October 27, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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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Author: Robert Zimmerman
Starliner delays have cost Boeing another $185 million
Capitalism in space: Boeing today announced that it has had to taken another $185 million charge out of its earnings, in addition to the $410 million previously deducted, in order to cover the problems and delays in developing its Starliner manned capsule.
When Boeing took the original earnings charge, it said it did so because it committed to redo the uncrewed flight test at no expense to NASA, a point a Boeing executive reaffirmed at the Oct. 19 briefing. “There’s no additional charges that will be going to the government for this. This is something that The Boeing Company will make sure we’ve got covered as we get this vehicle prepared,” said John Vollmer, vice president and program manager for Boeing’s commercial crew program.
These costs are beginning to pile up. Boeing has got to get this capsule fixed and flying, not only to begin bringing in some income but to show the world that it can do this right.
Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS
Using its Soyuz-2 rocket, Russia today successfully launched a Progress freighter to ISS, carrying more than 5,000 pounds of cargo.
The freighter is scheduled to dock with ISS Friday evening at 9:34 pm (Eastern). It will dock with the port on the 20-year-old Zvezda module, which has remained unused for the past six months because of concerns that the docking and undocking at the port was causing stress fractures in the sections of Zvezda closest to the port. The Russians have decided to do this docking for the express purpose of studying its impact on the module.
The Progress MS-18 spacecraft will link up with the rear docking port on Zvezda. With the help of cosmonauts on the station, Russian engineers have traced a small air leak on the station to the transfer compartment leading to Zvezda’s rear port. The compartment has been sealed from the rest of the space station since the departure of a previous Progress spacecraft from the rear docking port in April. But cosmonauts will re-open the compartment to unload cargo delivered by the Progress MS-18 spacecraft.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
38 China
23 SpaceX
18 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Arianespace (Europe)
China remains ahead of the U.S. 38 to 36 in the national rankings.
Eddie Van Halen – Another greatest guitar solo ever
An evening pause: Performed live in 1986. I suspect there are a lot of guitar solos that people will label the greatest ever.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
October 25, 2021 Zimmerman/Space Show podcast
You can now listen to the podcast of my Monday, October 25, 2021 appearance on the Space Show at this link.
I think this was once again an excellent show, especially because of the truly excellent questions posed by the listeners, some of which are regular readers of Behind the Black. Thank you all for participating!
Curiosity marches on into the mountains
Click for full image.
Click for interactive map
With the end of the solar conjunction in the first half of October, blocking communications with Mars because the Sun was in the way, Curiosity has resumed its travels. It has moved past the spectacular outcrop I have highlighted previously, an outcrop the science team has labeled Siccar Point.
They are now moving south at the base of the cliff to the west, the top of which is a plateau they call the Greenheugh Pediment, heading for a gap where the rover will be able to turn right and head up onto that pediment. The red dotted line on the overview map to the right shows this route, which corresponds to the red dotted line on the photo above.
I estimate the cliffs on both sides of Maria Gordon Notch are about 100 feet high. The notch itself I estimate is about 750 feet away. At the pace Curiosity has been traveling across this rough ground, it could probably reach it in about two to three weeks. However, I expect the science team will stop at least once along the way to do more detailed science work, so that journey might take a month or slightly more.
Today’s blacklisted American: American Geophysical Union rejects candidates for awards because they are white
Eagerly discriminated against by the
American Geophysical Union
“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” An awards committee of the American Geophysical Union, assigned to give fellowships to scientists of note, decided to reject all the candidates this year because they happened to be white.
Five of the nation’s top ice scientists found themselves in a conundrum. They’d been tasked with a formidable job: reviewing candidates for the American Geophysical Union’s fellows program, the most prestigious award given by the world’s largest earth and space science society. But when the group looked at its list of candidates, all nominated by peers, it spotted a problem.
Every nominee on the list was a white man.
….“That was kind of a bit of a showstopper for me,” said Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and one of the five committee members. Fricker and her colleagues — Jeff Dozier, Sinead Farrell, Bob Hawley, Don Perovich and Michele Koppes — represented the AGU’s cryosphere section, comprising scientists focused on the Earth’s snow and ice. The group was just one of about two dozen different committees, all reviewing their own lists of candidates.
The homogeneous pool of nominees didn’t sit right. … So the committee members made an uncomfortable decision. They declined to recommend any nominees at all.
