Author: Robert Zimmerman

PLD Space announces its upcoming plans

9:22 am

Capitalism in space: Having received in late January a $43.5 million grant, bringing its total funding to more than $120 million, the Spanish rocket startup PLD Space today announced its upcoming plans.

[T]he company intends to inaugurate the first serial space rocket factory in Spain in mid-2024. The facilities will also enable vertical integration of the launchers. The industrial site, whose building work is already underway, will house the factory for the first MIURA 5 units [the company’s orbital rocket] as well as the company’s head offices. In total, PLD Space will be able to count on 18,400 square metres of industrial facilities in Elche (Alicante).

…Also scheduled for 2024, construction work is to begin on the launch base at the European CSG spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana), which belongs to CNES [France’s space agency]. This site, covering over 15,700 square metres, will host MIURA 5’s first launches.

That France is now leasing launch facilities to private companies illustrates starkly how Europe is steadily abandoning Arianespace, the European Space Agency’s government-run commercial company. Instead, Europe is now choosing competition and private enterprise as its model. Expect these new companies, including PLD, to achieve big things in the coming years.

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Voyager-1 back on line after software patch works

9:09 am

For the first time since November, Voyager-1 is sending data back to Earth coherently, after engineers figured out a way to isolate a corrupted computer chip.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The software patch was sent to the spacecraft on April 18, 2024, taking 22.5 hours to get there. It then took 22.5 hours for a response. On April 20th they received a confirmation that the patch had worked. Over the next few weeks more patches will be sent to Voyager-1 to allow it to resume sending science data back to Earth.

Both Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 were launched almost a half century ago, in 1977, and both are now more than more than 15 billion miles from Earth, traveling in interstellar space. Their computers are also the longest continuously running operating systems. Both only have a little more than two years left in their nuclear power supply, which was always expected to run out of power about a half century after launch. That both have continued to function for that entire time is a magnificent testament to the engineers who designed them.

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On the left, certainty and violent passion; On the right, doubt and fearful timidity; This must change!

3:11 pm

What the left wants to destroy
What the left wants to destroy

“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” ― Winston S. Churchill

It is said that if you want to win a war, it is essential to know your enemy almost better than you know yourself, so that you know what will be required of you to win.

Americans, those who still believe in the Constitution and the basic values of our country — limited government and the right of each individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — routinely still think they are in the majority, that given a fair fight they will always win against the fascists of the left because the general public will immediately recognize the justice of the right’s cause.

This is not only a grave error, it is an error that Americans have been making for decades. Year by year since the 1960s Americans of all stripes have been unwilling to fight for right when it could have been easily won without bloodshed. Now bloodshed is almost certainly required, and the right continues to be unwilling to fight hard. Instead it still thinks its victories can be won easily, and so it is lazy about fighting those battles.

The left

To understand best why the right continues to lose, we first have to look closely at the left. As a movement, it has for decades been passionate and unwilling to compromise. Its leaders and followers are filled with certainty, and have been willing to do whatever is necessary to win.
» Read more

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Patchy arms in a nearby spiral galaxy

9:16 am

Patchy arms in spiral galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to study this southern hemisphere galaxy in detail. The galaxy, dubbed ESO 422-41, is located about 34 million light years away, and thus is a relatively close neighbor. From the caption:

A spiral galaxy, with a brightly shining core and two large arms. The arms are broad, faint overall and quite patchy, and feature several small bright spots where stars are forming. A few foreground stars with small diffraction spikes can be seen in front of the galaxy.

The patchy nature of the two arms makes each somewhat indistinct, so that at first glance this galaxy looks more like a elliptical blob, until you look close and notice those arms winding around that bright core. And as patchy as those arms are, the patches of blue are regions where new stars are forming.

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China launches “remote-sensing” satellite

10:41 am

China today successfully launched what its state-run press stated was “a remote-sensing” satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China.

No other information about the satellite was released. The state-run press also provided no information about where the rocket’s lower stages, which carry very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed within China.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

41 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 47 to 28, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 41 to 34.

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Computer models suggest there is no life in Europa’s underground ocean

11:22 am

The uncertainty of science: Several different computer simulations now suggest that the underground ocean inside the Jupiter moon Europa is inert and likely harbors no existing lifeforms.

He and his colleagues constructed computer simulations of Europa’s seafloor, accounting for its gravity, the weight of the overlying ocean and the pressure of water within the seafloor itself. From the simulations, the team computed the strength of the rocks about 1 kilometer below the seafloor, or the stress required to force faults in the seafloor to slide and expose fresh rock to seawater.

