Author: Robert Zimmerman

ESA awards Thales Alenia contract to build Mars lander for Franklin rover

8:40 am

Oxia Planum drainages
The drainage patterns at the Franklin rover
landing site

Click for paper [pdf].

The European Space Agency (ESA) today awarded the Italian company Thales Alenia a €522 million contract to build the entry, descent, and landing module for ESA’s Franklin rover, now scheduled for launch in 2028.

Under this contract, Thales Alenia Space will lead the definition of the Entry, Descent and Landing Module and maintenance activities for the transfer module (carrier) and the rover, including upgrades and replacement of time-sensitive elements. A full audit and tests will be carried out on the rover to ensure its readiness for the new mission. In addition, replacement of some payload elements is planned, such as integration of the new Enfys infrared spectrometer. The batteries and tanks will be replaced on the carrier module as well as potential adjustments to align with the updated trajectories to Mars. New developments on the descent module and landing pad are also required, because the European avionics part of the descent module will be reused.

This contract was necessary because the project was initially a partnership with Russia, whereby Russia provided this lander as well as the launch services. That partnership was severed after Russia invaded the Ukraine, which caused this mission to Mars to be delayed four to six years.

NASA then chipped in $30 million to help pay for launch out of Cape Canaveral, though no launch company has been announced. I suspect both ESA and NASA wish to wait before making a deal, considering how launch costs are dropping. At present it is impossible to predict the landscape of that market in 2028.

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April 8, 2024 Quick space links

3:24 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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What are Israel’s strategic military goals with its latest pull back from Gaza?

12:33 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Even the Arabs recognize these facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Over the weekend numerous news reports announced that Israel had suddenly pulled almost all its troops out of the Gaza strip, apparently abandoning its plan to finish off the last four battalions of Hamas that were hiding out in the southern town of Rafah.

Despite denials by Israel’s military and the Netanyahu government, on the surface it appeared Israel had bowed to pressure from the Biden administration to cancel its invasion of Rafah and instead break off its military offense against Hamas.

I suspect things are much more complicated, and could instead be — as some Israel officials claimed — a tactical maneuver intended to make that military invasion of Rafah more effective while reducing the large number of civilian deaths anticipated because of the more than a million Gazan refugees that have been crammed into that southern city.

The nature of the withdrawal reveals much about its goal:
» Read more

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A whirlpool half-hidden by dust

10:23 am

A whirlpool half-hidden by dust
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows us a magnificent spiral galaxy about 100 million light years away that also has very active nucleus at its center as well as many star-forming regions (in blue) in its outer arms.

That we do not see the same blue spiral arms on the right side of the photo is not because they are lacking, but because a very large stream of dust blocks our view.

This dark nebula is part of the Chamaeleon star-forming region, itself located only around 500 light-years from us, in a nearby part of the Milky Way galaxy. The dark clouds in the Chamaeleon region occupy a large area of the southern sky, covering their namesake constellation but also encroaching on nearby constellations, like Apus. The cloud is well-studied for its treasury of young stars, particularly the cloud Cha I, which has been imaged by Hubble and also by the … James Webb Space Telescope.

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Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snaps a smeared image of South Korea’s Danuri lunar obiter

10:04 am

Danuri as seen by LRO
Click for original image.

Cool image time! On March 5 to March 6, 2024, the orbits of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and South Korea’s Danuri orbiter had three close approaches, during which LRO had a chance to snap pictures of Danuri as it zipped by in the opposite direction.

The first image is to the right, cropped but expanded to post here.

The flight paths of the two vehicles were nearly parallel but in opposite directions, resulting in extreme relative velocity. The LROC NAC exposure time was very short, only 0.338 milliseconds. But still, Danuri was smeared by a factor greater than 10x in the downtrack direction.

…On the first opportunity, LRO was slewed 43 degrees to capture Danuri from a distance of 5.0 kilometers

Of the three pictures taken, this one appears the best. In all three cases, the fast relative speed was too fast for the camera shutter, so that Danuri’s image was smeared as you see.

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Today’s eclipse

9:49 am

The next eclipses to cross the U.S.
Map by Michael Zeiler (GreatAmericanEclipse.com). Click for original.

Today a solar eclipse will cross some of the most populated areas of Mexixo, the United States, and Canada, as shown on the map to the right.

We shall not see such an event in North America again until 2046, and that will only cover a small part of the Pacific northwest. If you have never seen such an event, get your eclipse glasses (essential if you don’t want to go blind), take some time off of work, and go see it today. This link from Sky & Telescope covers about everything you need to know.

