Author: Robert Zimmerman

Betelgeuse dimming again

10:00 am

Betelqeuse
An optical image of Betelgeuse taken in 2017 by a ground-based
telescope, showing its not unusual aspherical shape.
Click for original image.

It appears that the red giant star Betelgeuse is once again dimming, as it did in 2019-2020.

Betelgeuse, located in Orion’s right shoulder, ordinarily shines at magnitude +0.4, a close match to neighboring Procyon in Canis Minor. But since late January it’s lost some of its luster — at least a third of a magnitude’s worth. That may not sound like much especially given the star’s variable nature, but the red supergiant star is currently the faintest it’s been in the past two years.

Betelgeuse is less like a stable star and more like a gasbag in weightlessness, its shape bouncing in and out as convection bubbles from within push their way to the surface. In some cases, as in 2019-2020, a burst of a bubble releases dust and material, which scientists believe acted to block the star’s light at that time. The dimming now could be for the same reason. Or it could be because the star’s brightness is fundamentally variable. For years it reliably pulsed every 400 days, though that variation pattern now seems to have vanished since 2020.

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Engineers report progress in restoring proper communications with Voyager-1

9:51 am

According to a NASA update yesterday, software engineers for the Voyager-1 spacecraft now beyond the edge of the solar system have managed to decipher the garbled data the spacecraft’s computers have been sending back to Earth since November 2023, and are in the process of analyzing that data with the hope of restoring full understandable communications.

The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.

On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream. The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team wasn’t initially sure what to make of it. But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory.

This new readable data was the result of a command sent two days before, suggesting that engineers are on the right track. Because Voyager-1 is so far away, 15 billion miles, it takes 22.5 hours for any command to be sent to the spacecraft, and another 22.5 hours for ground controllers to get a response. This long lag time has slowed the effort to fix the problem, but this new success suggests that a full recovery is possible.

That recovery is going to be relatively short-lived, no matter what. The nuclear-powered power sources for both Voyager spacecraft, flying since 1977, are expected to finally run out of power sometime in 2026, after almost a half century of operation. Moreover, the computers on both Voyagers are the longest continuously running computers in history.

The engineering achievement of both is astonishing.

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SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starship successfully launches

9:19 am

Superheavy/Starship lifting off today
Superheavy/Starship lifting off today

Early this morning SpaceX successfully launched its Superheavy/Starship heavy-lift rocket on its third orbital test flight.

The flight achieved almost all of its test goals, and far exceeded what was accomplished on the previous test launch in November.

First, Superheavy appeared to operate perfectly through launch, putting Starship into its correct near-orbit trajectory. The hot-fire stage separation, where Starship begins firing its engines before separation, worked as planned for the second straight time. Superheavy then refired some of its engines so as to target its correct landing zone in the Gulf of Mexico. As it approached the ocean surface, however, it started to tumble, and though some engines appeared to light for the landing burn, something went wrong and the stage was lost.

Next, Starship continued on its coast phase, during which engineers apparently tested opening and closing the payload doors as well as demonstrating a propellant transfer between two tanks. It also appeared that the engineering team was testing a variety of orientation modes for Starship. First it flew oriented stable to the Earth’s horizon. Then it appeared they placed the spacecraft in barbeque mode, where a spacecraft is placed in a steady roll in order to evenly distribute the heat on its surface.

For reasons not yet explained, the team cancelled the refire test in orbit of its Raptor engines. As the orbit chosen was low, the atmosphere still slowed the spacecraft down so that its de-orbit would still occur over the Indian Ocean.

As Starship started to descend it appeared its flaps were working successfully to control its orientation. It also appeared the heat shield tiles were working, as shown in the picture below. As Starship entered the thicker part of the atmosphere however, some tiles could be seen flying away from the ship and the spacecraft began to tumble. At an altitude of about 65 kilometers signal was lost.
» Read more

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China has launch failure

8:09 am

A Chinese Long March 2C launch yesterday, lifting off from the Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China, failed to put its payload of two satellites into their proper orbit.

According to China’s state-run press, the third stage of the rocket “encountered an abnormality during flight.” It provided practically no other information, including whether the satellites even made orbit at all.

UPDATE: In December 2024 one of my readers informed me that the satellites were eventually able to reach their proper orbits, using their attitude thrusters. Thus this launch has been changed to a success.

