November 1, 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
Riccardo Cocchi &Yulia Zagoruychenko
An evening pause: Stay with it, it ain’t over till its over.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
November 1, 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 claims it is in the final steps to getting its LIFE inflatable module approved by NASA
This module will be about the only thing in the Orbital Reef station that is moving forward aggressively.
- Interview with NASA’s deputy manager supervising SpaceX’s contract for building the manned lunar lander based on Starship
Essentially, he outlines why a fixed-price contract and letting the company run the show, makes things happen. It also appears his office is doing things right.
- NASA’s corrupt and useless safety panel scolds SpaceX for not being perfect
This panel should have been disbanded years ago, when it claimed fueling the Falcon 9 with crew on board would be more dangerous. It is all politics, and it actually knows very little about modern rocketry.
- ULA’s Vulcan rocket wins 2024 Dr. Wernher von Braun spaceflight Trophy Award
This is essentially a participation award for a big contractor in the Huntsville area.
- Chinese pseudo-company claims it will build a rocket which will land using its own chopstick tower, and do it by ’26 at the latest
All they have right now is a short video animation essentially redrawing the actual Superheavy landing SpaceX did last month, plus about $14 million in funding.
Another model proposed for explaining flowing liquid water in the distant Martian past
Click for full resolution graphic.
A new model has now been proposed for explaining how liquid water could have once flowed on Mars and created the many channels and river-like features geologists see today.
This new theory posits that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, once thicker, fell as snow to bury water ice on the surface near the poles, where that ice then melted from pressure and heat from below to flow underground and then out into lower latitudes.
The paper, led by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist Peter Buhler, describes how 3.6 billion years ago, carbon dioxide froze out of Mars’ atmosphere and deposited on top of a water ice sheet at the poles, insulating heat emanating from Mars’ interior and increasing the pressure on the ice. This caused roughly half of Mars’ total water inventory to melt and flow across its surface without the need for climatic warming.
The graphic to the right is figure 1 from Buhler’s paper. It shows this process in the south pole, flowing north through Argyre Basin and along various now meandering channels to eventually flow out into the northern lowland plains. In every case Buhler’s model posits the water flowed in “ice-covered rivers” or “ice-covered lakes”, the ice protecting the water so that it could flow as a liquid.
This model confirms once again my impression that the Mars planetary community is increasingly considering glaciers and ice as a major past factor in shaping the planet we see today. This model suggests liquid water under ice, but it still remains possible that ice alone could have done the job.
A somewhat typical but strange crater in Mars’ Death Valley
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The camera team labels the primary feature in this picture as “ridges,” but what I see is a strange crater that at first glance appears to be impact-caused, but at closer inspection might be something else entirely.
This unnamed crater is about one mile wide. It is only about fifty feet deep, but sits above the surround landscape by about 200 feet. That high position suggests strongly that this crater was not formed by an impact by is instead a caldera from some sort of volcanic activity, with the splash apron around it simply examples of past magma flows erupting from within.
The ridges inside the crater might be glacial debris, as this location is at 35 degrees south latitude, making near surface ice possible.
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Boeing finally shuts down its DEI division
Boeing’s racist hiring goals in 2024
According to a report from Bloomberg news today, Boeing has now dismantled its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) division, with its head leaving the company.
Staff from Boeing’s DEI office will be combined with another human resources team focused on talent and employee experience, according to people familiar with the matter. Sara Liang Bowen, a Boeing vice president who led the now-defunct department, left the company on Thursday. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted phrase above tells us all we need to know. The focus under Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg will be “talent and employee experience,” not skin color or gender.
Bowen wrote the following in announcing her dismissal:
It has been the privilege of my lifetime to lead Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the Boeing company these past 5+ years. Our team strived every day to support the evolving brilliance and creativity of our workforce. The team achieved so much – sometimes imperfectly, never easily – and dreamed of doing much more still. [emphasis mine]
As far as I can tell, all that Bowen accomplished was to destroy the reputation of Boeing as a quality manufacturer of aerospace products. Instead, it became a place which hired people based on their race, and didn’t care if they knew the difference between a screwdriver and a forklift. The screen capture to the right comes from the company’s 2024 Boeing Sustainability & Social Impact Report [pdf], which is still online, as is the webpage of Boeing’s DEI division. Both still tout the racist quota goals of this DEI department that forced the company to consider race and gender above talent and experience in its hiring. Hopefully that ugliness will vanish soon as well.
Meanwhile, Boeing union employees on the west coast are about to vote on a third contract proposal, having rejected the previous two and going on strike since mid-September. I suspect the decision above to get rid of this poisonous DEI department will sit well with those union employees, and likely help to encourage them to approve the plan.
Scientists use Hubble and Webb to confirm there are as yet no planets forming in Vega’s accretion disk
Click for original image.
Using both the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, scientists have now confirmed, to their surprise, that the accretioni disk that surrounds the nearby star Vega is very smooth with almost no gaps, and thus apparently has not new exoplanets forming within it.
The two pictures to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, come from two different papers. The Hubble paper is here [pdf] while the Webb paper is here [pdf]. From the press release:
Webb sees the infrared glow from a disk of particles the size of sand swirling around the sizzling blue-white star that is 40 times brighter than our Sun. Hubble captures an outer halo of this disk, with particles no bigger than the consistency of smoke that are reflecting starlight.
