SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites
SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Cape Canaveral using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
63 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 63 to 65.
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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.
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SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Cape Canaveral using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
63 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 63 to 65.
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.
Apparently the Atlas V 551 NROL-107 launch is put off again, until Sunday at 08:47 EST, due to electrical problems in the “pogo” circuit. Pogo is oscillatory feedback caused by fuel flow surging affecting thrust levels, but what circuit controls it God knows. I guess Tory Bruno does.
I have often heard the launch crew call out “pogo” late in the countdown for Falcon 9s, but never any explanation of it.
Ps. I heard that pogo-ing got the last N-1, causing it to break up just before 1-2 staging, right at the hot-staging latticework as I recall. Heads-up, Elon.
Pogo was a problem during the second Saturn 5 launch, causing premature shutdown of engines. They got the capsule into orbit and were able to more or less complete the mission, but the very next flight of the Saturn 5 was Apollo 8, with three men on board going to lunar orbit. They launched in December 1968 because Von Braun’s team in Huntsville was convinced they had found the issue and solved it.
Apparently there are electrically controlled bellows in the long main propellant feed lines that actively damp the longitudinal vibrations otherwise called “pogo”. They were so severe in the April 1968 Apollo 6 test launch that it would have seriously injured a crew had one been onboard. Other large rockets in the past have been destroyed because of it.
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65
I had this post in mind when I ran across one of the most wrong-headed takes in recent memory on Twitter (which is saying something): “My real problem is that space should not be privatized, anything and everything done in space should be done through publicly funded and operated organizations. SpaceX should not be allowed to be independent.”
Tory Bruno helpfully explains this a little today on Twitter:
Louis McCarthy @mccarthy_louis
What’s the pogo system?
Tory Bruno @torybruno 8:10 AM · Sep 9, 2023
Three broad categories of combustion instability in liquid fueled rockets: screech (acoustic resonance inside combustion chamber), buzz (resonance with the medical structure), and pogo (long fluid column resonance in feedlines). Mighty Atlas kills pogo via a fluid energy absorber