Author: Robert Zimmerman

Rocket startup Orbex raises another $45 million

9:22 am

The British-based rocket startup company Orbex announced today that it has successfully raised another $45 million in private investment capital, adding to the $63 million it had previously raised.

Orbex is developing Prime, a small launch vehicle designed to place up to 180 kilograms into low Earth orbit. The vehicle, built by the company at a factory in Forres, Scotland, will launch initially from Space Hub Sutherland, a new launch site under development in northern Scotland.

“With Orbex, we will have a rocket assembled in Scotland, launching from Scotland and likely transporting satellites built in Scotland into orbit,” said Nicola Douglas, executive director of the Scottish National Investment Bank, in a statement. “We’re building a full end-to-end commercial space ecosystem in Scotland and we’re proud to play our part in this funding round.”

The company is targeting 2023 for its first launch from the new spaceport in Sutherland, Scotland.

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Both the Pentagon and Europe are looking for ways to fund Starlink for the Ukraine

9:13 am

According to an article in Politico today, both the U.S. military and the European Union (EU) are investigating ways in which either could fund the cost for providing Starlink to the Ukraine, rather than remaining a voluntary donation by SpaceX.

The most likely source of funding, several government and industry officials said, would be the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which has been used to acquire a range of weapons and services for the Ukraine war effort.

The Starlink issue also came up during a meeting of the European Union’s foreign ministers on Monday, as the countries discussed whether to contribute funding to ensure Ukrainians keep their access to the service. Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told POLITICO after the meeting that EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell raised the subject of paying to keep the service running in Ukraine, but the effort is still in its early stages.

It also appears there are discussions to find a back-up to Starlink. At the moment however the only possible option would be OneWeb, and it is not clear its design would work for the soldier in the field.

Regardless, considering the amount of cash being thrown at military contractors for the war — much of which is likely worthless and simply pork — it seems entirely reasonable to devote some to Starlink, a technology that has actually made a difference.

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ESA looking to SpaceX to launch Euclid space telescope

9:02 am

Capitalism in space: Having lost its Soyuz launch vehicle for its Euclid space telescope because of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the European Space Agency (ESA) is now looking at SpaceX as a possible option.

At a meeting of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Council, Mark Clampin, director of the agency’s astrophysics division, said his understanding is that the European Space Agency was leaning towards launching its Euclid mission on a Falcon 9 in mid to late 2023.

NASA is a partner on Euclid, a space telescope that will operate around the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth to study dark energy, dark matter and other aspects of cosmology. The 2,160-kilogram spacecraft was to launch on a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana in 2023.

Europe has for years used its own rockets for its science missions. However, right now the Falcon 9 appears the only option. The last launches of Europe’s Ariane-5 rocket are already assigned, and the new Ariane-6 rocket has not yet flown, is behind schedule, and its early launches are also already reserved.

Nor does ESA have other options outside of SpaceX. Of the rockets powerful enough to do the job, ULA’s Atlas-5 is also being retired, and the Vulcan rocket is as yet unavailable. Blue Origin’s New Glenn is years behind schedule, with no clear idea when it will finally launch.

A final decision is expected soon. ESA could either go with SpaceX, or simply delay several years until Ariane-6 is flying.

If SpaceX gets the job however it will once again demonstrate the value of moving fast in a competitive environment. While its competitors have dithered and thus do not have their rockets ready, SpaceX has been flying steadily for years, so it gets the business.

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Gemini/Apollo astronaut Jim McDivitt passes away at 93

8:49 am

R.I.P. Jim McDivitt, who was the commander of both the Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 missions in the 1960s, passed away on October 13, 2022 at the age of 93.

He first flew in space as commander of the Gemini IV mission in June 1965. McDivitt was joined by fellow Air Force pilot Ed White on the program’s most ambitious flight to date. During Gemini IV, White would become the first American to venture outside his spacecraft for what officially is known as an extravehicular activity (EVA) or as the world has come to know it, a spacewalk. … The mission’s four-day duration nearly doubled NASA astronauts’ previous time in space to that point, with the longest American spaceflight previously being Gordon Cooper’s 34-hour Mercury 9 mission.

