Year: 2024

Australia moves to make skin color and sex more important in hiring space engineers than skill or knowledge

9:18 am

A new industry group, established with full support of the Australian government, has been formed to encourage the hiring of minorities and women in that nation’s space industry, merely because they are minorities and women.

The Australian Space Diversity Alliance (ASDA) said it aims to support senior leaders and minimise the barriers that marginalised groups face. It comes after a series of reports have shown the sector is lagging behind others in regard to gender disparity, and alongside a talent shortage critics say can only be overcome with a more diverse intake.

ASDA was founded by eight industry figures, including Defence Council of Victoria’s Anntonette Dailey, ANU’s Dr Cassandra Steer, and Raytheon’s Linda Spurr. Defence Connect is one of the group’s industry partners, alongside five state governments, the iLAuNCH Trailblazer initiative, and communications agency The Write Space.

It makes the typical and very bogus claims of these Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that because woman comprise only 20% of the people in the space industry and minorities only 5%, bigotry must be involved. And the only solution is more bigotry, by favoring applicants from those groups even it they are less qualified than others.

The possibility that women and minorities might simply not be interested in doing this work is a reality that these race hustlers simply can’t tolerate. No, if women and minorities aren’t represented at a level we believe appropriate, we will make it so, regardless of skills, talent, knowledge or experience.

Expect the entire Australian space industry to suffer because of this effort.

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Private Indian company scrubs suborbital test launch

9:08 am

The private Indian company Agnikul yesterday scrubbed its first suborbital test launch from its privately owned spaceport on the east coast of India when it detected issues during a dress rehearsal countdown.

On Friday, Agnikul Cosmos Private Limited’s Agnibaan was slated to launch from the company-owned launchpad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) located inside Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) facility at Sriharikota.

“Agnikul is holding the launch out of an abundance of caution based on certain minor observations from the full countdown rehearsals last night,” it said in a statement. The company will announce a new date and time for the launch. The IIT-Madras incubated start-up is 3-D printing its space vehicle – Agnibaan, with single piece 3D-printed engine.

My post earlier this week about the location of this private launchpad was in error. The launchpad might be privately owned, but it is not at a different location from ISRO’s main Sriharikota spaceport. It is located within that spaceport, and exists because the Modi government several years ago required ISRO to let private companies use its facilities. Agnikul decided to use this to its advantage, building a whole launchpad within the Sriharikota site.

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ISRO completes second drop test runway landing of its own mini-reusable shuttle

8:56 am

Pushpak about to land
Click for original image

India’s space agency ISRO yesterday successfully completed the second runway landing of its own mini-reusable shuttle, dubbed Pushpak, after the vehicle was dropped from a helicopter at an altitude of 2.8 miles.

This mission successfully simulated the approach and high-speed landing conditions of RLV returning from space. With this second mission, ISRO has re-validated the indigenously developed technologies in the areas of navigation, control systems, landing gear and deceleration systems essential for performing a high-speed autonomous landing of a space-returning vehicle. The winged body and all flight systems used in RLV-LEX-01 were reused in the RLV-LEX-02 mission after due certification/clearances. Hence reuse capability of flight hardware and flight systems is also demonstrated in this mission. Based on the observations from RLV-LEX-01, the airframe structure and landing gear were strengthened to tolerate higher landing loads. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentences I think are the most significant. ISRO is pushing hard for reusability.

The concept of this spacecraft is somewhat comparable to the X-37B, though all the engineering can be applied to larger shuttles that can carry cargo and humans in and out of orbit. At the moment however Pushpak is simply an engineering test prototype, not yet ready for orbital flights. For example, the landing gears are too large and cannot be retracted, something unacceptable for orbital flights.

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March 21, 2024 Quick space links

3:23 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. 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.

 

  • Rocket Factory Augsburg touts its proposed Argo cargo freighter

    • The link provides a detailed description of this new spacecraft, clearly intended to provide ferrying services to the upcoming future space stations, with its most likely customer the Starlab station being built by Voyager Space, which is partnering with ESA and Airbus. This German company hopes to launch it by 2028.

 

 

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SpaceX launches a cargo Dragon to ISS

2:18 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched a Dragon freighter to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The cargo Dragon was flying for the fourth time. It will dock with ISS on March 23, 2024. The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing back at one of SpaceX’s landing pads at Cape Canaveral.

This was also the first Dragon launch from this particular SpaceX launchpad in four years. The company only recently reconfigured it for Dragon flights, both manned and unmanned, so that it has two options for launching NASA manned missions. NASA had demanded this before it would give SpaceX permission to launch Superheavy/Starship from that rocket’s new launchpad in Florida. The agency thought it was too close to SpaceX’s first manned launchpad, and wanted an option in case a Superheavy launch failure damaged the Dragon launchsite. With this success SpaceX is one step closer to flying operational Superheavy/Starship flights out of Cape Canaveral.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

28 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 33 to 21, while SpaceX now leads the entire world, including American companies, 28 to 26.

