Minh Ngọc Ng – La Valse d’Amélie
An evening pause: A pleasant way to start the weekend.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
SpaceX launches 21 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX today successfully launched another 21 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its seventeenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
101 SpaceX
46 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 118 to 69, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 101 to 86.
October 18, 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.
- Varda has gotten okay from Australia to land its capsules at the commercial Southern Launch range/spaceport
The company did this I am sure because of the hassles the FAA and Army gave it in returning its capsules in the U.S.
- Another pseudo-Chinese rocket company appears, dubbed “CosmoLeap”
The graphic is hilarious. They plan to use this new idea of using launch tower chopsticks to catch their first stage. What originality! And I’m sure they have this working in no time!
- Someone takes a close look at the cost overruns by Bechtel in failing to build the SLS 2nd mobile launcher
His conclusion: “With the right attitude and cost plus contract structures there are no limits to how expensive something can become.”
A different kind of chaos on Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 23, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I had originally chosen to feature a different picture of this spot, taken on August 1, 2024 in order to create a stereo pair, but this week the camera team featured this first photo, providing a caption.
This disrupted surface is characterized by a collection of rounded to flat-topped mounds of various sizes connected by narrow flat floors, typical of the aptly named “chaotic terrain” on Mars.
What could have caused this flat surface to break into pieces? You might imagine that a flat surface could be broken up if it was inflated or collapsed. One hypothesis is that large amounts of water were released from deep below the ground to cause the surface break up.
Normally on Mars, especially in the mid-latitudes, chaotic terrain is associated with glacial activity, suggesting that glaciers over time erode valleys along random criss-crossing fault lines to create the mesas and canyons. This patch of chaotic terrain however suggests a different formation process.
» Read more
GAO: Next SLS Artemis launches will almost certainly be delayed
NASA’s bloated SLS mobile launchers
According to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released yesterday, NASA’S continuing delays and technical problems building the various ground systems required for the next few Artemis launches will almost certainly cause those launches to be delayed.
The schedule at present is as follows:
- September 2025: Artemis-2 will be the program’s first manned mission, taking four astranauts around the Moon.
- September 2026: Artemis-3 will complete the first manned lunar landing.
- September 2028: Artemis-4 will send four astronauts to the Lunar Gateway station in orbit around the Moon, and then complete the second manned lunar landing.
The GAO report notes at length that modifications to the mobile launch platform SLS will use on the first two missions is taking longer than planned. It also notes that the problems completing the second mobile launcher continue, with the budget growing from $383 million to $1.1 billion, and the work years behind schedule with no certainty it will be completed in time for the 2028 mission. These issues are the same ones noted by NASA’s inspector general in August 2024.
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”
This report focused exclusively on the scheduling delays for the ground systems that will be used by SLS for each launch. It did not address the serious questions that remain concerning the serious heat shield damage experienced by the Orion capsule when it returned to Earth on its first unmanned mission in late 2022. NASA has been studying that problem now for two years, and as yet has not revealed a solution.
I continue to predict that the first manned landing, now scheduled for 2026, will not occur before 2030, six years behind the schedule first proposed by President Trump but actually fifteen years behind the schedule initially proposed by President George Bush Jr in 2004. All in all, it will take NASA almost a third of a century to put American astronauts back on the Moon, assuming the landing occurs in 2030 as I now predict. Compare that with the development time of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy. Proposed in 2017, it is already flying, and will almost certainly complete its first private manned lunar mission and its first test missions to Mars by 2027. The contrast is striking.
More and more the entire part of Artemis run by NASA is proving to be the failed disaster I predicted it would be in 2011. No wonder former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg wrote an op-ed yesterday calling for its cancellation. Like most politicians, reality is finally percolating into his thick skull, though several decades late.
Commerce loosens regulations, allowing American space companies easier use of international facilities
The Commerce department today announced that it has issued three new rulings that will ease the regulations and licensing procedures that American rocket and satellite companies have to go through in order to launch from international facilities.
The first rule will ease licensing for launches from Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This will make it easier for American rocket companies to launch from the new spaceports being built in these nations, as well as allow satellite and orbital tug companies to launch their spacecraft from these nations using non-American rockets.
The second rule, still in its interim stage of approval, would ease the export licensing for satellites and spacecraft “to over 40 allies and partners worldwide, reducing licensing requirements for the least sensitive components for most destinations, and broadening license exceptions to support additional National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) cooperative programs.” It appears this ruling focuses specifically on the countries who have signed the Artemis Accords, joining NASA’s Artemis program.
The third rule, which is at present only proposed, will remove from the State Department’s strict ITAR regulations many space-related defense technology, transfering their licensing to the much more relaxed Commerce department. This ruling appears aimed at helping the new burgeoning orbital tug, refueling, and satellite servicing industry, which uses rendezvous and proximity technology that was previously considered military in nature.
