April 5, 2024 Quick space links
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.
- ULA releases 28-page comic book about the origins of the Vulcan rocket
The link lets you download or view a pdf of the comic book.
- Space Force reiterates its requirement that ULA fly Vulcan twice before awarding it any launch contracts
According to Jay, rumors are now suggesting that the delay for the next Vulcan launch is not due to preparing Sierra’s Tenacity Dream Chaser cargo ship, but Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines that Vulcan requires. I doubt this. Tenacity only started its environmental testing a few weeks ago, and this testing can take at minimum two months, and more if anything goes wrong and needs fixing.
- One of the two test smallsats launched to lunar orbit with China’s Quequao-2 communications relay satellite, Tiandu-2, has now completed two of its engineering tests
The satellite has tested “key propulsion techniques [and using] a 3D printed storage box.” That’s all they tell us.
- 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.
- SpaceX’s head Gwynne Shotwell says the federal bureaucracy is slowing their work significantly
She thus confirms what I have been saying now for several years, since Biden took power. The federal government is now a major obstacle to private enterprise and innovation.
- On this day in 1990, Orbital Sciences flew its air-launched Pegasus rocket for the first time
Pegasus was intended to reduce orbital costs, but it never did so, and is now defunct because its cost can’t compete with SpaceX and others.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.
- ULA releases 28-page comic book about the origins of the Vulcan rocket
The link lets you download or view a pdf of the comic book.
- Space Force reiterates its requirement that ULA fly Vulcan twice before awarding it any launch contracts
According to Jay, rumors are now suggesting that the delay for the next Vulcan launch is not due to preparing Sierra’s Tenacity Dream Chaser cargo ship, but Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines that Vulcan requires. I doubt this. Tenacity only started its environmental testing a few weeks ago, and this testing can take at minimum two months, and more if anything goes wrong and needs fixing.
- One of the two test smallsats launched to lunar orbit with China’s Quequao-2 communications relay satellite, Tiandu-2, has now completed two of its engineering tests
The satellite has tested “key propulsion techniques [and using] a 3D printed storage box.” That’s all they tell us.
- 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.
- SpaceX’s head Gwynne Shotwell says the federal bureaucracy is slowing their work significantly
She thus confirms what I have been saying now for several years, since Biden took power. The federal government is now a major obstacle to private enterprise and innovation.
- On this day in 1990, Orbital Sciences flew its air-launched Pegasus rocket for the first time
Pegasus was intended to reduce orbital costs, but it never did so, and is now defunct because its cost can’t compete with SpaceX and others.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Shotwell is almost exactly right.
The regulatory agencies were set up to protect customers from operators, not to regulate innovation or product development. In the case of rockets, SpaceX and others have demonstrated that they can, do, and will launch their hardware and test units safely. The regulators (e.g. FAA) only need to make sure that traffic is clear in the danger zones. They are not there to make sure that development hardware works perfectly, because the whole point of developing innovative hardware is that it probably won’t work perfectly. It only has to work safely.
The failure of the flight termination system on Flight One was definitely in the FAA’s purview, but virtually nothing else was. The other sixty items that they regulated were not their concern.
whether the test unit works as intended is not the purview of regulators. Whether it blows up is not their purview. Only that it is safe, whether or not it works as intended and whether or not it blows up.
Regulatory interference outside their purview is an example of mission creep.
We do not need to get the regulatory system to move at the pace of innovation, we need to get them out of the way of innovation and development. They were not meant to be there.
Chapter 2 of the comic going to cover the sale of ULA?
And now — you can’t make up this stuff — the Biden Administration is proposing a space tax to help the struggling federal bureaucrats who are working tirelessly to make space safe:
https://www.aol.com/news/biden-wants-space-tax-companies-113738121.html
The FAA, according to Washington officials, “is already struggling to keep up with the pace of space launches,” and it is only fair that private space launch companies pay their “fair share” for the cost of regulating them. (Perhaps this is why it is taking them so long to approve test launches at Boca Chica, lol.)
