Category: Behind The Black

Europe’s Solar Orbiter to make last flyby of Earth

8:51 am

Solar Orbiter, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) probe to work in tandem with NASA Parker Solar Probe in studying the inner regions surrounding the Sun, will make last flyby of Earth on November 27, 2021, thus putting it into its planned science orbit.

While the press release gives a good overview of the mission, it focuses on the risk during that fly-by of the spacecraft hitting something during its close approach.

Solar Orbiter’s Earth flyby takes place on 27 November. At 04:30 GMT (05:30 CET) on that day, the spacecraft will be at its closest approach, just 460 km above North Africa and the Canary Islands. This is almost as close as the orbit of the International Space Station.

The manoeuvre is essential to decrease the energy of the spacecraft and line it up for its next close pass of the Sun but it comes with a risk. The spacecraft must pass through two orbital regions, each of which is populated with space debris.

The first is the geostationary ring of satellites at 36 000 km, and the second is the collection of low Earth orbits at around 400 km. As a result, there is a small risk of a collision. Solar Orbiter’s operations team are monitoring the situation very closely and will alter the spacecraft’s trajectory if it appears to be in any danger.

While there is a risk, it seems to me that ESA is taking advantage of the recent news outburst in connection with the Russian anti-sat test and the space junk it created to sell this mission. The risk of impact during this fly-by is very low, especially in the geostationary ring.

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NASA awards Intuitive Machines another contract to deliver science instruments to Moon

8:37 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded Intuitive Machines its third contract to use its Nova-C lander to deliver four science instruments in 2024 to an unusual geological feature on the Moon.

The investigations aboard Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander are destined for Reiner Gamma, one of the most distinctive and enigmatic natural features on the Moon. Known as a lunar swirl, Reiner Gamma is on the western edge of the Moon, as seen from Earth, and is one of the most visible lunar swirls. Scientists continue to learn what lunar swirls are, how they form, and their relationship to the Moon’s magnetic field.

…Intuitive Machines will receive $77.5 million for the contract and is responsible for end-to-end delivery services, including payload integration, delivery from Earth to the surface of the Moon, and payload operations. This is Intuitive Machines’ third task order award, the first of which is a delivery to Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon during the first quarter of 2022. This award is the seventh surface delivery task award issued to a CLPS partner.

Below is the present schedule for these commercial unmanned lunar landers:

  • 2022: Astrobotic to deliver 11 instruments to the crater Lacus Mortis.
  • 2022: Intuitive Machines to deliver 6 payloads to Oceanus Procellarum.
  • 2022: Intuitive Machines to deliver a drill and two instruments to the lunar south pole.
  • 2023: Firefly to deliver 10 instruments to Mare Crisium.
  • 2023: Masten to deliver nine instruments to the lunar south pole region.
  • 2023: Astrobotic to deliver VIPER rover to lunar south pole region.
  • 2024: Intuitive Machines to deliver 4 payloads to Reiner Gamma.

No one should be surprised if some of these landers fail. The goal of this program is to jumpstart a commercial industry of private lunar landers, which is why NASA is awarding so many contracts. Some will fail. Some will succeed. In the end both NASA and the general public will have several competing options for landing payloads on the Moon.

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Axiom sets launch date for first private commercial manned mission to ISS

8:17 am

Capitalism in space: Axiom has set February 21, 2022 as the target launch date for its first private commercial manned mission to ISS, carrying one employee and three passengers for eight days.

In making the announcement the company emphasized the science research the passengers — Larry Connor, Mark Pathy, and Eytan Stibbe — will do:

The crew activities of Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) will focus on science, education, and outreach, conducting approximately 25 experiments while onboard the ISS. Critical data from studies in human research, life and physical sciences, technology demonstrations, and Earth observation will expand the applicability of microgravity research to new sectors. The crew has submitted over 100 hours of human-tended research to conduct during their stay on station.

