An evening pause: This isn’t piano-centered, but it definitely is an example of another great genre of great music sung by two great performers. Performed live 1963 on the Judy Garland Show for television.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
According to the twisted language in a new NASA inspector general report [pdf] describing the present status of the Roman Space Telescope, the project is on schedule and on budget because NASA decided to predict ahead of time how much it would behind schedule and over budget at this moment. From its executive summary:
[A]s of March 2024, Roman was meeting its cost obligations and schedule to launch by May 2027. Roman was on track to launch despite encountering contractor performance issues and cost overruns related to hardware anomalies, under scoping of work, and inadequate oversight of subcontractors. Roman remains on schedule because Science Mission Directorate officials conducted a replan in May 2021 to mitigate the expected cost and schedule growth caused by COVID-19, increasing the life-cycle cost estimate from $3.9 billion to $4.3 billion. This replan also included delaying the launch readiness date from October 2026 to May 2027. As of March 2024, Roman was tracking its project reserves and potential delays with L3Harris as its top risks. Roman has been using its project reserves to mitigate cost growth related to L3Harris’s performance challenges. Despite these contract value increases, Roman is still within its life-cycle cost estimate because the project’s reserves cover these extra costs.
The insulting nature of this inspector general report is astonishing. The administrative state really does think the American public is too stupid to notice this. I wonder if they are right.
The report further notes issues with the telescope’s two subcontractors, BAE Systems and L3Harris, as well as warning of insufficient ground-based antenna capacity for downloading the data that Roman will produce.
[A]s of April 2024, the NSN [Near Space Network] did not have adequate capacity to support Roman’s mission requirements without planned upgrades to the White Sands antenna and lacked the funding to implement the necessary upgrades by the mission’s launch readiness date.
In other words, more money will be needed to build more ground antennas, something that NASA conveniently forgot to mention when it first proposed Roman to Congress. How interesting, but completely par for the course.
Hat tip stringer Jay.
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.
The company hopes that many satellite manufacturers will buy it to add to their payloads for later refueling and even de-orbit operations.
There are two key take-aways: 1. No asteroid appears reachable for a close fly-by. 2. The data suggests however that there is an unexpected high population of asteroids much farther out than expected.
New Secret Service head Robert Rowe
testifying before the Senate
During testimony earlier this week before a Senate committee, the new head of the Secret Service, Robert Rowe, was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tennessee) to comment on the whistleblower email that claimed the only interest of the agency’s top five supervisors was to cover their ass, not fix the incompetence that allowed a sniper to kill one innocent bystander and injure three others, including presidential canddate Donald Trump.
Rowe’s response summed up his misplaced priorities perfectly, and showed the utter truth of the whistleblower’s accusations.
Blackburn: I want to know how you feel about the fact that employees in your agency are worried about covering their behind. And not worried about protecting a former president.
Rowe: Thank you, Senator. So, I am hurt by that email, but not in the way you think I’m saying it. I’m hurt because my people are hurting right now. … My agency is hurting. Um, Emotions are raw.
How horrible. People at the Secret Service are “hurting!”
» Read more
Click for full animation
A release this week of new research papers based on data obtained during the impact mission of DART on the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022 has determined the approximate ages of both Dimorphos and the larger asteroid Didumos that it orbits.
Analysis suggested that both Didymos and Dimorphos have weak surface characteristics, which led the team to posit that Didymos has a surface age 40–130 times older than Dimorphos, with the former estimated to be 12.5 million years and the latter less than 300,000 years old.
This research also did a computer simulation that suggests Dimorphos was formed because of Didymos’ fast rotation rate, the fastest asteroid rotation rate so far measured. The spin caused first the development of a ridge on the equator of Didymos, which later literally threw material into space which later coalesced to form the satellite Dimorphus. The graphic to the right is from that simulation.
Other research studied the boulder distribution of Dimorphos, and structural nature of both asteroids.
A European mission, Hera, is scheduled to launch in October 2024 and rendezvous with Didymos and Dimorphos in 2026, obtaining close-up data following the DART 2022 impact.
Vast Haven-1 station inside Falcon-9 fairing
The space station startup Vast today announced the first two customers planning to place payloads on its Haven-1 single module space station, presently scheduled for launch in the second half of 2025.
The company also revealed that these payloads will be installed on the station in what it calls its Haven-1 Lab, which is essentially a variation of the payload rack system used on ISS.
The Haven-1 Lab features 10 Middeck Locker Equivalent payload slots, each roughly the size of a microwave. Each payload slot can weigh up to 30 kg (66 lbs), is provided with 100 W of continuous power, and has access to an Ethernet data connection. Payloads will be operated by the astronaut crew on Haven-1, as well as commanded and monitored by ground operators via Starlink laser links, providing Gigabit/s speed, low latency connectivity. Partners will have the opportunity to return products and samples from space via a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
In tandem with Vast’s announcement of its Haven-1 Lab, the company also announced Redwire and Yuri as its inaugural partners, representing some of the foremost experts in the development of microgravity payloads.
Redwire has flown numerous payloards already to ISS, including cutting edge 3D printers. Yuri is less well known, but it appears both it and Redwire are taking advantage of Vast’s much simpler paperwork requirements than NASA’s. Vast has taken no NASA funds, so it can approve payloads at its whim. Speeds things up, saves money, and everyone benefits.
These payloads will likely be part of the first Haven-1 manned mission, where four astronauts will spend 30 days in space, ferried to and from the module using a Dragon capsule and launched almost immediately after Haven-1 is placed in orbit.
