Author: Robert Zimmerman

FAA grounds SpaceX because of first stage landing failure early today

1:36 pm


“Great business you got there! Really be
a shame if something happened to it!”

They’re coming for you next: Once again the FAA has expanded its harassment of SpaceX by now grounding the company from any further launches while it “investigates” the failed landing of a Falcon 9 first stage last night. The FAA statement is as follows:

“The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starlink Group 8-6 mission that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on August 28,” the FAA said Wednesday in a statement. “The incident involved the failure of the Falcon 9 booster rocket while landing on a droneship at sea. No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation.”

The FAA’s actions against SpaceX since Biden became president have consistently been unprecedented and biased against the company. » Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Woman arrested in Arizona for publicly criticizing a public employee

12:55 pm

They’re coming for you next: While making a public comment criticizing the town’s attorney at the local city council meeting for Surprise in Arizona, Rebekah Massie was ordered to either shut up or be arrested by the town’s mayor, Skip Hall, because the council does not allow citizens to make such criticisms during the public comment period.

When she had the audacity to note quite correctly that she was entirely within her first amendment rights to say whatever she wanted, Hall then had her arrested.

I have embedded the video of this event below. It is egregious beyond words.


» Read more

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Evidence of Martian near-surface ice in an unusual location

11:48 am

Evidence of Martian near-surface ice in an unusual location
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 27, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a terrain sample, it was likely taken not as part of any specific research request, but to fill a gap in the camera’s picture-taking schedule so as to maintain its proper temperature.

The picture however shows features that help confirm earlier research into the near-surface ice believed to permeate Mars’ middle latitudes. The knobby flat terrain both inside and outside of the crater resembles what scientists have labeled “brain terrain”, an as-yet unexplained geological feature unique to Mars and usually associated with near-surface ice and the glacial features found above 30 degrees latitude.

This 1.4-mile-wide unnamed crater is located at 40 degrees north latitude, so expecting near-surface ice or glacial features here is not unreasonable. The location however is different for other reasons, that make this data more intriguing.
» Read more

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Musk: Starlink will be made available to all cell phones in emergencies

9:34 am

Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX will make its Starlink internet constellation available to anyone with a cell phone should they need it during an emergency in remote areas.

The SpaceX CEO made the comments in an X post as the company, in partnership with T-Mobile, currently seeks approval from the Federal Communications Commission to operate its direct-to-cellular Starlink technology commercially. SpaceX says the satellite-based service would provide supplemental cell coverage to Americans from space that would close mobile “dead zones.” Cellular service providers AT&T and Verizon have raised concerns about the technology, including that it would disrupt their own mobile networks.

In a letter to the FCC on Friday, SpaceX said the service would connect first responders in a variety of environments and would be able to send wireless emergency alerts to everyone — not just T-Mobile customers — in places where there is no earth-based cellular coverage.

While this offer is morally correct, it is also good politics, as it acts as icing on the cake to encourage the FCC to approve that T-Moble license request. At the moment the technical details for making the proposal happen remain murky, but SpaceX’s willingness to offer this emergency service at no charge, something its competitors have apparently not, cannot hurt it in its negotiations with the FCC.

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Boom completes second flight test of one-third-scale prototype supersonic jet

9:28 am

The airplane startup Boom Supersonic on August 26, 2024 successfully completed the second test flight of its one-third-scale prototype XB-1 supersonic jet, taking off from the Mojave Air & Space Port in California.

The flight was manned by the company’s chief test pilot Tristan Brandenburg, and had as its primary engineering goal to test the retraction and deployment of the jet’s landing gear. During the fifteen minute flight the plane climbed to 10,400 feet and a maximum speed of 277 miles per hour.

The test checklist included retracting and extending the undercarriage for the first time, checking the plane’s handling, and the activation of a new digital stability augmentation system for roll damping to help maintain control in stall conditions. In addition, the right wing of the XB-1 was fitted with tufting to monitor the direction and strength of airflow over the wing.

