December 21, 2022 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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Author: Robert Zimmerman
Kelly Clarkson – Silent Night
An evening pause: Performed live on television 2013, with the help of Trisha Yearwood and Reba McEntire.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
December 21, 2022 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- ULA CEO Tory Bruno on reusing Vulcan 1st stage engines: “Built the business case on 3. Everything above that is gravy.”
Considering that SpaceX has now reused its first stages routinely more than that and as much as 15 times, my sense from Bruno here is that ULA continues to seem very doubtful about reuseability.
- Ground-based image of the Apollo 8 engine burn — dubbed the Trans Lunar Injection or TLI — that on December 21, 1968 took it out of Earth orbit and headed to the Moon
As I wrote in Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8: “Unlike past space missions, these astronauts would actually be going somewhere.”
Sadly, since Apollo no humans have gone anywhere. Like the ancient mariners afraid to fall off the edge of the Earth, we have hugged the coast for the past half century, merely going around and around the Earth. Is it not time to finally travel to distant worlds?
InSight mission ended
The white patches mark the locations on Mars of the largest quakes
detected by InSight
NASA today announced that it has officially ended the mission of the InSight lander on Mars.
Mission controllers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft’s solar-powered batteries have run out of energy – a state engineers refer to as “dead bus.”
NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts. The agency will continue to listen for a signal from the lander, just in case, but hearing from it at this point is considered unlikely. The last time InSight communicated with Earth was Dec. 15.
Other than the success of InSight’s seismometer, this project was mostly a failure. Its launch was delayed two years, from 2016 to 2018, because of problems with the original French seismometer, forcing JPL to take over. Then its German-made mole digger failed to drill into the Martian surface, causing the failure of the lander’s second instrument, a heat sensor designed to measure the interior temperature of Mars.
Fortunately the seismometer worked, or otherwise it would have been a total loss. That data has told us much about Mars and its interior.
Webb in safe mode intermittently during the past two weeks
According to a short update today from the science team, the Webb Space Telescope went into safe mode on December 7, 2022 and was in that state “intermittently” through December 20, 2022 because of a software issue.
The James Webb Space Telescope resumed science operations Dec. 20, after Webb’s instruments intermittently went into safe mode beginning Dec. 7 due to a software fault triggered in the attitude control system, which controls the pointing of the observatory. During a safe mode, the observatory’s nonessential systems are automatically turned off, placing it in a protected state until the problem can be fixed. This event resulted in several pauses to science operations totaling a few days over that time period. Science proceeded otherwise during that time. The Webb team adjusted the commanding system, and science has now fully resumed.
It would be nice to have a more detailed description of that “software fault”, and how it affected the attitude control system. Such things can be very trivial, or they can be disastrous. NASA has a responsibility to tell the public which.
The Wuhan panic underlines how scientists have abandoned the search for truth
Modern science
For almost three years I have been documenting endlessly the utter failure of almost every policy imposed by politicians and government health officials in response to the COVID epidemic. From masks to social distancing to lockdowns to COVID shot mandates, none of their draconian rules have done anything to stop the spread of the Wuhan flu, which was always impossible anyway.
Even worse than these bad policies however has been the behavior of the scientific community the past three years. This community has increasingly put politics and narrative above the search for truth, a focus that signals a terrible cultural change that is so horrible its consequences can barely be measured.
To understand this tragedy we must first go back to what science and government once believed about epidemics. The traditional infectious disease policies that doctors and governments had successfully used for more than a century, based on real research and an honest appraisal of the facts by scientists, always recognized that it was impossible to “stop the spread” of a respiratory illness. What worked best was to protect the aged and sick, whom such diseases could kill, while allowing the virus to quickly spread through the rest of the healthy population in order to quickly create a herd immunity that would choke off the virus’s early most virulent strains. The disease would then mutate to milder forms — essentially a cold — that the aged and weak could fight off.
The virus of COVID-19 has done exactly this, but along the way it killed many more older and sick people then necessary, because today’s modern petty tyrants — encouraged by many scientists — decided instead to toss that past knowledge out. Herd immunity was delayed by the lockdown policies, and most governments did little to protect the aged and sick, with some governments even acting to introduce the virus to these threatened populations.
