Johnny Carson – Carnak routine c1981
An evening pause: When humor was designed to be ludicrously silly, and make absolutely no sense. This clearly occurred during the 1981 air traffic controllers strike.
Hat tip David Lohnes
Category: Behind The Black
January 10, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who probably has more energy than me at this time.
- Drone footage showing the stacking of Starship #24 on top of Superheavy #7
Quite spectacular, both in efficiency and majesty.
- NASA technicians recently finished welding the pressure vessel for the Orion crew module planned for Artemis-4
The NASA tweet lies by implying this capsule will take that crew to the Moon, when all it will do is take them to the Lunar Gateway. Starship will take them to the Moon.
- Virgin Orbit’s finances are really bad
The article essentially outlines the loss of revenue because the company could not launch in 2022, waiting for the UK bureaucrats to say yes. To stay afloat it borrowed lots of money, with the hope that revenues would begin pouring in with launches in 2023. That is now unlikely, at least for several months.
- China’s CAS-Space shows off models of its future rockets
CAS-Space is a pseudo-company, supposedly private but really owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As Jay wrote, “Looks like they copied both SpaceX and Blue Origin.” I found the similarity to be shameless, especially with its manned capsule.
China’s Mars orbiter and rover in trouble
Yesterday we reported a tweet from Scott Tilley that suggested engineers were having trouble establishing a communications link with China’s Mars orbiter Tienwen-1.
Today it appears that communications with China’s rover Zhurong have also not resumed following its winter hibernation from May until December.
The Post independently confirmed with two sources on Thursday that the rover should have resumed running by now, but no contact has been established.
Though Zhurong’s solar panels can be tilted to kick dust from them, during hibernation this is apparently not possible. Because the winter dust season this year was especially bad (killing InSight for example), it is possible that Zhurong experienced the same fate.
Zhurong had a 90 day mission, and instead lasted a year. Moreover, tt was never expected to survive a Martian winter. The achievement thus remains grand.
As for the Tienwen-1 orbiter, it would be a much bigger failure if communications cannot be re-established. China without question expected this orbiter to operate for years, even functioning as a communications link for later landers/rovers. Its loss will force a revision of later plans.
SpaceX successfully launches 40 OneWeb satellites
Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully placed 40 OneWeb satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
This was only the second launch of this first stage, which landed successfully at Cape Canaveral. The rocket has now deployed all 40 satellites successfully, putting more than 80% of OneWeb’s constellation in orbit.
SpaceX had also planned a Starlink launch from Vandenberg in California tonight, but an hour before launch it was delayed until tomorrow.
At the moment only SpaceX and China have launched any satellites in 2023, and are both tied at 2 launches each.
Clarence Gatemouth Brown – Leftover Blues
An evening pause: Very nice. Hat tip Judd Clark.
A question for my readers: Is the embedded video below interrupted with ads?
Virgin Orbit launch a failure today from Cornwall, Great Britain
Five minutes after I posted the information below, Virgin Orbit’s announcer came on to announce that LauncherOne had suffered “an anomaly” and would not successfully place the satellites in orbit.
The failure must have occurred during a later stage after the rocket was released and was preparing for the second engine burn of its upper stage. They have ended the live stream without providing a further update, which is not surprising considering the data that needs to be analyzed.
Original post:
—————
Virgin Orbit today successfully completed the first orbital launch ever the United Kingdom, taking off from a runway in Cornwall, Great Britain, and then releasing its LaunchOne rocket from the bottom of a 747.
All in all 9 satellites were launched. This was Virgin Orbit’s fifth successful commercial launch, and hopefully will open a 2023 whereby the company will makeup for six months of bureaucratic red tape that essentially blocked about six launches last year. As of this writing the satellites have not yet deployed.
The 2023 launch race:
2 China
1 SpaceX
Two SpaceX launches coming later this evening.
January 9, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Vulcan’s Centaur upper stage finished, now ready for testing
It likely could have been ready two years ago, but there was no point since the first stage couldn’t be finished without Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines. ULA has those engines now, and is pushing hard of a 2023 Vulcan launch.
- China might be having communications issues with its Tienwen-1 Mars orbiter
It appears “a ground station is struggling to obtain a lock with the spacecraft.” If Tienwen-1 dies, it likely also means the end of Zhurong on the Martian surface. American and European orbiters might be able to step up, but the technical issues would not be trivial.