Compared with the stress applied to the seafloor by Jupiter’s gravity and by the convection of material in Europa’s underlying mantle, the rocks comprising Europa’s seafloor are at least 10 times as strong, Byrne said. “The take home message is that the seafloor is likely geologically inert.”

A second computer model also suggested that the moon’s deep magna is not capable to pushing upward into that sea, further reinforcing the first model that the sea is geological inert, lacking the heat or energy required for life.

Though unconfirmed and uncertain, these results when looked at honestly make sense. Europa is a very cold world. An underground ocean might exist due to tidal forces imposed by Jupiter, but that dark and sunless ocean is also likely to be very hostile to life. Not enough energy to sustain it.

Like the water imagined to exist at poles of the Moon, we go to Europa on the hope of finding life, even if that hope is very ephermal.

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Update on SpaceX’s preparations for the 4th test flight of Superheavy/Starship

11:10 am

Link here. The article is definitely worth reading, as it tells us that SpaceX is pushing hard to be ready to launch in early May, as Musk has promised. The article also thinks SpaceX will be able to ramp up later launches to one every two months.

The article however is I think being naively optimistic about this timeline, because it naively assumes the FAA will quickly approve the launch licenses to meet that schedule. I guarantee the FAA won’t, as it has taken it one to four months after SpaceX was ready to launch to approve the licenses for the previous launches. The length of that approval process has shrunk each time, but FAA still made Space X wait each time, for no reason.

Making that schedule even more unlikely is SpaceX’s desire to do as many as nine test launches per year at Boca Chica. While the company could certainly do this, the environment reassessment issued in 2022 limits it to only five launches per year. It needs a waiver from the FAA and the Biden administration,
a waiver no one should expect considering the Biden administrations hostility to Musk.

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Slovenia signs Artemis Accords

10:58 am

NASA announced yesterday that Slovenia has become the 39th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining the American alliance for exploring the Moon and the solar system.

The alliance now includes these nations: Angola, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

As with all the recent announcements, the NASA press release now insists that the accords are designed to “reinforce and implement key obligations in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,” the exact opposite of the original goals of the accords. Rather than overvcome the Outer Space Treaty’s restriction on private property in space, the Biden administration is now using the accords to strengthen that restriction. To quote someone (Mussolini) whose policies the modern globalist world clearly admires, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

This could all change with different leadership in Washington, but whether the administrative state, led by the Democratic Party, will allow such a thing at this point in history is very questionable. And they appear aided in this totalitarian effort by a meek and largely ignorant American public.

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April 19, 2024 Quick space links

3:00 pm

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.

 

 

 

  • Anonymous sources say NASA is considering restructuring the entire Artemis lunar program

    • One idea is to insert an extra mission before the lunar landing flight, during which Orion and Starship would dock in Earth orbit to test out their systems prior to going to the Moon. Since the whole Artemis program has always been haphazardly planned, this change makes sense, as it should have been considered from the beginning. In fact, it should be flown before the second Artemis flight, which presently intends to take astronauts around the Moon, on the first flight using Orion’s environmental systems.

 

 

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Blue Origin completes delivery of the two BE-4 engines for ULA’s second Vulcan launch

10:04 am

Blue Origin this week completed delivery of the two BE-4 engines needed for the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, presently scheduled for sometime this fall.

That launch was originally targeting an April launch, but according to official announcements has been delayed until the fall because final ground testing of its payload, Sierra Space’s Tenacity mini-shuttle, is not complete. It appears that Blue Origin also contributed to that delay, as it is now obvious that its engines were not available as planned in time for that April launch.

This delay also raises questions about Blue Origin’s ability to ramp up BE-4 engine production to meet the needs of ULA’s Vulcan rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Both have large launch contracts with Amazon to launch its Kuiper constellation, while ULA also has almost as many contracts with the U.S. military. To meet those contracts, Blue Origin will have to produce several hundred BE-4 engines yearly in the very near future. Right now it appears it can only produce about one per year.

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Boeing to reduce staffing for SLS due to overall delays in Artemis

9:53 am

Boeing announced yesterday that it is going to reduce the staffing for its SLS rocket, caused by delays in other parts of the program that force it to stretch out operations.

When Boeing cites “external factors,” it is referring to the slipping timelines for NASA’s Artemis Program. In January officials with the space agency announced approximately one-year delays for both the Artemis II mission, a crewed lunar flyby, to September 2025; and Artemis III, a lunar landing, to September 2026. Neither of these schedules are set in stone, either. Further delays are possible for Artemis II, and likely for Artemis III if NASA sticks to the current mission plans.

