Author: Robert Zimmerman

Spadex’s unmanned docking faces possible two month delay

9:51 am

India’s Spadex mission, launched to test autonomous unmanned docking procedures necessary for many of that country’s future space plans, now faces a possible two month delay in orbit before the final docking can take place.

On January 11, 2025 the chase vehicle completed its closest proximity maneuver, getting within three meters of the target vehicle, after which it backed away as planned. ISRO engineers are presently analyzing the data before proceeding with the actual docking.

The problem is that this docking must occur by January 20, 2025. After that the lighting conditions will not allow another attempt until March.

It seems ISRO is not concerned about this situation, and would rather get things right, even if it means that delay.

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JPL survives LA fires

9:42 am

Though nothing is certain yet as the fires still rage, it appears that the facilities of JPL, including its Deep Space Network mission control that manages communications with all of America’s interplanetary probes have survived the Los Angeles fires that have destroy large swaths of that city.

The fires required a full evacuation of the facility, leaving that mission control unoccupied for the first time in sixty years. It appears however that the organization used work-arounds to maintain contact and operations with those probes.

How long the facility will remain in this state remains unclear. Some of the fires remain uncontrolled, and until that happens, there can be no return to any sense of normalcy in LA.

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Varda flying its second returnable capsule

9:29 am

The startup Varda, which specializes in flying a returnable orbiting capsule for customers, is now flying its second mission, this time for the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) testing hypersonic technologies.

The payload is known as OSPREE (Optical Sensing of Plasmas in the Reentry Environment), a spectrometer designed to collect atmospheric data during the capsule’s high-speed descent. The information will help refine thermal protection systems, sensor designs, and aerodynamics for hypersonic vehicles.

Unlike Varda’s first mission, the goal is not to stay in orbit to manufacture pharmaceuticals in weightlessness. Instead, the goal is to use Varda’s capsule during re-entry to do this research. Thus, the capsule will only stay in orbit for a few weeks before returning to Earth, this time at the Southern Launch commercial spaceport site in southern Australia.

The capsule was launched yesterday morning on SpaceX’s Transporter mission, which placed 131 different payloads in orbit.

Overall this entire mission illustrates the advantage of private ownership and competition. Varda has discovered an entirely unexpected income source and customer for its capsules, and it is eager to take advantage of that. Similarly, the Air Force is getting its hypersonic research done now for a fraction of the cost, using Varda as well as Rocket Lab’s HASTE improvisation, using its Electron rocket’s first stage to conduct suborbital hypersonic tests.

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SpaceX successfully launches two commercial lunar landers

11:26 pm

Map of lunar landing sites
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience

SpaceX tonight successfully launched two different private commercial lunar landers, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The prime payload was Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, flying ten science payloads to the Moon for NASA. It will take about six weeks to get to lunar orbit. The second payload was Resilience or Hakuto-R2, built by the Japanese startup Ispace on that company’s second attempt to land on the Moon. It is taking a longer route to the Moon, 4 to 5 months. The map to the right shows the landing locations for both landers. It also shows the first landing zone for Ispace’s first lander, Hakuto-R1, inside Atlas Crater. In that case the software misread the spacecraft’s altitude. It was still three kilometers above the ground when that software thought it was just off the surface and shut down its engines. The spacecraft thus crashed.

For context, the map also shows the landing sites of three Apollo missions.

Both spacecraft were correctly deployed into their planned orbits.

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

The 2025 launch race:

8 SpaceX
2 China

Right now SpaceX’s launch pace exceeds once every two days. If it can even come close to maintaining that pace, it will easily match its goal of 180 launches in 2025.

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Live stream of SpaceX launch of two lunar landers

9:27 pm

I have embedded below the live stream of tonight’s launch by SpaceX of its Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy, carrying a dual lunar lander payload, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and Ispace’s Resilience, scheduled for 1:11 am (Eastern).

Blue Ghost will take 45 days to reach the Moon, when it will land in Mare Crisium on the eastern edge of the Moon’s visible hemisphere.