The company plans a 10-flight test program with this prototype, eventually leading to flights exceeding the speed of sound. Boom also claims that its design will reduce the sound of the sonic boom, thus allowing its commercial supersonic jet to fly over land and increasing its commercial value. At the moment it has orders to sell as many as 96 of its full-scale plane to various airlines, including United and Japan.

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SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites but loses first stage at landing

8:44 am

SpaceX last night successfully placed 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in the early morning hours.

The first stage however fell over on its drone ship in the Atlantic after landing. This was its 23rd flight, which would have been a record reuse of a Falcon 9 booster had it landed successfully. Because of this failure, SpaceX rescheduled another Starlink launch, delaying it one day until August 30, 2024, as engineers assessed the stage data to determine the cause of the problem. From the video is appears that one leg on the far side, out of sight, either failed to deploy or collapsed after landing.

To be clear, SpaceX anticipates only a one day delay in all its launches because of this issue.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

84 SpaceX
35 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 99 to 53, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 84 to 68.

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Manned Polaris Dawn launch delayed due to weather

9:13 pm

SpaceX tonight scrubbed the launch of Jared Isaacman’s manned Polaris Dawn orbital mission due to poor weather predicted in the splashdown zones off the coast of Florida when the mission would have ended.

The flight has tentatively set now for August 30, 2024, but that remains a very preliminary date.

SpaceX however is not sitting on its hands while it waits for good weather for this manned mission. Tonight it has two Starlink launches scheduled a little more than an hour apart, one from Cape Canaveral in Florida followed by the second from Vandenberg in California. If the first launch is successful its Falcon 9 first stage will set a new record, flying for its 23rd time.

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August 27, 2024 Quick space links

3:15 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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Judge: Vanderbilt student protester who violently took over a building can be prosecuted

1:40 pm

Leftist protesters break into Vanderbilt building
Anti-Israel protesters assault a security guard (grey jacket)
at Vanderbuilt. Click for full video.

The lawless left: A judge ruled this week that Vanderbilt student protester Jack Petocz, who was one of three who violently attacked and injured a security guard in the process of taking over a building on March 25, 2024, was not exercising his first amendment rights and can be prosecuted for assault and face an almost yearlong prison sentence.

Judge Lynda Jones ruled during a preliminary hearing on Thursday that there was probable cause, and told Petocz he’s facing a possible jail sentence of up to 11 months and 29 days for the assault charge. Jones said Petocz may face more time if state prosecutors charge him with aggravated criminal trespass, a Class E felony.

It appears that Petocz was arguing that he was merely exercising his first amendment rights in breaking into the building and occupying it.
» Read more

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NASA IG: NASA’s effort to build new SLS mobile launcher is an epic disaster

12:20 pm

SLS's two mobile launchers, costing $1 billion
NASA’s bloated SLS mobile launchers

According to a new report [pdf] from NASA’s inspector general, both NASA and its contractor Bechtel have allowed the cost and schedule for the new larger SLS mobile launcher (ML-2) (on the right in the graphic) to go completely out of control, with the first launch on that platform to be delayed again until 2029.

NASA projects the ML-2 will cost over three times more than planned. In 2019, NASA estimated the entire ML-2 project from design through construction would cost under $500 million with construction completed and the ML-2 delivered to NASA by March 2023. In December 2023, NASA estimated the ML-2 project would cost $1.5 billion, including $1.3 billion for the Bechtel contract and $168 million for other project costs, with delivery of the launcher to NASA in November 2026. In June 2024, NASA established the Agency Baseline Commitment (ABC)—the cost and schedule baseline committed to Congress against which a project is measured—for a ML-2 project cost of $1.8 billion and a delivery date of September 2027. Even with the establishment of the ABC, NASA intends to keep Bechtel accountable to the cost and schedule agreed to in December 2023.

Despite the Agency’s increased cost projections, our analysis indicates costs could be even higher due in part to the significant amount of construction work that remains. Specifically, our projections indicate the total cost could reach $2.7 billion by the time Bechtel delivers the ML-2 to NASA. With the time NASA requires after delivery to prepare the launcher, we project the ML-2 will not be ready to support a launch until spring 2029, surpassing the planned September2028 Artemis IV launch date.