The experience is very hard to describe, though I tried when Diane and I traveled to South Bend, Idaho, in 2017 to experience that eclipse. As I wrote,

Totality was amazing. I was amazed by two things. First, how quiet it became. There were about hundred people scattered about the hotel lawn, with dogs and kids playing around. The hotel manager’s husband set up speakers for music and to make announcements, but when totality arrived he played nothing. People stopped talking. A hush fell over everything. Moreover, I think we somehow imagine a subconscious roar from the full sun. Covered as it was, with its soft corona gleaming gently around it, it suddenly seemed still.

Secondly, the amazing unlikeliness of the Moon being at just the right distance and size to periodically cause this event seemed almost miraculous. Watching it happen drove this point home to me. And since eclipses themselves have been a critical event in the intellectual development of humanity, helping to drive learning and our understanding of the universe, it truly makes me wonder at the majesty of it. I do not believe in any particular religion or their rituals (though I consider the Bible, the Old Testament especially, to be a very good manual for creating a good life and society), but I do not deny the existence of a higher power. Something made this place, and set it up in this wonderous way. Today’s eclipse only served to demonstrate this fact to me again.

I am sure your impressions will be unique to you.

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SpaceX launches 11 commercial payloads

6:00 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched 11 commercial payloads into orbit, as the first of what it calls its Bandwagon series, designed to provide launch ssatellites to medium inclination Earth orbits. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, its first stage completing its fourteenth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

36 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 41 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 36 to 30.

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Musk provides update to his Boca Chica crew

11:50 am

The candidate landing zone on Mars for Starship
The candidate landing zone on Mars for Starship

Elon Musk yesterday gave a 44-minute update on Starship/Superheavy to his team in Boca Chica, outlining what he now expects in the next two years as well as in the next two decades.

You can watch his presentation here. Musk began by once again describing his fundamental goal behind the company, to make the human race multi-planetary, for its own survival, and that Mars is at this time the best choice for doing so. He then provided some details about the on-going development of Starship/Superheavy:

  • SpaceX will be ready to launch 4th test flight in early May
  • There is an 80-90% chance they will attempt a tower landing of Superheavy, caught by its chopstick arms, by the end of this year
  • Starship will require at least two precision ocean landings before they attempt a tower landing
  • To provide tower redundancy for these test landings, by next year they will have 2 towers at Boca Chica, 2 at Cape Canaveral, with Cape Canaveral operational by next year
  • In 2024 they hope to build 6 Superheavys and Starships for test flights
  • By 2025 they plan to test full refueling of Starship in orbit
  • The third iteration of Starship/Superheavy will be capable of placing 200 tons in orbit
  • That third iteration will cost less to launch than Falcon 1, $2-3 million
  • To make a base on Mars self-sufficient quickly, he anticipates sending large fleets of Starships every two years, everytime the flight window to Mars opens.
  • The preferred landing sites will be in the low mid-latitudes, 30-40 degrees, with elevations two kilometers below the Martian “sea level”, to take advantage of a thick atmosphere.
  • If all goes as planned, Musk expects SpaceX to establish a Mars colony in about two decades

That next-to-last bullet point fits perfectly with the region north of Amazonis Planitia, as shown on the map above, where SpaceX has requested numerous images from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is two kilometers below the “sea level” of Mars. It is at a latitude either on or close to 40 degrees north latitude. It is a region that orbital data says has lots of very near-surface ice. And it is flat, making those first landings relatively safe.

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Argentina demands right to inspect Chinese antenna facility

9:45 pm

The Argentina government of Javier Milei is now demanding the right to inspect a Chinese antenna facility that was established in Argentina in 2014 and began operating in 2017 under a 50-year-lease.

Under the agreement between the two nations, 10% “of the resources in the base must be utilized by Argentina.” However, China has been operating the facility unsupervised from the beginning. Likely built to support China’s space program, manned and planetary, U.S. officials have also suggested it is being used for military purposes, a possibility that cannot be dismissed since all of China’s space program falls under the supervision of the People’s Liberation Army.

Milei apparently wants a hand in its operation, or at least a much clearer idea of what it is doing. It is very possible he will even shut it down if he is not satisfied with the answers he gets.

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SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites, with 6 capable of direct-to-cell service

9:34 pm

The beat goes on: SpaceX tonight launched another 22 Starlink satellites, six of which were capable of direct-to-cell service. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg, with its first stage completing its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

35 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 40 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 35 to 30.

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Varda quickly raises $90 million after completing its first orbital manufacturing mission

2:18 pm

As expect, Varda announced yesterday that it raised $90 million in investment capital following the publication of the results of its first orbital manufacturing mission, where its returnable capsule was used to produce test pharmaceuticals in space that cannot be made on Earth.

