Grace Bowers – Red House
An evening pause: She is seventeen, doing Jimi Hendrix.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Category: Behind The Black
May 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.
- Rocket Factory Augsburg touts its proposed Argo cargo capsule
Note that RFA did NOT win a contract for developing this capsule from ESA, as announced today, suggesting ESA rejected it.
- ULA’s CEO shows off images of 21 Vulcan rockets in production
Only one appears to have any engines. All are in various states of assembly.
- Dominican Republic looking into building its own spaceport
Article at the link includes a nice map of the world’s existing and planned spaceports.
- Video of Kuaizhou-11 launch yesterday
Only covers the first 12 seconds. Jay asks, “Anyone else notice the weird gassing at nose cone?”
Emails prove NIH officials engineered coverup of COVID origins in 2020
Anthony Fauci: Washington’s liar-in-chief
More than 30,000 pages of emails provided to a House subcommittee from the man who worked under Anthony Fauci have revealed a deliberate effort by Fauci and many others at NIH to delete and hide evidence that showed Fauci’s connections with the creation and leak of the COVID virus from the lab in Wuhan.
A top adviser at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted records critical to uncovering the origins of COVID-19 — and used a “secret back channel” to help Dr. Anthony Fauci and a federal grantee that funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, evade transparency.
NIH senior adviser Dr. David Morens improperly conducted official government business from his private email account and solicited help from the NIH’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office to dodge records requests, according to emails revealed in a memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which The Post obtained Wednesday.
“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”
As early as June 2020, only weeks after the full Wuhan panic had begun, Morens wrote the following to Peter Daszek, the man who used grant money awarded by Fauci to fund the dangerous infectious research at Wuhan and whose company Ecohealth Alliance has been suspended from all funding due to violations of NIH policy while doing this work.
“We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”
Morens worked under Fauci from 1998 to 2022. » Read more
ESA awards contracts to two companies to build unmanned orbital freighters
The European Space Agency (ESA) today awarded contracts worth 25 million euros each to two European companies — the French startup The Exploration Company and the established Italian contractor Thales-Alenia — to begin development of their own unmanned freighters capable of bringing cargo to and from orbit.
During phase 1 development, the selected companies will mature the design of their respective vehicles, focusing on mission requirements, architectures, technology maturation, and de-risking activities. This phase of development is expected to run from June 2024 to June 2026.
Phase 2 of the initiative will see the companies develop and execute a demonstration mission that must be launched by the end of 2028. However, the commencement of Phase 2 will be subject to decisions and appropriations made at ESA’s next ministerial-level council meeting, which will take place in late 2025.
These contracts only cover phase 1. If successful, these capsules will compete with the cargo capsules that SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and Sierra Space fly in providing supplies to the four commercial space stations presently being built.
SpaceX launches NRO reconnaissance satellite(s)
SpaceX last night successfully placed a National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) reconnaissance payload into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. Because of the classified nature of the flight, it is unclear whether the payload is one or several satellites.
The first stage completed its 16th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. The fairings completed their 12th and 3rd flights respectively.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
53 SpaceX
23 China
7 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 60 to 36, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 53 to 43.
Starliner manned launch delayed again; no new launch announced
In a very terse statement that apparently was only sent out by email to some sources, NASA and Boeing announced last night that the May 25, 2024 launch of the first manned Starliner mission on ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket had been postponed, with no new launch date set.
NASA, Boeing, and ULA are foregoing the Saturday, May 25 launch attempt for NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test. The team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy. There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed.
NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward,
The first launch scrub prior to the first launch date of May 6th was due to a valve issue on the Atlas-5 rocket. ULA quickly replaced that valve and the launch was rescheduled for May 17th. Then Boeing engineers detected a helium leak related to one of the attitude thrusters in the capsule’s service module. The launch was first delayed until May 21st, then delayed again until May 25th. Now it is delayed indefinitely.