This quote actually makes things sounder better than they are. Bechtel’s original contract was for $383 million, which means the IG’s present final estimate of $2.7 billion is more than seven times higher. The contract was awarded in 2019 and was supposed to be completed by 2023, in four years. Instead, at best it will take Bechtel a decade to complete the job.

The IG notes that this contact was cost-plus, and considers this the main cause of these cost overruns. It also notes that NASA has had the option to convert the contract to fixed-price, but has chosen not to do so.

Possibly the most damning aspect of the IG report is its conclusion, which essentially admits that nothing can be done to fix this problem.
» Read more

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Webb finds six exoplanets, all flying in interstellar space without a star

11:11 am

Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have discovered six different planets ranging in mass 5 to 10 times that of Jupiter, all unattached to any star or solar system.

The most intriguing of the starless objects is also the lightest, having an estimated mass of five Jupiters (about 1,600 Earths). The presence of a dusty disk means the object almost certainly formed like a star, as space dust generally spins around a central object in the early stages of star formation, said Langeveld, a postdoctoral researcher in Jayawardhana’s group.

All of these starless planets likely formed like this one, coalescing like a star does but unlike a star never having enough mass to ignite.

The astronomers are next going to attempt to detect the atmosphere’s of these rogue exoplanets, though it is not clear exactly how they will do this unless one of the exoplanets just happened to transit across a more distant star, something that simply does not happen very often.

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D-Orbit newest orbital tug deploys four smallsats

10:24 am

The Italian orbital tug company D-Orbit has now successfully deployed four smallsats from its newest tug, having been launched on August 16, 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The tug still has one more satellite to deploy, after which it will remain in orbit as it also carries four additional customer “hosted” payloads that are using the tug itself as their service module.

This is D-Orbit’s second demo mission, the first flying in 2023. It also appears be completely successful, which puts this company in an excellent position to garner future contracts from many small satellite companies. It is also a partner in a $256 million Italian project to test in-orbit robotic satellite repair.

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ABL completes investigation into launchpad fire in July

10:12 am

The rocket startup ABL yesterday released the results of its investigation into launchpad fire in July that destroyed its RS1 rocket during a static fire test prior to an orbital test launch.

In a statement, ABL Space Systems said it ignited the E2 engines in the first stage of the RS1 rocket in the test, but aborted the test after just half a second because of a low pressure reading in one engine that the company said was caused by a faulty pressure sensor. The engines shut down, but a fire then broke out under the base of the vehicle, fed by fuel leaks from two engines. That fire was contained but could not be extinguished by either water or inert gas systems, and the company started offloading kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants from the vehicle.

The launch pad the company uses at Kodiak does not have its own water supply, with the company instead using mobile tanks that ran out of water 11 and a half minutes after ignition. That caused the fire to spread “and a progressive loss of pad systems,” the company stated, including the inability to continue detanking the rocket and eventually telemetry from the rocket.

ABL’s first launch attempt of this rocket in January 2023 failed when the first stages shut down immediately after lift-off and the rocket crashed on the launchpad. It completed its investigation of that failure in October 2023 and was ready for its second launch attempt this summer when the fire described above occurred.

The company has raised several hundred million dollars, with its chief investor being Lockheed Martin, which has also signed a contract for as many as 58 RS1 launches. It increasingly appears those launches might very well go to other providers.

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Firefly delivers its first Blue Ghost lunar lander for final environmental testing

9:58 am

Blue Ghost in clean room
Blue Ghost in clean room

Firefly this week completed the integration of the ten customer payloads onto its first Blue Ghost lunar lander and shipped the lander to JPL in California for final environmental testing before its planned launch before the end of this year.

Following final testing, Firefly’s Blue Ghost will ship to Cape Canaveral, Florida, ahead of its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket scheduled for Q4 2024. Blue Ghost will then begin its transit to the Moon, including approximately a month in Earth orbit and two weeks in lunar orbit. This approach provides ample time to conduct robust health checks on each subsystem and begin payload operations during transit.

Blue Ghost will then land in Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeast quadrant on the Moon’s near side, before deploying and operating 10 instruments for a lunar day (14 Earth days) and more than 5 hours into the lunar night.