Varda announced April 5 it raised a Series B round led by venture firm Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. The company has raised $145 million to date. The funding round comes on the heels of the successful conclusion of its first demonstration mission, W-1, on Feb. 21 when the company’s capsule landed at the Utah Test and Training Range. The capsule had been part of a spacecraft launched in June 2023 to test the ability to produce pharmaceuticals in microgravity.

The new funding will allow Varda to scale up production of spacecraft that take advantage of microgravity to produce pharmaceuticals that are not possible or cost-effective to make on the ground.

The company already has a second returnable capsule scheduled for launch this summer on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket.

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April 5, 2024 Zimmerman appearance on the CJN Speaks podcast

1:23 pm

The Cut Jib Newsletter podcast, produced by JJ Sefton of the Cut Jib Newsletter blog and CBD (a regular contributor to the Ace of Spades website), graciously recorded an hour-long interview with me yesterday. That podcast is available here and here. I have also embedded it below.

The main topic was the three-part essay I wrote last week, attempting to predict the many crazy and anti-American tactics we can expect from the Democratic Party in the coming months, before and after the election. We went into this at length, and both Sefton and CBD added some points that I had missed, which was very illuminating.

We also spent some time talking about space stuff, but because it is a political blog most of that discussion revolved around the politics that is presently helping or hampering the development of a new American space industry, independent of government control.

Listen to it all. I think you find it worthwhile. And note, when I discuss my book, Conscious Choice, there was one moment where I was going to illustrate an additional reason the book is worth reading, but then my mind went blank. I can tell you now that this point was how Conscious Choice puts the lie to the Marxist 1619 project that claims falsely that American was built solely on the backs of slaves. I tell the real story, and it says very much the opposite, that America was built on freedom, and the slave states of the South only acted to hinder its development into the wealthiest, freest, and most successful nation on Earth, in all history. More important, that success was for all its people, not just those in charge.

» Read more

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April 5, 2024 Quick space links

3:53 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.

 

 

 

  • Virgin Galactic counter-sues Boeing over broken deal

    • A true battle of insects. Boeing had been hired by Virgin to build a new mother airplane for its suborbital flights. After doing some work, Boeing decided the job couldn’t be done, withdrew, but then sued to get paid. Virgin is now claiming Boeing’s work was “shoddy and incomplete” and so poor it doesn’t deserve any payments.

 

 

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The taffy terrain in Mars’ death valley

1:42 pm

Taffy terrain in Hellas Basin on Mars

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled “banded terrain and layering,” it actually is a good example of “taffy terrain,” a weird Martian geological formation unique to the Red Planet that scientists as yet don’t quite understand. This 2014 paper only says this:

The apparent sensitivity to local topography and preference for concentrating in localized depressions is compatible with deformation as a viscous fluid. In addition, the bands display clear signs of degradation and slumping at their margins along with a suite of other features that include fractured mounds, polygonal cracks at variable size-scales, and knobby/hummocky textures. Together, these features suggest an ice-rich composition for at least the upper layers of the terrain, which is currently being heavily modified through loss of ice and intense weathering, possibly by wind.

» Read more

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Mitsubishi joins private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station

8:24 am

The Japanese big space company Mitsubishi has now joined the private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station for NASA, teaming up with Voyager Space and Airbus.

At this moment it appears that Voyager, the lead company in this station, is attempting to capture the international market that up to now has been part of ISS. Airbus gets it direct access to European companies and the Europeans Space Agency (ESA). Mitsubishi now gets it direct access to Japanese government financing.

The other stations being built with NASA financing, Axiom and Orbital Reef, so far seem more focused on getting American business, as is Vast’s Haven-1 station, being built entirely from private funds.

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Thailand joins China’s partnership to build a lunar base on the Moon

8:13 am

Thailand today signed an agreement with China to become the eighth nation to join its partnership to build its lunar base on the Moon, dubbed the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

The partners so far are Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, and Venezuela. In addition, another nine academic organizations of one kind or another have signed on. Except for Russia, the partners in China’s program are mostly there for public relations purposes, and will contribute little to the project. And Russia itself will likely not contribute much either, considering its inability to get any major new projects launched for the past two decades.

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Voyager-1 still out of commission

8:05 am

Though engineers have now confirmed the cause of the computer problem that has prevented Voyager-1 from sending back readable data, a fix has not yet been attempted and the spacecraft remains in safe mode.

In early March, the team issued a “poke” command to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS [Flight Data Subsystem] memory, which includes the computer’s software code as well as variables (values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status). Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working. Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.

Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again.

