Author: Robert Zimmerman

Phantom Space orders more than 200 rocket engines from Ursa Major

9:58 am

Hadley engine from Ursa Major

Capitalism in space: The smallsat startup rocket company Phantom Space today announced it has ordered more than 200 rocket engines from the rocket engine company Ursa Major.

The order includes Ursa Major’s 5,000-Pound Thrust Hadley engines and the new 50,000-pound thrust Ripley engines. By using Ursa Major’s Hadley engines, Phantom’s Daytona rocket is slated for orbital launch in 2023, just three years after Phantom Space was formed. Under the terms of the agreement, Ursa Major will supply hundreds of its Hadley engines in different configurations including ground test and upper-stage vacuum variants, as well as numerous Ripley engines for planned upgrades to the Daytona vehicle.

The CEO of Phantom Space, Jim Cantrell, gave me a tour of its facility here in Tucson only three weeks ago, during which I took the picture above of a Hadley engine being tested and prepared for further static fire tests.

Cantrell had been the founder of Vector, his earlier failed attempt to create a smallsat rocket company. He clearly has not let that failure stop him.

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NASA to conduct second SLS launch dress rehearsal in June

9:47 am

In announcing a press conference later today about the status of NASA’s SLS rocket, the agency revealed it now plans to conduct a second SLS launch dress rehearsal in June.

NASA’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft arrived back at Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building April 26 after a 10-hour journey from launch pad 39B. Since their arrival, teams have worked to replace a faulty upper stage check valve and repair a small leak within the tail service mast umbilical ground plate housing. The teams also have been performing additional checkouts while the spaceport’s supplier of gaseous nitrogen makes upgrades to their pipeline configuration to support Artemis I activities.

We will likely find out NASA’s new launch schedule for the rocket today.

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China’s Long March 2D rocket launches 8 satellites

9:43 am

China today used its Long March 2D rocket to place eight Earth observation satellites into orbit as part of a larger constellation.

The Jilin-1 constellation, now consisting of 50 Earth observation satellites since its first launch in 2015, is China’s first-ever commercial remote-sensing satellite system. The system is operated by Chang Guang Satellite Technology Corporation, also known as Charming Globe, a commercial spinoff of the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics, and Physics in the northeast Chinese city of Changchun.

The constellation is planned to consist of 138 satellites by 2025, and the satellites will be orbiting at 535 km altitude above Earth. The constellation, featuring types of satellites with different capabilities, will ultimately be capable of revisiting any point on Earth every ten minutes, with an interim thirty-minute capability being achieved with sixty satellites in orbit.

China claims the data from this constellation will be for commercial use. Don’t be surprised however if its primary customer turns out to be China’s military.

As the rocket launched from one of China’s interior spaceports, its first stage crash landed in China. No word on whether it used parachutes or grid fins to control that landing.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

17 SpaceX
14 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
2 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 25 to 14 in the national rankings, with the U.S. leading all other nations combined 25 to 23.

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Endurance undocks from ISS for splashdown tonight; Watch here

9:29 am

SpaceX’s Endurance manned capsule today undocked from ISS carrying four astronauts with a planned splashdown off the coast of Florida at shortly after midnight (Eastern) tonight.

I have embedded the live stream for the splashdown below. It will go live about 11:00 pm (Eastern) in order to cover all the splashdown events:

11:48 p.m. Trunk jettison
11:53 p.m. Deorbit burn
12:04 a.m. Nosecone closed
12:43 a.m. Dragon splashdown
» Read more

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A quake south of Starship’s prime landing sites on Mars

1:31 pm

The lowlands south of Starship's prime landing site
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on February 23, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Though it shows the largely featureless northern lowland plains of Mars, it is particularly interesting for two reasons.

First, according to the photo’s label this scarp/ridge is apparently near a quake detected by the seismometer placed on Mars by the lander InSight, located about a thousand miles to the southwest. Though no information of the strength of this quake is available, it is likely to have been a small and weak one, interesting mostly because it indicates some small underground instability or a recent small impact on the surface. The image favors the former, as it shows no obvious recent features of change. What it does show is one very intriguing flow feature draping the scarp. As the location is at 34 north latitude in a region where scientists have found a lot of evidence of water ice very close to the surface, the flow could very well be glacial in nature, though dismissing a lava origin would be a mistake.

The second reason this location is of interest is what lies relatively nearby, as shown in the overview map below.
» Read more

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Pushback: Computer repairman who exposed Hunter Biden’s laptop sues media for slandering him

11:53 am

Adam Schiff, a pathological slanderer and liar
Any media that blindly repeats anything out of this guy’s mouth
risks getting sued for slander

Fight back twice as hard: The owner of the computer repair shop, who legally uncovered the laptop that belonged to President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and exposed significant evidence of corruption by both, has now filed a multi-million dollar defamation lawsuit against CNN, Politico, the Daily Beast, and Congressman Adam Schiff (D-California).

John Paul Mac Isaac was highlighted in a blacklist column in March, noting how his entirely legal effort to expose extensive corruption by Joe Biden and his son prior to the election caused him to be harassed, threatened, and driven to bankruptcy. While he lived in hiding because of the physical threats against him, Isaac also found it impossible to get unemployment insurance because of stone-walling by the Delaware unemployment department, stone-walling that only ended when Isaac wrote of letter of complaint to the state’s junior senator.

Isaac’s nightmare began when Democrats like Schiff began spreading lies against him, suggesting without any evidence that he was a treasonous Russian agent and had even obtained the laptop illegally. Mainstream media outlets acting as Democratic Party operatives immediately republished those lies as if they were true, despite the reality that only a tiny amount of due diligence would have revealed them to be lies.