While it appears this easing of regulation goes against the Biden administration general policy of tightening regulations, the changes make sense if we recognize that these regulations also loosen access to American technology for many international partners, something this administration favors.
All in all, however, the changes are thoughtfully worked out, and will likely help energize the American space industry without releasing important technology to the wrong nations.
ESA awards OHB Italia a preliminary contract to build Ramses probe to Apophis
The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday awarded the company OHB Italia a €63 million preliminary contract to begin work on mission dubbed Ramses that will launch in 2028 and rendezvous with the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it flies past the Earth on April 13, 2029 at a distance of less than 20,000 miles.
The contract award is preliminary because the entire project still has to be approved by the ESA ministral council of nations, meeting in 2025. Because of the short development time, however, ESA’s management found funds from its existing budget to begin work.
To speed work, the project is also using as its design basis the Hera asteroid spacecraft, which was recently launched to study the binary asteroids Didymos-Dimorphos. That mission was also built remarkably fast for a European space project, going from contract to launch in just four years.
NASA has already re-tasked its OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission to head for Apophis, renaming it OSIRIS-APEX for reasons that baffle me. The mission had successfully delivered samples from the asteroid Bennu, but after completing that mission had sufficient fuel and was well placed to do this additional rendezvous as well.
ULA recovers nozzle debris that fell off during second Vulcan launch
ULA has recovered some of the debris that fell to earth after the nozzle on one of Vulcan’s two solid-fueled strap-on boosters fell off during the early stages of the rocket’s second launch on October 4, 2024.
Julie Arnold, a ULA spokesperson, confirmed to Ars that the company has retrieved some of the debris. “We recovered some small pieces of the GEM 63XL SRB nozzle that were liberated in the vicinity of the launch pad,” Arnold said. “The team is inspecting the hardware to aid in the investigation.”
The booster was built by Northrop Grumman. Vulcan can use from from two to six on each flight (in pairs), depending on the mass of its payload and the mission requirements. At the moment ULA has 35 of these boosters in storage awaiting future flights. It is expected that once the company has an idea of the root cause of the failure, it will have to inspect each booster to avoid a repeat of the problem.
Though ULA has not announced any changes in its plans to launch twice more before the end of the year, both for the Pentagon, that schedule is now uncertain due to this problem. For example, there as yet is no word on whether the military is willing to certify the launches. It had required ULA to complete two test flights of Vulcan before doing so, and the nozzle issue has cast a cloud on that plan.
Train – Drops Of Jupiter
An evening pause: Performed live 2000.
Hat tip John Jossy.
October 17, 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.
- NASA officials hint it might no longer maintain a continuous human presence in space after ISS
They say this is because they are unsure the commercial stations will be ready for continuous occupation when ISS is retired. While that is likely a factor, a more important factor is NASA itself. When those commercial stations are flying private customers, NASA’s presence — which for decades has accomplished far less than it should have — will become increasingly irrelevant. A permanent human presence in orbit might not be continuous initially in the 2030s, but that gap won’t last long, as long as freedon and competition is allowed to flourish.
- The countries who have signed the Artemis Accords are compaigning for new countries to join
These comments were made by representatives from Estonia, Canada, Italy, Australia, and NASA. While expanding the alliance has advantages, the comments all indicate no interest in the accords’ initial purpose, to get around the limitations to private ownership imposed by the Outer Space Treaty. Instead, they seem focused on “building on the treaty,” a very bad sign for the future of capitalism and private enterprise in space.And to prove my analysis, NASA’s official even said that China could sign the accords if it wished. So much for defending freedom, capitalism, and private ownership.
Sinwar’s elimination is merely one small win in Israel’s new quest for total victory
The obvious reasons why killing the leaders
of Hamas and Hezbollah is a good thing.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.
The confirmation today that Israel had finally killed Hamas leader Yahha Sinwar, considered the main architect behind the October 7, 2023 murder, rape, and torture of more than a thousand Israeli men, women, children, and babies near Gaza is good news, but it only is one small victory in what is now clearly Israel’s decision to go for nothing less than total victory against the terrorists who have been hounding and killiing its citizens wantonly for decades.
You see, since the 1973 Yom Kippur war, all of Israel’s responses against terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have been limited and targeted, and ended quickly with fake ceasefires that allowed those terrorist groups to not only regroup, but actually expand their capabilities.
The most blatent and best example of this what happened in connection with Israel’s 2006 month-long invasion of Lebanon, launched in an attempt to defeat Hezbollah. The invasion bogged down, and as a result Israel and Hezbollah ended up agreeing to UN resolution 1701, which had Israel evaculate southern Lebanon and the UN take on the task of keeping the peace. The agreement also created a demilitarized zone in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah was forbidden.