Once launched, Firefly will become the third American company, after Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, to build a privately owned lunar lander and attempt a lunar landing. Since the other two companies were not entirely successful in their landing attempts, Firefly has the chance to be the first to succeed.

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SpaceX blasts its satellite competitors for lobbying the government to shut down Starlink/T-Mobile partnership

9:45 am

SpaceX on August 22, 2024 responded harshly to the effort by its satellite competitors to get the FCC to shut down the planned partneship of Starlink and T-Mobile, whereby Starlink will fill the gaps in T-Mobile’s coverage.

You can read SpaceX’s letter here. Its language however is quite blunt:

While the petitions from AT&T, Verizon, DISH/EchoStar, and Omnispace lack technical basis or legal merit, their game is clear. AT&T and Verizon seek to hamstring their competitor T-Mobile by talking out of both sides of their mouths, on one hand demanding without technical support that T-Mobile and SpaceX operate at unnecessarily low power levels that will force Americans to sacrifice service, while giving their own partner AST a free pass. AT&T goes so far as to claim to have conducted a secret study it refuses to show the Commission to support suppressing SpaceX’s out-of-band emissions to an interference-protection level ten times below the limit sufficient to protect terrestrial networks, while allowing its partner AST to exceed that limit.

DISH/EchoStar repeats its demand to siphon proprietary information from SpaceX to aid its own flailing ambitions, while stoutly refusing SpaceX’s repeated requests to engage in actual good faith coordination the way a company with actual technical concerns would.

And although it still has no commercial satellite service anywhere in the world, Omnispace continues to make unfounded claims of prospective harmful interference to prop up a decade-old spectrum play that it fears will lose financial value if American consumers can enjoy ubiquitous mobile connectivity using the PCS G Block downlink.

Fortunately, none of these unfounded arguments present any reasonable basis to delay swift grant of SpaceX’s request to bring ubiquitous mobile connectivity to American consumers.

The FCC has not yet responded to any of these demand letters. Nor has it yet issued the waiver SpaceX had requested in June 2024 allowing its Starlink system to operate beyond its licensed radio frequencies in order to facilitate cell surface with T-Mobile.

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NASA reveals technical problem during solar sail deployment of test mission

9:32 am

NASA today revealed that a technical problem occurred during the deployment of a demonstration solar sail mission launched in April on Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket.

Upon an initial attempt to unfurl, the solar sail paused when an onboard power monitor detected higher than expected motor currents. Communications, power, and attitude control for the spacecraft all remain normal while mission managers work to understand and resolve the cause of the interruption by analyzing data from the spacecraft.

The goal had been test the boom deployment of a 860 square foot sail from a cubesat only about 4 feet in size.

The concept of the solar sail is simple: Use the pressure produced by sunlight to maneuver and fly controlled throughout the solar system. The idea has been tested successfully several times, with the Japanese IKAROS test solar sail and the Planetary Society’s Lightsail-2 the most successful. Sadly almost all other attempts to test this idea have had technical problems of one kind or another.

Ironically, one test solar sail proved that such a deployment from a cubesat could be done very cheaply, unlike NASA’s effort above. Brown University students in 2023 used cheap off-the-shelf parts to launch a smallsat sail that successfully deployed and was then used to lower the satellite’s orbit in order to de-orbit it more quickly. Total cost, $10,000. And it worked.

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August 26, 2024 Quick space links

8:27 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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Launch of Jared Isaacman’s second spaceflight scheduled for tonight

4:10 pm

The real rocket behind tonight's launch
The real rocket behind tonight’s launch

UPDATE: The launch tonight was scrubbed due to a helium leak in a “ground side umbilical disconnect.” SpaceX is now targeting Wednesday, August 28 at 3:38 AM (Eastern) for the next launch attempt.
Original post:
———————–
At 3:38 am (Eastern) tonight, SpaceX’s will attempt the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman (on his second spaceflight) and three other private passengers (two of which are SpaceX employees), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida carrying the Resilience capsule on its third flight.