To underline the failure of these policies, here are just a small recent sampling of the growing research outlining the failures of masks, social distancing, and lockdowns:
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The same region on Ganymede, as seen by Voyager-1 in 1979 and Juno in 2021
Click for full image.
When the Jupiter orbiter Juno did a close pass of the moon Ganymede on June 7, 2021, it took four pictures, covering regions mostly photographed for the first time by Voyager-1 in its close fly-by in 1979.
Scientists have now published the data from this new fly-by. Though Juno’s higher resolution pictures revealed many new details when compared with the Voyager-1 images from four decades earlier, the scientists found no changes. The comparison image, figure 2 of their paper, is to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here.
A flicker comparison between the registered JunoCam and Voyager reprojected mosaics revealed no apparent new impact features. Given the high albedo of fresh craters on Ganymede, with high albedo ejecta deposits two or three times the diameter of the craters themselves, we argue that new craters as small as 250 m diameter would be detectable in images at these 1 km per pixel scales. Extrapolating Ganymede cratering rates from Zahnle et al. (2003) below 1 km, the probability of JunoCam observing a new crater over 12.2 million km2 in 42 years is 1 in 1500, consistent with none being observed.
In other words, at these resolutions finding no new impacts is not a surprise.
Of the new features detected, the Juno images could see more details in the bright rays emanating from the crater Tros (in the lower center of both images), and thus found “…terrain boundaries previously mapped as ‘undivided’ or as ‘approximate’, several large craters, and 12 paterae newly identified in this region.”
Paterae resemble craters but are thought to be a some form of volcanic caldera. Their geological origin however is not yet completely understood.
The paper’s conclusion is actually the most exciting:
The insight gained from this handful of images makes it likely in our opinion that new observations from the upcoming JUICE and Europa Clipper missions will revolutionize our understanding of Ganymede.
SpaceX and the Ukraine resolve funding issues for Starlink terminals
According to a Ukrainian official, the Ukraine has worked out a method to pay for another 10,000 Starlink terminals by obtaining funding from several European nations.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov has announced that over 10,000 additional Starlink terminals will be sent to Ukraine in the coming months, confirming that issues regarding how to fund the country’s critical satellite internet service have been resolved.
The governments of several European Union countries are ready to share payment said Fedorov (who is also Ukraine’s minister for digital transformation) in an interview with Bloomberg, affirming that “As of now all financial issues have been resolved.” Fedorov did not publicly identify which governments are contributing towards the payments but confirmed that there’s currently no contract in place and that Ukraine will need to find additional funding by spring 2023.
Elon Musk had threatened to end Starlink support without some form of payment. It appears his threat, which was almost immediately retracted, forced some action by these governments.
Kepler’s first discovered exoplanet is spiraling into its aging star
Measurements of the orbit of first exoplanet discovered by the Kepler space telescope have determined that its orbit is very slowly shrinking, and that it will eventually spiral into its aging sun.
In the case of Kepler-1658b, according to the new study, its orbital period is decreasing at the miniscule rate of about 131 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) per year, with a shorter orbit indicating the planet has moved closer to its star.
Detecting this decline required multiple years of careful observation. The watch started with Kepler and then was picked up by the Palomar Observatory’s Hale Telescope in Southern California and finally the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope, or TESS, which launched in 2018. All three instruments captured transits, the term for when an exoplanet crosses the face of its star and causes a very slight dimming of the star’s brightness. Over the past 13 years, the interval between Kepler-1658b’s transits has slightly but steadily decreased.
The scientists think tidal forces are causing the orbit to shrink. The star itself is old and beginning to expand as it evolves towards its own stellar death.
ISS spacewalk postponed because controllers had to maneuver station to avoid space junk
An American spacewalk to install new solar panels to ISS yesterday was suddenly scrubbed when ground controllers identified a piece of space junk that was going to fly within a quarter mile of the station.
While flight control teams were preparing for today’s U.S. spacewalk, updated tracking data on a fragment of Russian Fregat-SB upper stage debris showed a close approach to station. Based on this new data, flight control teams directed the crew to stop spacewalk preparations as the ground team stepped into procedures to perform a Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver (PDAM.)
