March 22, 2024 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Category: Behind The Black
Vivaldi – Spring
An evening pause: Seems the perfect piece of music to herald in the first weekend of spring. This is first movement of Vivaldi’s The Seasons. Performed here by Alana Youssefian and the Voices of Music.
March 22, 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.
- Sierra Space’s first Dream Chaser mini-shuttle, Tenacity, begins environmental testing
These tests will confirm that the spacecraft can resist the harsh environment of space.
- Roscosmos approves new March 23, 2024 launch date for manned Soyuz after launch abort
It will dock with ISS two days later.
- On this day in 1982 the third flight of the space shuttle Columbia took place
As the tweet notes, this was the first flight where NASA did not paint the external tank, saving 600 pounds in weight. It was the third of four manned test flights of Columbia, after which NASA declared the shuttle operational.
Martian vent or sink?
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Though the scientists label this image showing “channels”, what I see is either a vent or a sink, with the channels to the south indicating past flows either coming out of the depression or into it. The uncertainty exists because the surface grade in this region is essentially flat. There is a lot of small up and down variations, but overall it is very difficult to determine the general trend, suggesting that when the depression and channels formed the grade was different, and there is no way from this data to determine the angle at that time.
Were the flows that created the channels lava or water or ice? Knowing the grade when these channels formed would help answer this question, but other research now suggests the latter.
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Australia moves to make skin color and sex more important in hiring space engineers than skill or knowledge
A new industry group, established with full support of the Australian government, has been formed to encourage the hiring of minorities and women in that nation’s space industry, merely because they are minorities and women.
The Australian Space Diversity Alliance (ASDA) said it aims to support senior leaders and minimise the barriers that marginalised groups face. It comes after a series of reports have shown the sector is lagging behind others in regard to gender disparity, and alongside a talent shortage critics say can only be overcome with a more diverse intake.
ASDA was founded by eight industry figures, including Defence Council of Victoria’s Anntonette Dailey, ANU’s Dr Cassandra Steer, and Raytheon’s Linda Spurr. Defence Connect is one of the group’s industry partners, alongside five state governments, the iLAuNCH Trailblazer initiative, and communications agency The Write Space.
It makes the typical and very bogus claims of these Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that because woman comprise only 20% of the people in the space industry and minorities only 5%, bigotry must be involved. And the only solution is more bigotry, by favoring applicants from those groups even it they are less qualified than others.
The possibility that women and minorities might simply not be interested in doing this work is a reality that these race hustlers simply can’t tolerate. No, if women and minorities aren’t represented at a level we believe appropriate, we will make it so, regardless of skills, talent, knowledge or experience.
Expect the entire Australian space industry to suffer because of this effort.
Private Indian company scrubs suborbital test launch
The private Indian company Agnikul yesterday scrubbed its first suborbital test launch from its privately owned spaceport on the east coast of India when it detected issues during a dress rehearsal countdown.
On Friday, Agnikul Cosmos Private Limited’s Agnibaan was slated to launch from the company-owned launchpad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) located inside Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) facility at Sriharikota.
“Agnikul is holding the launch out of an abundance of caution based on certain minor observations from the full countdown rehearsals last night,” it said in a statement. The company will announce a new date and time for the launch. The IIT-Madras incubated start-up is 3-D printing its space vehicle – Agnibaan, with single piece 3D-printed engine.
My post earlier this week about the location of this private launchpad was in error. The launchpad might be privately owned, but it is not at a different location from ISRO’s main Sriharikota spaceport. It is located within that spaceport, and exists because the Modi government several years ago required ISRO to let private companies use its facilities. Agnikul decided to use this to its advantage, building a whole launchpad within the Sriharikota site.
ISRO completes second drop test runway landing of its own mini-reusable shuttle
Click for original image
India’s space agency ISRO yesterday successfully completed the second runway landing of its own mini-reusable shuttle, dubbed Pushpak, after the vehicle was dropped from a helicopter at an altitude of 2.8 miles.
This mission successfully simulated the approach and high-speed landing conditions of RLV returning from space. With this second mission, ISRO has re-validated the indigenously developed technologies in the areas of navigation, control systems, landing gear and deceleration systems essential for performing a high-speed autonomous landing of a space-returning vehicle. The winged body and all flight systems used in RLV-LEX-01 were reused in the RLV-LEX-02 mission after due certification/clearances. Hence reuse capability of flight hardware and flight systems is also demonstrated in this mission. Based on the observations from RLV-LEX-01, the airframe structure and landing gear were strengthened to tolerate higher landing loads. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted sentences I think are the most significant. ISRO is pushing hard for reusability.