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Defiance: Blacklisted Portland professor joins New College in Florida

2:57 pm

Bruce Gilley of Portland State University, willing to fight
Bruce Gilley of Portland State University

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Bruce Gilley, the Portland State University political scientist professor who was vilified, blacklisted, and threatened with death after writing a paper arguing that western colonialism was not all evil, that it also brought benefits to third world nations, has now taken a job as a scholar in residence at New College in Florida.

Left-leaning scholars have shown active disdain for both Gilley and New College, the latter of which is in the process of being remade from a poorly ranked campus heavily focused on social justice and critical race theory into one that prioritizes a classical liberal education.

“What they are doing there is of global significance, because this is a public university, it’s where the clearest democratic fight is,” Gilley told The College Fix in a telephone interview Friday discussing his new post. In a piece for the American Conservative, Gilley explained further: “New College is the first Reconquista of a publicly-funded venue. …Taking back power from the academic mullahs who have turned higher education in the West into little more than a madrassa system of leftist thought depends on storming the public institutions, not fleeing from them.”

Gilley’s paper on colonialism had made this quite reasonable historical statement:
» Read more

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SpaceX announces launch time tomorrow for 3rd Superheavy/Starship launch

1:58 pm

UPDATE: The FAA has now amended [pdf] SpaceX’s launch license to approve tomorrow’s Superheavy/Starship launch.

Original post:
————————-
SpaceX has sent out email notices and now revised its Starship/Superheavy webpage to reflect a target launch time for the third Superheavy/Starship launch tomorrow, March 14, 2024, at 7 am (Central).

The third flight test of Starship is targeted to launch Thursday, March 14. The 110-minute test window opens at 7:00 a.m. CT.

A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to stay tuned to our X account for updates.

I have not yet received a notice from the FAA, announcing the approval of a launch license, but SpaceX’s announcement likely signals that the approval has been given. As I noted yesterday, this approval was likely given as close to the launch as possible to help preclude any legal action by the various leftist activist groups that want to stop Elon Musk, stop SpaceX, and stop any grand human achievement. Their dislike and alienation with success is so deep that such tactics are now necessary to stymie them and allow such achievements to proceed.

A youtube live stream will also be available here. If the flight succeeds in getting Starship into orbit, it will attempt to open and close its payload door, attempt a propellant transfer test, and then attempt the first in-space relight of a Raptor engine in order to bring it down controlled in the Indian Ocean.

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Scientists: Mars’ mysterious slope streaks and seasonal recurring lineae are caused by dust

1:08 pm

Massive flow on Mars
A typical Martian slope streak.

On Mars there are two mysterious features that are somewhat similar but entirely unique to the Red Planet, and for years have baffled planetary geologists as to their origins.

One feature is called slope streaks, which appear randomly year-round as either dark or bright streaks on slopes. They resemble avalanches, except that they do not change the topography, have no debris piles at their base, and sometimes travel along that topography, sometimes even going uphill for short distances. Over time these streaks then fade.

The other feature is called recurring slope lineae, because though they look like slope streaks, they are not random but appear seasonally at the same places each year. Lineae are also always dark.

Scientists have proposed many theories to explain both, with most theories involving some form of water process, either the seepage of brine from below or water vapor causing the Martian surface dust to flow, like droplets on a car windshield. None of these theories has been confirmed, or entirely accepted.

Two studies at this week’s 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas have both concluded that water is not a factor in the formation of either phenomenon. Instead, both papers propose a much simpler explanation: Wind and blowing dust interact to cause small dust avalanches.
» Read more

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Lucy’s first encounter with an asteroid produced surprises

12:39 pm

Dinkinesh, with Salam

At the 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference presently being held in Texas, the science team for the Lucy asteroid mission presented their first papers outlining what they learned during the spacecraft’s first asteroid encounter, flying past the main belt asteroid Dinkinesh on November 1, 2023.

To the right is the the best image taken at closest approach, at about 270 miles distance, annotated to include the analysis of Dinkinesh’s shape by scientists. As noted in the summary paper [pdf], the asteroid is about a half mile in diameter, and appears to have an equatorial ridge, similar to the ridges found on the near-Earth rubble-pile asteroids Bennu or Ryugu. Dinkinesh is not a rubble pile, however. Though boulder-strewn, it appears more solid, and even has what the scientists call a longitudinal trough, as indicated in the picture.

The ridge overlays the trough implying that it is the younger of the two structures. However, there is as yet no information to better constrain their relative ages, and thus they could potentially have formed in the same event. Indeed, Dinkinesh’s ridge and trough are likely the result of mass failure and the reaccretion of material, and may both be linked to the formation of Selam.

