September 4, 2024 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
Arianespace successfully completes the last launch of Avio’s Vega rocket
Tonight the last launch of the Vega rocket, built by the Italian company Avio and managed by Arianespace, successfully lifted off from French Guiana, placing a European Earth observation satellite into orbit.
The launch was delayed several years because of a failure during a previous launch that required a major redesign of an engine. Further delays took place when Avio literally lost the tanks for the rocket’s upper stage, and had to improvise a solution (which has never been explained fully).
The rocket will now be replaced by the Vega-C, which after several more launches will be entirely owned and managed by Avio, which will market it to satellite customers without any significant participation of the government middleman Arianespace.
This was only the second launch by Europe in 2024, so the leader board of the 2024 launch race does not change.
86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 56, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 71.
Scary Pockets & Frankfurt Radio Big Band – Harder Better Faster Stronger
An evening pause: A cover of the Daft Punk song.
Hat tip Daniel Morris.
September 4, 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.
- Blue Origin says it is about to conduct a static fire test of New Glenn’s upper stage
Good news in that the company is getting done what needs to be done to fly that first launch. The picture at the tweet however makes me really doubtful it can meet the October 13-21 launch window of its payload of two Mars orbiters.
- Tonight BepiColumbo does its fourth flyby of Mercury
It will dip down to within 103 miles of the surface. Images will be released within the next day.
- China touts an image taken by its Tianwen-1 Mars Orbiter
The location is in the high latitudes of the southern cratered highlands, and not surprisingly shows a scattering of craters. It was spring when the picture was snapped, so the mantle of CO2 dry ice that covers these high latitudes in the winter is beginning to sublimate away. The terrain itself looks like it is heavily impregnated with ice as well.
A channel of ice, water, or lava?
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows one small section of a Martian canyon approximate 750 miles long and dubbed Elysium Fossae.
The canyon walls at this spot rise about 3,300 to 3,800 feet from the canyon floor. The canyon itself is thought to be what geologists call a graben, initially formed when the ground was pulled apart to form a large fissure.
That’s what happened at this location, at least to start. This canyon is on the lower western flank of the giant shield volcano Elysium Mons. The cracks, which radiate out outward from the volcano’s caldera, likely formed when pressure from magma below pushed upward, splitting the surface.
That formation process however does not fully explain everything.
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European rocket startup Maiaspace to begin tests of upper stage engine in ’25
The European rocket startup Maiaspace, a subsidary of ArianeGroup, has announced it will begin static fire tests of the upper stage engine for its Maia rocket in 2025, with a planned first launch before the end of that year.
The first stage of Maia is intended to be reuseable, and has been under development by ArianeGroup for the European Space Agency (ESA) for years.
The rocket’s first stage will essentially be the Themis reusable booster demonstrator, which is also being developed by ArianeGroup under an ESA contract. Initial hop tests of the Themis demonstrator had been expected to begin this year at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. However, the first test of the demonstrator is now not expected until 2025. MaiaSpace will, as a result, have very little wiggle room in its schedule if it is to conduct an inaugural launch attempt next year.
Transitioning this first stage to a wholly private operation will certainly speed up its development, but the transition will take time.
Sierra Space completes acoustic testing of Shooting Star cargo module that will fly on first Dream Chaser launch
Sierra Space today announced that it has successfully completed acoustic testing of the Shooting Star cargo module that will fly on first ISS mission of its Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle.
During the Direct Field Acoustic Test (DFAN), the test team placed stacks of purpose-built loudspeakers – each one a highly-engineered acoustic device – in 21-ft-tall columns surrounding the spacecraft. Their goal was to test whether the structural elements of Shooting Star could withstand the acoustic environment of a launch on a Vulcan Centaur rocket. Over a four-day period, test engineers blasted the spacecraft with a controlled sound field that was 10,000x higher intensity than the volume of a typical rock concert, recreating the sonic intensity of a launch. Shooting Star withstood acoustic levels greater than 140 dB for several minutes at a time, proving its flight worthiness.
