Stan Ridgway – Camouflage
An evening pause: Though performed live, this version is edited and dubbed with the official recording from 1986. While the song is quite good, I can’t help thinking about yesterday’s pause.
Hat tip Alex Gimarc.
Category: Behind The Black
November 27, 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.
- ULA’s CEO says they are right now modifying the nozzle design on the Vulcan solid-fueled strap-ons
He also says the changes will be ready for next launch.
- ULA’s CEO says that the number of BE-4 engines on hand is 3X what others claimed yesterday
Based on his claim, ULA has enough BE-4 engines now for 12 Vulcan launches next year.
- December 3, 2024 Vega-C launch delayed again
No new launch date announced. The reason for the new delay was not given, other than a vague statement that “preliminary checks” have to be done.
- On this day in 2018 InSight touched down on Mars
Though the mission was able to do the first seismology on Mars, overall it was a troubled mission. It was delayed years because the first seismometer, built by France, didn’t work and had to be replaced, and then the second science instrument, a German-built drill designed to drill down five meters, failed to work on Mars.
Unusual light-colored Martian dunes
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 27, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The picture was simply labeled a “terrain sample,” which usually means it was taken not as part of any specific research request, but to fill a gap in the schedule so as to maintain the camera’s proper temperature. When such gap-filler pictures are necessary, the MRO camera team tries to snap something of interest. Sometimes the pictures end up somewhat boring. This time however the picture highlights a dune field that is unusually light in color.
Since most Martian sand is volcanic in origin, it tends to look dark in orbital pictures. That this sand looks bright could be because it is inherently different, or it could be that lighting conditions make what normally looks dark to look bright instead.
» Read more
Trump’s picks to run all the federal health agencies guarantees major change is coming
Trump defiant
Fight! Fight! Fight! The announcement late yesterday that president-elect Donald Trump has picked Jay Bhattacharya, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH) underlined quite forcefully the certainty that the outsider nature of all of Trump’s picks to head all the health-related agencies in the federal government will led to major changes in how those agencies operate.
Bhattacharya had been blacklisted for his very vocal opposition to the government’s lockdown and mandate policies during the COVID epidemic. He along with Martin Kulldorff, one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccines and who was also blacklisted during the epidemic, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration that strongly criticized the policies imposed by these health agencies, calling instead for a return to the standard response to infectious diseases that had been followed successfully for more than a century.
Putting Bhattacharya in charge of NIH is incredibly ironic. When he along with Kulldorff had come out opposed to the lockdown and jab mandates advocated by Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, Collins in league with Anthony Fauci, then head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), put together a back-room campaign to have Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and many others blacklisted across social media. This campaign also had Kulldorff removed as a member of the CDC’s vaccine safety advisory committee.
Two years later, Collins is now gone, is being sued for his actions, and Bhattacharya has replaced him.
Trump’s defiant choice of Bhattacharya however is only one of many similar decisions, beginning last month with the choice of Robert Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
» Read more
NASA: forcing it to fly VIPER would cause it to cancel funding to 1 to 4 other commercial lunar landers
VIPER’s now canceled planned route at the Moon’s south pole
According to a response by NASA to a House committee and obtained by Space News, if Congress forces the agency to fly its canceled VIPER moon rover NASA would have to cancel funding to one to four other commercial lunar landers being built by private companies as part of NASA’s CLPS program.
In one scenario, NASA assumed VIPER would launch on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander as previously planned in September 2025. The agency estimated it would need to spend $104 million to prepare VIPER itself, $20 million of which had already been allocated for activities in fiscal year 2024, along with $20 million in “additional risk mitigation activities” for Griffin. “NASA estimated that these additional funding requirements would lead to cancellation of one CLPS delivery and delay of another delivery by a year,” it stated.
A second scenario anticipated a one-year slip in VIPER’s launch to September 2026. NASA projected an additional $50 million in costs for VIPER and $40 million for Griffin. That would have resulted in two canceled CLPS task orders and a one-year delay to two others.
NASA also revealed it considered “alternative delivery means” for VIPER other than Griffin. NASA did not disclose details about those alternatives, calling them “highly proprietary” but which would have delayed the launch of VIPER beyond 2026 “and would still include significant uncertainty about the reliability of delivery success.” NASA projected total costs of $350 million to $550 million with this scenario, resulting in the cancellation of four CLPS task orders and delaying three to four more by two years.
