February 2, 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.
- Blue Origin boasts about its proposed Blue Ring orbital tug
As always, company officials make a lot of promises. As always, the only thing that counts is actual achievement, something that Blue Origin has so far lacked.
- Related: Video of Blue Origin engine test in Huntsville of a BE-4 engine
To speed production the company is now doing static fire engine tests in Huntsville and at its Texas facility.
- SpaceX experiences engine failure during Merlin static fire test at its Texas facility
The company has been working to upgrade Merlin so that it can fly as many as 30 times. This might have been a test-to-failure as part of that program. Or not.
- 40 members of Congress send letter to NASA, complaining about cuts to Mars Sample Return mission
It’s all a game. NASA makes the cuts to generate protests. Congress screams and protests. The two get together and fund everything, then claiming they saved the world. In this game however no one ever asks: “Is the project as designed worth the money? Can this be done a better way?” To ask such questions would suggest maybe the money shouldn’t be spent, and that concept is wholly alien to these swamp players.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
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.
- Blue Origin boasts about its proposed Blue Ring orbital tug
As always, company officials make a lot of promises. As always, the only thing that counts is actual achievement, something that Blue Origin has so far lacked.
- Related: Video of Blue Origin engine test in Huntsville of a BE-4 engine
To speed production the company is now doing static fire engine tests in Huntsville and at its Texas facility.
- SpaceX experiences engine failure during Merlin static fire test at its Texas facility
The company has been working to upgrade Merlin so that it can fly as many as 30 times. This might have been a test-to-failure as part of that program. Or not.
- 40 members of Congress send letter to NASA, complaining about cuts to Mars Sample Return mission
It’s all a game. NASA makes the cuts to generate protests. Congress screams and protests. The two get together and fund everything, then claiming they saved the world. In this game however no one ever asks: “Is the project as designed worth the money? Can this be done a better way?” To ask such questions would suggest maybe the money shouldn’t be spent, and that concept is wholly alien to these swamp players.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Blue Origin seems like a different company since Smith left. I’m all SpaceX all the time, but let’s give Blue a chance. The more the merrier.
Competition is a good thing.
I find Musk’s announcement that they are planning an upgrade on the Falcon 9 for greater endurance to be interesting.
And this test on the Merlin 9 is clearly part of that plan.
It also supports my view that the success of Starship/Superheavy will result in the retirement of Falcon 9, as a few others have suggested in other threads, other forums.
If they had no plans to continue using Falcon 9, they would not put time/money into further R&D.
sippin, I honestly don’t understand your position. Your last two paragraphs seem to contradict each be other. Can you clarify for me?
Ray.. indeed, because I mistyped.
“…will NOT result in the retirement…”
I was distracted by my better half while I was entering my thoughts.
She has that effect on me.
I never believed that F9 was going to be retired, even if Starship gets rolling.
sippin, glad that got cleared up – I must have reread those sentences a half-dozen times thinking I must be missing something!
I have opined here and elsewhere that F9/FH is not only going to have a long productive life. but it is likely to remain highly popular long after SpaceX wishes it would go away! There is likely to be a huge market for it beyond the time when Elon would rather sell the services of newer designs, but customers are going to find the attraction of a rocket that almost literally never fails to be irresistible!
I remember when the Atlas was held up as the ne plus ultra of reliability, for a number of successes that F9 has long ago blown past. And that was for an expendable booster that started every flight with a whole new set of many untested parts and a complex assembly process, something we used to think was wonderful.
Sooner or later an F9 will RUD, but most customers will just see that as a well-hidden flaw fortunately discovered, and thus essentially permanently corrected!
Of course, larger boosters will enable a whole new class of ultra-heavy payloads, but advancements in miniaturization will likely mean that there will be also be a continuing and growing supply of mid-sized payloads.
At some point payload designers are going to have recalibrate the trades between cost and mass. For example, do you, per tradition, select extremely expensive rad-hardened electronics, or do you select cheap consumer electronics, add in more for greater redundancy, and shield them with extra mass?
Another example, do you shave every gram from structure with a long and expensive engineering process, or do you go cheap by designing simpler but heavier structures?
The one- or two-magnitude drop in launch cost is going to drive this recalibration, but it will take time. Old habits die hard.
NASA, in particular, seems absolutely unable to wrap its collective head around Starship’s capabilities.
NASA’s version of Starship
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230017880/downloads/Trent%20MACHETE%20SciTech2024%20Manuscript%20v3.pdf
Hmm
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=56167.0;attach=2248956;sess=0
It’s a trap!
It’s really one of Gov. Abbot’s schemes… ;)
Ray Van Dune wrote: “I have opined here and elsewhere that F9/FH is not only going to have a long productive life. but it is likely to remain highly popular long after SpaceX wishes it would go away!”
I suspect that the Cygnus/Dragon/Dream Chaser/Starliner size vehicle will be popular with space stations rather than the much more massive Starship. Starship is 100 tons before cargo and reentry/landing propellants, and can you imagine it slamming into your space station with every docking? If you think that the Russian module is aging fast with the much lighter Soyuz and Progress dockings, imagine the reduced lifetime with the massive Starship docking all the time.
To keep the smaller manned and cargo spacecraft flying will require the smaller Falcon 9, Vulcan, and Antares 330.
__________________
Patrick Underwood,
I worked in a department where they once did have to shave weight on an instrument, because they went overweight. They once couldn’t find rad-hard versions of chips that they needed, so they used commercial off the shelf chips and shielded them.
I expect future weight budgets to be somewhat looser, up until someone figures out just how much more performance you can get out of the additional weight available. Instead of satellites with ten instruments, they might put a hundred instruments, with correspondingly larger and heavier power supplies (e.g. solar arrays).
When NASA went from smallsats in the 1960s to large satellites in the 1980s, They just added more instruments, and each instrument still had tight limits on weight and power. They may have been able to fly heavier instruments, but only because the technology required heavy materials or the instruments were too large/heavy to fly in the 1960s.
Would the James Webb Space Telescope have needed all that advanced technology if Starship were available, or would they have filled up the larger weight budget with an even larger mirror and structure?
Projects tend to expand to use all the available resources.
Blue Ring name is bad, bad juju. It is that of a very venomous octopus – “They are one of the world’s most venomous marine animals. Despite their small size—12 to 20 cm (5 to 8 in)—and relatively docile nature, they are very dangerous to humans if provoked when handled because their venom contains a powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue-ringed_octopus
I suppose many of you have already seen this, but Eric Berger’s recent piece in Arstechnica is pertinent here: about how the technology of the (recently retired) Ingenuity helicopter on Mars was tremendously innovative – basically because, constrained by weight restrictions, the craft’s engineers of necessity chose to use commercial (non-space hardened) components including the processor, lithium battery, etc., all over the vehicle – which nonetheless performed essentially flawlessly, through Martian winter, over multiple years time.
A big lesson for the future.
Michael, exactly right. Traditional space-qualified electronics are not only expensive and long-lead, they are also, by necessity, several years out of date. As a consequence of Moore’s Law, they are therefore ancient.
Ingenuity only worked because it was not part of the primary mission, just a high-risk tech demonstrator that was extremely lucky to make it onto the manifest.