That flyby had produced one major surprise, the existence of a smaller satellite asteroid orbiting Dinkinesh, now dubbed Selam. It is shown in the lower left, as it appeared from behind the main asteroid as Lucy flew past. A later picture however revealed an even greater surprise.
» Read more

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There likely is little or no ice in the Moon’s permanently shadowed craters

11:47 am

Shadowcam-LRO mosaic
The floor of Shackleton Crater showing no obvious ice deposits,
as seen by Shadowcam. The black cross marks the south pole.
Click for original image.

This week the 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference is being held in Texas. The conference was originally established in connection with the Apollo missions to allow scientists to release their Moon research results. It quickly morphed into an annual event covering research from the entire planetary research community.

I have reviewed the abstracts for this year’s meeting, and culled what I think are the most significant new results from the conference, which I will report on in the next few posts.

We begin however with possibly the most important result from the conference, given by the science team for the ShadowCam instrument on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter. That low-light camera was designed to take high resolution pictures of the permanently-shadowed craters of the Moon, to see if there was any visible or obvious ice hidden there. Though the science team presented a number of papers, the summary paper [pdf] by the instrument’s principal investigator, Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, gave the bottom line:

The data so far is finding very little evidence of water ice in these dark regions.
» Read more

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The investors behind Space One, the Japanese commercial rocket company that had a launch failure yesterday

9:01 am

The explosion yesterday of the new Japanese-built Kairos-1 solid-fueded rocket shortly after lift-off immediately raised questions whether the new rocket company that built it, Space One, could survive that failure.

This story from CNBC suggests it will, based mainly on the nature of its principal investors.

Space One was set up in 2018 by a consortium of Japanese companies including Canon Electronics, IHI Aerospace and construction firm Shimizu, along with the government-owned Development Bank of Japan. Mitsubishi UFJ and Mizuho Financial Group, two of Japan’s biggest banks, also own minority stakes in Space One.

The story is focused on the declines in the stock values of these companies, following the failure, with Canon’s stock falling the most, 12.7%.

My takeaways from the article however are different. First, these are not small investors. Space One is backed by some of Japan’s biggest corporations as well as indirectly by the Japanese government. One failure should not cause them to back out of the project.

Second, that the company was formed in 2018 by these Japanese heavy-hitters and only now was able to finally attempt a launch — that ended in failure — suggests Japan’s heavy-hitters continue to do things slowly and poorly. Not only have these big companies been working much too slow to build this relatively small rocket, Mitsubishi’s effort to build the much larger H3 rocket for Japan’s space agency JAXA has also been fraught with delays and problems, from engine cracks to launch failures. It appears Japan’s space industry is building things with the same lackadaisical attitude of America’s modern airline industry.

Third, that this “startup” was created by a team of old space large companies suggests Japan still doesn’t get the basics of capitalism. This new company isn’t creating any real competition. It was instead apparently formed to keep these heavy hitters in control of the Japanese launch market. This partnership reminds me of the many projects put together for decades by American consortiums of old space companies, such as Boeing teaming with Lockheed Martin to create ULA. All such partnerships were designed not to create new companies and new innovative products that would compete, but to maintain the control these old companies had on the industry.

Space One will likely fly again, but until we begin to see completely new companies from Japan, backed by independent new investors, this country is going to continue to lag behind everyone else.

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First launch of Japanese rocket startup fails

10:03 pm

The first launch attempt by the Japanese rocket startup Space One failed today, when its Kairos-1 rocket blew up mere seconds after launch.

The launch took place from the company’s own launchpad in the south of Japan. The live stream shows the rocket appear to lift off cleanly, moving upward out of frame. When the video then switches camera to a more distant view, the rocket fails to appear from behind a nearby hill. Instead, a white cloud explodes upward. Shortly thereafter the live stream switches back to the launchpad, where there is a fire and smoke. Fire hoses then begin working to put the fire out.

Space One is the first independent commercial rocket startup in Japan apparently not working with that country’s JAXA space agency. We will have to wait and see whether it can recover from this failure.

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A Martian tadpole

3:01 pm

Overview map

A Martian tadpole
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, with the rectangle in the inset marking the area covered by the picture. The science team labels this “inverted features,” a more vague way to describe the feature geologists dub “inverted channels.” The flow of a river or glacier acts to harden and increase the density of the channel bed. Later, the water or ice disappears, leaving just the canyon.