- China completes 100 second static fire test of new core engine for Long March 5
No word on whether this replaces the Long March 5B, whose core engines cannot be restarted and thus cause the core stage to crash uncontrolled to Earth.
Defrosting Martian Dunes
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was a captioned image on January 6, 2023 from the science team of the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). From the caption by Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona:
In the late winter when first illuminated, the carbon dioxide frost at high latitudes will begin to sublimate. Over sand dunes, the defrosting spots and mass wasting on steep slopes produce striking patterns. This scene is especially artistic given the shapes of the dunes as well as the defrosting patterns.
Webb finds “wide diversity of galaxies in the early universe”
Click for full image.
New data from the Webb Space Telescope and presented this week at an astronomy conference has found that galaxies in the early universe exhibit much of the same range of shapes and morphologies seen in the recent universe, a result that was not expected.
The image to the right comes from the press release. You can read the research paper here [pdf].
The study examined 850 galaxies at redshifts of z three through nine, or as they were roughly 11-13 billion years ago. Associate Professor Jeyhan Kartaltepe from Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Physics and Astronomy said that JWST’s ability to see faint high redshift galaxies in sharper detail than Hubble allowed the team of researchers to resolve more features and see a wide mix of galaxies, including many with mature features such as disks and spheroidal components.
“There have been previous studies emphasizing that we see a lot of galaxies with disks at high redshift, which is true, but in this study we also see a lot of galaxies with other structures, such as spheroids and irregular shapes, as we do at lower redshifts,” said Kartaltepe, lead author on the paper and CEERS co-investigator. “This means that even at these high redshifts, galaxies were already fairly evolved and had a wide range of structures.”
The results of the study, which have been posted to ArXiv and accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, demonstrate JWST’s advances in depth, resolution, and wavelength coverage compared to Hubble. Out of the 850 galaxies used in the study that were previously identified by Hubble, 488 were reclassified with different morphologies after being shown in more detail with JWST. Kartaltepe said scientists are just beginning to reap the benefits of JWST’s impressive capabilities and are excited by what forthcoming data will reveal.
“This tells us that we don’t yet know when the earliest galaxy structures formed,” said Kartaltepe. “We’re not yet seeing the very first galaxies with disks. We’ll have to examine a lot more galaxies at even higher redshifts to really quantify at what point in time features like disks were able to form.”
In other words, it appears galaxies of all shapes, as we see them today, already existed 11-13 billion years ago, shortly after the universe was born. This defies most theories about the formation of the universe, which predict that these early galaxies would be different than today’s.
The data however at this point is sparse. Webb has only begun this work, and as Kartaltepe notes, they need to look a lot more galaxies.
Steady decline for decades in the publication of “disruptive science”
Though their definition of what makes a science paper disruptive is open to debate, a review of millions of peer-reviewed papers published since the end of World War II has shown a steady decline in such papers, as if scientists are increasingly unwilling or unable to think outside the box.
The graph to the right comes from this research.
The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, the researchers calculated a measure of disruptiveness, called the ‘CD index’, in which values ranged from –1 for the least disruptive work to 1 for the most disruptive.
The average CD index declined by more than 90% between 1945 and 2010 for research manuscripts, and by more than 78% from 1980 to 2010 for patents. Disruptiveness declined in all of the analysed research fields and patent types, even when factoring in potential differences in factors such as citation practices.
The authors also analysed the most common verbs used in manuscripts and found that whereas research in the 1950s was more likely to use words evoking creation or discovery such as ‘produce’ or ‘determine’, that done in the 2010s was more likely to refer to incremental progress, using terms such as ‘improve’ or ‘enhance’.
The article that I link to above is from Nature, so of course it can’t see the elephant in the room, citing as a possible explanation “changes in the scientific enterprise” where most scientists today work as teams rather than alone.
I say, when you increasingly have big government money involved in research, following World War II, it becomes more and more difficult to buck the popular trends. Tie that to the growing blacklist culture that now destroys the career of any scientist who dares to say something even slightly different, and no one should be surprised originality is declining in scientific research. The culture will no longer tolerate it. You will tow the line, or you will be gone. Scientists are thus towing the line.