The distribution of dust in the Vega debris disk is layered because the pressure of starlight pushes out the smaller grains faster than larger grains. “Different types of physics will locate different-sized particles at different locations,” said Schuyler Wolff of the University of Arizona team, lead author of the paper presenting the Hubble findings. “The fact that we’re seeing dust particle sizes sorted out can help us understand the underlying dynamics in circumstellar disks.”
The Vega disk does have a subtle gap, around 60 AU (astronomical units) from the star (twice the distance of Neptune from the Sun), but otherwise is very smooth all the way in until it is lost in the glare of the star. This shows that there are no planets down at least to Neptune-mass circulating in large orbits, as in our solar system, say the researchers.
At the moment astronomers consider the very smooth accretion disk surrounding Vega to be rare and exception to the rule, with most debris disks having gaps that suggest the presence of newly formed exoplanets within them. That Vega breaks the rule however suggests the rule might not be right in the first place.
North Korea launches test ballistic missile for the 1st time in almost a year
North Korea not only successfully launched on October 30, 2024 a test ballistic missile for the 1st time in almost a year, the missile set a new altitude record, reaching an altitude of 4,350 miles, more than a thousand miles higher than the country’s previous missile record.
Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani told reporters the missile’s flight duration of 86 minutes and its maximum altitude of more than 7,000 kilometers (4,350 miles) exceeded corresponding data from previous North Korean missile tests.
Having a missile fly higher and for a longer duration than before means its engine thrust has improved. Given that previous ICBM tests by North Korea have already proved they can theoretically reach the U.S. mainland, the latest launch was likely related to an effort to examine whether a missile can carry a bigger warhead, experts say.
In other words, North Korea is getting very close to having an operational ICBM that can deliver a nuclear warhead anywhere on the globe. Worse, it appears this solid-fueled rocket launches from a large mobile vehicle, making it impossible to locate and destroy beforehand.
Hypersonic engine manufacturer Reaction Engines goes bankrupt
Reaction Engines, the British hypersonic engine company that since 2011 has been touting its Skylon spaceplane and winning a variety of development contracts to build it. has now gone bankrupt, shutting down all operations.
However, this year, the company found itself in major financial difficulties due to unexpectedly slow growth and the inability to secure an additional £150 million (US$193 million) in funding, followed by BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce being unwilling to put up bail-out capital.
As a result, as of October 31, Reaction Engines is in the hands of administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The company’s website forwards to PwC where there is a notice saying that further information will be released to creditors as the available assets are assessed. According to Sky News, 173 of the company’s 208 staff were made redundant.
After more than a decade of work and no apparent progress, it appears no one was willing to front the company any additional cash.
European Commission finally awards contract to build its government Starlink-type constellation
The European Commission yesterday finally awarded a gigantic contract to a consortium of European satellite companises to build its government-conceived and government-designed communications constellation designed to duplicate constellations already in orbit and built by Starlink and OneWeb.
The full constellation, dubbed IRIS2 and first proposed in 2022, is expected to have 290 satellites. The consortium, dubbed SpaceRISE, is led by satellite companies SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat, and also includes Thales Alenia Space, OHB, Airbus Defence and Space, Telespazio, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Hisdesat, and Thales SIX.
In other words, practically every major European aerospace company gets a piece of the pie.
According to a 31 October press release, the European Commission aims to have the IRIS2 service up and running by 2030. The project was initially expected to cost approximately €6 billion, of which the European Commission would provide 60%, with the rest being covered by private industry. However, recent reports have indicated that the project’s budget will likely reach as much as €10 billion.
Based on these numbers, it is going to take more than six years to launch, with each satellite costing about 3.5 million euros.
This is a very typical European government project, conceived not to fill a real need but to make sure there is a European version of something for Europe to use. It is also conceived as a way to transfer cash to as many European aerospace contractors as possible. Considering the number of companies involved and the fact that the whole constellation is government designed, expect the budget to well exceed ten billion euros before completion, and take far longer to become operational than presently planned. For example, the project was first proposed more than two years ago and only now has the contract been issued. In that time SpaceX conceived and has practically launched its entire direct-to-cell Starlink constellation of about the same number of satellites.
House on Haunted Hill
An evening pause: For Halloween, I have decided to bring back this wonderfully staged classic from 1958, starring Vincent Price and directed by William Castle. No blood, no gore, but the worth every minute.
October 31, 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.
- Goldstone antenna touts its part in detecting Voyager-1’s signal, suddenly coming from a frequency not used in more than four decades
Truly something to tout, as this is amazing engineering detective work.
- Next launch of Mitsubishi’s H3 rocket for JAXA is now scheduled for November 2, 2024
The rocket will place a Japanese military communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit, the first time it has done so.
- The pseudo-commercial division of a Chinese space agency now aims to market itself to the international launch market
The pseudo-company is CAS Space, and its rocket is Kinetica-1 (which has launched four times so far). It also has its not-yet-flown Kinetica-2 rocket.How it hopes to garner any business having any links to American aerospace technology I have no idea. There are many strict laws and State Department ITAR regulations prohibiting any American business from working in or with China.