The press release however made no mention as to when the launch will actually take place. Sierra first got the contract to build Dream Chaser in 2016, and was supposed to make its first flight in 2020. That launch has been repeatedly delayed, and is now four years behind schedule. Supposedly it was to take place this year on the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket in the spring of 2024, but was removed from that launch because of delays in preparing Tenacity for launch.
As of today, no new launch date has been announced, and though Sierra says Tenacity will be ready for launch by the end of this year, don’t expect it to happen before 2025.
Private company launches small test rocket from privately run sea-based platform
The rocket startup Evolotion Space on August 31, 2024 successfully launched a small test rocket from privately run sea-based platform operated by the Spaceport Company, a startup in itself.
The launch itself did not appear to reach space, but was instead designed to test both the rocket and the sea platform’s operation.
The experiment occurred approximately 30 miles south of Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. The test served to validate The Spaceport Company’s sea-based launch equipment and ground support equipment, said the company’s CEO and founder Tom Marotta. “Emerging hypersonic technologies require additional and larger test ranges to accommodate higher cadence testing campaigns,” he said. “With this new commercial facility, we will alleviate the burdens on government ranges and enable at-sea test environments that existing land-based ranges are unable to provide.”
The solid-fueled rocket meanwhile is being developed by Evolution to initially do hypersonic testing for the military.
NASA asks space industry for proposals on using the shelved Janus probes on mission to Apophis
NASA has now put out a request for proposals from the space industry for refitting the two Janus planetary probes, whose asteroid mission was shelved when its launch as a secondary payload was delayed due to problems with the Psyche primary payload, as a mission to the asteroid Apophis in connection with its April 13, 2029 close approach to the Earth.
NASA has been studying this new mission goal since early 2023, but apparently had failed to come up with a plan. It is now asking the private sector for suggestions on getting it done, including finding the funding for any plans.
Russia claims its next unmanned Moon mission, Luna-26, is on schedule
The original phase I plan of Chinese-Russian lunar
base plan, from June 2021.
According to Russia’s state-run press, its next unmanned Moon mission, Luna-26, is on schedule for a planned launch in 2027, though that press also claims the launch may happen in 2026 instead.
The problem with this claim is that Russia had for years said that this lunar orbiter would launch by 2025. As expected, the mission has not launched on time, as have all of Russia’s 21st century lunar exploration plans. For example, the previous lunar mission, the Luna-25 lunar lander, was originally supposed to land on the Moon in 2021, was not launched until 2023, and ended up crashing on the Moon when the spacecraft did not function properly during a engine burn in lunar orbit.
In the first phase of the so-called China-Russian partnership to explore the Moon, is shown by the 2021 graph to the right, China continues to do all the heavy lifting, and do so pretty much on the schedule predicted. Russian meanwhile continues to do what I predicted back in 2021, get nothing done on time and when launched have problems.
If – Forgotten Roads
An evening pause: Recorded live 1971, and in every way is part of that time period.
Hat tip Alec Gimarc.
September 3, 2024 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, with the last two links today from readers Mike Nelson and Robert Pratt respectively. 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.
- Blue Origin releases an image of its New Glenn first stage landing ship, dubbed Jacklyn
The tweet says it is “arriving very soon.” Why is it that everything from Blue Origin is “arriving very soon?” Isn’t it time for something to get here already?
- Rocket Lab’s CEO shows off factory filled with Electron and Haste rockets, ready to launch
I wonder if they will attempt to recover and reuse any. They had been pushing hard to reuse the first stage last year, but recently that effort seems to have faded.
- China touts prototype moon soil bricks to be sent to its Tiangong-3 space station to see how they handle the harsh environment of space
They claim the bricks are stronger than concrete.
- India’s space agency is still targeting a December ’24 to February ’25 window for first unmanned Gaganyaan test flight
They still hope to fly the manned mission is 2025.
- Scientist obtain first detection of a weak electrical field around the Earth first predicted more than 60 years ago
That early data had found a stream of particles escaping at the poles, and the most likely explanation was this weak field, now confirmed.
