Author: Robert Zimmerman

Rocket of Chinese pseudo-private company fails on 2nd launch

8:52 pm

The new colonial movement: Today’s second launch of the Chinese pseudo-private company iSpace’s Hyperbola-1 rocket ended in failure soon after launch.

No details yet on what went wrong.

The company had successfully completed its first orbital launch in July 2019. The smallsat rocket, using four solid-rocket stages, is almost certainly derived from China’s military technology, and thus the company could not exist without significant government supervision.

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Billionaire buys of entire SpaceX launch for tourist flight and charity

4:41 pm

Capitalism in space: An American billionaire has purchased an entire SpaceX Dragon flight and Falcon 9 launch, set for sometime in October ’21, with the goal of using the publicity of the flight to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Besides fulfilling his dream of flying in space, Jared Isaacman announced Monday that he aims to use the private trip to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, half coming from his own pockets.

A health care worker for St. Jude already has been selected for the mission. Anyone donating to St. Jude in February will be entered into a random drawing for seat No. 3. The fourth seat will go to a business owner who uses Shift4 Payments, Isaacman’s credit card processing company in Allentown, Pennsylvania

This flight means that SpaceX is likely going to have at about five commercial manned flights in the next year, three by NASA, one by Axiom to ISS, and Isaacman’s above. Moreover, none include the flights by various entertainers and reality show producers who have been rumored as being interesting in buying tickets. Nor does this include the tourism flights the Russians are planning in the next year.

All told, these flights strongly suggest that there is a very healthy market for commercial manned spaceflight, a market that can only grow once Boeing finally enters the market with its Starliner capsule.

I must also add that we have been waiting for commercial space tourism flights for almost sixteen years, since Richard Branson began promising them on his suborbital SpaceShipTwo back in 2004. Never happened, and now seems very second class in comparison to the pending orbital flights. As the article at the link says disparagingly about Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin’s suborbital craft, they “will just briefly skim the surface of space.”

Both Branson and Bezos had a window to make suborbital space tourism pay off. Neither stepped through it.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Mike Lindell, CEO of My Pillow

2:10 pm

They’re coming for you next: And in the case of Mike Linddell, the CEO of the company My Pillow, the left is coming at him from all sides.

First he was banned from Twitter, merely because Twitter decided it apparently did not like him.

Twitter said Tuesday that it permanently suspended Lindell — a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump — because of his “repeated violations” of the company’s civic integrity policy, which it implemented last fall to clamp down on misinformation.

Twitter didn’t say which of Lindell’s posts pushed it over the edge. [emphasis mine]

As is typical of this corrupt leftist company, it does not provide any evidence for its claims. Nor does it outline clearly the standards that Lindell was supposed to have violated.

No, what Twitter really doesn’t like is that Lindell has been a vocal supporter of Trump, and for that he must be silenced.

Next, the computer company Dominion, which sits in the center of many of the election fraud allegations from the November 3rd election, has threatened Lindell with a defamation lawsuit for daring to note the many problems that others have identified with the manner in which Dominion’s machines tabulated votes in several states.
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More weird features and changes on Mars

1:31 pm

Some strange stuff on Mars
Click for full 2020 photo.

Overview map

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on September 28, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Uncaptioned and labeled “Reticulate Bedform Change Detection on Arsia Mons West Flank,” it shows a whole bunch of strange features in addition to a change that occurred sometime in the past two years.

I think it also well illustrates in one image how alien Mars is.

The main features in this photo are what scientists have dubbed reticulate bedforms. These features, found mostly in the high elevations on the flanks of the giant volcanoes in the Tharsis Bulge to the west of Valles Marineris, are thought to be ancient dunes made of volcanic dust and debris that has solidified into an aggregate. These dunes are found with a variety of patterns.

Aggregates on the flanks are transported downslope by katabatic winds and form linear and “accordion” morphologies. Materials within the calderas and other depressions remain trapped and are subjected to multidirectional winds, forming an interlinked “honeycomb” texture. In many places on and near the volcanoes, light-toned, low thermal inertia yardangs and indurated surfaces are present.