I have embedded a live stream of the launch below. SpaceX says it will begin 3.5 hours before launch. For those on the west coast the timing is reasonable. East coasters will have to do without sleep tonight if they wish to watch.

The mission’s main engineering goal during its five-day duration is to complete the first all private spacewalk using EVA suits developed by SpaceX. Two of the crew will exit the capsule, but all four will be in the suits because the capsule has no airlock and will be entirely vented of air during the spacewalk. The mission’s secondary goal (which it actually will do first) will be to raise the orbit to about 870 miles, the highest orbit for a manned flight since the Apollo missions in the 1970s. During that high orbit the crew will do radiation research, which they will continue after the orbit is lowered. More information about the mission goals can be read here.

The mission’s real goal however has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with freedom and the American dream. This is an entirely private mission. The rocket is privately built. The capsule is privately built. The launchpad is privately built. The launch crew is privately employed. The astronauts are all private citizens, with one paying the way for the entire flight and two flying as employees of SpaceX to test the operation of its capsule in orbit.

No government money is involved. The government had little or no say on what will happen. The mission will illustrate in very stark terms what the American dream is all about, since it has been conceived, paid for, and created entirely by private citizens following their own dreams and goals.

Hail to freedom! May the bell of liberty always ring.
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The fall of DEI accelerates

12:50 pm

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

Fight! Fight! Fight! In the past two months it has become very clear that if Americans are willing to stand up to the left and its Marxist bigoted agenda, Americans will win.

Since late June, five different university systems have shut down their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices. Each is listed below, in chronological order:

And this list does not include the University of Florida, which in March shut down its own DEI office because the state legislature not only banned such offices, it cut the budgets of them.

Though it is true these states are all solidly conservative with legislatures largely controlled by Republicans, this fact on its face proves that voting can make a difference, with Florida the biggest proof. Unlike the other states, Florida had for decades been a swing state between the Democrats and Republicans. Voters however changed that in the past decade, so that today the state legisilature is solidly Republican. The result has been a definitive policy shift acting to eliminate these racist Marxist programs from state-financed universities.

There is no reason similar changes cannot be forced in other battleground states. Nor should we consider it impossible in the coastal states (California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Massachusetts, etc) where Democrats maintain full control. DEI concepts are inherently racist and divisive, and serve only to encourage anger, resentment, and hate across all ethnic groups. Ordinary voters recognize this routinely, when they make the effort to look.

Nor are things changing solely in the unversities because of the willingness of voters to force change. The boycott of Bud Light because of its endorsement of the queer agenda last year is having profound impact on corporate culture. In just the last few months a number of major companies have announced the elimination of their own DEI departments and programs, also listed below in chronological order:

The first three stories are from NPR and CNN, which explains the effort of the headlines to blame the evil “pouncing” of conservatives for this action (thus also implying that conservatives are bigots) . In truth, what these leftist news outlets refuse to recognize is that DEI programs are bigoted by their very nature, designed to favor some races over others merely because of skin color. These programs thus violate numerous civil rights laws, not to mention basic human morality and fair treatment. In addition, it appears the customers of all these companies, not simply conservatives, made it clear they would stop buying these products if company management did not take action to shut down these DEI policies.

Faced with a public backlash and the real threat of lawsuits and legal action against them, these companies are now recognizing that it makes no sense legally, financially, and morally to promote such things.

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Increasingly, Americans are no longer willing to make believe that DEI and Marxism has a rightful place on the intellectual landscape. These ideas are garbage and downright evil, and it is a great tragedy that American academia allowed them to flourish on campuses for the past half century. The public is now beginning to make it clear that such ideas need to be sent to the ash heap of history, and legislators, academic administrations, and corporate managements are being forced to listen.

The trend is very obvious. If people actually pay attention and make it clear they will no longer tolerate the imposition of these bigoted leftist policies, those policies can be canceled and eliminated. One simply has to have the courage to fight, as Donald Trump said with such defiance immediately after getting shot.

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A real whirlpool in space

9:52 am

A real whirlpool in space
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture above, cropped to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nearby galaxies that have what astronomers call an Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), because the supermassive black hole at the center is devouring nearby material at a great rate and thus producing high energy emissions as it does so.