Considering that Voyager-1’s power supply will run out sometime in 2026, after almost a half century of operation, the engineers really don’t have that much time to fix the problem and resume science operations.

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SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites

7:47 am

Like an Energizer bunny: SpaceX last night successfully placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its 14th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

34 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 39 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 34 to 30. SpaceX also has another launch scheduled for tonight.

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April 4, 2024 Quick space links

3:25 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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Pushback: The legislative effort in Texas to end DEI in state colleges is beginning to work

1:19 pm

Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the Texas state legislature passed a law last May (subsequently signed by Governor Greg Abbott) to ban all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in state colleges, I expressed some doubts about whether this legislature would work.

The universities have simply been told the money they formally spent on DEI can no longer be spent on such racist operations. Since they have the cash anyway, what will prevent college administrators to create a new office with a new name, let’s call it the “Openness and Support Office”, and hire the fired DEI staffers that have been terminated from a different college. By simply rearranging the chairs, these administrators — who apparently all enthusiastically support DEI’s Marxist and racist program — can recreate it without making it obvious. And the legislature has agreed to give them the funds for doing so.

It appears the house-cleaning is beginning in Texas universities
It appears the DEI house-cleaning is beginning
in Texas’ universities.

Since then, Texas university administrations have been responding to the legislation in a variety of ways, all of which suggest that, though my doubts continue to have merit, the bill is having a laudatory effect. This week the University of Texas at Austin announced that it is shuttering its DEI offices and terminating around sixty people associated with these bigoted programs. From the email announcement by the university president, Jay Hartzell:

[F]unding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17’s effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.

» Read more

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Gilmour’s Eris rocket now assembled and ready for launch from Bowen spaceport in Australia

10:43 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Click for original map.

The Austrialia rocket starup Gilmour has now assembled its first Eris rocket in anticipation of its first orbital test launch from that company’s Bowen spaceport on the east coast of Australia.

According to the report at the link, the launch could happen “in the coming weeks,” though no date has been set. Gilmour has already received its spaceport license from the Australian government, but has not yet gotten its launch license from the Australian Space Agency, despite putting in its application two years ago.

It appears there is now a race between this spaceport and the one on the south coast run by Southern Launch to launch first. Both are saying they will launch in mere weeks, but both are also awaiting launch approvals from the Australian Space Agency, which appears to be having difficulties making these first approvals. Either it is dragging its feet, or doesn’t know how to do this yet. Hopefully the bureaucrats will figure out how to say yes to freedom and let these spaceports and companies finally launch, before they run out of cash.

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NASA picks three commercial companies to build manned lunar rovers

10:29 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that it has picked three commercial companies, Astrolab, Intuitive Machines, and Lunar Outpost, to begin feasibility design work on its new manned lunar rovers, dubbed a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), for its planned Artemis missions to the Moon.

NASA will acquire the LTV as a service from industry. The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, milestone-based Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract with firm-fixed-price task orders has a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion for all awards.

The three companies are actually each a partnership of several American companies, as follows:

  • Astrolab is building its FLEX rover in partnership with Axiom Space, Inc., and Odyssey Space. Its contract is worth up to $1.9 billion.
  • Intuitive Machines is building its RACER rover in partership with AVL, Boeing, Michelin, and Northrop Grumman. This initial award is worth $30 million, but future buys from NASA could exceed $1 billion.
  • Lunar Outpost is building its Lunar Dawn rover in partnership with Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Goodyear, and MDA Space.

All three lead companies are essentially startups that have partnered with older established players, a likely requirement imposed by NASA to give their effort some experienced help. Though this system of dividing up the work between all the players follows the old scheme used by NASA and the established big space companies for decades in order to guarantee every company gets steady work and a continuing cash flow from the government, the difference is that the product will be designed, built, and owned by each partnership, not NASA, allowing each to sell that product to others outside the agency.

If this goes as planned, eventually the government money will become somewhat irrelevant, once a real commercial industry starts functioning in space and on the Moon. That’s what happened in the airplane industry in the 1920s to the 1950s.

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Engineers confirm IXPE is fixed and resuming science observations

10:00 am

Engineers have now confirmed the software fix they sent to the IXPE space telescope on March 26, 2024 has worked, and have taken the telescope out of safe mode so that it can resume science observations.

The IXPE mission is now observing a new transient X-ray source – Swift J1727.8–161 – a candidate accreting black hole. The source has recently begun producing jets of material moving at a fraction of the speed of light. The IXPE observations will help to understand accretion onto black holes, including potentially revealing how the relativistic jets are formed.

The telescope observes the universe in X-rays, but does so by observing its polarization. This approach provides information not seen in direct observations.

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