- Keynote speech by Kathryn Lueders, SpaceX’s general manager at Boca Chica, at an August 27th event run by the Brownsville Chamber of Congress
She outlines the company’s strong commitment to the Brownsville area, and how it will facilitate the fast production and reflight of Starship spacecraft. This commitment also includes the hiring of 300 more engineers.
Williams-Sonoma sued over its racist DEI hiring policies
The racist hiring policies at Williams-Sonoma, beginning with
its board of directors and continuing all the way down
On September 3, 2024 the non-profit first amendment legal firm America First Legal (AFL) filed a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the Williams-Sonoma corporation for its extensive DEI racial hiring policies that specifically favor some skin colors over others.
Williams-Sonoma, a kitchenware and home furnishings retailer with brands including Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Pottery Barn Teen, West Elm, Williams Sonoma Home, Rejuvenation, Mark and Graham, and GreenRow, proudly represents to the public and its shareholders and investors that race, sex, and national origin are motivating factors in its hiring, employment, and contracting practices.
As outlined in Williams-Sonoma’s 2024 Annual Report, their Equity Action Plan and Equity Action Committee led to “approximately 68.1% of our total workforce identified as female and approximately 41.1% identified as an ethnic minority group.” The company boasts higher management, comprising “56.6% of Vice Presidents and above identified as female.”
Williams-Sonoma’s Equity Action Committee also appears to reward executives for making race, color, sex, or national origin a motivating factor in hiring and other employee practices. The Equity Action Plan tracked and set goals for the diversity of the company, board members, and board nominees. It then designed the “Associate Equity Network Groups” that benefit some workers and disfavor others, specifically white, male, and religious Americans.
In other words, this company demands race and sex be considered as a qualification for a job, regardless of the person’s skills, experience, or talent, and it also demands that whites and men be put on the back of the bus, considered last in all hiring decisions, merely because they are either white or male.
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A frozen Martian splash
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and enhanced to post here, was taken on July 11, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the southeast quadrant of a three-mile-wide unnamed crater that is surrounded on all sides by a dramatic but frozen splash apron of material, created when this impact occurred.
The rim rises between 200 to 400 feet from the surrounding plains, while the crater floor drops 700 feet to sit below those plains by 300 to 500 feet. In other words, that splash apron contains the material that was thrown up when the bolide drilled into the plain at impact, leaving behind this deep hole.
Why such a dramatic splash apron? Its existence suggests that the ground here was muddy, with a lot of water ice likely present. The location and wider context helps confirm this guess.
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Two-lobed asteroid imaged by radar
Click for original image.
During the August 18, 2024 first close fly-by of a potentially-dangerous asteroid only discovered back in May, astronomers used the Goldstone dish in California to produce the high resolution radar images shown in the picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here.
The images were captured when the asteroid was at a distance of 2.8 million miles (4.6 million kilometers), about 12 times the distance between the Moon and Earth.
Discovered by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona, on May 4, the near-Earth asteroid’s shape resembles that of a peanut – with two rounded lobes, one lobe larger than the other. Scientists used the radar images to determine that it is about 980 feet (300 meters) long and that its length is about double its width. Asteroid 2024 JV33 rotates once every seven hours.
Asteroids formed as contact binaries, once considered the stuff of science fiction, have now been found to be relatively common, comprising about 14% of the near Earth asteroids larger than 700 feet across that have been radar-imaged. The refined orbital data suggests this asteroid might be a dead comet, though that conclusion is unconfirmed. That orbital data also tells us that though this object has the potential of hitting the Earth, it will not do so “for the foreseeable future.”
Scientists find oldest known reference to a solar eclipse dated approximately 6,000 years ago
In studying an ancient Hindu text called the Rig Veda that was compiled around 1,500 BC, scientists have found what they think is the oldest known reference to a solar eclipse, dated approximately 6,000 years ago.
You can read the peer-reviewed paper here [pdf]. From the paper’s conclusion:
We propose that the eclipse recorded in the Rig Veda refers to observations made of an eclipse around 4000 BC. By analyzing the description, we propose that the eclipse was the one that occurred in 4202 BC or else in 3811 BC. We propose that it was observed in Central Asia. To our knowledge, this is one of the oldest known references to a specific total solar eclipse mentioned in the historical literature.