NASA preferred option is for a private company to take over VIPER. At the moment the agency is reviewing eleven proposals put forth by such companies that has “enough spaceflight experience and technical abilities to conduct the VIPER mission.”
Congress has gotten involved because the science community has lobbied hard to save it. The project itself has been a problem for NASA since its first iteration as Resource Prospector, when NASA would have built both the rover and lander. It has consistently gone over budget and behind schedule, even after NASA gave the lander portion to a private company, Astrobotic. At present the rover is 3X over budget with more overages expected, which is why NASA cancelled it.
American spaceplane startup signs deal with Australian spaceport startup
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.
The American spaceplane startup Titans Space, which hopes to develop a reusuable space plane based on designs developed in the 1970s by Rockwell, has now signed a deal with the Australian spaceport startup Space Port Australia to work together to find an Australian location for both building the spaceplane and launching it.
Titans Space, a company that is taking an innovative approach to the space industry, has ambitious plans to become the largest low-earth orbit and lunar space tourism company in the world, as well as the largest “real estate owner in space and the Moon”.
Space Port Australia, which is headquartered in the NSW regional town of Moree, is committed to creating an integrated space facility which fosters innovation, industry, education and helps grow Australia’s place in the space sector.
Though Titans has raised some investment capital, this project is right now in its aspirational phase. It is very possible none of this will happen. This announcement is mostly an attempt to generate interest in both projects.
As for Space Port Australia, if it finds a location for this project it would be the fourth spaceport in Australia, joining the three spaceports that already have completed or have planned launches, as shown on the map to the right.
FCC approves use of Starlink for direct cell-to-satellite T-Mobile service
Despite objections from all of SpaceX’s competitors, the FCC has now approved the use of its Starlink constellation for direct cell-to-satellite service as part of T-Mobile’s cellular network.
The decision noted that many technical issues still must be cleared.
There are a few limitations on how this type of service (which the FCC calls “supplemental coverage from space,” or SCS) can work. Right now it officially has to operate as an extension of an existing terrestrial provider, in this case T-Mobile. That’s because the regulations on how you broadcast stuff in space are different from those for how you broadcast stuff to and from a phone (as opposed to a base station antenna). AT&T, for its part, is partnering with AST SpaceMobile.
SpaceX must also be sure that its service does not interfere with other services on the ground, while the ground services do not have to worry about whether they might interfere with the satellite signals.
Nonetheless, this approval likely means that soon users of T-Mobile (as well as AT&T) will no longer have any dead zones. When there are no cell towers available, their phones will simply access the orbiting constellations of either Starlink or AST SpaceMobile.
ESA flies suborbital rocket from Swedish spaceport
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday successfully flew a small suborbital rocket from the Esrange spaceport in Sweden, completing the sixteenth such flight since 1987.
The rocket reached an altitude of 256 km before falling back to Earth and providing approximately six minutes of microgravity to six scientific experiments onboard.
…All systems performed well during the flight and the valuable payloads were recovered by helicopter soon after landing. Flight samples of the experiments will now be returned for further analysis to science teams from Sweden, Germany and Finland, after more than two years of preparations.
This suborbital launch is only a preliminary of much bigger things to come. The rocket startup Firefly is building a launchpad at Esrange for orbital launches. Furthermore, the European startup MaiaSpace, a subsidary of ArianeGroup, plans to do tests of its partly reusable Maia rocket there in 2025.
Judge dismisses lawsuit against SpaceX by activists
A federal judge has now thrown out a lawsuit that had been filed by anti-Musk activists in an attempt to halt all launches by SpaceX of its Starship/Superheavy rocket at Boca Chica.
U.S. District Judge Rolando Olvera issued his ruling last Thursday in response to the request filed by Save RGV on Oct. 9. The group has alleged that SpaceX’s water deluge system is releasing untreated industrial wastewater during launches and sought to halt the launches.
The water deluge system is designed to dampen the effects of Starship’s rocket engine blasts during liftoff and static fire engine testing.
“At the beginning of the Starship-Super Heavy Launch System’s development, it became evident that a deluge water system was necessary to protect the launch site and surrounding areas during launches,” Olvera wrote in the order. “A deluge water system sprays large quantities of potable water at the base of the spacecrafts during launch to prevent fires and reduce dispersal of dust and debris.