The commander will be former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, who now works for Axiom. This will be his fifth spaceflight.

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Musk lays out Starship testing plan

12:27 am

Capitalism in space: In a meeting in Washington today, Elon Musk laid out SpaceX’s upcoming testing plan for developing its Starship/Superheavy heavy-lift reusable rocket.

“We’ve completed the first orbital booster and first orbital ship, and we’ll be complete with the launch pad and launch tower later this month, and then we’ll do a bunch of tests in December, and hopefully launch in January,” Musk said. “There’s a lot of risk associated with this first launch, so I would not say it is likely to be successful, but I think we’ll make a lot of progress,” musk said. “We’ve also built a factory for making a lot of these vehicles. So this is not a case for just one or two. We’re aiming to make a great many.

“We intend to do hopefully a dozen launches next year, maybe more,” Musk said. “And if we’re successful with it being fully reusable, that means we build up the fleet just as we are with the Falcon 9 booster, which is reused.”

Musk says the cost of a Starship launch will eventually fall below the cost of a Falcon 9 rocket flight, which a SpaceX manager said last year can fall below $30 million with reused parts.

“Basically, we intend to complete the test flight program next year, which means it’s probably ready for valuable payloads that are not for testing, but actual real payloads, in 2023.”

According to this schedule 2022 will be devoted to refining the rocket to make it dependable, and 2023 will be used to fly unmanned cargo flights to prove it out for later manned flights.

SpaceX will also likely develop in parallel the various expected versions of Starship, including the refueling ship, the manned lunar lander, and ships used for point-to-point transportation on Earth.

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Rocket Lab successfully launches two satellites; recovers 1st stage in ocean

8:27 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab tonight successfully launched two Blacksky satellites, a launch that had been delayed for several months because of the New Zealand COVID lockdowns.

The company also recovered the first stage after it splashdowned in the ocean. A helicopter stood by to observe the stage as it came down by parachute, getting data in preparation for a later recovery attempt where the helicopter will snatch the stage in the air by its parachutes and then transport it back to land.

This was Rocket Lab’s fourth launch in 2021, which brings it back into a tie with Northrop Grumman and ULA. All three however do not make the leader board. The leaders in the 2021 launch race remain unchanged:

41 China
25 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 41 to 39 in the national rankings.

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Haley Reinhart & Casey Abrams – Time of the Season

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Hat tip Dan Morris.

Readers! I am in need of evening pause suggestions! If you’ve seen something you think would work, say so in the comments, without providing a link. I will email you. For those interested in participating in making this webpage fun, here are my guidelines for suggesting evening pauses:

1. The subject line should say “evening pause.”
2. Don’t send more than three in any email. I prefer however if you send them one email at a time.
3. Variety! Don’t send me two or three or five from the same artist. I can only use one. Pick your favorite and send that.
4. Live performance preferred.
5. Quirky technology, humor, and short entertaining films also work.
6. Search BtB first to make sure your suggestion hasn’t already been posted.
7. I might not respond immediately, as I schedule these in a bunch.

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Volcanic vent on Mars

2:43 pm

Overview of Arsia Mons pits

To understand today’s cool image we really should start from a distance and zoom in. The overview map to the right focuses in on the two southernmost giant volcanoes in the string of three that sit to the east of Mars’ biggest volcano, Olympus Mons, and to the west of the planet’s biggest canyon, Valles Marineris.

The black dots mark the locations of the many high resolution photos taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that I have featured previously on Behind the Black. Many are isolated openings with no related geological features. Others appear to be skylights into a more extensive lava tube, hinted at by either a continuing surface depression or a series of similar skylights.

The white dot marks the location of today’s cool image, about 350 miles south of Arsia Mons’ caldera.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: David Horowitz Freedom Center banned from Breakers hotel in Florida

11:10 am

No free speech allowed at The Breakers
No free speech allowed at The Breakers. Photo: David Broad

The new dark age of silencing: The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida has banned the conservative David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC) from holding an event there, despite the fact that it has allowed such an event every year without problems for the past twenty years.

