harm to wildlife, there appears no reason for this long delay.

The delay therefore can only be for two reasons, neither good. Either the people at Fish & Wildlife are utterly incompetent, and need eight months to write up the paperwork (even though in April they already knew that there was no reason to delay), or they are vindictive, power-hungry, and wish to exercise an animus against SpaceX in order to hurt the company.

Mostly likely we are seeing a combination of both: The bureaucrats at Fish & Wildlife are incompetent and hate SpaceX, and are using their newly gained power over issuing launch licenses to hurt it.

Either way, if Fish & Wildlife uses its entire 135-day window to issue its launch approval to SpaceX, no launch can occur this year. SpaceX will be stymied, and the development of this new heavy-lift reuseable rocket, possibly the most important new technology in rocketry ever, will be badly crushed. Not only will NASA’s Artemis program be damaged (it wants Starship as its manned lunar lander), SpaceX might face huge financial loses, as it needs Starship to launch and maintain its Starlink communications constellation.

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