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Some more “What the heck?” geology on Mars

2:00 pm

What the heck?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small part of a region dubbed Iani Chaos, but what this geology shows is way beyond my pay grade.

Why there are those tiny aligned mounds, oriented at right angles to the slope, is not clear at all. Nor is it obvious what created the lighter chaotic terrain at the base of the slope.

The elevation difference between the low and high points is about 400 feet. The slope continues up to the west for another 600 feet to the top of a north-south ridgeline. The patterns here suggest vaguely some flows downhill, such as that widening east-to-west gap, but only vaguely.

The look at the overview map only compounds the mystery.
» Read more

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Mob of Democrats threatens violence against conservative students at the University of Memphis

11:55 am

Democrats in Georgia in 1915, lynching Leo Frank
Democrats in Georgia in 1915, lynching Leo Frank

In a now typical display of the modern leftist protest movement, a mob of Democrats threatened to kill attendees at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Memphis on March 20, 2024 where Kyle Rittenhouse was scheduled to appear.

A savage mob terrorized conservative students attending a Turning Point USA event featuring Kyle Rittenhouse at the University of Memphis. The mob literally chased conservative students shouting obscenities and violent threats. Several students who had been attending a campus Bible study were also caught up in the melee. Eyewitnesses say the mob made direct threats against TPUSA leadership. Radical black activists cheered the chaos. There are no reports of arrests. The TPUSA group later found refuge in a nearby safe house

When Rittenhouse attempted to give his speech, he was shouted down and forced to go directly to Q&As. Though it seemed from at least one clip that this Q&A proceeded with some civility (though interspersed with many angry catcalls from the crowd), it ended abruptly after thirty minutes, which according to Rittenhouse was because they had a hard cut off time.

At the first link are numerous videos showing that mob in all its glory, one of which is embedded below. It shows several attendees of the event being escorted into the building by police, as the mob surrounds and chases them, shouting curses and threats.
» Read more

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Citizen scientist project discovers 16 active asteroids

10:39 am

A project that has enlisted approximately 8,300 ordinary citizens to review more than 430,000 photos taken by a telescope in Chile has discovered sixteen asteroids that produce comae and tails like comets.

Identifying and tracking active asteroids whose activity specifically appears to be due to the sublimation of ice – known as main-belt comets – is a particular interest of the project team, as it is an essential part of understanding the abundance and distribution of volatile material like ice in the Solar System.

…The project, utilizing publicly available Dark Energy Camera (DECam) data from the Victor M. Blanco telescope in Chile, involved the examination of more than 430,000 images of known minor planets by 8,300 volunteers, where images identified by citizen scientists as being likely to contain active asteroids were then passed on to the science team for confirmation and additional analysis.

You can read the research paper here. If you want to participate, the Active Asteroids project is still on-going, and can be accessed here.

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Six launch companies give updates on the status of their rockets

9:03 am

Link here. The event was a panel at a conference where officials from SpaceX, ULA, Mitsubishi, Arianespace, Relativity, and Rocket Lab gave presentations.

Based on what is reported at the link, the Mitsubishi update was the most significant:

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) successfully launched its H3 rocket Feb. 16 after the rocket’s inaugural launch failed nearly a year earlier, a setback that Iwao Igarashi, vice president and general manager at MHI, called a “nightmare.” “There were no major problems with the rocket” on its second flight, he said.

We will have to see. Though everything worked as planned on the second flight, the true test on whether Mitsubishi has overcome the issues from the first launch will be the rocket’s third launch, presently scheduled for sometime next year.

A Relativity official said their Terran-R rocket is still targeting a first launch in 2026, while Rocket Lab was hopeful that the first launch of its larger Neutron rocket would occur by the end of this year.

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China Long March 2D launches “group of satellites”; Russia scrubs manned Soyuz launch

8:45 am

China today successfully launched what it simply labeled as “a group of satellites”, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.

No other useful information was released about the payloads. Nor was there any word as to the crash site of the rocket’s first stage, which uses toxic hypergolic fuels and landed somewhere in China.

Meanwhile in Russia a launch of a Soyuz-2 rocket carrying three astronauts to ISS was aborted at about T-20 seconds for reasons that as yet remain unclear. According to NASA the next launch opportunity is March 23, 2024.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

27 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 32 to 21, while SpaceX remains ahead of the entire world, including American companies, 27 to 26.

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Rocket Lab launches classified smallsat for National Reconnaissance Office

12:36 am

Rocket Lab in the early morning hours of March 21, 2024 successfully launched a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, its Electron rocket lifting off from Wallops Island in Virgina.

For this launch Rocket Lab made no attempt to recover its first stage. As of posting the payloads had not yet been deployed.

A Chinese Long March 2D launch was also scheduled to occur just prior to the Rocket Lab launch, but as of posting there was no word on whether that launch had taken place.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

27 SpaceX
11 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

American private enterprise presently leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 32 to 20, while SpaceX leads the entire world, including American companies, 27 to 25.

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