Whether that helium leak remains the cause of this new delay remains unknown. That no new launch date has been proposed suggests the need to bring the rocket and capsule back to the assembly building to destack it in order to fix the problem. That NASA, Boeing, and ULA are being so coy about revealing any details suggests however that some additional issue might have been uncovered.
Regardless, this new extended delay is very bad publicity for Boeing. While the comparison is somewhat unfair, it continues to make Starliner look like an American version of a Yugo, not the kind of vehicle one would nonchalantly climb into for a flight into space.
Original Enigma Voices – Sadeness
An evening pause: Performed live in Tel Aviv 2019.
May 21, 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 to study using blimps to transport rocket sections from factory to launchsite
It signed a deal with the airship company Aeros.
- RFA touts video of its first static fire test of the first stage of its RFA-1 rocket
The test went off perfectly. However, one local news report stated that the company hopes to launch “by the end of the year”, which suggests a delay, caused either by development issues or red tape from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority. Previously the word had been the launch would happen by June.
- China to expand its commercial launchpad facilities at its Wenchang coastal spaceport
The expansion indicates the continuing growth in China’s pseudo-private launch industry. It also illustates another way the Chinese government maintains control over those pseudo-companies, which have to launch from government-run sites.
- On this day 50 years ago the Soviet Union ended its Moon rocket program
The rocket was the N1, which never launched successfully.
Glacial tributaries draining south on Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 27, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “valley network”, what appears to be several tributaries flowing downhill from the northeast to come together into a larger single flow to the southwest. The elevation drop from the high to the low points in this picture is about 600 feet.
What formed the valleys? This location is at 35 degrees south latitude, so we are almost certainly looking at what appear to be shallow glaciers within those valleys, protected by a thin veneer of dust and debris. It also appears that the stippled surrounding plains might also contain a lot of near-surface ice, also protected by a thin layer of dust and debris. The stippling indicates some sublimation and erosion.
» Read more
Air Force proposes installing seven more telescopes on Hawaiian peak
Air Force is proposing the addition of seven more telescopes on the top of Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
It appears it is also facing major opposition within Hawaii to this proposal.
Last week, the Air Force held scoping meetings in Kahului, Pukalani and Kihei that drew hundreds of people, many of them Native Hawaiians who consider Haleakala sacred and oppose any further installation of telescopes. They made their voices loud and clear in many hours of testimony.
“The American military is like a sick old man who won’t take no for an answer,” said Sesame Shim. Shim described the installation of telescopes on Haleakala as a violent desecration of a family member, an analogy several other women echoed in testimony, eliciting loud applause.
According to the Air Force, the telescope are needed to track the growing number of orbiting objects in space.
If the Air Force proceeds, I am sure this opposition will attempt to physically block construction, as it did with the now practically defunct Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s big island. It appears that the political forces on Hawaii not only are opposed to all technology, they are hostile to all non-natives, and are working in the end to cleanse their islands of these white-skinned devils.
China’s Kuaizhou-11 rocket launches four satellites
China yesterday successfully placed four satellites into orbit, its solid-fueled Kuaizhou-11 rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
The only information about the satellites released by China’s state-run press was that one was “an ultra-low orbit technology test satellite,” likely similar to the reconnaissance satellites that Redwire is producing here in the U.S.
The state-run press also made no mention on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
52 SpaceX
23 China
7 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 59 to 36, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 52 to 43.
Sierra Space’s Tenacity mini-shuttle arrives at the Cape
Capitalism in space: Sierra Space’s Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle has finally arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its final testing and assembly onto ULA’s Vulcan rocket.
Upon arrival at Kennedy, teams moved Dream Chaser Tenacity to the high bay inside the Space Systems Processing Facility, where it will undergo final testing and prelaunch processing ahead of its launch scheduled for later this year.
…The remaining pre-flight activities at Kennedy include acoustic and electromagnetic interference and compatibility testing, completion of work on the spaceplane’s thermal protection system, and final payload integration.
If all goes right, Tenacity’s first mission will last 45 days, delivery about 7,800 pounds of cargo to ISS, and prove out the reusable mini-shuttle for up to seven more flights to ISS.