Although the SLS rocket will be ready for the current schedule, barring a catastrophe, the other elements are in doubt. For Artemis II, NASA still has not cleared a heat shield issue with the Orion spacecraft. That must be resolved before the mission gets a green light to proceed next year. The challenges are even greater for Artemis III. For that mission NASA needs to have a lunar lander—which is being provided by SpaceX with its Starship vehicle—in addition to spacesuits provided by Axiom Space for the lunar surface. Both of these elements remain solidly in the development phase.

What Boeing is telling us indirectly is that, though NASA has not yet announced any further delays in those launch dates for Artemis-2 and Artemis-3, those dates are going to be delayed, quite possibly by one or more years.

None of this is a surprise. I have long been predicting that the first manned lunar landing in the Artemis program will not take place before 2030. In fact, that date was obvious the moment NASA announced its plan to make the Lunar Gateway space station an integral part of the program, back in 2018, when it was called LOP-G.

Now that SLS development is complete and NASA considers it “operational”, Boeing is merely reducing the staffing to maintain its assembly line, reducing it accordingly because of expected delays when additional rockets will be needed.

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Analysis of Io’s atmosphere suggests it has been volcanically active for its entire 4+ billion year history

9:34 am

By analysizing the isotobes in Io’s atmosphere, scientists now believe that it has been volcanically active since its initial formation at the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

de Kleer et al. found that both elements [ sulfer- and chlorine-bearing molecules] are highly enriched in heavy isotopes compared to average Solar System values due to the loss of lighter isotopes from the upper atmosphere as material is continuously recycled between Io’s interior and atmosphere. The findings indicate that Io has lost 94% to 99% of the sulfur that undergoes this outgassing and recycling process. According to the authors, this would require Io to have had its current level of volcanic activity for its entire lifetime.

This data suggests that Io, as well as Jupter’s other three large Galilean moons (Europa, Calisto, and Ganymeded) have been in their present orbits since their formation 4.5 billion years ago. It also means that, while Io’s geological history keeps getting wiped out by its volcanic activity, the other three contain detailed geological records of the solar system’s entire history. Combine that with the geological data we will eventually get from Mars, it appears that we shall someday be able to document that history far beyond anything expected.

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April 18, 2024 Quick space links

4:13 pm

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.

Both tweets are devoid of any real information, so who knows? It is likely the second is real and happening, but there continue to be rumors about Blue Origin’s production rate.

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FAA to now require that reentry spacecraft get landing license before launch

4:05 pm

We’re here to help you! The FAA is now going to require that any company planning to launch a payload or spacecraft into orbit to get both its launch and landing licenses before launch, in order to avoid the situation that occurred last year when Varda launched its capsule and then had difficulties getting its landing license approved due to red-tape confusion between government agencies.

In a notice published in the Federal Register April 17, the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation announced it will no longer approve the launch of spacecraft designed to reenter unless they already have a reentry license. The office said that it will, going forward, check that a spacecraft designed to return to Earth has a reentry license as part of the standard payload review process.

In the notice, the FAA said that decision was linked to safety concerns of allowing spacecraft to launch without approvals to return. “Unlike typical payloads designed to operate in outer space, a reentry vehicle has primary components that are designed to withstand reentry substantially intact and therefore have a near-guaranteed ground impact as a result of either a controlled reentry or a random reentry,” it states.

While this seems to fall directly under the FAA’s basic authority, to make sure launches and landings pose no risk to the general public, I guarantee it is also going to slow the growth of the new space manufacture industry. I fear that with time approvals will be delayed, some so much that companies will go bankrupt waiting for approval. The FAA will never be able to guarantee perfection in this matter, and as bureaucrats tend to be cautious, expect it to increasingly oppose re-entries by new companies.

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites

3:48 pm

Bunny march on! SpaceX today successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

41 SpaceX
15 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 47 to 27, while SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 41 to 33.

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Ancient flood lava in the Martian cratered highlands

2:13 pm

Ancient flood lava on the cratered highlands of Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 4, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The ridges were the primary reason this photo was taken, as they cover a 50-mile-square region of relatively flat terrain that also appears to be a series of steps downward to the west. The dotted line on the picture indicates one of those steps downward, with the plain to the west of that line about 100 to 200 feet lower that the plain to the east.

My first guess was that these ridges might be inverted channels, but that really didn’t make sense considering their random nature completely divorced from the downward grade. Then I took a wider view, and came up with a better guess.
» Read more

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