An evening pause: This video is apropos of Arlo Guthrie’s words about the impact of American music in yesterday’s evening pause. Here a classical orchestra in Austria performs a song from one of Broadway’s greatest musicals, The Music Man, and everyone in the audience knows it.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also tipped me off to the Starliner and Ispace stories earlier today.
This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
This is technology developed by Masten Space Systems and bought and absorbed into Astrobotic in 2022.
Launch date is still targeting the fall.
It will take a week or so for citizen scientists to begin posting processed images that cull the good data from these raw pictures.
The satellite is being built by the European company Thales Alenia.
Thales Alenia builds the spacecraft’s basic structure.
That was more than fifty years ago. Had we harnessed that technology then, Americans would already have viable colonies on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids.
Pro-Hamas protesters threaten blind children.
Click for story.
Two weeks ago I urged the UNC fraternity brothers who stood up to pro-Hamas rioters at their college by protecting Old Glory from desecration to use the half million dollars raised for them for something more worthwhile than a big party.
Why not use these funds instead to create a database that identifies every single one of the Hamas protesters who attempted to take over the UNC campus so that future employees will have a resource when it comes time to hire graduates? Why not then use that UNC database as the starting point for a nationwide database, to identify other Hamas protesters who took over colleges at every other university?
It seems that database already exists, called Canary Mission, which was revealed to me first in this somewhat hostile news article on May 12, 2024 from the Times of Israel, which seems more interested in protecting pro-Hamas rioters from the consequences of their actions than defending Jews and Israel from attack.
The goal of Canary Mission is very straight-forward, and utterly legal. From its About webpage:
» Read more
The blunt truth. Courtesy of Doug Ross.
The United Nations on May 8, 2024 very quietly cut in half the number of women and children listed as killed in Gaza during the Israeli operation.
The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its child fatality figure from the Gaza war sharply downward, reporting more than 14,500 deaths on May 6 but then 7,797 on May 8. OCHA also revised downward its figure for women fatalities from more than 9,500 deaths to 4,959 deaths.
This follows the recognition in April that more than 10,000 casualities on Hamas’ list had no names or identifying information, and were removed. At that same time Hamas’ Gaza Ministry of Health stopped claiming that 70% of those killed were women and children. It apparently realized the lie was no longer working, that even its allies in the UN couldn’t buy it any longer.
In other words, the UN has finally acknowledged that the numbers it was getting from Hamas were bogus and made-up. » Read more
Capitalism in space: The Japanese company Ispace has won a contract with the European company Control Data Systems (CDS) to place CDS’s precise localization instrument on Ispace’s APEX lunar lander, its first NASA mission.
CDS’s technology, which combines precision localization with telecommunications, uses Ultra-Wideband for determining precise positions and was developed specifically for space applications with support from the European Space Agency. The lack of a GPS-like system on the Moon, makes the technology ground-breaking for future applications related to lunar exploration.
The agreement … also represents the first Romanian payload to be delivered to the lunar surface. The technology will be integrated into the APEX 1.0 lunar lander as part of ispace technologies U.S. (ispace-U.S.) Mission 3, currently scheduled for 2026. A lunar rover will transport the CDS equipment on the surface to test the localization technology using an antenna that will remain on the APEX 1.0 lander.
Though Ispace is based in Japan, it has divisions in both the U.S. and Europe, which is allowing it to sign contracts with NASA and companies in both locations.
While ULA has successfully replaced the valve in the upper stage of the Atlas-5 rocket, the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has slipped another four days, to May 21, 2024, because a newly discovered helium leak in the capsule’s service module.
Starliner teams are working to resolve a small helium leak detected in the spacecraft’s service module traced to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster. Helium is used in spacecraft thruster systems to allow the thrusters to fire and is not combustible or toxic.
NASA and Boeing are developing spacecraft testing and operational solutions to address the issue. As a part of the testing, Boeing will bring the propulsion system up to flight pressurization just as it does prior to launch, and then allow the helium system to vent naturally to validate existing data and strengthen flight rationale.
The prevous launch scrub was entirely due to the ULA’s rocket, not anything related to Boeing. This delay however is a Boeing issue, and it only reinforces the general uneasiness everyone feels about Boeing’s quality control work.
SpaceX last night successfully placed another 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its eighteenth launch, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
51 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 58 to 33. SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 51 to 40.
Click for original image.
Click for interactive map
The images above and below are small sections from 360 degree panorama created on May 13, 2024 from 31 photos taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity.
The overview map to the right provides the context. The red dotted line indicates Curiosity’s planned route, while the white dotted line its actual route. The rover’s present position is marked by the blue dot. The yellow lines indicate the area covered by the picture above, while the green lines indicate the area covered by the picture below.