Russian controllers successfully used the engines on a docked Progress freighter today to complete the avoidance maneuver, firing those engines for 10 minutes and 21 seconds.
It appears the station was never in any danger.
Virgin Orbit finally receives launch license from British bureaucracy
We’re here to help you! The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority has finally issued a license to Virgin Orbit to launch nine satellites from a Cornwall airport.
The launch date however has not yet been set, because it appears licenses for the nine satellites still need to be issued, though according to the article at the link, approval appears “imminent.”
The press release from the UK Space Agency brags about the speed in which this license was issued:
The UK Civil Aviation Authority granted the licences within 15 months, well within the expected timescales for these types of licences, putting the UK’s regulatory framework on a competitive footing with other international space regulators.
Hogwash. If the licensing process for every commercial launch in the UK is going to take this long, rocket companies are going to quickly find other places to launch from.
Launch failure for Arianespace’s Vega-C rocket
The second launch of Arianespace’s Vega-C rocket, an upgrade from the Vega rocket that has launched previously, failed yesterday when a problem with the second stage occurred at 2 minutes 27 seconds into the flight.
Designated Vega Vehicle 22 (VV22), the rocket was the second Vega flight of the year and Arianespace’s fifth mission of 2022. VV22 was originally set to launch in November 2022, but a component in the upper composite in the payload fairing needed to be replaced. The launch failure occurred during stage 2 flight, with CEO Stephane Israel citing an “underpressure” indicated during that stage’s burn.
I have embedded video of the launch below, cued to T-30 seconds, just before launch. The rocket was carrying two Earth observation satellites built by Airbus.
The rocket itself has four stages, with the failure occurring when the second stage clearly did not maintain the rocket’s correct path. Though it appeared to be working, it was not providing enough power, so instead of continuing upward into space, the rocket fell back into the atmosphere.
» Read more
Melinda Kathleen Reese – O Come O Come Emmanuel
An evening pause: This was first posted in February 2019. I think it bears repeating this Christmas season. As I noted then,
The video replays her singing the same thing three times. There is a good reason, as she almost appears to have begun singing as a lark, and the acoustics of the church astonish her. The repeats help bring out this amazing quality.
December 20, 2022 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Fiscal year 2023 omnibus bill provides $25.4 billion for NASA
Increases the budget by 5.6% from last year. Overall, it appears Congress is funding everything as NASA wishes, while maintaining pork projects like SLS and Orion.
- Is Virgin Orbit a Phantom in the UK?
Interesting article, but in a word, the answer has always been “Yes!” Virgin Orbit wants to launch from Cornwall in the UK, but its factories and management is all U.S. based. Since its launch vehicle is an airplane, it is not likely to bring much else to the UK for a very long time. For anyone in Britain to think otherwise is to live in a fantasy world.
- Virgin pumps another $20M into Virgin Orbit. $25M was pumped in last month.
This money is once again needed to cover the loss of revenue because of its lack of launches in the second half of 2022, caused partly by red tape in the UK and partly from rocket technical problems.
- The secret payloads of Russia’s Glonass navigation satellites
Detailed historical article, much of it describing detectors designed to monitor nuclear tests to make sure the U.S. did not violate any test ban treaties. The U.S. equivalent was its Vela satellites.
- Video of fairing release test of new Tianlong-2 rocket from Chinese pseudo-company Space-Pioneer
According to Jay, “Tianlong-2 is almost a knockoff of the expendable Falcon-1 rocket, but it has twice the payload.”
Three quick links providing graphics of China’s next generation crew spacecraft, suggesting it will be larger. None should be taken very seriously, as yet.
- Graphic showing the new crew spacecraft compared to Shenzhou crew capsule
The new version is wider, 5 meters in diameter, and appears to not use fairings during launch.
- Animation showing new crew spacecraft docking a Tiangong-3 with an additional module
The new spacecraft is docking with the bottom port, so that much of it is not visible.
Pushback: Blacklisting Virginia Tech soccer coach loses effort to get lawsuit dismissed
Kiersten Hening
Bring a gun to a knife fight: Charles Adair, the soccer coach for the woman’s team at Virginia Tech, has lost in his effort to dismiss a lawsuit against him by former player, Kiersten Hening, who he blacklisted from playing because she refused to kneel in support of Black Lives Matter during the National Anthem before a game.