The reason?

“After a 20-year relationship with The Breakers resort, the Freedom Center was informed that we would no longer be allowed to have our annual Restoration Weekend event at the resort due to the Center being too controversial,” DHFC President Michael Finch told The Epoch Times. [emphasis mine]

The hotel claims the ban isn’t because of politics, but because the “logistical and operational requirements” of holding the annual event had become more complex. While the hotel was not specific, its statement strongly implied that the increased cost of security against leftist threats of violence caused it to cancel the contract.

In other words, the hotel endorses the heckler’s veto. Threaten violence against someone who disagrees with you and The Breakers will bend over backwards to silence that speaker for you.

I would say that anyone planning to visit Palm Beach should celebrate The Breakers new policy of cowardice and find some other hotel to stay at. It certainly seems that this hotel really isn’t interested in protecting conservatives from violence. It would rather ban them from existence.

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UAE Al-Amal Mars orbiter finds surprising variations in Mars atmosphere

10:32 am

Oxygen variations in Martian atmosphere
Click for full graphic.

The United Arab Emirates Al-Amal (“hope” in English) Mars orbiter has discovered unexpected variations of oxygen and carbon monoxide in the Martian atmosphere.

The EMM team had expected to observe a relatively uniform emission from oxygen at 130.4 nm across the planet and yet here we are, faced with unpredicted variations of 50% or more in the brightness.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the variations in oxygen on Mars’s dayside. Though the map does not indicate the geography below, the concentration of oxygen in the northern latitudes appears to correspond to the planet’s northern lowland plains. In fact, the variations should not have been a surprise, since the surface of Mars has such a stark dichotomy between its northern and southern hemispheres.

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Ingenuity’s 16th Martian flight is now scheduled for November 18

9:27 am

According to an update today from the Ingenuity science team, Ingenuity’s sixteenth flight on Mars is scheduled for no earlier than November 18th, and will be a relatively short hop of about 100+ meters to the north, compared to previous flights.

It appears the roughness of the terrain on this flight can cause an accumulating error in its flight software. Because the landing area is also rough, they want to bring the helicopter down sooner to make sure it lands close to where it should.

The present plan is to hop north to return to the location of Ingenuity’s first flight, at Wright Brothers Field. Along the way they will also consider installing an update in the flight software to improve the helicopter’s capabilities.

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NASA expected to finally certify Rocket Lab’s Virginia launchpad by end of year

9:15 am

It appears that after more than a year of delays, the NASA bureaucracy might finally approve launches at Rocket Lab’s new spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia by the end of the year.

The article at the link is mostly about Rocket Lab’s planned acquisition of another company that builds satellite deployment systems. However, its real story was in the last paragraph:

[T]he company is still waiting for NASA to complete certification of an autonomous flight termination system the company needs to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia. Delays in NASA’s certification of that system has, in turn, delayed the use of Launch Complex 2 there for Electron missions. “The current expectation is that it could be done as early as the end of the year,” [Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s chief financial officer] said of that certification, “which would allow us to commence flight operations out of LC-2 and Wallops in the first half of 2022.”

The company got FAA approval for launches more than a year ago, and had hoped to launch shortly thereafter. NASA however has blocked that launch, refusing for more than a year to approve the flight termination system Rocket Lab uses to destroy rockets should something go wrong just after launch.

The delay is baffling. Rocket Lab has successfully proven that its system works in that it has used it several times to safely abort launches in New Zealand. This success apparently has not been good enough for NASA’s bureaucrats, and the result is that Rocket Lab’s ability to launch rockets has been seriously hampered in ’21.

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Europe joins U.S. in condemning Russian anti-satellite test

8:57 am

Europe’s top space policy chief today joined the U.S. in strongly condemning the Russian anti-satellite test that produced a cloud of several thousand pieces of orbiting space junk.

European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton condemned Russia’s anti-satellite missile system test, which led to the destruction of a satellite in low orbit.

“As European Union (EU) Commissioner in charge of EU Space policy and in particular of Galileo & Copernicus, I join the strongest condemnations expressed against the test conducted by Russia on Monday November 15, which led to the destruction of a satellite in low orbit (COSMOS 1408),” Breton wrote on Twitter late on Tuesday.

The Russians continue to insist the debris poses no threat to ISS, but their own state-run press proves them wrong. This TASS report claims the debris is no threat because it orbits 40 to 60 kilometers (25 to 35 miles) above the station.

That the debris is presently orbiting above the station is exactly why it poses a threat. While mission controllers will periodically raise ISS’s orbit to counteract the loss of altitude due to friction from the very thin atmosphere at that elevation, the various orbits of the satellite debris will continue to fall. Eventually that entire cloud will be drop into ISS’s orbit.

It is likely that the debris spread over time will make it easy for controllers to shift ISS to avoid individual pieces, but the need to dodge will certainly increase with time, raising the odds that something will hit the ISS.

The test seems almost so stupid an act by Russia that one wonders if its purpose was to create a long term threat to ISS itself. At least one private U.S. company, Axiom, plans to attach its own modules to ISS and use it as a base for the next few years for commercial operations. Others want to use ISS as a hotel for private tourists.

The Russians meanwhile are planning to launch their own new station. If the Russians put it in an orbit safe from this debris cloud, this test will have thus conveniently damaged their main competitor in commercial space operations.

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UAE to raise private money to help refurbish Baikonur launchpad

8:39 am

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has struck a deal with both Russia and Kazakhstan to jointly work together to upgrade the oldest Soyuz launchpad at Baikonur, the one used to put Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961.

The most interesting aspect of the deal is its private investment component:

The modernisation of the spaceport involves reconstructing the site to allow for more launches, including commercial and human space flights to the International Space Station.

As part of the agreement, all three parties will bring investors forward to contribute towards the upgrade.

“The UAE space agency is not investing or facilitating as the government. We’re looking for private partners within the UAE to partake. There’s a lot of interest,” Mr Al Qasim said.

This suggests that in exchange for providing private capital, the UAE will obtain launching rights at Baikonur, available for its own privately-built rockets. None yet exist, but it is clear the UAE government is encouraging such activity.

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History Unplugged – The Age of Discovery 2.0: Episode 5

4:21 pm

Episode five of the six part series, The Age of Discovery 2.0, from the podcast, History Unplugged, is now available here.

On this episode Scott Rank interviews Rand Simberg. From the show summary:

The history of exploration and establishment of new lands, science and technologies has always entailed risk to the health and lives of the explorers. Yet, when it comes to exploring and developing the high frontier of space, the harshest frontier ever, the highest value is apparently not the accomplishment of those goals, but of minimizing, if not eliminating, the possibility of injury or death of the humans carrying them out.

To talk about the need for accepting risk in the name of discovery – whether during Magellan’s voyage in which 90 percent of the crew died or in the colonization of Mars – is aerospace engineer and science writer Rand Simberg, author of Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space.

For decades since the end of Apollo, human spaceflight has been very expensive and relatively rare (about 500 people total, with a death rate of about 4%), largely because of this risk aversion on the part of the federal government and culture. From the Space Shuttle, to the International Space Station, the new commercial crew program to deliver astronauts to it, and the regulatory approach for commercial spaceflight providers, our attitude toward safety has been fundamentally irrational, expensive and even dangerous, while generating minimal accomplishment for maximal cost.

Rand explains why this means that we must regulate passenger safety in the new commercial spaceflight industry with a lighter hand than many might instinctively prefer, that NASA must more carefully evaluate rewards from a planned mission to rationally determine how much should be spent to avoid the loss of participants, and that Congress must stop insisting that safety is the highest priority, for such insistence is an eloquent testament to how unimportant they and the nation consider the opening of this new frontier.