The concept of this spacecraft is somewhat comparable to the X-37B, though all the engineering can be applied to larger shuttles that can carry cargo and humans in and out of orbit. At the moment however Pushpak is simply an engineering test prototype, not yet ready for orbital flights. For example, the landing gears are too large and cannot be retracted, something unacceptable for orbital flights.
Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass – Tijuana Brass Medley
An evening pause: Performed live on television 1975.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
March 21, 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.
- Space Force awards three contracts for developing orbital servicing technologies
The contracts went to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, and a new startup Spacebilt.
- Rocket Factory Augsburg touts its proposed Argo cargo freighter
The link provides a detailed description of this new spacecraft, clearly intended to provide ferrying services to the upcoming future space stations, with its most likely customer the Starlab station being built by Voyager Space, which is partnering with ESA and Airbus. This German company hopes to launch it by 2028.
- Chinese pseudo-company delivers 1st stage engines for another Chinese pseudo-company
The engines are for Space Pioneer’s Tianlong-3 rocket, which is essentially a copy of Falcon 9, and hopes to do a first launch in July.
- Astronomers complain about budget cuts to Hubble and Chandra
Hey, if you are going to push for expensive, overbudget, and behind-schedule boondoggles like the Roman Space Telescope, you better recognize that real telescopes will suffer to pay for them.
SpaceX launches a cargo Dragon to ISS
SpaceX today successfully launched a Dragon freighter to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The cargo Dragon was flying for the fourth time. It will dock with ISS on March 23, 2024. The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing back at one of SpaceX’s landing pads at Cape Canaveral.
This was also the first Dragon launch from this particular SpaceX launchpad in four years. The company only recently reconfigured it for Dragon flights, both manned and unmanned, so that it has two options for launching NASA manned missions. NASA had demanded this before it would give SpaceX permission to launch Superheavy/Starship from that rocket’s new launchpad in Florida. The agency thought it was too close to SpaceX’s first manned launchpad, and wanted an option in case a Superheavy launch failure damaged the Dragon launchsite. With this success SpaceX is one step closer to flying operational Superheavy/Starship flights out of Cape Canaveral.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
28 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 33 to 21, while SpaceX now leads the entire world, including American companies, 28 to 26.
Some more “What the heck?” geology on Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small part of a region dubbed Iani Chaos, but what this geology shows is way beyond my pay grade.
Why there are those tiny aligned mounds, oriented at right angles to the slope, is not clear at all. Nor is it obvious what created the lighter chaotic terrain at the base of the slope.
The elevation difference between the low and high points is about 400 feet. The slope continues up to the west for another 600 feet to the top of a north-south ridgeline. The patterns here suggest vaguely some flows downhill, such as that widening east-to-west gap, but only vaguely.
The look at the overview map only compounds the mystery.
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Mob of Democrats threatens violence against conservative students at the University of Memphis
Democrats in Georgia in 1915, lynching Leo Frank
In a now typical display of the modern leftist protest movement, a mob of Democrats threatened to kill attendees at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Memphis on March 20, 2024 where Kyle Rittenhouse was scheduled to appear.
A savage mob terrorized conservative students attending a Turning Point USA event featuring Kyle Rittenhouse at the University of Memphis. The mob literally chased conservative students shouting obscenities and violent threats. Several students who had been attending a campus Bible study were also caught up in the melee. Eyewitnesses say the mob made direct threats against TPUSA leadership. Radical black activists cheered the chaos. There are no reports of arrests. The TPUSA group later found refuge in a nearby safe house
When Rittenhouse attempted to give his speech, he was shouted down and forced to go directly to Q&As. Though it seemed from at least one clip that this Q&A proceeded with some civility (though interspersed with many angry catcalls from the crowd), it ended abruptly after thirty minutes, which according to Rittenhouse was because they had a hard cut off time.
At the first link are numerous videos showing that mob in all its glory, one of which is embedded below. It shows several attendees of the event being escorted into the building by police, as the mob surrounds and chases them, shouting curses and threats.
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Citizen scientist project discovers 16 active asteroids
A project that has enlisted approximately 8,300 ordinary citizens to review more than 430,000 photos taken by a telescope in Chile has discovered sixteen asteroids that produce comae and tails like comets.
Identifying and tracking active asteroids whose activity specifically appears to be due to the sublimation of ice – known as main-belt comets – is a particular interest of the project team, as it is an essential part of understanding the abundance and distribution of volatile material like ice in the Solar System.