Even later, erosion begins to wear away the surrounding terrain. Because the canyon floor is now harder than that surrounding terrain, that floor is more resistent to erosion, and eventually becomes ridge following the exact same path as the long gone river or glacier.

This is what we have here, with this inverted channel, which is about five miles long, once draining into the deeper eroded valley to the south.

The location is at 38 degrees north latitude and inside the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude region I dub glacier country, because almost every image shows evidence of glaciers or ice flows on the surface. This picture however is a rare exception. The features in this picture instead appear to be bedrock, something that is rarely seen in the canyons and craters in glacier country. It is beyond my pay grade however to explain why this spot lacks such features. Or it could be the near surface ice here looks so much like bedrock I am misinterpreting the picture.

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Another United airplane makes an emergency landing

1:26 pm

United Airlines: Run by bigoted clowns
United Airlines: Run by bigoted clowns

As more proof that the United Airlines policies for hiring and promotion — focused solely on skin color, ethnicity, and sex more than talent, knowledge, and skills — is making flying on that airline downright dangerous, another United flight today had to make an emergency landing when immediately after take-off fluid began pouring from the plane.

Just 10 seconds after flight 830 from Sydney to San Francisco took the air, video by plane spotter New York Aviation got clear images of fluid spewing from the plane — it looks like it was coming from the rear right landing gear.

The crew of the Boeing 777-300 jet continued over the ocean for a while before turning around. Video from a passenger shows the crew dumping fuel before landing. The plane landed safely back at the airport in Sydney, with no injuries, but a lot of questions.

This was the fifth such incident of a United flight in just over a week, including four emergency landings and a failure after landing.

Though this was a Boeing jet, the fault here lies entirely with United, its pilots, and its maintenance department. Though pilots should be able to rely on their maintenance departments to keep the plane airworthy, they are also supposed to check their airplanes carefully before take-off. That neither the pilots of this plane or the maintenance staff detected anything before take-off suggests that no one is really doing their job right.

No matter. United is determined to make sure that half its employees are blacks or minorities or women, no matter how little those new hires know about maintaining an airplane. So what if planes fall from the sky and people die? United will have achieved diversity, equity, and inclusion!

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The “news” outlet that slandered a 9-year-old football fan is no more

12:39 pm

Holden Armenta on his way to the Superbowl
Holden Armenta in face-paint and headdress,
on his way to the Superbowl. Click for video.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: The “news” outlet Deadspin, that slandered a 9-year-old football fan for no reason other than outright hate of America, is no more, its owner G/O Media selling it to another company that immediately shut it down.

In the past few months the struggles of G/O have been well publicized, from their being forced to shutter (and later sell the rights to) Jezebel to facing down a lawsuit from the family of a Kansas City Chiefs fan who was smeared as ‘racist’ for wearing what they called ‘blackface’ to a game by Deadspin.

Well, apparently Deadspin has proved to be more trouble than it’s worth to the suits at G/O, because today it was announced that they’d sold the property to European firm ‘Lineup Publishing’… who have no interest in retaining any of the current Deadspin staff.

» Read more

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FAA lists possible launch windows for Starship/Superheavy launch

11:59 am

Though it as yet not issued a launch permit, the FAA has now released an advisory to the public, listing the possible launch windows for the next Starship/Superheavy launch, beginning on March 14, 2024 and including windows on each day through March 18th.

The advisory lists a primary date of Thursday, March 14, with the time 12:00Z-14:13Z (7 a.m. to 9:13 a.m. central). The plan also includes backup dates for the following four days, with the window closing at 8:01 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday before increasing to 9:13 a.m. again on Monday.

It is very possible this advisory is premature. It does strongly suggest however that the FAA is about to issue the launch licence. Based on past actions, expect that license to be announced as close to the launch date as reasonably possible, in order to make difficult or impossible any legal action to stop it by the various independent activist groups that have been suing both SpaceX and the FAA. (While the FAA has clearly been ordered by higher-ups in the Biden administration to slow-walk SpaceX’s effort, its people generally want SpaceX to succeed.)

If the first launch attempt will be on March 14th, two days hence, that license licence must be issued soon.

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Sunspot update: The Sun continues what appears will be a weak maximum

10:30 am

As I have done each month since 2011, I am now posting an annotated version of NOAA’s monthly graph, tracking the solar sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Sun. The NOAA updated graph was posted at the start of March, covering activity through the end of February, so this report is a little later than normal.