Link here. Progress is being made, but it remains unclear when the next orbital test flight of Superheavy/Starship will take place. Musk had predicted early August, and though the company appears getting close, there remains no word yet on from the FAA about issuing a launch license.
The article at the link however provides a lot of information about the construction of the second launch site at Boca Chica, as well as the future Starship prototypes to be launched. The next flight, the fifth, will use what SpaceX is calling its Block 1 version of the spaceship. The sixth flight will also fly this version. The seventh flight however will fly what SpaceX dubs its Block 2 verison, incorporating many upgrades and changes based on the previous test flights.
This information suggests several things. First, SpaceX wants to do three more orbital test launches in the near future, likely before the end of this year. Whether the FAA will allow such a thing remains unknown. The environmental reassessment that it issued in 2022 allows SpaceX to do five launches per year at Boca Chica, but requires the company to get FAA approval for each one, and also requires SpaceX to submit extensive paperwork before that approval will even be considered. Whether the FAA can move quickly enough between test flights to get this three more launches completed before December seems very doubtful, based on its past track record.
Second, it gives us a sense of the overall development. In developing Falcon 9, SpaceX went through five Block designs before the operational Block 5 that now flies so routinely. The company however was flying operationally and profitably by Block 2. If SpaceX is now moving to Block 2 for Starship, it means it is likely confident that this version will be capable of returning Starship to the ground undamaged and up to additional flights.
For reasons that appear fundamentally stupid, ULA early in July announced that it will now forbid independent freelance photographers who use the remote sites inside the launch facility at Cape Canaveral from selling their pictures independently.
The language was clear: Photographers were welcome to set up remote shots at ULA launches if they worked for the media or wanted to post their work on social media. However, photographers could not sell this work independently, including as prints for fellow enthusiasts or for use in annual calendars.
“ULA will periodically confirm editorial publication for media participating in remote camera placement,” the email stated. “If publication does not occur, or photos are sold outside of editorial purposes, privileges to place remote cameras may be revoked.”
In other words, photographers who come to Cape Canaveral to take pictures will only be allowed to do so it they are working for professional media, or are selling their work to news outlets. Photographers who make a living selling prints to collectors, or simply post them on social media in order to garner traffic, will eventually lose their access to the sites.
The article suggests this policy was instituted because managing the number of photographers had become unwieldy, but that is a pure guess, since ULA has not provided any explanation, nor has it responded to any questions from other press outlets.
From a PR point of view, this decison by ULA makes no sense. All it does is antagonize the public and the press, while reducing its public footprint. In this age of social media, publicity comes not just from major media outlets, but from the independent individuals writing for their own websites or X feeds.
Callisto’s basic design
This story about a first stage government-built Grasshopper-type rocket designed to demonstrate and test vertical landing has instead become a perfect demonstration of why governments should not design, build, and own anything.
It appears the first test flight of the Callisto test rocket, first proposed in 2015 and being built by a joint partnership of the German (DLR), French (CNES), and Japanese (JAXA) space agencies, has now slipped from 2024 to 2026.
Earlier this month, CNES deployed a refreshed website. Prior to that deployment, the agency’s Callisto project page had stated that the rocket’s first flight would occur in 2024. The new Callisto project page has a more detailed timeline, stating that the detailed design phase will be completed by the end of 2024. Vehicle integration in Japan is then expected in 2025, followed by a first launch from the Guiana Space Centre between 2025 and 2026. This revision outlines an approximate two-year slip in the project’s timeline. [emphasis mine]
These three agencies took almost a decade to simply conceive and design the project. Apparently they not yet even built anything. This despite a budget of slightly less than $100 million carved out of the entire budget for creating the Ariane-6 expendable. Compare that with SpaceX, which conceived its Grasshopper vertical test prototype in 2011, began flying that year, and resulted in an actual Falcon 9 first stage landing in 2015.
Will Callisto ever fly? Maybe, but don’t expect it to produce a rocket that is financially competitive with SpaceX. Instead, expect these three government agencies to subsidize its cost in order to make its price competitive on the open market. More likely Callisto will fly a few times, but will likely result in no new orbital rocket. Instead it will be superseded by the private rocket startups worldwide that are now building actual orbital rockets and will likely make them reuseable before Callisto even leaves the ground.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
An evening pause: Like the past two evening pauses this week, this also centers on a piano solo, and also takes us to an entire different musical genre. It is a bit long for a pause, but I can’t resist continuing the piano theme. You might recognize the third movement.
The soloist is 18-year-old Ignas Maknickas (who is clearly having fun), playing with Lithuania’s Ciurlionis School of Arts Symphony Orchestra.
Hat tip Todd Jones.
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.
After discovering that the cubesat intended for the mission had serious technical issues, they junked it and have been rushing to prepare the cubesat intended for the third mission. It is not clear yet whether it will be ready on time.
The image’s resolution is so good you can also see one of the station’s robot arms inspecting Starliner.
This Space News article claims the Chinese pseudo-company, Space Pioneer, is pushing forward anyway, but a close read suggests nothing about its future is certain.
The main cause of the drop is the loss of Russia’s entire international commercial market due to its breakup with Arianespace.
I wish them good luck but note that there is a lot of blarney here, revealed by the fact that it took me a lot of digging to discover they don’t yet have a location for this spaceport, a detail they very carefully fail to mention on their webpage or press materials.
The discovery was actually not a big surprise to the scientists. The press however thought it a very big deal, since it really knew nothing about the research that had already shown evidence of lots of near surface ice in the high latitudes.