While this sounds a lot like the story of condemned prisoners being made to buy their own bullets, on a more optimistic side, it does suggest that space travel is well on the road to becoming, like the airlines, just another business — regulation and all. It will be interesting to see how this works out.
Milt,
From your linked article:
So, let me see if I’ve got this right. These launch companies launch the spacecraft that make huge profits for their operators, and the launch companies pay taxes on their profits, but the greedy government thinks that the taxes on all these profits isn’t enough? Just how much would be enough?
If the government is so hard up for money, it could save billions every day just by reducing the money it pays to people to not work — plus, once those people start working, they will pay taxes on their earnings rather than sucking on the collective teat of the rest of us. Heck, if the FAA needs more people, use that welfare money to hire some of those welfare recipients, who themselves have become accustomed to a free ride just for loafin’ around.
Better yet, move some of those FAA guys off of regulating innovation and development so that they can facilitate those development flights from private launch pads so that the new launchers can make even more profit launching even more hugely profitable spacecraft into orbit and beyond.
But no. They want to cut open the goose as it lays the golden eggs.
Greedy government. Greedy, greedy government.
Really? And just how much is “fair?” Is is fair that the rest of us pay huge taxes to support layabouts to lay about?
Bob made an appearance on CuJibNewsLetter’s podcast.
Topics will be familiar to site readers, but good discussion nonetheless.
https://cutjibnewsletter.com/podcast/cutjibnewsletter-speaks-season-7-episode-4/
Bob made an appearance on CutJibNewletter’s podcast. Most of the topics are familiar to readers of the site, but good discussion nonetheless.
https://cutjibnewsletter.com/podcast/cutjibnewsletter-speaks-season-7-episode-4/
This is a 3 minute video by economist Dr Peter St Onge “produced on an iPhone and a $100 dollar microphone”.
He says corporate journalists are being laid off by the thousands in an election year because readers have lost trust in them since they are lying woke Marxist activists.
They are being replaced by grassroots news sources who are often more expert and more honest (think Robert).
“Tens of thousands of mainstream journalists laid off in what’s being called an ‘Extinction Event’ for corporate journalism.”
https://twitter.com/profstonge/status/1775867358893973953
The Jack Chick tract-like ULA Comic should have ended with Mr Cowboy hat accepting Bezos as his lord and savior.
I want a comic book about how many times Gary Hudson got told “no” by investors.
Today’s comic books are filled with angst after all.
The power to tax is the power to destroy.
-R Limbaugh
I have been predicting this step for sometime.
Between taxation and carefully written regs, add in subsidized work selectively given, it allows the government to start selecting winners and losers within an industry.
Politicians cannot help themselves. And they never consider the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
The timeline on page 24 of ULA’s 28-page comic book shows a sixteen-minute launch to orbit. The Centaur engines have a first main engine cutoff (MECO-1) at 0:16:04.1. That seems to me to be a rather long time to orbit.
“ULA releases 28-page comic book about the origins of the Vulcan rocket”
A purple horse and sparkly dust?
Sounds like a hallucination.
Of course when you’re building a rocket that is too expensive to be competitive and powered by engines supplied by an unreliable supplier that is planning to use the same engines on a competing rocket, a little magic dust may be needed to create a celebratory mood.
Looks like Tony is expecting to ride off into the sunset once Bezos buys the company.
But I can see Vulcan galloping for a while. If the likely merger does happen BO would be wise to keep the (likely) dependable Vulcan keeping customers happy while they work on New Glenn (and if that proceeds at the usual “any day now” BO pace it could be a while before it’s ready).
Will Tony stay on? Can BO make enough BE-4s to supply Vulcan launches and New Glenn’s development?
It’s going to be interesting.
So guys, I too thought the big announcement from ULA was the sale, especially since the 39th Space Symposium was over the weekend. It was a let down to see it was nothing but a comic book. Who knows, maybe Tory and his magical purple horse will announce the sale at Comic-Con.