October 2, 2024 Quick space links
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.
- Astrobotic successfully completes ground communications tests between its Griffin lunar lander and NASA’s Deep Space Network
The launch is presently scheduled for 2025 on a Falcon Heavy rocket.
- New Horizons is now 60 times as far from the Sun as Earth, and has almost doubled Pluto’s distance from the Sun since flying past it in 2015
It is flying 300 million miles farther out each year.
- ESA touts new antenna in its own deep space network
Now all Europe has to do is launch some deep space probes.
- ISRO is hopeful its first unmanned test orbital Gangayaan mission will happen before the end of this year
This isn’t really news, as the agency has been saying this for quite some time. If anything, the story hints that the mission will likely be delayed until early next year.
- Russian prime minister claims the first 300 satellites in its own “Starlink” constellation will be launched by 2027
And if you believe him I have bridge in Brooklyn I could sell you cheap!
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
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.
- Astrobotic successfully completes ground communications tests between its Griffin lunar lander and NASA’s Deep Space Network
The launch is presently scheduled for 2025 on a Falcon Heavy rocket.
- New Horizons is now 60 times as far from the Sun as Earth, and has almost doubled Pluto’s distance from the Sun since flying past it in 2015
It is flying 300 million miles farther out each year.
- ESA touts new antenna in its own deep space network
Now all Europe has to do is launch some deep space probes.
- ISRO is hopeful its first unmanned test orbital Gangayaan mission will happen before the end of this year
This isn’t really news, as the agency has been saying this for quite some time. If anything, the story hints that the mission will likely be delayed until early next year.
- Russian prime minister claims the first 300 satellites in its own “Starlink” constellation will be launched by 2027
And if you believe him I have bridge in Brooklyn I could sell you cheap!
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Minor edit in New Horizons blurb: “It is flying 300 million miles farther out each year.”
Andi: Fixed. Thanks.
Mr. Zimmerman I hear you all the time on the John Batchelor show, I like your website. is there an app I get when I contribute ? I would like to contribute
Al Armstrong
armstronglaw47@outlook.com
Albert Armstrong: First, thank you for the kind words about my work. As for donating or subscribing, the tip jar on my page (and below in this post) lists all the ways to do so, none of which require an app.
—————–
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. In the tip jar are buttons for making either a donation or a subscription using Paypal.
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
—————–
As always, I am endlessly grateful to all those who donate, since you don’t have to. Thank you all!
Phys.org has a great new article entitled:
“New design software takes a concept to a multitude of configurations.”
This was from the AIAA AVIATION FORUM AND ASCEND 2024.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a program called “deepSPACE” which generated different iterations of aircraft…rather like what UNILEVER did with “evolving” soap nozzle designs–as in a recent TED TALK.
Hello Bob,
You (and Rand) have flogged the problems with SLS and Orion so thoroughly that the horse is reduced to a thin glue, and at a certain point, there is a risk of just preaching to the choir, since virtually everyone here agrees about the whole thing. And yet, there’s a new dissection by Casey Handmer (formerly of JPL) at his blog that really grapples with the broad organizational dysfunction not just in the Artemis program but across the entirety of NASA that really deserves highlighting for folks here, if you have a mind.
I mean, it’s just brutal. I have a few small quibbles. But he has the receipts.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/
Richard M: He provides a nice comprehensive summary of all the many problems at NASA that I have been documenting day-by-day here at BtB. It is very depressing. If Harris becomes president (I don’t say “win” because in a well-run election this candidate would lose badly. We don’t have such things anymore) we can be certain nothing at NASA will change, even as the feds accelerate their attacks on Musk and private enterprise.
From a personal note, I find it depressing that Handmer knows nothing of my work. He writes that four years ago he was “unable to find a comprehensive summary of the ongoing abject failure known as the NASA SLS (Space Launch System).” Yet I had written many, beginning with my first in 2011. This happens all the time. I sometimes wonder if I even exist.
Hello Bob,
Good question. I wonder if it is because you aren’t on the hellsite (aka, X)? Or Google is up to something nefarious with its search engine again?
Or, maybe he has a different sense of what he is looking for in “comprehensive?” I just don’t know.
I admit, I first found you through Rand’s blog….
I feel a wee bit sorry for the NASA engineers and other staff who grok what’s going on and are helpless to do anything about it. That has to be a depressing existence. But this is surely one more reason why NASA centers are hemorrhaging so much talent (like, well, Handmer) to commercial space companies — certainly the ones in a position to make the career change, at any rate. But that only accelerates the problem.
Richard M: For sure my disinterest (and lack of time) for adding X to my workload contributes to the problem. However, I am also a noted space historian who has written award-winning books on almost all the most important events in space during the 20th century. You’d think that would make people aware of my work, but yet it doesn’t.
No matter. I am very glad others are now pounding home the failures of NASA’s entire management. What must be remembered however is that NASA’s failures are merely a minor example of the failures across the entire federal bureaucracy. In fact, NASA does far better than almost any other government agency. Think about that for a few seconds.
Richard M,
Thank you for the link. It is a good read.
I’m not sure that Casey Handmer intended for this paragraph to summarize his entire essay, but I think it does it nicely.
He complains about several projects that slipped schedule and went far over budget. Many for similar reasons as the above paragraph.
Afterthoughts seems to have become the NASA way. NASA did an excellent job with Apollo, because they understood the challenges and worked hard from the beginning to overcome all of them.
Artemis, for example, is entirely made up of afterthoughts and components designed for other intentions. It is hard enough to get things to work together when they have been designed to work together, but to slap together a number of arbitrary parts and get it working is a Herculean task.
The Mars Sample Return has a similar problem, in that the method to take and store samples was designed before anyone designed the return portion of the mission. Instead of designing them together so that their operations were synchronized, it is more like some rescue mission, where we know the samples are in “lifeboats” scattered across the landscape, and the return mission has to figure out how to collect them all then how to get them back. How did Handmer describe that?
Because they didn’t work together as a team, they had to get it all to work as an afterthought.
Artemis has been similar. The Orion capsule came from the Constellation project that would return man to the surface of the Moon, so that should be adequate to the task, since it was designed for the task. However, Constellation was cancelled and Congress insisted that NASA have a heavy-lift launch vehicle, SLS, and then later upgrade it to a super-heavy lift vehicle, but they specified no mission for it, just a basic capability. With the lift capacity being too low, an Apollo-like mission was out of the question, as Orion couldn’t even get into and out of low lunar orbit, so a highly elliptical orbit lunar space station was conceptualized and added to the project. Yet another makeshift adaptation to poor planning from the outset. Congress fancied itself as a rocket scientist when it designed SLS, but lacking a mission, they didn’t know what to design.
Handmer does sort of mention that all this makeshift design work started with the Space Shuttle, which needed DoD support in order to get it through Congress.
This may have been the beginning of where it all went wrong. NASA didn’t have support back in the early 1970s, resulting in political compromises becoming standard operating procedure, right down to having to let Congress play rocket scientist in order to get SLS funded. For decades, NASA was known for its technical excellence, but it was actually festering from political forces and compromises.
NASA is still our greatest knowledge base for space operations. Our new space companies can rely upon them for technical assistance on their new designs.
This isn’t even Handmer’s last word on the topic: