An evening pause: Performed live October 31, 2022.
Hat tip Judd Clark. I once again must ask for suggestions from my other readers. Judd Clark and Alton Blevins continue to send great stuff, but I really like to have as many people contributing as possible. If you have suggested before you know the rules. If not, state you have something you want to suggest in the comments below, but DON’T post a link to it.. I will email you to get it.
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.
Momentus will fly small experiments that will be flown the company’s Vigoride orbital tugs.
The drop was from about 3-5 feet off the ground.
The company is called Fancy Space, and it apparently has nothing at this point but a cool video.
White died in the Apollo-1 launchpad fire in 1967.
The goal was to achieve the first completely successful docking in space, but the shroud on the target spacecraft only partly released, preventing the docking. Instead, Stafford and Cernan flew in formation, taking great pictures of that spacecraft, looking like “an angry alligator.”
As I have done at the start of every month since I begun this webpage back in 2010, I am posting NOAA’smonthly update of its graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, adding to it several additional details to provide some larger context.
While April had showed only a small uptick in sunspot activity, in May the sunspot activity on the Sun went boom, setting a new high for sunspots during this solar maximum as well as the highest sunspot count since September 2002. The sunspot count of 171.7 smashed the previous high of 160 this cycle, set in June 2023. This new high underlined was by the large solar flare on May 9th that sent the most powerful geomagnetic storm to hit the Earth’s magnetic field in many decades, producing spectacular auroras in many low latitudes.
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Chang’e-6’s landing zone is indicated by the
red box, on the edge of Apollo Creater
(indicated by the wavy circle).
China’s state-run press yesterday released a short movie created from images taken by its Chang’e-6 lander during its descent to the lunar surface on the far side of the Moon this past weekend.
I have embedded that footage below. The final five frames however are very puzzling, in that they do not appear to show a smooth descent to a specific spot, but appear to jump about wildly. Moreover, the footage does not appear to show the actual landing itself, but appears to stop while the spacecraft is still above the ground.
It is possible that this footage is simply showing the spacecraft’s software searching for a good landing spot, combined with a decision in China not to release footage of the actual touchdown. It could also be that something has gone wrong, and they are stalling about saying so. This last possibility I think very unlikely, but it must be considered, based on the information available.
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NASA yesterday evening confirmed that the agency, ULA, and Boeing are now targeting June 5, 2024 at 10:52 am (Eastern) for the launch of the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule carrying two astronauts to ISS for a two week checkout mission.
Technicians and engineers with ULA (United Launch Alliance) worked overnight and on Sunday to assess the ground support equipment at the launch pad that encountered issues during the countdown and scrubbed the June 1 launch attempt. The ULA team identified an issue with a single ground power supply within one of the three redundant chassis that provides power to a subset of computer cards controlling various system functions, including the card responsible for the stable replenishment topping valves for the Centaur upper stage. All three of these chassis are required to enter the terminal phase of the launch countdown to ensure crew safety.
On Sunday, the chassis containing the faulty ground power unit was removed, visually inspected, and replaced with a spare chassis. No signs of physical damage were observed. A full failure analysis of the power unit will be performed to better understand root cause. Meanwhile, ULA has completed functional checkouts of the new chassis and the cards, and all hardware is performing normally.
These kinds of technical issues happen too often on ULA launches. Company engineers always fix them, but it never appears they fix them permanently. Too often on launches they pop up again, causing more scrubs.
The goal should be to fix them so they never pop up again, and your launches can begin to launch reliably, on time. And we know it can be done, because SpaceX has done it.
Chang’e-6’s landing zone is indicated by the
red box, on the edge of Apollo Creater
(indicated by the wavy circle).
China today announced that today at 6:23 pm (Eastern) the lander of its Chang’e-6’s lunar orbiter successfully soft landed on far side of the Moon.
Teams will now begin initial checks of the lander’s systems and soon begin collecting samples. The lander will collect up to 2,000 grams of samples, using a scoop to grab surface regolith and a drill for subsurface material. Samples are expected to be sent into lunar orbit within around 48 hours. Chinese space authorities have yet to publish a timeline for the mission and its steps, however.
Once docked to the orbiter, the samples will get transferred to the return spacecraft, which will return to Earth and land in China, in the same manner as was done with its Chang’e-5 sample return mission in 2021. Unlike those earlier samples, which came from the Moon’s near side (where the Apollo and Soviet samples had come from), these new samples will be first obtained from the far side.
The Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, today announced he has canceled his “Dear Moon” Starship mission that was supposed to take him and a bunch of artists and writers on a fly-by mission to the Moon.
Maezawa suggested the cause of the cancellation was uncertainty over the project development, saying he signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption the launch would come by the end of 2023. “It’s a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch,” Maezawa said. “I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time.”
This decision really suggests to me that Maezawa’s whole project was simply a PR stunt. It seems strange to cancel now, when actual test launches of Superheavy/Starship are taking place and showing solid and speedy progress.
No matter. I have no doubt others will show up and buy flights. I also would not be shocked in the slightest if another billionaire shows up to and offers to fly the artists and writers who won seats on Maezawa’s proposed flight.
Go bunny! Last night SpaceX successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its 14th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
58 SpaceX
26 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 66 to 40, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including other American companies, 58 to 48.
On May 24, 2024 the Hubble Space Telescope once again paused its science operations and entered in safe mode, apparently due to gyroscope problem.
The telescope automatically entered safe mode when one of its three gyroscopes gave faulty telemetry readings. Hubble’s gyros measure the telescope’s slew rates and are part of the system that determines and controls precisely the direction the telescope is pointed. NASA will provide more information early the first week of June.
It is not clear if this is the same gyroscope that caused the last two safe mode events.
With each such event the telescope gets closer and closer to having only two gyroscopes. At that point it will shift to one-gyro mode, using only one and holding the second in reserve. From then on it will no longer be able to take perfectly sharp pictures. Science will still be possible, but not like before.
UPDATE: The launch is now scheduled for June 5, 2024 at 10:52 am (Eastern).
For reasons that appeared related to the ground system’s of ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket, the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner’s capsule was scrubbed today at T-3:50.
It appears they want to try again tomorrow at 12:03 pm (Eastern), assuming ULA can figure out what happened.
The repeated scrubs and delays that have so far prevented this launch are beginning to remind my of my childhood watching the early NASA launch attempts during the Mercury program. Then, they hadn’t done this before, and were being very careful about everything.
Now, it seems that NASA, ULA, and Boeing are acting the same way, and that is probably because they are very nervous about Starliner and don’t want anything to go wrong.
I had intended to embed the live stream, but slept late (it IS the weekend, y’know). Sorry.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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An evening pause: Those familiar with the original series, The Prisoner, will find this quite amusing. As the filmmaker notes on the youtube webpage, “And yes, this is cheesy as crap. I made it that way on purpose. Be seeing you!”
And if you aren’t familiar with the original, which was a truly unique and very surreal spy TV show of the 1960s, watch the original opening first. It is amazing how close this new version matches, in a ridiculous way, the shot angles and action of the actual opening sequence.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