Definitely worth a listen, especially considering our society’s panic over COVID. Our society appears incapable of accepting any risk at all, even though risk cannot be avoided, and to do great things you must embrace it in some manner.

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Hubble operations contract extended to 2026, even as engineers work to fix it

3:10 pm

NASA announced today that it has extended the contract for operating the Hubble Space Telescope through 2026, even as it also provided an update on the effort of engineers to bring all the telescope’s science instruments out of safe mode.

[T]he agency has awarded a sole source contract extension to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) in Washington for continued Hubble science operations support at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, which AURA operates for NASA. The award extends Hubble’s science mission through June 30, 2026, and increases the value of the existing contract by about $215 million (for a total of about $2.4 billion).

…Currently, the spacecraft team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is investigating an issue involving missed synchronization messages that caused Hubble to suspend science observations Oct. 25. One of the instruments, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, resumed science observations Nov. 7, and continues to function as expected. All other instruments remain in safe mode.

During the week of Nov. 8, the Hubble team identified near-term changes that could be made to how the instruments monitor and respond to missed synchronization messages, as well as to how the payload computer monitors the instruments. This would allow science operations to continue even if several missed messages occur. The team has also continued analyzing the instrument flight software to verify that all possible solutions would be safe for the instruments.

In the next week, the team will begin to determine the order to recover the remaining instruments. The team expects it will take several weeks to complete the changes for the first instrument.

It appears that it is going to take some time to bring all the instruments back in line, considering that they are fixing the instruments one-by-one, in sequence, and that the first fix is taking weeks. Hopefully as they get each instrument back they will be able to move faster once they know what works.

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Russia confirms and defends anti-satellite test

1:33 pm

Russia today confirmed that it had done the anti-satellite missile test earlier this week that destroyed one of its defunct satellites and produced a cloud of space junk.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence also issued a Russian-language statement defending the test. The minister-general of the army, Sergei Shoigu, said that the test was successful and that “the resulting fragments do not pose any threat to space activities,” according to a machine-generated translation to English.

The U.S. State Department said Monday that the test created a cloud of space debris made up of over 15,000 objects, calling it a threat to astronauts and cosmonauts, and space activities of all countries. The debris could pose a threat for years to come, experts have said. The space station’s crew had to shelter in their return ships on Monday when the debris cloud was first detected.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos wrote on Twitter Monday that the space debris cloud “has moved away from the ISS orbit”, which is roughly 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. The space debris tracker LeoLabs estimates the debris cloud is at 273 to 323 miles (440 to 520 km) in altitude. However, “the station is in the green zone,” Roscosmos added.

The Russian claim that the debris at present poses no threat to ISS could very well be true. The trouble is that it appeared to have posed a threat initially, and will likely be a problem in the future. As a signatory of the Outer Space Treaty, Russia was required to avoid such a situation, and chose not to.

The article at the link notes similar tests by China (2007), the U.S. (2008), and India (2019). Of all these anti-satellite tests, only the U.S. targeted a satellite in an orbit so low that the debris posed no threat to operating satellites or manned spacecraft, and was also quickly pulled Earthward to burn up in the atmosphere. India chose a higher satellite whose debris posed less threat, but took longer to burn up and was initially of some concern.

China and Russia could have done the same thing. They did not, and their irresponsibility has badly worsened a problem that already was considered a serious concern.

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Craters in the soft Martian northern lowland plains

12:25 pm

Craters in the soft Martian northern lowland plains
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was a featured image today from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The caption, written by Carol Weitz of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, focused on the wind patterns created within these craters.

These impact craters in the northern middle latitudes have interesting interiors: all of them have wind-blown (aeolian) ripples.