McDivitt’s second spaceflight as the commander of Apollo 9 played a critical role in landing the first humans on the Moon. This was the first flight of the complete set of Apollo hardware and was the first flight of the Lunar Module. The mission launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on March 3, 1969, with Commander James McDivitt, Command Module Pilot David Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot Russell Schweickart. After launch, Apollo 9 entered Earth orbit and the crew performed an engineering test of the first crewed lunar module, nicknamed “Spider,” from beginning to end. They simulated the maneuvers that would be performed during actual lunar missions. During the mission, the astronauts performed a series of flight tasks with the command and service module and the lunar module. The top priority was rendezvous and docking of the lunar module with the command and service module. The crew also configured the lunar module to support a spacewalk by McDivitt and Schweickart. On Flight Day 10, March 13, 1969, the Apollo 9 capsule re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, within three miles and in full view of the recovery ship, the USS Guadalcanal, about 341 miles north of Puerto Rico.

To me, McDivitt’s most important discovery occurred early in his Gemini mission. After launch he was tasked with an attempt to approach and rendezvous with the upper stage, shortly after deployment. He was surprised to find that his intuition about doing so was utterly wrong. Whenever he tried to close the distance by applying thrust in the direction implied by his earthbound instincts, the distance actually increased.

McDivitt’s experience showed that rendezvous and docking in orbit was not going to be simple. In fact, it took almost the entire Gemini program in 1965 and 1966 to figure it out.

McDivitt never went to the Moon, but he was like all the first generation of American astronauts, professional, careful, dedicated, and remarkably good at what he did. May he rest in peace.

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After 30 years the Geotail solar probe appears dead

8:01 pm

Launched in 1992 as a joint U.S./Japan project to study the tail of the Earth’s magnetosphere, the Geotail solar mission appears to be over, though engineers continue to work the problem.

Originally, Geotail was equipped with two data recorders to collect the mission’s scientific data. One data recorder failed in 2012 after 20 years of gathering information about the plasma environment around Earth. The remaining data recorder continued collecting data for 10 more years until it experienced an anomaly on June 28, 2022.

The team at JAXA discovered the error with the recorder and have been performing tests to investigate the cause and extent of the damage. Ongoing attempts to recover the recorder have been unsuccessful. Without a functioning recorder, the science data from the U.S. instruments can no longer be collected or downlinked. NASA, ISAS, and JAXA are deciding the best path forward for the mission given the failure.

When the solar wind hits the Earth’s magnetosphere, it pushes it away so that on the side away from the Sun a tail forms, almost like the wake of a ship.

Without any way to download the spacecraft’s data, however, Geotail’s value as a scientific probe is extremely limited. If engineers can still control it and adjust its orbit, however, then it might still be useful for a variety of engineering and orbital flight tests.

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October 17, 2022 Quick space links

3:55 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who trolls twitter so we don’t have to.

 

 

 

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Blacklisting in academia has been going on for decades unseen

1:04 pm

The output from modern academia
The triumphant result of academia’s long blacklisting of conservatives

Blacklists are back and academia loves ’em: Though the return of blacklisting by Democrats has only become evident and blatant in the past two years, this blacklisting culture against conservatives has been aggressively blackballing such people from academia for decades, largely silently and without any news coverage.

That no one has noticed this blackballing is because until recently this effort hasn’t tried to get conservatives fired. Instead, administrators and faculty heads in colleges nationwide have simply made it a point to not hire conservatives. They blackballed them, and did so silently so that it was difficult to accuse them of any unfair discrimination.

How do I know this? A recent series of surveys performed by the College Fix proves it unequivocally. The data from Cornell University, though extreme, was hardly unusual:
» Read more

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Jets from baby stars

12:12 pm

Jets from baby stars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated and reduced to post here, was taken across multiple wavelengths by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows two different Herbig–Haro objects (HH 1 at the top and HH 2 on the bottom). Herbig-Haro objects are the bright cloud clumps found near newly formed baby stars. These particular clouds are about 1,250 light years away. The jets flowing away from HH 1 are speeding away at about 250 miles per second.

Note that the baby stars themselves are not visible, buried in the dust that surrounds them. The bright star in the upper right is an unrelated foreground star.