That graph is below. In February sunspot activity remained essentially steady, only slightly higher than the activity from the month before. Those numbers also hovered at about the same level seen since August 2023.
» Read more

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Rocket startup Phantom Space completes another investment capital funding round

8:59 am

The Tucson-based rocket startup Phantom Space has successfully completed another investment capital funding round, bringing the total funding it has raised to $37 million.

Balerion Space Ventures led the round, which also included participation from the Reaser Family Office, KOLH Capital, and a handful of existing and new investors.

The company hopes to do its first test launch of its Daytona rocket next year, lifting off from Vandenberg. The article at the link says the launch permits from Vandenberg have been obtained, but as of about a month ago my sources said the company was still awaiting approvals from various agencies.

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ISS crew splashes down safely

8:50 am

SpaceX’s Endurance manned capsule yesterday safely splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, bringing home a crew of four astronauts from ISS after completing a six month mission.

NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov, returned to Earth splashing down at 5:47 a.m. EDT. Teams aboard SpaceX recovery vessels retrieved the spacecraft and its crew. After returning to shore, the crew will fly to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

…Moghbeli, Mogensen, Furukawa, and Borisov traveled 84,434,094 miles during their mission, spent 197 days aboard the space station, and completed 3,184 orbits around Earth. The Crew-7 mission was the first spaceflight for Moghbeli and Borisov. Mogensen has logged 209 days in space over his two flights, and Furukawa has logged 366 days in space over his two flights.

This was the third flight of Endurance. As always, it is important to note that though the passengers were government employees from the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Russia, the entire splashdown crew and capsule were private employees of SpaceX. This was a private mission, purchased by those governments.

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Rocket Lab launches radar satellite

8:39 am

Rocket Lab today successfully launched the fourth radar satellite for the commercial company Synspective, its Electron rocket lifting off from its spaceport in New Zealand.

On this flight Rocket Labt did not attempt to recover its first stage.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

24 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia
3 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 28 to 19. SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world combined 24 to 23.

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The strange surface of the perennial dry ice cap at Mars’ south pole

4:40 pm

The strange surface of Mars' dry ice cap
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on January 24, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a region about 180 miles from the south pole of Mars.

This terrain is intriguing because is the pattern of ridges that cover it entirely. I have simply cropped the original image to show these ridges in highest resolution. The full image shows them covering a region much larger than this.

What are we looking at? Because it is near the pole, it is likely that the black splotches are caused by carbon dioxide gas breaking through the winter mantle of dry ice that covers the poles during the winter months and then sublimates away, from the bottom, each spring. As the dry ice turns to CO2 gas that gas is trapped, until it can find a weak spot in the overlying mantle. When the pressure builds enough, the mantle breaks, the gas escapes, and as it does so it deposits the dark dust around the breakage. That dust fades as the mantle disappears.

Sounds good, eh? Not so fast.
» Read more

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United Airlines diversity quotas finally begin paying off in disaster

11:57 am

United Airlines: Run by fascist clowns
United Airlines: Run by fascist clowns

In the past week there have been four serious airplane incidents involving United Airlines. Though most of the media focus has been aimed at Boeing — which clearly has demonstrated significant management and design issues with almost all its new products in the past few years — the real culprit of these recent failures is not Boeing. All of the following potentially deadly incidents occurred on United flights, and all suggest major problems within its maintenance and hiring departments.

  • March 4: A United Boeing 737 had to make an emergency landing shortly after take-off when a fire started in one of its engines. One news report claimed the fire was caused when some bubble wrap was pulled into the engine, an explanation that seems exceedingly unconvincing, especially because no investigation has yet been completed.
  • March 7: While taking off in San Francisco, one wheel on a United Boeing 777-200 airplane fell off, crushing several cars in an airport employee parking lot, with the plane making an emergency landing in Los Angeles. United had purchased the airplane 22 years previously, so the problem had to come from within United’s maintenance department.
  • March 8: A United Boeing 737-Max ended up on the grass while taxiing off the runway after landing when its left main landing gear collapsed. One passenger reported the incident occurred due to bad driving by the pilot, who mistakenly steered the plane onto the grass, causing the gear to collapse.
  • March 8: A United Airbus A320 had to make an emergency landing in Los Angeles when it experienced “complete hydraulic failure” in one of the airplane’s three hydraulic systems.

In 2020, shortly after George Floyd’s death, United officials made a very public commitment to instituting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas in hiring, from maintenance to pilots. For example, it announced it would favor training and hiring pilots based on skin color and sex, regardless of qualification.
» Read more

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Hubble and Webb confirm decade-long conflict in universe’s expansion rate

8:58 am

The uncertainty of science: New data from both the Hubble and Webb space telescopes has confirmed Hubble’s previous measurement of the rate of the Hubble constant, the rate in which the universe is expanding. The problem is that these numbers still differ significantly from the expansion rate determined by the observations of the cosmic microwave background by the Planck space telescope.

