July 21, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who is more awake than I on this Friday afternoon.
- Amazon to build $120 million Kuiper satellite facility in Florida
The plan is to have this facility pumping out satellites for launch by early 2025. This will give Amazon less than two years to get 1,600 satellites in orbit, as required by its FCC licence.
- NASA Powerpoint presentation touting the two Artemis manned lunar landers
The link downloads the pdf. Lots of empty blather, but the side-to-side comparison of SpaceX’s Starship with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is quite educational.
- ISRO announces July 30th as next PSLV launch date
The rocket is carrying a radar Earth observation satellite and six smallsat second payloads
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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, who is more awake than I on this Friday afternoon.
- Amazon to build $120 million Kuiper satellite facility in Florida
The plan is to have this facility pumping out satellites for launch by early 2025. This will give Amazon less than two years to get 1,600 satellites in orbit, as required by its FCC licence.
- NASA Powerpoint presentation touting the two Artemis manned lunar landers
The link downloads the pdf. Lots of empty blather, but the side-to-side comparison of SpaceX’s Starship with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is quite educational.
- ISRO announces July 30th as next PSLV launch date
The rocket is carrying a radar Earth observation satellite and six smallsat second payloads
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
hmm. The SpaceX part shows actual men and women in hard hats with hands on hardware. And
both LEO and beyond experience, and a lander thar has already been landing
Amazon’s timeline seems to be cutting things a bit close. At 30 satellites per launch that is 54 [successful] launches. At 50 per launch it is 32. I guess the question becomes at what point do the Blue Origin delays force them to start contracting out some of those launches?
TL: Amazon has already contracted things out. See this post from 2022:
Amazon announces launch agreements with Blue Origin, Arianespace, and ULA
On the climate front
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-greenland-greener-history-previously-thought.html
Thanks for the slide down link. After listening and watching your post on Jethro Tull’s For Michael Collins, Jeffery and Me and Wayne’s link to “Forgotten Astronaut”, I looked at the slides.
It proudly announces that the space suit shown will be worn by the first woman on the moon. I guess the men will wear another suit?
We have become a caricature of the naughty 4th grader and Neil Armstrong has been reduced to simply a snickering
“The First P _ _ _ S on the moon” and we wait with baited breath for the announcement of “The First V _ _ _ _ A on the moon”
So sad to see our fall.
Speaking of the climate front, I’m surprised that no one has figured out how much carbon is being released into the atmosphere by all those Canadian wildfires. Or does that not count because they can’t monetize it?
For your next quick links: The Senate Appropriations Committee just approved $42 M for the FAA’s Off of Commercial Space Transportation (same as request) and has some interesting accompanying language in the report, jabbing hard at the FAA’s approval of Starship launches.
Peter Hague comments: “The US senate, it seems, can never forgive Elon Musk for giving the US a commanding lead in space launch. Maybe they feel that SpaceX being allowed to do their thing wasn’t fair to the Chinese?”
https://twitter.com/SpcPlcyOnline/status/1682499364957061122
Nice find on that “report to the Principal’s office” thing from the Senate anent the FAA.
The NASA pdf was as Bob and/or Jay noted, quite educational including about what wasn’t there, namely how the propellant logistics loop is going to be closed anent reusable landers left parked in NRHO. There is no step shown, for example, that gets Blue’s “Transporter” (LEO-to-NRHO tanker) back to LEO from NRHO for another fill-up. Blue’s Earth-to-LEO Refueler isn’t shown to be explicitly reusable either, though, in fairness, it might well be as the SpaceX tankers are not explicitly shown as reusable either, though we know that is the intent. What the intent of the two lander providers is anent these lacunae may well not be of much concern to NASA, especially in the context of Artemis III in particular as NASA largely still regards expendability as a baseline characteristic of space hardware.
There is more still to be learned about both SpaceX’s and Blue Origin’s total concept of operations for lunar missions. I speculate that both Blue’s “Transporter” craft as well as a yet-to-be-revealed LEO-to-NRHO propellant depot variant by SpaceX will have non-ablative heat shields sufficient to allow aerobraking into orbit at the LEO end of their return-from-NRHO trajectories. That, along with SpaceX’s Dear Moon-class Starship and Blue’s recently announced New Glenn-launched crew vehicle would provide both companies with completely reusable infrastructures for Earth-to-Moon excursion-and-return missions for both crew and cargo.
Thanks for the 2022 link. I’d missed that one.