In the case of HH 1/2, two groups of astronomers requested Hubble observations for two different studies. The first delved into the structure and motion of the Herbig–Haro objects visible in this image, giving astronomers a better understanding of the physical processes occurring when outflows from young stars collide with surrounding gas and dust. The second study instead investigated the outflows themselves to lay the groundwork for future observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Webb, with its ability to peer past the clouds of dust enveloping young stars, will revolutionise the study of outflows from young stars.

There is a lot of complexity here that this image only hints at. Note for example the smaller cloud objects near HH1, the shape of which suggest a shaping by some interstellar wind.

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Government to Musk: “Nice business you got here, shame if something happened to it.”

11:46 am

The government to Elon Musk: Nice business you got here.
The press and the feds negotiate with Elon Musk

Over the past week a series of events relating to the Ukraine War, Elon Musk, and Starlink illustrated starkly the growing corrupt, aggressive, and unrestrained power of our federal government and the administration state and press that supports it.

Our story begins in early October when Elon Musk put forth his own proposed solution to the Ukraine War, suggesting that to end the war the Ukraine should cede the Crimea to Russia and forgo its attempts to join NATO, making itself a neutral power instead.

Not surprisingly, Ukrainian officials responded to this somewhat naive though sincere proposal with great hostility. So did the press, the Biden administration, and many in social media.

Then, on October 14, 2022 Elon Musk said that his company Starlink cannot continue indefinitely providing service to the Ukraine, without some reimbursement. At the beginning of the war Musk had made Starlink available for no charge, and it has been an important factor to the Ukrainians in their recent military successes.
» Read more

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Russia launches military satellite using Angara rocket; new global record for launches

9:00 am

Russia today successfully launched a classified military satellite using its new Angara rocket in its Angara-1.2 configuration.

Like ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, Angara is modular, so depending on the payload’s launch needs, it can have additional strap-on boosters, from none to four. This launch had no side boosters at all.

The launch was the 135th of 2022, passing the record set last year of 134 successful launches for the entire world in one year. In 2022 the record was broken in the last week. This year the record has been broken two and a half months before the end of the year. Based on the number of planned launches for the rest of the year, 2022 is likely to easily exceed 150 launches.

And the reason this number going through the roof is because of the advent of private enterprise, private ownership of rockets, and intense competition. New rocket companies are sprouting up everywhere worldwide, each with their own rocket competing aggressively for business by lowering costs. The lower costs make it possible for more satellite companies to find financing because making money will be easier. This in turn results in more customers for the rocket companies, which encourages more competition which pushes the price down further.

The cycle feeds on itself, and will only end when the full potential of space exploration is reached. And since that potential is literally endless, this growth for the human race is also endless. The only thing that could stop it is if human civilization decides to stop it, intentionally, either from willful ignorance or fear.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

47 SpaceX
45 China
15 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 67 to 45 in the national rankings, but now trails the rest of the world combined 68 to 67.

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OSIRIS-REx does mid-course correction

8:36 am

To better refine its path back to Earth in order to properly aim its sample return capsule, engineers had OSIRIS-REx do a short successful 30 second engine burn on September 21, 2022.

Nor will this be the only course correction prior to sample return on September 24, 2023 in Utah.

To ensure a safe delivery, “Over the next year, we will gradually adjust the OSIRIS-REx trajectory to target the spacecraft closer to Earth,” said Daniel Wibben, trajectory-and-maneuver design lead with KinetX Inc. “We have to cross Earth’s orbit at the time that Earth will be at that same location.” Wibben works closely with the Lockheed Martin team in Littleton, Colorado, that flies the spacecraft.

Last month’s maneuver was the first time the OSIRIS-REx team changed the spacecraft’s trajectory since it left Bennu on May 10, 2021. Following this course adjustment, OSIRIS-REx would pass about 1,367 miles (2,200 kilometers) from Earth. A series of maneuvers beginning in July 2023 will bring OSIRIS-REx even closer, to 155 miles (250 kilometers) off the surface, close enough to release its sample capsule for a precision landing – via parachute at the Air Force’s Utah Test and Training Range in the Great Salt Lake Desert.

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