“Because of these dangers, Defendant cannot launch its spacecrafts without the deluge water system.”
SpaceX had argued that environmental reviews by both federal and state agencies had determined that the deluge system caused no harm. Olvera concurred, and also noted that to block launches would do significant harm to SpaceX and NASA’s entire lunar program.
This activist group, which represents almost no one in southern Texas, has no real interest in the environment. It filed this and other lawsuits simply as lawfare to try to stymie SpaceX for political reasons, knowing that we have more than seven decades of data at spaceports in Florida and California that prove rocket launches and deluge systems cause no environmental harm. In fact, they help wildlife by creating a large refuge where that wildlife can thrive.
Expect further similar lawsuits, all of which will be summarily dismissed afterward.
What I wonder is who is paying for this lawfare? SaveRGV likely doesn’t have the resources.
Engineers restore Voyager-1 after communications issue
The routes the Voyager spacecraft have
taken since launch.
Engineers have now manged to resume normal communications with the Voyager-1 interplanetary probe after it had shut down its main communications channel last month due to low power levels.
Earlier this month, the team reactivated the X-band transmitter and then resumed collecting data the week of Nov. 18 from the four operating science instruments. Now engineers are completing a few remaining tasks to return Voyager 1 to the state it was in before the issue arose, such as resetting the system that synchronizes its three onboard computers.
The X-band transmitter had been shut off by the spacecraft’s fault protection system when engineers activated a heater on the spacecraft. Historically, if the fault protection system sensed that the probe had too little power available, it would automatically turn off systems not essential for keeping the spacecraft flying in order to keep power flowing to the critical systems. But the probes have already turned off all nonessential systems except for the science instruments. So the fault protection system turned off the X-band transmitter and turned on the S-band transmitter, which uses less power.
The S-band transmitter had not been used since 1981, so it took awhile for ground engineers to find the very weak signal. Once found however it was possible to recover operations, though those operations will likely continue for only another year or two. The spacecraft’s power supply is expected to finally run out sometime in ’26 or ’27.
Two launches early today
China and SpaceX successfully completed launches early today.
First, the Chinese pseudo-company Landspace launched a new version of its Zhuque-2 methane-fueled rocket, lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China. The mission placed two test satellites into orbit, but more important, the launch tested the rocket’s new fuel-loading systems that copies SpaceX’s, loading the fuel quickly and cooling it to a lower temperature to increase its density and thus allow more to be packed into its tanks.
No word on where the rocket’s first stage crashed inside China.
SpaceX then placed 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
122 SpaceX
55 China
14 Russia
13 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 141 to 82, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 122 to 101.
November 26, 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.
- ULA confirms it has the engines in house for flights 3, 4, 5, and 6 of Vulcan Centaur
What this means is that Blue Origin is finally figuring out how to produce BE-4 engines on an assembly line basis. Not only does this bode well for Vulcan launches, it bodes well for Blue Origin’s own New Glenn rocket.
- Asteroid that was a temporary moon of the Earth might have come from the Moon itself
Its solar orbit allows it to loop around the Earth periodically, but then escape back into its solar orbit. This time it was captured by the Earth for 57 days.
- Progress hatch now open and cargo unloading is proceeding as planned
The Russians think the “toxic smell” first detected when the hatch was first opened came not from this freighter but from the docking port itself. No further details however have been released.
- Russian government approves sale by Roscosmos of older hardware lacking historical value
This allows Roscosmos to earn quick cash by selling off things like older Soyuz capsules sitting unused in warehouses.
- Chinese pseudo-company Space Pioneer is reported to have resumed static fire tests of the first stage of its Tianlong-3 rocket
In June during a previous test the stage broke free from its mounts and launched itself.
- Missouri senator touts his effort to reform the space regulatory framework
Lots of blather, but little substance. The bottom line remains that the administrative state has too much power, and the bills this guy helped pass did little to change that.
- Blue Origin has lowered New Glenn at the launchpad from vertical to horizontal
It did so without doing any static fire tests. Either there is an issue that is delaying things again, or the company is still proceeding in its normal leisurely pace that gets nothing done now if it can be done months hence.
- On this day in 1958 NASA chose the name “Mercury” for its first manned space program
This was before there was any plan to send astronauts to the Moon, so the Gemini and Apollo programs did not yet exist. Mercury was the entire American manned program.