Outside of the craters and along the crater floors, the ripples are all oriented in the same direction. However, along the walls of some of the larger craters, the ripples are situated radially away from the center, indicating the winds moving inside the larger craters can be influenced by the topography of the crater wall.

Additionally, many of the larger craters have layered mesas along their floors that are likely sedimentary deposits laid down after the craters formed but prior to the development of the aeolian ripples.

I am further intrigued by the rimless nature of these craters, as well as the lack of significant rocky debris at their edges. They all look like the bolides that created them impacted into a relatively soft surface that, rather than break up into rocks and boulders, melted, flowed, and then quickly refroze into these depressions.

The location, as always, provides us a possible explanation.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: HS student sues after being punished for saying there are only two genders

11:12 am

No free speech allowed at Exeter High School in New Hampshire.
No free speech allowed at Exeter High School in New Hampshire.
Photo: Austin Blake Grant

They’re coming for you next: A freshman student from Exeter High School in New Hampshire is suing his school district and assistant principal for suspending him from one football game because he had stated his Catholic belief that there are only two genders in a text message exchange with another student.

The boy’s name is at this point being withheld, with the lawsuit being handled by his attorney, Ian Huyett of Cornerstone Action, a Christian advocacy group focused on New Hampshire issues.

The lawsuit alleges the student received a one-game suspension in September in violation of his constitutional right to free speech and the New Hampshire Bill of Rights because he expressed what the suit called his Catholic belief there are “only two genders,” male and female.
» Read more

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Branson sells another $300 million in Virgin Galactic stock

9:00 am

Capitalism in space: Richard Branson has sold another $300 million of his Virgin Galactic stock, reducing his share in the company to only 11.9%.

When Virgin Galactic went public, Branson sold off 49%, so that he was still the majority owner with 51% holdings. Since then, he has made more a billion dollars reducing his holdings to a point where today he is a very minor player in the company. Meanwhile, after that one suborbital passenger flight in July, that included Branson, the company has delayed further commercial suborbital flights until late next year while it overhauls WhiteKnightTwo and Unity.

Branson’s entire strategy with this company sure looks like a classic case of a pump-and-dump scheme. He pumps the company up for fifteen years, goes public, and then times his stock sales to maximize the value of the stock. And in the process he gets out before the company begins any commercial operations, when its viability will finally be demonstrated clearly.

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FAA targets finalizing Starship environmental report by end of year

3:56 pm

The FAA today announced that it hopes to complete the permit process for SpaceX’s Starship operations at Boca Chica by the end of this year.

If you go to the link you will see a table that shows the agency’s overall plan. The table also suggests that extensions in the permitting process are also possible, though it appears the FAA is working now to avoid this.

I say excellent. I also say I will believe it when I see it. I want the FAA to show me my skepticism of this bureaucratic process is not justified. I want it to prove to me that there is no politics working in the background to slow the process.

Remember, after six months of work the FAA’s draft reassessment approved SpaceX’s Starship operations. To now delay or reject that approval will require a some heavy outside pressure, since the majority of the comments received by the the FAA during the comment period were favorable to the project.

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Russian anti-sat test creates 1500 more pieces of space junk

3:40 pm

In what appears to be a test of Russia’s anti-satellite system dubbed Nudol, a defunct Russia satellite has been blasted into approximately 1,500 pieces by a missile launched from Russia.

Under normal circumstances, Kosmos 1408 would not have approached the International Space Station closely enough to pose a threat, however following the breakup, thousands of individual pieces of debris will have scattered into their own orbits. At least 1,500 pieces of debris from the satellite have already been identified by the United States Space Command. However, many smaller objects will have been generated, which will take much longer to identify. With high relative velocities, even a tiny fragment can cause significant damage should it collide with another spacecraft.

Owing to concerns about the debris cloud, the crew aboard the ISS were instructed to close hatches between the space station’s modules and take shelter aboard the Dragon and Soyuz capsules docked to the station.