Resilience will take a much longer route, not arriving at the Moon for four to five months. It will then attempt to land in Mare Frigoris in the high northern latitudes of the visible hemisphere. If successful it will also deploy its own mini-rover dubbed Tenacious.
» Read more

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January 14, 2025 Quick space links

3:25 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.

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Is China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover dead?

12:58 pm

According to monthly images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover on the far side of the Moon, it has not moved since March 2024, suggesting it is no longer functioning.

“Up to about February 2023 the rover was moving about 7 or 8 metres every drive and typically about 40 m per lunar day. Suddenly the drives dropped to about 3 or 4 m each and only about 8 or 10 m per lunar day,” Stooke said in an email.

“That lasted until about October 2023, and then drives dropped to only 1 or 2 m each. In March 2024 Yutu 2 was resting just southwest of a 10 m diameter crater, and it’s been there ever since, as revealed by LRO images,” Stooke added.

It is possible the rover is not entirely dead, but there is no way to be sure. China is not generally forthcoming when things fail. For example, it has never acknowledged the shut down of its Zhurong Mars rover, which it had hoped would survive its first Martian winter. When that winter ended however no reports from Zhurong were released by China, which suggested it was no longer functioning. China however did not report this. It simply made believe the rover no longer existed.

It could be China is now doing the same with Yutu-2.

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Launches galore!

12:44 pm

Map of lunar landing sites
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience

The next two days will be another example of the resurgent American launch industry, with a wide range of rocket launches running the gamut from the maiden flight of the New Glenn rocket, another dramatic test flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy, and a launch by SpaceX of two (not one!) lunar landers.

We begin however now with another successful launch by SpaceX’s of its Transporter commercial program, designed to place in orbit as many smallsats as possible at once. The company’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off today from Vandenberg in California, carrying 131 payloads, from cubesats to microsats to orbital tugs.

The first stage completed its second flight, landing on back at Vandenberg. The fairings completed their 18th and 19th flights respectively. As of posting the payloads have not been deployed.

The 2025 launch race:

7 SpaceX
2 China

SpaceX continues its relentless goal of completing in 2025 one launch almost every other day. For example, the launch above is only the first launch planned by SpaceX today. Tonight it will launch another Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying both Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander as well as Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander. The map to the right shows the landing targets of both.

Tomorrow the launch pace will continue. First SpaceX will attempt the seventh orbital test launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, lifting off from Boca Chica, with a launch window beginning at 4 pm (Central).

Blue Origin will later that evening once again attempt the maiden launch of its New Glenn rocket. The three hour launch window opens at 1 am (Eastern).

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Mars geology at its strangest

11:22 am

Strange Martian geology
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the northeast quadrant of a weirdly distorted unnamed 3-mile-wide crater in the northern lowland plains of Mars. The crater rim is the ridgeline that enters from picture’s left edge to curve down to exit at bottom right.

The geological feature of interest however is the strange mound to the left of that rim, inside the crater. It certainly appears, based on shadows, that the top of this mound popped off at some time in the past, leaving behind that sharp-edged hollow.

Note however that there is no eruption debris. When a volcano erupts, the debris covers the nearby mountainside. Here we see no evidence of anything that was flung out from this small eruption.
» Read more

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Boom about to go supersonic

9:29 am

The commercial supersonic airplane company Boom is on the verge of flying its XB-1 test vehicle faster than the speed of sound.

The company has been doing a regular test flight program, each time increasing the plane’s speed.

During the latest 44-minute flight at an altitude of 29,481 ft (8,986 m) with Chief Test Pilot Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg at the controls, the prototype aircraft reached transonic speed. That is, flight so close to Mach 1 that some areas of airflow over the airframe exceed the speed of sound.

It’s also the point where the XB-1 was subjected to a maximum dynamic pressure of 383 Knots Equivalent Air Speed (KEAS), which is a pressure on the fuselage and wings greater than what it would experience when flying supersonic at Mach 1.1.

In short, XB-1 pushed what was once called the Sound Barrier.

Next step: break the sound barrier.

At the completion of this testing the company will then begin manufacture of its full scale supersonic passenger plane, dubbed Overture, that will carry up to 80 passengers and will sell to airlines. It already has contracts and financial support from a number of major airlines, including United and Japan Airlines.

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