That agreement was an utter failure. Neither the UN nor Lebanon had the ability or even the desire to limit Hezbollah, and so before long it had made that demilitarized zone a launchpad for rocket attacks into Israel. In Israel’s most recent campaign to clear out that zone, it has also discovered tunnels and large weapons caches clearly designed for Hezbollah’s own planned October 7th-type invasion.
After October 7th, what I labeled Israel’s Pearl Harbor, Israel was clearly no longer going to accept this failed piecemeal and limited negotiating approach, administered by dishonest third parties like the UN and even the United States. Instead, it decided to go by an old American concept of “unconditional surrender,” first made plain by Grant during the Civil War and then underlined by Eisenhower and Roosevelt in their insistence on “total victory” in World War II.
In other words, Israel would only accept a ceasefire or peace treaty if it involved the surrender and capture of the leadership of Hamas and Hezbollah. If they refused to do this, then Israel resolved to kill them.
It has now demonstrated its ability to do so, with gratifying success.
Israel’s military actions since October 7th however also illustrate a major change in strategy and tactics. » Read more
A water sprinkler in space
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a long term program to monitor changes in the R Aquarii binary star system, located about 700 light years away.
R Aquarii belongs to a class of double stars called symbiotic stars. The primary star is an aging red giant and its companion is a compact burned-out star known as a white dwarf. The red giant primary star is classified as a Mira variable that is over 400 times larger than our Sun. The bloated monster star pulsates, changes temperature, and varies in brightness by a factor of 750 times over a roughly 390-day period. At its peak the star is blinding at nearly 5,000 times our Sun’s brightness.
When the white dwarf star swings closest to the red giant along its 44-year orbital period, it gravitationally siphons off hydrogen gas. This material accumulates on the dwarf star’s surface until it undergoes spontaneous nuclear fusion, making that surface explode like a gigantic hydrogen bomb. After the outburst, the fueling cycle begins again.
This outburst ejects geyser-like filaments shooting out from the core, forming weird loops and trails as the plasma emerges in streamers. The plasma is twisted by the force of the explosion and channeled upwards and outwards by strong magnetic fields. The outflow appears to bend back on itself into a spiral pattern. The plasma is shooting into space over 1 million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 15 minutes! The filaments are glowing in visible light because they are energized by blistering radiation from the stellar duo.
The press release likens these filaments to the spray thrown out by a water sprinkler, and I must say that’s an apt description.
Since 2014 scientists have taken regular pictures of R Aquarii, and found that the central structures have been changing in a perceptible manner, despite their gigantic size. Below is a movie created from five photos taken from 2014 to 2023.
» Read more
NASA assembles two new panels to review its Mars Sample Return mission plans
NASA yesterday announced that it has assembled two new panels to review its Mars Sample Return mission plans, dubbed the strategy review and the analysis team, to be done in conjunction with the proposals the agency has already received from the private sector.
The team’s report is anticipated by the end of 2024 and will examine options for a complete mission design, which may be a composite of multiple studied design elements. The team will not recommend specific acquisition strategies or partners.
The strategy review team has been chartered under a task to the Cornell Technical Services contract. The team may request input from a NASA analysis team that consists of government employees and expert consultants.
The analysis team also will provide programmatic input such as a cost and schedule assessment of the architecture recommended by the strategy review team.
The first panel contains a mixture of NASA officials and scientists, while the second is mostly made up of NASA managers.
Whatever these panels decide, it is very clear that major changes are required to this project in order to get the Perseverance core samples on Mars back to Earth within a reasonable amount of time and at an acceptable cost. The present project design is chaotic, confused, and running significantly overbudget and behind schedule, with no indication anything will change in the near future.
Musk: We will attempt to catch Starship like Superheavy, “hopefully early next year”
According to a tweet by Elon Musk on October 15, 2024, SpaceX is targeting early 2025 for the first attempt to recover Starship after launch, and to do it the same way it recovered Superheavy, by catching it with a set of launch tower chopsticks.
To do this will require getting that second launch tower at Boca Chica operational. It will also require SpaceX to successfully restart Starship’s Raptor engines in space, something it has not yet done. Once this is demonstrated to work, the company would also have to do another orbital test where Starship is put in a full orbit and then de-orbited precisely to a point over the ocean, demonstrating that such a return can next be done reliably over land.
In other words, a tower catch can only happen after at least two more test flights. Thus, to do it early next year means SpaceX will have to establish a test launch pace of a launch every one or two months. This is actually something Musk has said repeatedly he wants to do, but has been stymied repeatedly by FAA red tape from doing it.