Let me make this very clear: They bluntly rejected the nominees for only one reason: their race. If this isn’t outright bigotry and racism I do not know what is. And if you don’t believe me, you should read the public letter these committee members wrote explaining their decision. In it they say:
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Water and carbon monoxide detected in exoplanet’s atmosphere
Astronomers, using both the Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based Gemini Telescope, have detected water and carbon monoxide in the atmosphere of an exoplanet 320 light years away.
Previously hydrogen, helium, hydrogen cyanide, iron, and magnesium have been detected in the atmospheres of a variety of exoplanets. In other cases scientists found exoplanets that were devoid of water.
This detection of water and carbon monoxide is a first for these two materials, and is somewhat significant as it is the first detection that suggests an exoplanet atmosphere that might have similarities to Earth.
Poland becomes thirteenth nation to sign Artemis Accords
The new colonial movement: Poland yesterday announced that it has signed the U.S.-led Artemis Accords.
In brief comments at the ceremony, [Polish Space Agency (POLSA) President Grzegorz Wrochna] said he saw the Artemis Accords as a first step toward greater cooperation with the United States. He noted that while Poland is a member of the European Space Agency, Polish space companies are looking to expand their business outside Europe. “They want to reach for new markets, especially the U.S. market,” he said. “They want to participate in missions of other agencies, especially NASA. We would like to open the door for them, and I believe this is the first step.”
The full list of signatories at this moment: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, and the United States.
While the accords — introduced by the Trump administration — are cleverly written to appear to endorse the mandates of the Outer Space Treaty, they are also written to bluntly minimize that treaty’s hostility to private property. With each new signatory, the ability to overturn that treaty’s limitations preventing legal protection to private property in space grows, as it binds a growing number of nations in an alliance to do so.
Not surprisingly, Russia and China have said they oppose the Artemis Accords. Both of these nations do not want legal protections in space to private citizens or companies. Instead, they wish that power to reside with them, or with the United Nations.
Whether the strategy behind the Artemis Accords will work however remains unclear. That strategy requires the U.S. to maintain its strong support for private property in space. Any wavering of that support will weaken the ability of this new Artemis alliance to overturn the Outer Space Treaty’s provisions that make private ownership of territory in space impossible.
China’s Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket successfully launches a remote sensing satellite
China’s Kuaizhou-1A smallsat solid rocket today successfully launched a commercial remote sensing satellite.
This launch, the 38th successful launch this year by China, ties its previous high in 2018. The country had two additional launches this year, but those were failures.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
38 China
23 SpaceX
17 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Arianespace (Europe)
China now leads the U.S. 38 to 36 in the national rankings.
Russian engineers to dock next Progress to Zvezda to test it
Russian engineers have decided that they will dock the next Progress freighter flying to ISS and scheduled to launch tomorrow to the Zvezda module in order to find out if the stress of that docking will cause more cracks in the module’s aft section.
Scheduled for launch in early hours of October 28, 2021, the Progress MS-18 cargo ship will be on a two-day trip to the International Space Station, aiming to dock at the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module, ISS. That particular docking mechanism was unoccupied for half a year, because it is connected to the rest of the outpost via the PrK transfer compartment, which had been leaking air despite all efforts to seal tiny cracks in its walls. Progress MS-18 should confirm that the PrK chamber could be used safely.
This is not crazy, it actually makes a great deal of sense. The engineers need to know if a docking results in more cracks. If so, it will confirm the cause and also provide them the data they need to prevent such things on future manned space vessels.
Ingenuity completes 14th flight on Mars
Ingenuity’s shadow below it during 14th flight.
Click for full image.
On October 24th, Ingenuity successfully completed its 14th flight on Mars, a short test hop up and down to see if the helicopter could function properly as the air pressure in the Martian atmosphere drops due to seasonal variations.
As planned, the helicopter executed its first 2,700 rpm flight, proving that Ingenuity is capable of flying in the weeks and months ahead on Mars, during which seasonal changes on the surface will result in decreases in air density. The short 23-second flight included a peak altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) above ground level, with a small sideways translation of 7 feet (2 meters) to avoid a nearby sand ripple.
I predict the next flight will head north, leap-frogging past Perseverance to get a better view of the South Seitah area so that the rover team can decide whether they can continue north through that terrain or retreat backwards.