The photo to the right appears to show all three patterns, even though it is located on the northwestern slopes of of Arsia Mons, the southernmost of the string of three giant volcanoes in the Tharsis Bulge. On the overview map to the right, this photo’s location is indicated by the white box. The black boxes indicate the location of all the pits caves that surround Arsia Mons which I have previously posted about on Behind the Black.

It is intriguing that, at least at this point, these particular reticulate bedforms on the slopes of Arsia Mons happen to be in a region where few cave pits have so far been identified. It could be that the conditions that form each are mutually exclusive. If you get pits on the slopes of Martian volcano you can’t have reticulate bedforms. Or maybe not all the pits have yet been located, or the flanks of the volcano has many more reticulate bedforms that I simply have not documented.

Either way, this particular cool image has two areas of interest, as noted by the white boxes above.
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Environmentalists cheer FAA blocking of Starship test flight

9:28 am

Two Starship prototypes now on launchpads
Two Starships are better than one!

They’re coming for you next: It appears the environmentalist movement is thrilled that the FAA and the Biden administration blocked last week’s test flight of SpaceX’s ninth prototype of Starship.

It also appears they are gunning to end Starship entirely, and might now have the right people in charge to get it done.

Jim Chapman, president of the nonprofit Friends of the Wildlife Corridor, says it is unusual for a federal regulatory agency to allow a company to conduct tests prior to completion of an environmental review and licenses issued.

He and other environmentalists have repeatedly expressed concerns to Border Report of what they say is a lack of oversight by the FAA on this site. But Friday’s actions gave Chapman some hope. “The fact that the FAA is going by the book for a change is a good development,” Chapman said. “They’re following the law by doing that and they’re supposed to do the environmental evaluation before they issue new licenses and up until now they kind of haven’t been doing that.”

The irony here is that these environmentalists are claiming that SpaceX’s rocket facility at Boca Chica will threaten the local beach wildlife, when we have more than a half century of evidence from Cape Canaveral that a rocket launch facility does the exact opposite. When the federal government established its Florida spaceport it reserved vast tracts around it for safety, but also reserved that land as a wildlife preserve. The result has been that the beach wildlife at Cape Canaveral has thrived, and been protected.

What these environmentalist really want to do is prevent SpaceX from flying, merely because they hate the development of new technology and the advancement of human capabilities. The environmental movement is routinely against anything new, and has been for decades.

With the Democrats controlling Congress and the White House, their allies are now in power. I would not at all be surprised if the FAA’s action last week is also tied to this environmental review. If so, expect future test flights at Boca Chica to be further delayed and stretched out.

Meanwhile, this past weekend SpaceX rolled out its tenth Starship prototype, placing it on a second launchpad right next to prototype #9, as shown by the screen capture above from the LabPadre 24/7 live feed this morning. The company sure is making it clear that the only reason they have been stalled is the government.

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India is targeting ’21 for first unmanned test launch of manned system

9:07 am

The new colonial movement: According to Indian government officials, the first unmanned test flight of their Gaganyaan manned capsule will occur before the end of 2021.

The first unmanned launch is slated for December 2021. The Gaganyaan is a crewed orbital spacecraft expected to carry three astronauts into space for at least seven days. The spacecraft is likely to consist of an orbital module which will have a service and a crew module. The mission is estimated to cost around Rs 10,000 crore. The GSLV Mk-III, now called LVM-3 (Launch Vehicle Mark-3), will be deployed for the launch.

The new name for the rocket helps distinguish it from the GSLV Mk-II, a smaller version aimed mostly at commercial customers.

India also hopes to launch a new smallsat rocket in ’21, as well as its next lunar lander/rover, Chandrayaan-3. The country’s space effort will also be attempting to recover from its shutdown in 2020 due to the Wuhan virus panic.

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NASA delays lunar lander contract award

8:55 am

NASA, now under the control of the Biden administration, has quietly delayed by at least two months the contract award to two companies to build manned lunar landers for its Artemis program.

With short funding from Congress and a new administration focused on more pressing national issues, the move was expected.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a team of aerospace giants led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Leidos-owned Dynetics won a combined $967 million in seed funding from NASA last year to develop rivaling concepts for a human lunar landing system. It’s the space agency’s first effort to spend money on astronaut moon landers since the Apollo program in the 1970s.