Hening filed a lawsuit against Virginia Tech and Coach Adair in 2021 but Virginia Tech immediately attempted to file a motion to have the suit tossed. The athlete stated that when she refused to take part in the kneeling, which at the time was a virtue signal statement indicating public support for the Black Lives Matter movement, Adair began to insult and demean her as well as limiting her time to play during matches.
According to [U.S. District Judge Thomas T. Cullen], “Hening, who had been a major on-field contributor for two years prior to the 2020 season, also asserts that Adair removed her from the starting lineup or the next two games and drastically reduced her playing time in those games because she had engaged in this protected First Amendment activity. As a result, Hening resigned from the team after the third game of the season.” [emphasis mine]
You can read Cullen’s full decision here [pdf].
Cullen’s decision is intriguing not only because he not only threw out Adair’s effort to get the lawsuit dismissed, he also threw out Adair’s claim that he deserves “qualified immunity” as a public official. » Read more
A congregation of Martian dust devils
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 9, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a spot on Mars where, as indicated by the many many tracks, dust devils routinely develop and travel across the surface.
Though this whole region appears to favor dust devils, within it are places that are even more favored. For example, the number of tracks on the northern and eastern slopes of that small hill at center left practically cover the surface, while the hill’s western and southern slopes are almost untouched.
Both the overview map and the global Mars map below provide the full context.
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Perseverance’s planned route up onto the Jezero Crater delta
Click for original image.
Even as the Perseverance science team prepares to cache the ten first core samples on the surface of Mars for later pickup by a future Mars helicopter for return to Earth, they have also released the planned route they intend to follow as they drive the rover up onto the delta that flowed into Jezero Crater in the distant past.
The black line on the map to the right shows that route, with the black dots indicating points in which further core samples will likely be taken. The red dot indicates Perseverance’s present position, with the white line indicating its past travels. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s present position.
Rocket Lab reschedules first Wallops launch to January
Having had to scrub the launch on December 18th and December 19th due of weather, Rocket Lab has now officially rescheduled its first Wallops launch to January.
The move of the planned launch window from December 2022 to early 2023 was driven by weather and the additional time that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at Wallops and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) required to complete essential regulatory documentation for launch. The delay in documentation left only two days in the originally scheduled 14-day launch window and both of those final remaining days were unsuitable for launch due to bad weather. The Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport within NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility is now closed for launch activity for the remainder of the December due to holiday airspace restrictions, preventing further launch attempts in 2022.
Rocket Lab originally wanted to launch from Wallops two years ago, but has been repeatedly stymied by government red tape. At that time the company wanted to use the software of its own flight termination system, a system that it has successfully used in New Zealand more than two dozen times, including several times where launch failures actually required the system to destroy the rocket. NASA said no, and instead insisted on spending two years apparently creating its own software which also requires the added presence of NASA officials during launch.
Astronomers identify what they think are the Milky Way’s first stars
The concentration of ancient stars in the Milky Way’s core region.
Click for originial image.
The uncertainty of science: Using data produced by the European space telescope Gaia, combined with computer analysis, astronomers think they have identified the Milky Way’s first stars, all located within 30,000 light years of the galaxy’s core region.
The researchers began by locating a sample of two million bright red giant stars with the right spectra, using computer neural network machine learning.
With that sample, it proved comparatively easy to identify the ancient heart of the Milky Way galaxy – a population of stars that Rix has dubbed the “poor old heart”, given their low metallicity, inferred old age, and central location. On a sky map, these stars appear to be concentrated around the galactic center. The distances conveniently supplied by Gaia (via the parallax method) allow for a 3D reconstruction that shows those stars confined within a comparatively small region around the center, approximately 30,000 light-years across
The stars in question neatly complement Xiang’s and Rix’s earlier study of the Milky Way’s teenage years: They have just the right metallicity to have brought forth the metal-poorest of those stars that, later on, formed the Milky Way’s thick disk. Since that earlier study provided a chronology for thick-disk formation, this makes the ancient heart of the Milky Way older than about 12.5 billion years.
While the uncertainties of this scientific result are huge, it still helps identify the beginnings of the Milky Way, its initial size, and the kind of stars that existed here at that time.
