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
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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
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows 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. 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. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally 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.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four 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 or subscription:
4. 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.
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.