The scientists came to this conclusion based on information contained and not contained in the Hindu text. The text noted the event occurred three days before the autmnal equinox, and that it occurred when that equinox occurred in the constellation Orion, when today the equinox occurs in the constellation Pisces. This reduced the number of possible eclipses to a small number during the time period around 4,000 BC. The text also lacked any mention of various Hindo myths explaining eclipses that appeared more recently, thus confirming this ancient date and telling the researchers that the nomadic people who compiled the Rig Veda were likely living in central Asia at that time.
The only two eclipses that fit the bill occurred on either October 22, 4202 BC or October 9, 3811 BC. This makes it the earliest known reference to an eclipse, far earlier than the possible eclipses that occurred in around 3340 BC and around 1300 BC.
Largest corporate investor in rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg finalized deal to go private
The German company OHB, the largest corporate investor in the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg, has finalized its deal with the investment company KKR to go private and delist OHB from the German stock market.
OHB announced in August 2024 the deal where KKR would buy shares not owned by the Fuchs family for 44 euros ($48.70) per share. Under the deal, the Fuchs family will maintain its controlling 65.4% ownership of OHB while KKR owns 28.6%. That combined 94% ownership will allow OHB to delist from the exchange, effectively taking the company private.
It appears that both companies are committed to OHB’s investment in Rocket Factory, and by getting OHB delisted it gives them greater flexibility in doing so. It also appears that Marco Fuchs, the CEO of OHB, had decided in the last few years that for rocket startups being a public company was counter-productive in many ways.
“We saw all these SPACs fail. We see very different valuations out there. So, it’s not a good place to be, in the public market, especially in the core business model of doing space projects,” he said at the Space Tech Expo Europe conference. “It’s not exactly what capital markets appreciate.”
In a sense, this deal appears to be a show of support for Rocket Factory, even though its first launch is seriously delayed due to a recent failed static fire test of its first stage that destroyed the stage.
That sonar-type sound heard on Starliner’s speakers was simply feedback
In a short post today NASA noted that the mysterious sonar-type sound heard on Starliner’s speakers over the weekend was nothing more than simple feedback caused by an “audio configuration between the space station and Starliner” and that the sound stopped when that configuration was adjusted.
The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback. The crew is asked to contact mission control when they hear sounds originating in the comm system. The speaker feedback Wilmore reported has no technical impact to the crew, Starliner, or station operations
In other words, this is not a rare event, and from the beginning was not considered by the astronauts, ground engineers, or NASA management to be a matter of concern. The fix was apparently simple and straightforward, and is part of the work done whenever any new vehicle gets docked and tied into ISS’s systems.
It appears however to have caused many in the news media and in the space world to go nuts simply because it was linked to Starliner and Boeing. This is similar to the recent pattern of assigning all blame to Boeing whenever any Boeing-built plane has technical problems, even if that plane had been purchased by the airline decades earlier and its maintenance was solely the responsibility of the airline for that long.
Boeing is definitely a company in trouble, on many levels. We shouldn’t however look for problems there in the company when they clearly don’t exist.
China launches “remote-sensing satellites” test satellites
China today successfully placed a classified “group” of “remote-sensing satellites” into orbit to test “new technologies of low-orbit constellations,” its Long March 4B lifting off from the Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China.
That is all the information that China’s state-run press released. No word was released as to where
in China the lower stages crashed. As to the number of satellites launched, according to this independent site, the launch had nine payloads, which suggests but does not confirm nine satellites.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 55, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 70.
John Gabriel & Nelson Riddle – El Dorado
An evening pause: I think this song quite fitting to end the summer season. Sung by George Alexander, it plays over the opening credits to the classic 1966 John Wayne film of the same name, directed by Howard Hawks. The magnificent paintings that form the backdrop to the credits were painted by Olaf Wieghorst.
My daddy once told me what a man ought to be.
There’s much more to life than the things we can see.
And the godliest mortal you ever will know
Is the one with the dream of El Dorado.So ride, boldly ride, to the end of the rainbow.
Ride, boldly ride, till you find El Dorado.