August 22, 2023 Zimmerman/Space Show podcast
The podcast of my appearance last night on the Space Show with David Livingston is now available. You can download it here.
As always, it was a good discussion about a number of interesting topics.
Year: 2023
First mission in Isaacman’s private space program delayed again
The first mission in the Polaris space program of manned flights by billionaire Jared Isaacman, using SpaceX’s manned spacecraft and rockets, has now been delayed until early in 2024.
Isaacman, in the podcast interview, suggested the delays were linked to the development of a new spacesuit required for a spacewalk, the first by a private astronaut mission, planned for Polaris Dawn. “We’ve had a little bit more free time this summer than we probably would have expected,” he said, which he attributed to the timing of spacesuit development and training. That effort “doesn’t always sync up, so we’ve had a little more free time with family and work this summer.”
That new suit, billed as the first new spacesuit developed in the United States in four decades, is critical to future human activities on moon and Mars, he argued. “We’re going to need spacesuits that don’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars in order to do that. We’re pretty excited because the suit that we are testing out, the evolution of it someday could be very well worn by people that are walking on the moon or Mars.”
This mission, dubbed Polaris Dawn, will use a Falcon 9 and one of SpaceX’s fleet of four manned Dragon capsules to spend several days in Earth orbit while conducting that first private spacewalk. Isaacman’s entire Polaris program includes two more manned missions,the second possibly aimed at raising and even doing maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope, and the third using Starship to go around the Moon.
Isaacman has already flown one private mission in space, in 2021, dubbed Inspiration4. It flew for three days in orbit, carrying four passengers, including Isaacman himself. Since it did not dock with ISS, it was an entirely private manned mission, with no significant government involvement.
Space junk that ESA demo mission intends to de-orbit as been struck by another piece of space junk
In a strange bit of irony, an abandoned payload adapter from a mission launched a decade ago that a European Space Agency (ESA) mission was planning on capturing and de-orbiting has been hit by another piece of space junk, creating additional bits debris around it.
The adapter is a conical-shaped leftover, roughly 250 pounds (113 kg) in mass, from a 2013 Vega launch that sent a small fleet of satellites into orbit. Space tracking systems found new objects nearby the adapter, which ESA learned about on Aug. 10. The objects are likely space debris from a “hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object” that smacked into the payload adapter, the agency said. We may never know if the crashing object was natural or artificial, given it didn’t appear in tracking systems.
The ESA mission, dubbed Clearspace-1, intends to launch in 2026 and use four grappling arms to grasp the payload adapter, after which both shall be sent to burn up in the atmosphere. Its goal is to demonstrate technology for removing space junk. This event, creating extra debris pieces around the payload adaptor, puts a kink on that mission while also underlining the need for such technology.
Mission engineers now have three years to figure out what, if anything, they need to do to deal with the extra debris. The good news so far is that it appears the payload adapter remains intact, its orbit has not changed, and the surrounding debris appears small enough to pose “negligible” risk.
India successfully lands Vikram on the Moon
Click for interactive map.
India this morning successfully placed its Vikram lander, carrying its Pragyan rover, on the surface of the Moon in the high southern latitudes.
I have embedded the live stream below, cued to just before landing.
The next challenge is getting Pragyan to roll off Vikram, and spend the next two weeks exploring the nearby terrain. The mission of both it and Vikram is only planned to last through the daylight portion of the 28-day-long lunar day, so it is not expected for either to survive the lunar night. Both will make observations, but the main purpose of this mission has already been accomplished, demonstrating that India has the technological capability to land an unmanned spacecraft on another planet. That the landing was in the high southern latitudes added one extra challenge to the mission.
August 22, 2023 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS
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.
VisioRacer – Audi’s Audi’s Supercharged V16 racecars of the 1930s
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.
I will NOT wear a mask, part two
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.”
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August 22, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- New graphics on the side of Blue Origin facility in Florida
My heart be still!
- Weather for next Electron launch in two days looks good
Scheduled for August 24, 2023 at 11:30 am New Zealand time, which is equivalent to 7:30 pm (Eastern) on August 23, 2023.
- Video from Astra touting its rocket assembly line
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.
- Images taken by Vikram on August 20th
These images were taken after Vikram separated from its propulsion unit, and demonstrated that it could orient itself accurately and the camera was working.
The very tip of a thousand-mile-long crack 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 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.
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Proposed Las Vegas spaceport signs deal with launch startup
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.
Redwire to build biotech lab in Sierra Space’s LIFE space station
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.