Hubble and Webb come up with a rate of expansion 73 km/s/Mpc, while Planck found an expansion rate of 67 km/s/Mpc. Though this difference appears small, the scientists in both groups claim their margin of error is much smaller than that difference, which means both can’t be right.

You can read the paper for these new results here.

The bottom line mystery remains: The data is clearly telling us one of two things: 1) the many assumptions that go into these numbers might be incorrect, explaining the difference, or 2) there is something fundamentally wrong about the Big Bang theory that cosmologists have been promoting for more than a half century as the only explanation for the formation of the universe.

The solution could also be a combination of both. Our data and our theories are wrong.

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Two SpaceX launches yesterday evening, on opposite coasts and only five hours apart

8:39 am

SpaceX yesterday completed two different Starlink launches, placing 46 satellites total into orbit from opposite coasts and only five hours apart.

First, at 7:05 pm (Eastern) a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying 23 Starlink satellites, with its the first stage successfully completing its seventeenth flight.

Next, just over five hours later, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg, carrying its own cargo of 23 Starlink satellites, with its first stage also completing its seventeenth flight.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

24 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world in successful launches 27 to 19. SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including other American companies, 24 to 22.

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Stratolaunch completes first flight of its Talon-A hypersonic test vehicle

8:50 pm

Stratolaunch yesterday successfully completed the first flight of its Talon-A hypersonic test vehicle, released from its giant Roc airplane.

Primary objectives for the flight test included accomplishing safe air-launch release of the TA-1 vehicle, engine ignition, acceleration, sustained climb in altitude, and a controlled water landing.

“While I can’t share the specific altitude and speed TA-1 reached due to proprietary agreements with our customers, we are pleased to share that in addition to meeting all primary and customer objectives of the flight, we reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers,” said [Dr. Zachary Krevor President and CEO of Stratolaunch]. “Our goal with this flight was to continue our risk reduction approach for TA-2’s first reusable flight and be steadfast on our commitment of delivering maximum value to our customers. We are excited to review the data from today’s test and use it as we plan our next steps toward TA-2’s first flight later this year.”

Stratolaunch’s main customer is the Air Force, which wishes to use this testbed to test hypersonic flight in a number of ways, both for missiles and possibly aircraft. Those military goals explain the required secrecy.

Stratolaunch is under competitive pressure from Rocket Lab, which has already demonstrated that the first stage of its Electron rocket can provide a similar testbed. Stratolaunch is reusable, however, which potentially makes it cheaper with a faster turnaround. Rocket Lab in turn is already capable of test flights. This Stratolaunch success will likely spur Rocket Lab to complete its program to recover and reuse those first stages, while Rocket Lab’s succes is likely spurring Stratolaunch to accelerate its own program.

Ain’t competition wonderful?

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Japanese rocket startup scrubs first launch attempt

9:11 am

The first Japanese rocket commercial rocket company, Space One, today scrubbed the first launch attempt of its Kairos rocket, scheduled to take off from its own launchpad in the south of Japan.

“We informed the public in advance that we wanted to make the area free of people, but even 10 minutes before the launch, a vessel remained in the area, so we decided to cancel the launch because it would have been impossible for them to leave promptly,” Space One executive Kozo Abe told a news conference in the afternoon.

Abe said there were no technical problems with the launch and that the next attempt could come as soon as Wednesday, with the company likely to give a more detailed schedule at least two days before the new date.

The rocket has four-stages, the first three solid-fueled and the last liquid-fueled. Its capacity is comparable to Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket, and the company hopes to eventually ramp up to as many as twenty launches per year.

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Grateful thanks to everyone who donated during this year’s February fund drive

9:00 am

My February birthday fund-raising campaign for this website, Behind the Black, is now over. Despite a relatively weak initial three weeks, the last week was spectacular, making this campaign the second best ever. Thanks to every person who donated or subscribed. It continues to astonish me that people who can read my work for free like it enough to donate money voluntarily. Words cannot express my appreciation for that support, especially in these uncertain times.

This post will remain at the top of the page for the next few days, just to make sure my thanks are seen by everyone. I can’t possibly send thanks personally to everyone, so this post will have to serve for all.

Scroll down for the most recent updates.

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