India’s ISRO space agency yesterday successfully tested the engines to be used in the manned launch abort system for its manned Gaganyaan mission.
The actual manned mission has been delayed to ’24, at the earliest, as ISRO has decided to fly two unmanned test missions first.
Capitalism in space: The FCC yesterday approved SpaceX’s communications license for one or more Starship orbital launches, with a six month launch window beginning on September 1, 2022.
This FCC approval is not a launch license, which must be given by the FAA. It does tell us that SpaceX will not attempt the first orbital launch of Starship before the end of this month. It also tells us that the company likely plans on an aggressive test program from September ’22 through February ’23, assuming the FAA and the federal bureaucracy finally stops blocking that program.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
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An evening pause: Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
The FCC today canceled a $900 million subsidy it had awarded to SpaceX in December 2020 as part of a federal program to help establish broadband service in rural communities.
The reasoning for canceling the award given at the link is very unclear. However, since the award a lobbying effort by Starlink’s competitors — teamed up with Democrats in Congress — to cancel the award has been on going. It now seems to have succeeded.
Another clue to explaining this cancellation is timing. The award was announced at the end of the Trump administration, when his appointees controlled the FCC. The cancellation took place during the Biden administration, with the FCC now controlled by Democrats who are increasing revealing themselves to be very hostile to private commercial space in general and Musk and SpaceX in particular.
Nonetheless, it seems absurd to give SpaceX any such subsidy, regardless of the politics. As I said in February 2021:
No one, including SpaceX, should get these funds. SpaceX is proving they aren’t necessary to get the job done (bringing fast internet service to rural communities). Moreover, the federal government really doesn’t have the cash, deep in debt as it is.
Sadly, just because the FCC cancelled its award to SpaceX we should not expect as modern taxpayers that the money won’t be spent. Expect the Biden administration to instead dole it out to its preferred vendors.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on April 21, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of a spot in the Martian northern lowland plains.
Generally the surface of these lowland plains — especially at high latitudes above 30 degrees — tends to appear very water saturated, producing blobby features and what look like mud volcanoes. This picture however features something different, what the scientists have labeled fractures, geological features that appeared caused by dry conditions and sudden quake-like events. The break in the fracture near the top of the photo illustrates why water flow had little if anything to do with its formation. Other fractures in the full image show the same thing. Also the stippled surface along the picture’s right edge also suggest there is little near surface water or ice at this location.
The location, as shown by the overview map below, suggests that water might still have played a part, but only a long time ago.
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The user’s manual for today’s universities
Persecution is now cool! From June 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022, students, teachers, and administrators on college campuses nationwide made 186 attempts to blackball or censor either other individuals for having wrong opinions or to cancel history and facts because that history or facts offended them.
These numbers come from a database, available to read here, is that is maintained by the news outlet The College Fix, which focuses on reporting on the corruption, intolerance, and bankruptcy that is now endemic on most American college campuses.
There have been 112 speakers, signs, statues and other targets completely canceled on campus during the last academic year, and another 74 attempted cancelations, according to The College Fix’s Campus Cancel Culture Database, which tracks such incidents. That amounts to a total of 186 campus cancel culture incidents from June 1, 2021 to May 31, 2022. Put another way, there have been almost four campus cancel incidents per week over the past school year.
“For people who claim that cancel culture is a made up right-wing phenomenon, I invite them to scroll through page after page after page of our Campus Cancel Culture Database,” said Jennifer Kabbany, editor in chief of The College Fix. “You can’t go a week without something on campus being memory holed, erased, fired, renamed or what have you,” she said.
Nor has there been any slow-down in new incidents. » Read more
Yesterday the InSight science team posted the lander’s ongoing power status, as it has been doing about every week since in June the team announced that they expected power to run out sometime in August, ending the mission.
I have created the graph to the right, showing the data from all those updates, to try to glean the overall trends. The red line indicates the tau level of dust in the atmosphere, essentially telling us how much that dust is blocking light from the Sun. Normally outside of dust season this number should range from 0.6 to 0.7. Since May 17 that dust level has been steadily declining, which thus increases the amount of sunlight reaching the panels.
The blue line marks the amount of power the lander’s panels have been able to produce. The lack of change in this line reveals both good and bad news. The good news is that the power level is holding steady, at a level that allows InSight’s one operating instrument, its seismometer, to continue to function. Should this power level continue to remain stable, that seismometer should be able to operate past August, thus extending the instrument’s life longer than expected.
The bad news is that the power levels are not going up as the dust level is dropping. This suggests that the dust layer on the panels that is preventing them from generating power is actually getting thicker. InSight has still not experienced any puff of Mars’ weak wind capable of blowing dust off those panels. Instead, as the dust settles out of the atmosphere with the end of dust season, some is settling on the panels themselves.
As new updates arrive I will update this graph. Stay tuned. InSight is not yet dead, though the vultures are unfortunately circling overhead.
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) yesterday opened an investigation into the purchase of InMarsat by Viasat, announced in November ’21, to see it that merger would “result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”
This investigation will clearly delay the merger. It also appears somewhat counter-productive, considering that Inmarsat has been having trouble making money in recent years due to the market’s shift from its big geosynchronous satellites to constellations of smallsats in low Earth orbit, such as SpaceX’s Starlink. Viasat meanwhile has been desperately trying to block Starlink because of that very competitive threat.
By merging, these two satellite companies might survive and compete with the new orbital constellations. Otherwise, they might both go out of business, thus reducing competition. It seems the CMA will be shooting itself in the foot if it blocks this merger.
China today used its Long March-6 rocket to place sixteen satellites into orbit, all of which appear to be for military and civilian Earth observations.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
35 SpaceX
30 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 50 to 30 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 50 to 48.
Click for original photo.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX engineers yesterday performed static fire tests of both its Superheavy prototype #7 and its Starship prototype #24.
The Superheavy prototype fired one engine, and did so only a few weeks after that prototype experienced an explosive event the launchpad during earlier fueling/engine tests. Yesterday’s engine test was the first time any Superheavy prototype had fired its engines on the launchpad.
The Starship prototype meanwhile fired two engines on a nearby vertical test stand.
SpaceX’s plan is to stack #24 on top of #7 and attempt an orbital launch test that will have the Superheavy prototype land in the Gulf of Mexico while the Starship prototype reaches orbit and then returns to Earth in the Pacific northeast of Hawaii. Based on the company’s normal pace of operations, that flight is probably only weeks away. However, before that flight engineers will have to do a full static fire test of all 33 of #7 engines, and then like do it again with Starship #24 stacked on top.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch another 52 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The first stage completed its third flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The fairings also completed their third flight.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
35 SpaceX
29 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 50 to 29 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 50 to 37.
