August 23, 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
Ringo Starr, Robbie Robertson, & many others – The Weight
An evening pause: It remains amazing how pervasive the music of the 1960s remains, worldwide.
Hat tip Mike Nelson for providing this nice way to go into the weekend.
August 23, 2024 Quick space link
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.
Only one today from Jay. A quiet day.
- Mynaric’s manufacturing woes threaten to delay production of U.S. military satellites
The German company is to supply the optical terminals that the satellites will use to send and receive laser signal, and its contract involves supplying these terminals to four other companies in their contracts with the Pentagon. It apparently is having problems scaling up the production of these units from making a few to many in order to serve a plethora of constellations.
Robert Kennedy’s speech today, in which he suspends his campaign and endorses Trump
Even Robert Kennedy agrees with this now
Below I have embedded in its entirety Robert Kennedy Jr.’s speech today where he announced he has suspended his campaign, endorsed Donald Trump for president, and declared he will campaign for him.
You should watch it, especially beginning from around seven minutes into the speech, when he begins to describe at length the tyrannical anti-democratic nature of today’s modern Democratic Party, and why that nature has forced him to leave that party, the party of his father, Robert Kennedy and his uncle, John Kennedy, to which he has belonged since he was a child. The key quote:
I attended my first Democratic convention at the age of six in 1960 and back then, the Democrats were the champions of the Constitution of civil rights. The Democrats stood against authoritarianism against censorship against colonialism, imperialism and unjust wars. We were the party of Labor of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the bulwark against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name. It was the Party of Democracy.
As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war censorship, corruption, big Pharma, big tech big ag and big money wanted abandoned democracy by canceling the primary to conceal the cognitive decline of the sitting president.
He now sees Trump as the only way now to prevent this party of censorship and corruption from destroying our great nation.
This quote however does not give you the full flavor of his speech. It is nuanced, thoughtful, educated, and principled. You might not agree with everything he believes, but you will discover that he came to those beliefs based on rational thought, reasoned research, and critical thought. And it is that ability to think critically and openly about the Democratic Party — that he and his family have been an integral part for more than half a century — and to reject it and endorse Donald Trump. It is therefore incumbent upon every American citizen to do the same, to use our brains to make a thoughtful (not emotional) choice in November.
Which means it is incumbant upon everyone to spend a short 40 minutes to watch this speech. If you run it at 1.5 speed you can still understand everything, it will take less time.
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Finding beauty on Mars in all the strange places
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on May 23, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The white dot in the inset of the overview map above indicates the location on Mars, smack dab in the middle of the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip that I call glacier country, because practically every close-up image of this region shows glacial features.
This picture is no exception. The arrows in the inset show the downhill grade, falling about 1,700 feet across the entire inset. That grade is a reflection of the transition that takes place in this glacier country from the cratered southern highlands to the northern lowland plains.
I decided to crop the image at full resolution — showing only a tiny portion — because to my eye these curving linear grooves, produced naturally as Mars’ climate cycles cause glaciers to shrink and then grow repeatedly so that each cycle lays down a new line while squeezing the previous lines, are almost like a work of art. This might be nothing more than a glacier on an alien planet, but nature has caused it to form a very beautiful picture.
NASA adds three orbital tug startups to its contract bid list
NASA yesterday added three orbital tug startups to its contract bid list, allowing these companies to bid on projects that require the deployment of NASA smallsats to different orbits after launch.
NASA announced Aug. 22 that it selected Arrow Science and Technology, Impulse Space and Momentus Space for its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract. That selection allows them to compete for task orders for launching specific missions, typically small satellites willing to accept higher levels of risk in exchange for lower launch costs.
Arrow provides small satellite companies the deployment equipment used to release the satellite after launch. Impulse and Momentus have orbital tugs that not only deploy smallsats, but move them to their preferred orbit after the tug’s release from its launch rocket.
This NASA announcement allows its smallsats to be launched on either a dedicated small rocket that puts the satellite in its desired orbit or as part of a larger rideshare launch with many satellites that then uses the tug to get the satellite where it needs to be.
Amazon commits almost $20 million more to expanding its satellite production facility
Amazon yesterday revealed it is going to spend an addition $19.5 million to expand its satellite production facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in order to overcome the long multi-year delay in getting production started.
The company said Aug. 22 the investment will support a secondary, 3,900-square-meter support facility at the site, which would help accelerate launch cadence amid a looming regulatory deadline to deploy half the constellation by July 2026. The building would join a 9,300-square-meter satellite processing facility Amazon announced last year at Kennedy’s runway-equipped Launch and Landing Facility, bringing total investment in the site to nearly $140 million.
The company hopes to open this additional facility by next year. It will need it, because its FCC license for its Kuiper internet constellation — conceived to be similar to SpaceX’s Starlink — requires it to launch half of the constellation of 3,200+ satellites by 2026 and have the entire constellation in orbit by 2029. Meeting that first deadline will be challenging at this point, though the company hopes to be launching frequently in the next few years. It has contracts to launch satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9. To provide payloads for those launches however it will need to be able to quickly build a lot of satellites, and that’s what this additional investment is for.