I suspect Musk’s tweet is expressing his unstated hope that a Trump victory in November will force the FAA to ease its bureaucratic interference.
Rocket Lab wins launch contract to launch quickly, within two months
Rocket Lab yesterday announced that it has scheduled a new Electron launch for October 19, 2024, based on a contract it signed with a “confidential commercial customer” only two months ago.
The expedited mission will be Rocket Lab’s fastest turnaround to date: from signed contract to launch date in less than two months.
If successfully, it will also be the company’s 12th launch in 2024, completed in the year’s first 10 months. Its previous record for successful launches in a single year, nine, was set in 2022, and that took the entire year to accomplish. Though this record is certainly impressive, it appears at this time that the company will not meet its goal of 20 launches in 2024, though it might not miss it by much.
Scientists: most asteroids come from a limited number of earlier break-ups
According to three different recently published papers (available here, here, and here), the majority of all meteorites hitting the Earth likely came from a limited number of specific past break-ups of larger asteroids.
New studies show that 70% of the 70,000 meteorites that have been found on Earth have come from 3 recent collisions in the main asteroid belt which sits between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The collisions occurred 5.8, 7.5 and 40 million years ago, according to the studies. They correspond to 3 young asteroid “families” known as Karin, Koronis and Massalia. These families formed from the destruction of asteroids at least 30km across.
The 70% number comes from data in the last two papers above, while the first paper claims it is more like 80% of all asteroids. The Massalia family is the most dominate, with it estimated to be the source 37% of all meteorites as well as a major impact half a billion years ago.
The first study also found that both Ryugu and Bennu came from the same event and are part of another family of asteroids called Polana.
Sierra Space wins NASA contract to develop trash compactor for use in space
Sierra Space yesterday announced that it has won a NASA contract to develop trash compactor for use in space and test it on ISS by 2026.
The system’s goals will not only be to reduce the volume of waste, but to recover all the water contained within it.
Current primary waste systems in space cannot reclaim water or effectively reduce the volume of trash in a manner necessary for long-term space travel. The TCPS [Sierra’s compactor] is being developed to recover nearly all the water from the trash for additional use. This capability may be vital not only for deep space exploration but also for commercial orbital facilities or extraterrestrial bases. As a stand-alone system, TCPS only requires access to power, data, and air-cooling interfaces and it provides a simple user interface to facilitate crew interactions.
The key to this development is that it isn’t being developed by NASA solely for ISS. Sierra will own the product, and design it to be used on any in-space operation, from space stations to lunar bases.
NASA to phase out its government-built communications satellite constellation, rely on commercial services
Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that beginning on November 8, 2024 it will begin the phase out of its government-built TDRS communications satellite constellation, requiring all future missions to use commercial services for communications and data transmission.
As of Friday, Nov. 8, the agency’s legacy TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite) system, as part of the Near Space Network, will support only existing missions while new missions will be supported by future commercial services.
…While TDRS will not be accepting new missions, it won’t be retiring immediately. Current TDRS users, like the International Space Station, Hubble Space Telescope, and many other Earth- and universe-observing missions, will still rely on TDRS until the mid-2030s. Each TDRS spacecraft’s retirement will be driven by individual health factors, as the seven active TDRS satellites are expected to decline at variable rates.
NASA in 2022 already issued contracts to six commercial communication companies to provide these services, Inmarsat, Kuiper Government, SES, SpaceX, Telesat, and Viasat. Yesterday’s annoncement involves NASA’s long term plan to retire the TDRS constellation.
SpaceX sues California Coastal Commission
Wants to be a dictator
As promised by Elon Musk, SpaceX has now filed suit against California Coastal Commission, and its commissioners, accusing it of violating Musk’s first amendment rights and using its regulatory power against the company simply because those commissioners disagree with Musk’s political positions.
You can read SpaceX’s lawsuit filing here [pdf]. From its introduction:
[The Commission has engaged in naked political discrimination against Plaintiff Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) in violation of the rights of free speech and due process enshrined in the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Rarely has a government agency made so clear that it was exceeding its authorized mandate to punish a company for the political views and statements of its largest shareholder and CEO. Second, the Commission is trying to unlawfully regulate space launch programs—which are critical to national security and other national policy objectives—at Vandenberg Space Force Base (the Base), a federal enclave and the world’s second busiest spaceport.
The lawsuit stems from the comments made by the commissioners when then voted against the military’s plan to allow SpaceX to increase its launch rate at Vandenberg spaceport to up to 50 launches per year. In those comments, the commissioners made it clear that the main reason they were voting against the motion was because they were offended by Elon Musk and his political positions, not because the company was doing anything wrong. In fact, the commissioners knew SpaceX was doing nothing wrong. As noted at the first link above:
» Read more
October 16, 2024 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more