An earlier lawsuit by Isaac against Twitter was thrown out by the courts, leaving him with about $175K in legal bills. This new lawsuit however is now possible because of new sponsorship.
» Read more

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Fish & Wildlife documents now reveal its objections to SpaceX Boca Chica facility

9:32 am

We’re here to help you! Documents obtained by CNBC under a Freedom of Information request have revealed the specific objections of Fish & Wildlife that has helped delay the approval of the FAA’s environment reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility for Starship launches.

SpaceX must take steps to track and mitigate its impact on endangered species and their habitat in order to gain approvals for testing and commercial launches of its Starship Super Heavy lift-launch vehicle in Boca Chica, Texas, according to documents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service obtained by CNBC.

The documents, released by the federal agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, show that recent declines in an endangered bird species, the piping plover, have already been correlated with SpaceX activity at the South Texas facility.

The documents also reveal that SpaceX is, for now at least, reducing the amount of energy it plans to generate at a utility-sized natural gas power plant on the 47.4-acre launch site there.

According to a lawyer from the radical environmentalist organization the Center for Biological Diversity who was interviewed for the article, Fish & Wildlife’s demands are not tremendously restrictive, and might actually allow the project to go forward, since they appear to only require SpaceX to “monitor affected animal populations carefully, limit construction and launch activity to specific seasons or times of day and night, and use shuttles to reduce vehicle traffic of workers on location.”

I see it differently. I think Fish & Wildlife bureaucrats are struggling to come up with reasons to block SpaceX. They know that decades of data in Florida prove that rocket launches have no negative impact on wildlife. To claim such a thing in Texas is thus not justified. They are trying to do it anyway.

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South Korean smallsat rocket startup to launch first suborbital test flight

9:18 am

Capitalism in space: A new South Korean smallsat rocket startup company, Innospace, is now planning its first suborbital test launch in December, launching a Brazilian military payload from that country’s Alcântara Space Center.

The 16.3-meter, single-stage test rocket is a precursor to the company’s planned commercial satellite launcher Hanbit-Nano, a two-stage small satellite launcher designed to carry up to a 50-kilogram payload to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. The first stages of the two rockets are powered by a 15-ton-thrust hybrid rocket engine that uses liquid oxygen and paraffin-based propellants. Hanbit-Nano’s upper stage is equipped with a 3-ton hybrid engine, according to the Sejong-based company’s website.

“If the upcoming test launch is successful, we will start preparing for a test launch of Hanbit-Nano,” Innospace spokesperson Kim Jung-hee told SpaceNews.

The company has so far raised almost $28 million in private investment capital. It also has an agreement with Norway to launch its rockets from there.

Since South Korea’s government has its own rocket program, it will be interesting to see which succeeds first in getting into orbit.

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Old Russian Proton rocket engine explodes in orbit, creating more space junk

9:11 am

According to tracking data from the Space Force, an old Russian Proton upper stage engine, originally launched in 2007, broke up on April 15, 2022, creating a small cloud of new space junk in a highly elliptical orbit.

These Proton upper-stage ullage motors are known as SOZ motors, and there are currently 64 of them in Earth orbit, McDowell tweeted. The acronym is short for “Sistema Obespecheniya Zapuska,” which translates roughly as “Launch Assurance System,” he said.

“The SOZ motors don’t use up all their propellant when they fire. And they have an unfortunate tendency to go bang years or decades later, leaving a bunch of debris in highly elliptical orbit. At least 54 SOZ motors have now exploded,” McDowell tweeted.

The SOZ motor that just blew up had been racing around Earth in a highly elliptical path, getting as close as 241 miles (388 kilometers) and as far away as 11,852 miles (19,074 km), McDowell said in another tweet, noting that “the debris will take quite a while to reenter.”

“So — this debris event was predictable and is well understood; still very unfortunate,” he wrote. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words suggest a certain irresponsibility on the Russian’s part. If these upper stage engines are abandoned with fuel still on board, why doesn’t Russia use that fuel to fire the engines to de-orbit them safely, especially as the engines have a tendency to eventually blow up and cause space junk? There might be complex technical reasons, but I suspect the real reason is pure laziness on Roscosmos’ part. No one ever bothered to think about it.

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ESA: ExoMars will likely be delayed till ’28 at the soonest

9:03 am

An official of the European Space Agency (ESA) at a May 3rd science meeting announced that the launch of its ExoMars rover will likely be delayed until 2028 at the earliest because of the partnership breakup with Russia due to its invasion of the Ukraine.

Russia had been providing both the launch rocket as well as the lander on Mars.

Speaking at a May 3 meeting of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), Jorge Vago, ExoMars project scientist at ESA, said he doubted a new lander could be ready by 2026. “It is theoretically possible, but in practice we think it would be very difficult to reconfigure ourselves and produce our own lander for 2026,” he said. “Realistically, we would be looking at a launch in 2028.”

Launching in 2028 could pose technical challenges for ExoMars. One trajectory would get the rover to Mars relatively quickly, but have it arrive just a month before dust storm seasons starts at the preferred landing site. An alternative trajectory would require traveling for more than two years to each Mars, but get the rover there six months before dust storms start.

“We have been trying very hard to convince the engineering team that the dust storm season is not death,” Vago said. “We should concentrate on making the rover more robust and able to weather a dust storm.”

There are other issues. The rover will need new radioisotope heating units, or RHUs, to provide power, since Russia will no longer providing them. If the U.S. provides, the launch for security reasons will have to take place in the U.S., which means the launch provider will have to be American.

The delay to ’28 also could cause the ExoMars rover mission to be completely changed, repurposed to become part of the sample return mission that the ESA and NASA are partnering to bring back the cached samples that Perseverance is gathering. If so, this repurposing might delay its launch to Mars even further.

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