It must be noted again that the Kuiper constellation was first proposed by Amazon at almost the exact same time as Elon Musk proposed his Starlink constellation. SpaceX now has several thousand satellites in orbit and is earning several billion dollars per year from several million signed up customers. Amazon in comparison has only launched two test satellites and zero operational satellites in that same time frame.
Norway approves spaceport license for Andoya
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
The Norwegian government announced yesterday that the Andoya spaceport that has been used for decades for suborbital test launches, has been given a spaceport license to conduct orbital launches from the site.
According to a statement from the Norwegian ministry, the license allows the spaceport to conduct up to 30 launches a year, including four during overnight hours. Those launches, to be overseen by the Civil Aviation Authority of Norway, can take place on azimuths between 280 and 360 degrees, supporting missions primarily to polar and sun-synchronous orbits.
The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace already has a 20-year lease to conduct orbital launches from Andoya, and hopes to do the first orbital test launch of its Spectrum rocket there. According to the Norway government, the first launch is planned for this year, but that likely will only be a suborbital test, not a full orbital launch. Of the three rocket startups from Germany, Isar is the only one that has not yet done any engine tests (as far as we know) or suborbital test launches of its rocket engine or design. Hyimpulse has done a suborbital test launch from an Australian spaceport, and Rocket Factory Augsburg have done numerous tests both in Germany and at the Saxaford spaceport. This license to Andoya will likely signal the start of those public tests by Isar.
A fourth European rocket startup, PLD from Spain, is presently prepping its own launchpad in French Guiana, and hopes to conduct its own first orbital test launch next year.
Until this week it appeared that Rocket Factory was in the lead to be the first European rocket startup to attempt an orbital launch. That changed when the rocket’s first stage was destroyed during a static fire launchpad engine test earlier this week. Right now it is not clear who is in the lead.
Rocket Factory identifies cause of failure during rocket static fire test
According to Rocket Factory Augsburg, its investigation into the explosion during the first full nine-engine static fire test of its RFA-1 rocket earlier this week has identified the cause of the failure.
In an update on LinkedIn on 22 August, RFA COO Dr. Stefan Brieschenk announced that the company had completed an initial internal review. In what Dr. Brieschenk describes as “very preliminary” findings, he explains that the company has identified an “oxygen fire in one of the turbopumps” as the root cause of the incident. “That engine and that turbopump have run before without issues, wrote Dr. Brieschenk. “Eight engines ignited. We had multiple back-up and safety systems in place that were supposed to shut everything down – but things did not align on Monday as planned.”
As he notes, this is very preliminary. The company probably still does not know why the fire occurred in that turbopump, and it will need to find out in order to fix the problem. And without that fix, it is almost certain the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) will not issue the company a launch license when a new first stage is built and delivered to the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands where the launch is planned.
All in all, expect a delay of at least one year before that launch can occur. Base on the CAA’s past history, that delay could easily extend to two years.
Starliner decision expected tomorrow, August 24
According to a NASA update today, the agency will hold “an internal Agency Test Flight Readiness Review” to discuss whether to return Starliner manned or unmanned on Saturday morning, August 24, 2024 and then hold a press conference immediately afterward to discuss the results of that review.
What makes this review and press conference different from all previous Starliner reviews and conferences is that NASA administrator Bill Nelson will attend.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and leadership will hold an internal Agency Test Flight Readiness Review on Saturday, Aug. 24, for NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test. About an hour later, NASA will host a live news conference at 1 p.m. EDT from the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
The only reason a politico like Nelson would participate in such proceedings is because he has taken control of the decision-making process, and will make the decision himself. The review is likely to educate him as best as can be done in this short time, and he will then decide whether the two astronauts who launched on Starliner, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will return on it in the next week or so, or will stay on board ISS until February 2025 and return on the next Dragon crew capsule scheduled to launch to ISS in late September.
Nelson might have decided to get involved on his own, but I am certain that if so it was strongly “encouraged” by officials above him in the White House. There is an election coming up, and the risks involved in using Starliner to return the astronauts must be weighed in connection not just with its engineering concerns but with its political ramifications also.
Nelson’s decision will also provide us a strong indication of a future Harris administration’s attitude toward space.
Greg Lake – From The Beginning
An evening pause: Performed live 2005.
Hat tip Greg Johnson.
August 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.
- Data suggests a second exoplanet is tugging at orbit of first
The data comes from TESS in orbit, and is among the plethora of new exoplanets that spacecraft has found in its monthly survey of 93% of the sky.
- Private Polaris Dawn mission now targeting an August 27, 2024 launch
The tweet includes a video (with dramatic music to make something already exciting seem like a fake movie) in which it appears the hatch for the spacewalk during this mission is not going to be at the top, where Dragon capsules have had their docking port, but on the side.
- China proposes its own exoplanet-hunting space telescope
Launch is targeting 2028. The telescope’s program will be similar to Kepler, looking at the same regions in the sky over four years in the specific hope of detecting an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone.
- ISRO to release the Vikram/Pragyan archive of photos to the public tomorrow
The tweet includes some samples, as does this different tweet. The release will celebrate the one year anniversary of Vikram’s lunar landing.
- On this day in 1963 Joe Walker made his last X-15 flight—and set an altitude record of 354,300 feet (67 miles)
In other words, he made it into space, which explains why he was finally awarded astronaut wings in 2005. Too bad he had passed away before the honor was bestowed him.