…The project, utilizing publicly available Dark Energy Camera (DECam) data from the Victor M. Blanco telescope in Chile, involved the examination of more than 430,000 images of known minor planets by 8,300 volunteers, where images identified by citizen scientists as being likely to contain active asteroids were then passed on to the science team for confirmation and additional analysis.
You can read the research paper here. If you want to participate, the Active Asteroids project is still on-going, and can be accessed here.
Six launch companies give updates on the status of their rockets
Link here. The event was a panel at a conference where officials from SpaceX, ULA, Mitsubishi, Arianespace, Relativity, and Rocket Lab gave presentations.
Based on what is reported at the link, the Mitsubishi update was the most significant:
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) successfully launched its H3 rocket Feb. 16 after the rocket’s inaugural launch failed nearly a year earlier, a setback that Iwao Igarashi, vice president and general manager at MHI, called a “nightmare.” “There were no major problems with the rocket” on its second flight, he said.
We will have to see. Though everything worked as planned on the second flight, the true test on whether Mitsubishi has overcome the issues from the first launch will be the rocket’s third launch, presently scheduled for sometime next year.
A Relativity official said their Terran-R rocket is still targeting a first launch in 2026, while Rocket Lab was hopeful that the first launch of its larger Neutron rocket would occur by the end of this year.
China Long March 2D launches “group of satellites”; Russia scrubs manned Soyuz launch
China today successfully launched what it simply labeled as “a group of satellites”, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.
No other useful information was released about the payloads. Nor was there any word as to the crash site of the rocket’s first stage, which uses toxic hypergolic fuels and landed somewhere in China.
Meanwhile in Russia a launch of a Soyuz-2 rocket carrying three astronauts to ISS was aborted at about T-20 seconds for reasons that as yet remain unclear. According to NASA the next launch opportunity is March 23, 2024.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
27 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 32 to 21, while SpaceX remains ahead of the entire world, including American companies, 27 to 26.
Rocket Lab launches classified smallsat for National Reconnaissance Office
Rocket Lab in the early morning hours of March 21, 2024 successfully launched a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, its Electron rocket lifting off from Wallops Island in Virgina.
For this launch Rocket Lab made no attempt to recover its first stage. As of posting the payloads had not yet been deployed.
A Chinese Long March 2D launch was also scheduled to occur just prior to the Rocket Lab launch, but as of posting there was no word on whether that launch had taken place.
The leaders in the 2024 space race:
27 SpaceX
11 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia
American private enterprise presently leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 32 to 20, while SpaceX leads the entire world, including American companies, 27 to 25.
March 20, 2024 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Seasick Steve – Walkin’ Man
An evening pause: Performed live 2010.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
March 20, 2024 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any commegnts or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- First two boosters for first Ariane-6 launch are assembled and ready to fly
These are I think the side boosters, and both still need to be integrated with the core stage. Launch is targeting a June-July timeframe.
- SpaceX releases video of a test of its emergency escape system for its second manned launchpad at Cape Canaveral
That is one wild ride!
- Video of Queqiao-2’s 4.2 meter antenna unfolding shortly after deployment by rocket
Whatever one thinks of China’s government, the technology here is impressive.
Cracking terraces in Valles Marineris
Click for original image.
Today’s cool image returns us to the truly spectacular terrain found on the floor of West Candor Chasma, one of the giant side canyons that form Valles Marineris, the biggest canyon in the solar system, many times larger than the Grand Canyon on Earth.
The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 5, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). On the overview map above its location is indicated by the red dot in the inset. The two green dots mark previous cool images from August 2022 and February 2024.
All three images show the same wild alternating dark and light terracing, suggesting many sedimentary layers like those seen in our Grand Canyon, but enhanced by the different erosion processes of the thin Martian atmosphere and its one-third Earth gravity.
The second image to the right zooms in on the area indicated by the rectangle. What makes this area doubly interesting are the cracks that appear to cut through the terraces. In the north-south crack it also appears that the terraces are now offset on each side of the crack.
Apparently, some event, likely an earthquake that occurred after the terraces formed, caused the ground to rip apart, with the earth shifting sideways on either side. Though the seismometer on the InSight lander detected no major quakes in this region, this image suggests they have occurred here, sometime in the past.
To give you a sense of scale, the canyon’s nearby rim to the west is about 14,000 higher, making that canyon wall two to three times taller than the walls of the Grand Canyon.