Many active galaxies are known to astronomers at vast distances from Earth, thanks to the great brightness of their nuclei highlighting them next to other, dimmer galaxies. At 128 million light-years from Earth, UGC 3478 is positively neighbourly to us. The data used to make this image comes from a Hubble survey of nearby powerful AGNs found in relatively high-energy X-rays, like this one, which it is hoped can help astronomers to understand how the galaxies interact with the supermassive black holes at their hearts.

The bottom line is that this spiral galaxy literally is a whirlpool, the entire galaxy spiralling down into that massive black hole in its center. One cannot help wondering why such galaxies don’t end up eventually getting completely swallowed by that black hole.

Or maybe they do, and we don’t see such things because all that is left is a supermassive black hole that emits no light or energy at all, a dark silent ghost traveling between the galaxies unseen and undetectable.

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First high resolution images released from Juice’s fly-by of the Earth & Moon

9:34 am

Juice's high resolution view of the Moon
Click for original image.

The Italian science team that runs the high resolution camera on the asteroid probe Juice have now released that camera’s first images, taken to test its operation during the spacecraft’s close fly-by of both the Moon and then the Earth a week ago.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, shows the Moon’s surface during that close fly-by, which got within 435 miles. The camera is dubbed Janus, and was developed by Italy and operated by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics.

JANUS will study global, regional and local features and processes on the moons, as well as map the clouds of Jupiter. It will have a resolution up to 2.4 m per pixel on Ganymede and about 10 km per pixel at Jupiter.

The main aim of JANUS’s observations during the lunar-Earth flyby was to evaluate how well the instrument is performing, not to make scientific measurements. For this reason, JANUS took images with various camera settings and time intervals – a bit like if you’re going out to test a DSLR camera for the first time. In some cases, researchers intentionally ‘blurred’ the images so that they can test out resolution recovery algorithms. In other cases, they partially saturated the image to study the effects induced on the unsaturated areas.

As can be seen by the sample image above, the test images appear to have demonstrated that Janus will function as planned when Juice arrives in orbit around Jupiter in 2031 in order to study that gas giant’s upper atmosphere as well as its larger icy moons, Ganymede, Calisto, and Europa.

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JAXA finally shuts down SLIM operations after four months of no contact

9:14 am

SLIM's last image
Click for original image.

Japan’s space agency JAXA today announced that it has now closed down all further attempts to contact its SLIM lunar lander on the surface of the Moon.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) concluded operations of the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) on the lunar surface at 22:40 (JST), on August 23, after being unable to establish communication with the spacecraft during the operational periods from May to July*, following the last contact on April 28, 2024.

SLIM was launched onboard the H-IIA Launch Vehicle No.47 (H-IIA F47) on September 7, 2023 from the Tanegashima Space Center and achieved Japan’s first Moon soft landing on January 20, 2024. The landing precision was evaluated with a position error of approximately 10 meters from the target point, confirming the world’s first successful pinpoint landing. In addition, the Multi-Band Camera (MBC) successfully performed spectral observations in 10 wavelength bands on 10 rocks, exceeding initial expectations. Further, despite not being part of the original mission plan, the spacecraft was confirmed to survive three lunar nights and remained operational, demonstrating results that surpassed initial goals.

The lander’s main goal was to demonstrate the ability to do a precise robotic landing within a 100 meter landing zone. And even though one nozzle fell off during landing, resulting in SLIM landing on its side, it accomplished that goal and then survived three lunar nights, exceeding significantly its expected ability to function in harsh lunar environment.

The image to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by SLIM just before it was shut down for its first lunar night. It looks to the southeast across the width of 885-foot-wide Shioli Crater, the opposite rim the bright ridge in the upper right about a thousand feet away.

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Rocket Factory Augsburg releases footage of 1st stage failure during static fire test

9:03 am

The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg today released the film footage it took during the failed 9-engine static fire test of its 1st stage last week.

I have embedded that footage below.