According to the story at the link, ISS will cut through the expected debris cloud every orbit.

It is amazing that Russia would perform such a test on a satellite with an orbit that close to ISS’s, especially since there are many pieces of abandoned space junk in lower orbits so that their debris clouds would pose little problem, especially because their orbits would decay quickly.

This test is comparable to the Chinese anti-sat test in 2007, which caused a larger debris cloud that still poses a threat to ISS and other working satellites.

According to the Outer Space Treaty, a nation must control the objects it puts in space so that they pose no risk to others. Both the Russian and Chinese anti-sat tests prove these nations have no respect for the treaties they sign.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Texan denied COVID healthcare because he is white

1:34 pm

Racist criteria for medical treatment at MacArthur
Whites go to the back of the bus at MacArthur Medical Center

At the MacArthur Medical Center in Irving, Texas a white man was denied COVID monoclonal antibody treatments for the single reason that he happened to be white.

We know this is true because the individual, Harrison Hill Smith, posted a video of his experience, available at the link. Here is a transcript:

“So I’m not going to be able to get it today because I don’t qualify? What if I smoke or vape? What if I were black and Hispanic. Then I’d be able to qualify?” the white man, presumably Harrison Hill Smith, asks the healthcare worker in the video.

“Yup,” the healthcare worker, who’s black, replies.

“I’m being denied medical service because of my race?” Smith then asks again just to confirm.

“That’s the criteria,” the worker indifferently responds.

It also appears that the Texas Department of Health approves this discriminatory policy.
» Read more

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NASA IG: Artemis manned lunar landing will likely not happen in ’25

11:01 am

IG's estimate of SLS's per launch cost

According to a new NASA inspector general report released today [pdf], because of numerous technical, budgetary, and management issues, the planned Artemis manned lunar landing now set for 2025 is likely to be delayed several years beyond that date. From the report’s summary:

NASA’s three initial Artemis missions, designed to culminate in a crewed lunar landing, face varying degrees of technical difficulties and delays heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic and weather events that will push launch schedules from months to years past the Agency’s current goals. With Artemis I mission elements now being integrated and tested at Kennedy Space Center, we estimate NASA will be ready to launch by summer 2022 rather than November 2021 as planned. Although Artemis II is scheduled to launch in late 2023, we project that it will be delayed until at least mid-2024 due to the mission’s reuse of Orion components from Artemis I. … Given the time needed to develop and fully test [SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander] and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years. [emphasis mine]

Gosh, it sure didn’t long for my prediction from last week — that the new target date of ’25 was garbage — to come true.

Today’s report also states that it does not expect the first test launch of SLS to occur in February ’22, as NASA presently predicts, but later, in the summer of ’22. It then notes that the next SLS launch, meant to be the first manned launch of SLS and Orion and presently scheduled for late ’23, will almost certainly be delayed to mid-’24. And that’s assuming all goes well on the first unmanned test flight.

While the report lauds SpaceX’s fast development pace, it also does not have strong confidence in SpaceX’s ability to get its Starship lunar lander ready on time, and believes that NASA could see its completion occurring from three to four years later than planned.

The report also confirms an August 2021 inspector general report about NASA’s failed program to develop lunar spacesuits, stating that its delays make a ’24 lunar landing impossible.

The report states that Gateway is well behind schedule, and will likely not be operational until ’26, at the earliest. While the present plan for that first manned lunar landing does not require Gateway, Gateway’s delays and cost overruns impact the overall program.

Finally, the report firmly states that the per launch cost of SLS is $4.1 billion, a price that will make any robust lunar exploration program utterly unsustainable.

Before the arrival of Trump, NASA’s original plan for SLS and Gateway called for a manned lunar landing in 2028. The Trump administration attempted to push NASA to get it done by ’24. This inspector general report suggests to me that this push effort was largely wasted, that NASA’s Artemis program will likely continue to have repeated delays, announced piecemeal in small chunks. This has been the public relations strategy of NASA throughout its entire SLS program. They announce a target date and then slowly over time delay it in small amounts to hide the fact that the real delay is many years.