Last Wednesday, NASA told the three contractors that an extension to their development contracts “will be required,” picking a new award date of April 30th. Under the Trump administration’s timeline, the agency had planned to pick two of the three bidders in late February, giving a stamp of approval for two systems that would inevitably carry humans to the moon.

This delay would likely have occurred under Trump as well, mainly because Congress only appropriated less than a third of the money needed for this Artemis program.

However, under Biden it was guaranteed. A major review is about to happen, designed not to kill Artemis but to slow it down appreciable. Congress likes the pork Artemis produces, but is wholly uninterested in it actually flying any dangerous missions. I suspect Biden will agree. The focus will once again shift back to Gateway, making any lunar landing require it so that it must be built first. Such a shift will guarantee that no American manned missions to the surface of the Moon will occur before ’30, but also allow the spending of gobs of money building a small lunar station that will only be occupied for short periods.

The big loser here, to my mind, is Jeff Bezos. His company, Blue Origin, was building the descent portion of the lunar lander, with all other portions built by his big space partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper. Not only is most of the other work by these partners more easily shifted to other uses related to Gateway, but those companies already have plenty of government contracts. As far as I can remember, Blue Origin has no other big government deals, with its New Glenn having been rejected by the military, and its lunar descent technology unneeded until there is a lunar landing, and I expect that to be significantly delayed.

For the past four years Bezos has clearly wanted to make Blue Origin a new big space contractor. Right now it appears that effort has failed wholly.

Dynetics will also lose out big, as they are a new company and can ill afford losing a contract here.

SpaceX will likely be hurt the least. Not getting any money for designing Starship to land on the Moon will do little to slow its development. Starship is almost completely privately funded, and does not need NASA money to get built.

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January 28, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

11:22 pm

Embedded below the fold in two parts. This is one of my more significant Batchelor appearances. The first segment spends a lot of time outlining the power play of the FAA and the Washington bureaucracy to shut down SpaceX’s most recent Starship test. The second segment outlines what is a developing significant science discovery that one science paper calls a paradigm shift related to Mars. The building evidence is now suggesting to scientists that glaciers and ice might have been the major factor for shaping the surface of Mars, not flowing water. If flowing water ever existed on Mars, it might only have been a minor factor in the Red Planet’s geological history.
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NASA to do another static fire test of SLS’s core stage

10:52 pm

NASA has now scheduled a second static fire test of the core stage of its SLS rocket, tentatively scheduled for the fourth week in February.

The first test, planned to last eight minutes, shut down after only one minute when the stage’s computers decided the parameters on engine #2 were outside their conservative margins. That burn also had a sensor issue with its fourth engine.

Conducting a second hot fire test will allow the team to repeat operations from the first hot fire test and obtain data on how the core stage and the engines perform over a longer period that simulates more activities during the rocket’s launch and ascent. To prepare for the second hot fire test, the team is continuing to analyze data from the first test, drying and refurbishing the engines, and making minor thermal protection system repairs. They are also updating conservative control logic parameters that resulted in the flight computer ending the first hot fire test earlier than planned. The team has already repaired the faulty electrical harness which resulted in a notification of a Major Component Failure on Engine 4. This instrumentation issue did not affect the engine’s performance and did not contribute to ending the first test early.

Assuming this test is successful, they will then need a month to get the stage ready for shipment by barge to Cape Canaveral, where it will take several more months to get it assembled with its two strap-on solid rocket boosters, its upper stage, and the Orion capsule on top.

Right now the unmanned test flight into orbit of this entire rocket and Orion is set for November ’21. While NASA has not announced a delay, this additional static fire test puts significant pressure on that schedule.

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On the edge of Mars’ giant volcanic flood plain

3:03 pm

Flows and pitted material on the edge of Mars' great volcanic flood plain
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on September 30, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Uncaptioned, it shows what the science team labels “Flows and pitted material in Terra Sirenum.”

Downhill is to the southeast, which means the pitted material forms some sort of filled terrain, with the surface eroded similarly everywhere. At a latitude of 32 degrees south, these flows could conceivably be glacial features. Are they?

A wider look might help answer that question. Below is a photo taken by MRO’s context camera, cropped and reduced to post here.
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