As the company’s CEO noted two days ago, the company has identified the cause as a fire in an oxygen pump which they think was unrelated to the engine design. This explanation remains puzzling, however. If the problem was not engine design, it suggests instead some other quality control error, which it is even more important to identify in order to prevent such errors in the future.

The video provides numerous angles of the failure, including one that captured the moment when the first stage fell over. As the CEO noted, it fortunately fell in the right direction, missing critical launchpad equipment and thus reducing significantly the damage to the pad.
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Starliner will return unmanned; crew will return in February 2025 on Dragon

10:51 am

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS.

In a briefing today, NASA’s administrator Bill Nelson announced that Boeing’s Starliner capsule, launched in June on its first manned mission, will return unmanned and that the two astronauts it brought to ISS — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — will return in February 2025 as part of the crew of the next Dragon manned mission, scheduled to launch in late September.

Nelson made it a point to note that NASA’s past inactions to protect astronauts on two different shuttle missions, thus leading to their deaths, was a factor in this decision. The agency now decided safety must come first, and since Starliner’s return abilities still carry uncertainties that relate directly to safety, it decided to use a more reliable and tested Dragon capsule to return those astronauts back to Earth. During the entire briefing and Q&A session it became very clear that NASA is now paying very close attention to its engineers and their conclusions, rather than dismissing those conclusions because of other management concerns, as it did during those previous two shuttle failures.

Nelson also stated that NASA still wants to use Starliner as a second crew vehicle to ISS. He noted that he has spoken to Boeing’s new CEO, who apparently committed to getting Starliner fixed and operating. It remains undecided whether another test manned flight will be required of Boeing (at Boeing’s cost) before NASA certifies it as an operational vehicle. Whether any other customers will be willing to use the capsule remains unlikely until Boeing has flown a lot of Starliner NASA flights with no problems.

At this moment they are looking to bring Starliner back in early September, using a simplified undocking system to get the vehicle away from ISS quickly. The next Dragon mission will launch no earlier than September 24th carrying two astronauts and two empty flight suits that Wilmore and Williams use during their return.

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Update from Rocket Factory Augsburg’s CEO on first stage explosion on launchpad

9:26 am

Link here, but I have embedded his video statement below. He goes into detail about what they now believe happened when the rocket exploded during the static fire test, as well as the limited damage to the launchpad. They do not think the failure was a design flaw, which means it was caused by something that was done while building the engine. The company now plans to use for this first launch the stage that it was building for its second launch, and hopes to launch next year.

There was one little quote from him that tells me the company’s statement prior to the failed test that it could launch “in a matter of weeks” was based solely on its own engineering but was not going to happen. In today’s statement he says, almost as an aside, that “We wanted to launch in the next few weeks or months and this is unfortunately no longer possible.” [emphasis mine]

What the highlighted words tell me is that had this test been successful, Rocket Factory would have been able to stack the rocket and would have been willing to launch quickly. For that schedule to extend into months however could only be for one reason, an expectation that the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) would not issue the launch license immediatley, but would dither as it did with Virgin Orbit (bankrupting that company).

Thus, red tape remains a major obstacle for the next launch. I suspect the CAA — risk adverse as all bureaucracies are — will not be comfortable issuing a new license after this failure, unless Rocket Factory can show unequivocally that it has taken actions that will prevent all such failures in the future, something that is likely impossible.

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Blue Origin delays first New Glenn launch two weeks to October 13, 2024

9:04 am

The first launch of Blue Origin’s new New Glenn orbital rocket, carrying two Rocket Lab Mars orbiters built for NASA, has now been delayed two weeks to October 13, 2024.

The decision was made public by a very short and vague press release by NASA that stated no reasons for the delay and did not say clearly who made the decision. The release also did not indicate the launch window for this mission. The mission is going to Mars, which means it must launch within a certain clearly degined period this fall, when orbital mechanics will allow the orbiters to reach Mars as planned, or the mission will get delayed two years.

Blue Origin had previously targeted September 29, 2024 for the launch, but I have not been able to locate any source that states when that launch window ends. The delay of two weeks definitely shortens that window, but I don’t know how much.

Can Blue Origin meet this window? That remains unknown, but we shall soon find out.

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