Expect this same pattern with the manned lunar landing mission. They announce a delay of one year from ’24 to ’25. After a year they will then announce another delay to ’26. A year later another delay to ’27. And so forth.

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Zhurong’s continuing travels on Mars

10:26 am

Zhurong overview map
Click for original map.

This past week the Chinese press released a new but limited update on the status of both its Mars orbiter Tianwen-1 and its Mars rover Zhurong.

The map to the right uses as its background a high resolution picture from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I have superimposed Zhurong’s route in green. You can get an idea of how far the rover has traveled since resuming communications with Earth in late October by comparing this map with the one I posted then. After stopping at a small sand dune (the crescent-shaped white features), it curved around to head to the southeast towards a rough area and a trough that is thought to be filled with sediment.

Meanwhile, the orbiter has shifted its orbit, changing from one dedicated mainly as providing a communications relay between Zhurong and Earth to one that now allows it to begin a two-year photographic survey of Mars.

To supplement the resulting gaps in communications for Zhurong, China and the European Space Agency (ESA) have made their first test using ESA’s Mars Express satellite as a relay satellite. Both hope to know soon whether it worked.

In either case, Zhurong’s travels will likely be slowed somewhat due to the reduction in communications access.

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China building floating sea platform for rocket launches

9:57 am

The new colonial movement: According to its social media channel, a Chinese pseudo-company is building a new floating sea platform to be used for both rocket launches of all kinds as well as first stage landings.

The 533 feet (162.5 meters) long, 131 feet (40 meters) wide “New-type rocket launching vessel” is being constructed for use with the new China Oriental Spaceport at Haiyang, Shandong province on the Eastern coast.

The new ship is expected to enter service in 2022. It will feature integrated launch support equipment and be capable of facilitating launches of the Long March 11, larger commercial “Smart Dragon” rockets and, in the future, liquid propellant rockets, according to the social media channel for the spaceport.

The vessel could also in the future be used for the recovery of first stages, possibly in the same way as SpaceX’s autonomous spaceport drone ships provide a landing platform for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket first stages.

Long March 11 uses solid rocket motors and is designed for quick launch from a simple launchpad, so this platform would work easily with it. Changing that platform to handle liquid fueled rockets however is not trivial, and once done the platform would not necessarily be a good place to land first stages, considering the presence very nearby of fuel tanks and fuel lines.

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Russian astronaut id’s possible leak location in Zvezda

9:50 am

A Russian astronaut today told mission control that he thinks he has located another leak in the Zvezda module of ISS.

Roscosmos cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov detected a possible air leak spot in the intermediate chamber of the Zvezda module aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the cosmonaut told the Flight Control Center during a communications session on Monday.

The Russian cosmonaut said he had traced the possible spot of the continued air leak while inspecting the Zvezda module’s intermediate chamber at the weekend. “I began preparing a perimeter for laying a cord today. I detected a suspicious spot and started to examine it,” the cosmonaut said, replying to a question about the work in the intermediate compartment in a live broadcast by NASA.

As the Russian cosmonaut said, he made a photo of the detected spot using a microscope with magnifying lens. He did not make video footage of the works, he said. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words are significant. Up until now all leaks that the Russians have identified have been in Zvezda’s aft section, the part where the docking port is located. That pattern suggested that the many dockings over the module’s two decade-plus lifespan could have led to stress fractures in that module.

That they might have now found an air leak in intermediate section of the module suggests that the age-caused stress fractures are occurring in a more widespread manner. This is very concerning.

On a positive note, when the astronauts sealed the earlier leaks in the aft module, the loss of air dropped significantly. If the leak stops entirely when they seal this leak, we will have some confidence that the problem is under some control, for the time being.

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