Russians preparing replacement Soyuz for launch to ISS
ISS after November 28, 2022 docking of unmanned Dragon freighter.
MS-22 is the Soyuz capsule that is leaking.
Though a final decision will not be made until the completion on December 27, 2022 of their investigation into the leak in the coolant system of the Soyuz capsule docked to ISS, the Russians have begun preparing a replacement Soyuz for launch.
A backup spacecraft to bring cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) back to Earth will be prepared by February 19 and the spaceship is currently undergoing tests at the Baikonur spaceport, Roscosmos Chief Yury Borisov said on Monday.
That replacement Soyuz was supposed to launch in March, which means they can only accelerate its preparation by about a month. Assuming it is determined that the leaking capsule cannot be used safely as a lifeboat, this means that until February the station does not have its standard complement of lifeboats.
Should something happen that requires an immediate evacuation before February, it might be possible to get an extra three people into the two Dragon capsules presently docked to ISS, since each was designed to carry a maximum of six passengers, though generally four is considered their maximum capacity.
InSight fails to respond during scheduled communications session
Since December 15, 2022 engineers have been unable to contact the Mars InSight lander, which likely means its power levels have finally fallen so low that the spacecraft is no longer functioning.
On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA’s InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, 2022.
The graph to the right shows the decline in InSight’s power levels since May. The atmosphere has been clearing following the dust storm in October, indicated by the drop in the tau level. Normal tau levels outside of dust storm season are around 0.6-0.7. It is therefore likely that as this dust cleared, it also settled on InSight’s solar panels, and reduced their ability to generate power to the point the spacecraft ceased functioning.
This is very much the same thing that put the rover Opportunity out of business in 2019.
According to this update, engineers are going to continue to try to contact the lander, but it is likely that this effort will end in about a week, should no contact be successful.
Helene Fischer – Feliz Navidad
An evening pause: A Spanish Christmas song, with some English lyrics, sung in Germany. Makes for a good start to this Christmas week.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
December 19, 2022 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Longer video of Zhuque-2 launch failure
You need to scroll down to see the second part, which appears to end before the failure.
- Ham radio cubesat released from Tiangong-3
More details about the satellite here.
- PR film from rocket startup Stoke Space
The most interesting part is where the film describes the company’s 2nd stage, which uses many mini-thrusters in a ring to make it reusable. For more info, see this October 2021 post.
- Roscosmos head Borisov claims Soyuz leak hole is about 0.8mm in size
This was part of his press statement that TASS reported earlier, but without including this one detail. How Borisov knows the hole size however is not explained.
December 16, 2022 Zimmerman/Pratt on Texas podcast
I appeared on Robert Pratt’s Pratt on Texas podcast on Friday, talking space and slavery. The podcast, covering three segments and 27 minutes long, can be listened to here. I have also embedded the podcast below.
» Read more
Today’s blacklisted American: Law firm fires lawyer of 44 years for expressing the wrong opinion
They’re coming for you next: The law firm Hogan Lovells recently fired a partner lawyer with 44 years of experience, Robin Keller, simply because she dared at a company meeting to express some rational reasons why Roe v Wade should have been overturned.
As Keller wrote, “I was invited to participate in what was billed as a ‘safe space’ for women at the firm to discuss the decision. It might have been a safe space for some, but it wasn’t safe for me.”
She recounts how “Three weeks later I received a letter stating that the firm had concluded that my reference to comments labeling black abortion rates genocide was a violation of the antiharassment policy.”
Apparently, “a participant complained that she could not breathe and others called her a racist.” These crybabies then demanded she be fired, and the company quickly acquiesced.
The company’s blackballing of Keller should surprise no one. A quick review of Hogan Lovells’ website shows us that this is a very politically correct leftist law firm. On its Diversity, Equity & Inclusion website, the company proudly tells us that:
» Read more
Big sink near the Martian south pole
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 12, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The image is rotated so that south is at the top. The science team labels this a “subsidence feature,” or in plain English, a sinkhole.
Its perfectly circular shape, plus its central peak, strongly suggests we are looking at an impact crater. However, the lack of a raised rim of debris, produced by the ejecta from the impact, raises questions about this conclusion, and is one reason why the scientists think this is a sinkhole instead. Its shape however could be telling us that this sink is simply mirroring the existence of a buried crater.