The image above looks north, back down Gediz Vallis and across to the north rim of Gale Crater, about 20-25 miles away. The red dotted line marks the rover’s path to get up to this point. All told, Curiosity has climbed about 2,500 feet in elevation since it left the floor of Gale Crater about nine years ago.
The image below looks south, up Gediz Vallis and towards the peak of Mount Sharp (not visible), about 26 miles away and about 16,000 feet higher up. Curiosity might move forward about 500 feet to the small hill on the left (indicated by the red dot), or it might turn west from this point, as indicated by the red dotted line on the overview map.
Click for original image.
The uncertainty of science: According to data obtained from ground-based telescopes of a newly discovered transiting exoplanet, that planet has the density of cotton candy.
This new planet, located 1,200 light-years from Earth, is 50% larger than Jupiter but seven times less massive, giving it an extremely low density comparable to that of cotton candy. “WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller,” explains Khalid Barkaoui, a Postdcotral Researcher at ULiège’s EXOTIC Laboratory and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy. Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date. This extremely-low-density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants, even under the unrealistic assumption of a coreless structure.”
Such a gas giant is not impossible. For example, Saturn’s density is so low that if you could find an ocean large enough it would float. The scientists theorize that this exoplanet is likly comprised mostly of hydrogen and helium.
Nonetheless, there are phenomenon here that we certainly do not understand.
According to a report yesterday [behind a paywall], the Air Force has sent a letter of concern to ULA and its joint owners, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, about the long delays getting its new Vulcan rocket operational.
When the military chose in 2021 ULA and SpaceX to be its two launch providers for the first half of the 2020s, it expected ULA to complete 60% of the launches and SpaceX 40%. It also expected Vulcan to being launching within a year or two, at the latest.
Instead, the first launch of Vulcan did not occur until 2024, and its second launch — required by the military before it will allow Vulcan to launch its payloads — won’t occur until late this year. Worse, the military has a large backlog of launches it has assigned to Vulcan that need to launch quickly.
“I am growing concerned with ULA’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs,” [Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank] Calvelli wrote. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays. ULA has a backlog of 25 National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Vulcan launches on contract.”
These 25 launches, Calvelli notes, are due to be completed by the end of 2027. He asked Boeing and Lockheed to complete an “independent review” of United Launch Alliance’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rockets and meet its commitments to the military. Calvelli also noted that Vulcan has made commitments to launch dozens of satellites for others over that period, a reference to a contract between United Launch Alliance and Amazon for Project Kuiper satellites.
ULA says that once operations ramp up, it plans to launch Vulcan twice a month. The Air Force doubts about whether that will be possible however are well founded. To meet that schedule ULA will need delivery per month of at least four BE-4 engines from Blue Origin, and so far there is no indication the Bezos company can meet that demand. Delays at Blue Origin in developing that engine are the main reason Vulcan is so far behind schedule in the first place.
In order to get Vulcan operational, ULA needs to fly a second time successfully. The second launch of Sierra Space’s Tenacity mini-shuttle is booked for that flight, and was originally supposed to launch this spring. Tenacity however was not ready, as it is still undergoing final ground testing. The launch is now set for the fall, but both ULA and the Pentagon are discussing replacing it with a dummy payload should Tenacity experience any more delays.
The source of all of these problems points to Blue Origin. Not only has it been unable to deliver its BE-4 rocket engine on schedule — thus blocking Vulcan — the long delays in developing its own New Glenn orbital rocket (which uses seven BE-4 engines) has given the military fewer launch options. As a result the military has been left with only one rocket company, SpaceX, capable of launching its large payloads.
To put Blue Origin’s problems in perspective, for Blue Origin to finally achieve its many promises and get both Vulcan and New Glenn flying regularly, it will need to begin producing a minimum of 50 to 150 BE-4 engines per year, with two-thirds for its own New Glenn rocket. Right now all evidence suggests the company is having problems building two per year.
In other words, the Pentagon might send a letter of concern to ULA, but it should instead be focusing its ire on Blue Origin.
XRISM, a joint X-ray space telescope built by NASA and Japan’s space agency JAXA, is collecting data despite the failure on one instrument of an aperture door to open.
In January, project scientists said that XRISM was working well except for an aperture door, also called a gate valve, for the Dewar on its imaging instrument, Resolve, which failed to open. The instrument can still operate with the door closed, although the door, made of beryllium, does attenuate some X-rays at lower energies.
At the time, efforts were underway to try and open the gate valve. However, speaking at a May 7 meeting of the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said those efforts were on hold for the next year and a half.
Instead, the science team decided to proceed with science operations, since the telescope has two other working instruments, and can get data even from this hindered third.
XRISM is a replacement of a previous JAXA X-ray telescope that launched in 2016 but failed immediately.
An evening pause: The introduction is long, but worth it because Guthrie soon transcends the shallow politics of these lefty folk singers. Performed live 1993. To hear Elvis Presley sing it, go to this 2013 evening pause.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