The overview map below as always provides more context.
» Read more
Could the Apollo 11 lunar module still be orbiting the Moon?
According to one researcher, at least two of the Apollo lunar modules that took astronauts up and down from the Moon could still be in lunar orbit, though their location is presently unknown.
His paper outlining the possible survival of the Apollo 11 LM Eagle can be found here. From his abstract:
The Apollo 11 “Eagle” Lunar Module ascent stage was abandoned in lunar orbit after the historic landing in 1969. Its fate is unknown. Numerical analysis described here provides evidence that this object might have remained in lunar orbit to the present day. The simulations show a periodic variation in eccentricity of the orbit, correlated to the selenographic longitude of the apsidal line. The rate of apsidal precession is correlated to eccentricity. These two factors appear to interact to stabilize the orbit over the long term.
More details here.
Hat tip to reader Mike Nelson, who sent me this story today. I am certain I reported it previously, but searching on Behind the Black failed to find it, so I decided to post again. As the researcher concludes:
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could find this amazing little vessel and bring her back to Earth!!!!
Blobs in space
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today by the science team. From the caption:
This image shows a small region of the well-known nebula Westerhout 5, which lies about 7000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of interesting features, including a free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule (frEGG). The frEGG in this image is the small tadpole-shaped dark region in the upper left. This buoyant-looking bubble is lumbered with two rather uninspiring names — [KAG2008] globule 13 and J025838.6+604259.
FrEGGs are a particular class of Evaporating Gaseous Globules (EGGs). Both frEGGs and EGGs are regions of gas that are sufficiently dense that they photoevaporate less easily than the less compact gas surrounding them. Photoevaporation occurs when gas is ionised and dispersed away by an intense source of radiation — typically young, hot stars releasing vast amounts of ultraviolet light. EGGs were only identified fairly recently, most notably at the tips of the Pillars of Creation, which were captured by Hubble in iconic images released in 1995. FrEGGs were classified even more recently, and are distinguished from EGGs by being detached and having a distinct ‘head-tail’ shape. FrEGGs and EGGs are of particular interest because their density makes it more difficult for intense UV radiation, found in regions rich in young stars, to penetrate them. Their relative opacity means that the gas within them is protected from ionisation and photoevaporation. This is thought to be important for the formation of protostars, and it is predicted that many FrEGGs and EGGs will play host to the birth of new stars.
The bright red edges of these blobs are places where ionization is occurring, which tells us that the young hot star causing it is to the top, beyond the edge of the picture. Its radiation is also likely causing the blob’s tabpole shape as material is pushed downward away from the star.
Weather forces Rocket Lab to scrub first launch from Wallops
High altitude winds yesterday forced Rocket Lab to scrub its first Electron launch attempt from Wallops Island in Virginia yesterday.
The weather also forced the company to cancel a launch attempt today.
Teams are now evaluating the next possible launch window while coordinating with holiday travel airspace restrictions. The flight will lift off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex-2 (LC-2) at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
This could mean that Rocket Lab will not be able to launch before the end of the year. The company very much wishes to do this, however, as it would give it ten launches in 2022, as well as a launch pace of one per month for most of the year.
This first launch from Wallops is also important, as it would give Rocket Lab three launchpads, including one in the U.S. for launching classified military payloads. It had hoped to launch from Wallops two years ago, but red tape at NASA delayed the launch.
South Korean rocket startup to launch suborbital test rocket
Innospace, a South Korean rocket startup, hopes tomorrow to complete the first suborbital launch of its Hanbit-TLV test rocket from Brazil.
The Sejong-based company aims to develop Korea’s first private commercial satellite launcher, the Hanbit-Nano, with data collected from the test launch. Hanbit-Nano will be a two-stage rocket equipped with a 15-ton-thrust hybrid engine, powered by solid fuel and liquid oxidizer.
Originally scheduled for 6 a.m., Monday, the test launch of the Hanbit-TLV rocket was delayed by a day due to unexpected rain and inclement weather. Innospace said that the launch window is open until Wednesday.
The launch will also be a significant event for Brazil’s Alcântara Launch Center, which is trying to attract commercial rocket companies to use it.