To my readers: I had intended to include this paper as part of a larger essay about the general blacklist culture that now dominates American society, but my continuing health issues make it difficult to sit at my desk for long periods. I hope to have things under control in the next few days, but until then my posting is going to continue to be limited.
Two nearby galactic neighbors
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of two nearby galaxy neighbors to the Milky way.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the galaxy LEDA 48062 in the constellation Perseus. LEDA 48062 is the faint, sparse, amorphous galaxy on the right side of this image, and it is accompanied by a more sharply defined neighbour on the left, the large, disc-like lenticular galaxy UGC 8603. A smattering of more distant galaxies also litter the background, and a handful of foreground stars are also visible throughout the image.
LEDA 48062 is estimated to be approximately 30 million light years away. This image was part of a recent Hubble campaign to study every known galaxy within 33 million light years.
Assuming that UGC 8603 is about the same approximate distance, the utter dissimilarity between these two galaxies is quite mystifying. It is also possible that UGC 8603 is larger and much farther away.
Musk: SpaceX is now targeting late February/March for 1st orbital launch of Starship
According to a tweet put out by Elon Musk on January 8, 2023, SpaceX is now targeting late February/March for 1st orbital launch of the 24th prototype of Starship and the seventh prototype of Superheavy.
The testing in 2022 has not gone as smoothly as hoped, and is the reason no launch occurred last year:
Super Heavy B7 first left SpaceX’s Starbase factory in March 2022 and has been in a continuous flux of testing, repairs, upgrades, and more testing in the nine months since. The 69-meter-tall (~225 ft), 9-meter-wide (~30 ft) steel rocket was severely damaged at least twice in April and July, requiring weeks of substantial repairs. But neither instance permanently crippled the Starship booster, and Booster 7 testing has been cautious but largely successful since the rocket’s last close call.
Following its return to the OLS [orbital launch site] in early August, Super Heavy B7 has completed six static fire tests of anywhere from one to fourteen of its 33 Raptor engines. It has almost certainly dethroned Falcon Heavy to become the most powerful SpaceX rocket ever tested. And on January 8th, 2023, SpaceX rolled the rocket back to Starbase’s orbital launch site for the seventh time. According to statements made by CEO Elon Musk and a presentation from a NASA official, the last major standalone test between Booster 7 and flight readiness is a full 33-engine static fire. Together, B7’s 33 Raptor 2 engines could produce up to 7600 tons (16.7 million lbf) of thrust at sea level, likely making Starship the most powerful rocket stage in the history of spaceflight.
I had read speculation earlier that it was impossible for SpaceX to do a full 33-engine static fire test because the OLS could not hold the rocket down. That now appears to be incorrect.
Musk’s tweet and proposed schedule should also not be taken with great seriousness. He routinely sets ambitious targets merely to keep the pace fast, even if those targets are not met.
Decision on leaking Soyuz and its replacement to be made by Russia on January 11th
According to Russian space reporter Anthony Zak, Russia now says it will make its final decision on replacing the leaking manned Soyuz capsule on ISS January 11. Zak added this:
According to unofficial reports, the damaged spacecraft would return to Earth without crew, while the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft would be launched in February 2023 piloted by a single cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko. His crew mates Nikolai Chub and Andrei Fedyaev would remain on the ground to free return seats for the two Russian members of the stranded Soyuz MS-22 crew. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, who also traveled to the ISS on Soyuz MS-22, would return to Earth aboard a US Dragon vehicle, according to that scenario. On Jan. 9, 2023, Roskosmos denied that such a plan had been approved.
I have strong doubts about these “unofficial reports.” First, there would be no reason to fly the Soyuz manned, as it can do everything automatically, just like a Progress freighter. Second, there are serious safety issues about flying Rubio home as an extra passenger on Dragon. More likely someone in Russia wants to tweak some noses by suggesting Russia considers its own astronauts more valuable than the American.
Expect Russia to announce that the new Soyuz will arrive unmanned in February, and bring all three men home.
China launches twice today to start its 2023 year
China today launched twice with two different rockets from two different spaceports.
First, a Long March 7 rocket took off from its coast Wenchang spaceport, placing three satellites into orbit. Few details were released about the satellites, other than they were being used for various tests of new technology.
Second, the Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy used its military-derived solid fueled Ceres-1 rocket to place five smallsats into orbit from China’s interior Jiuquan spaceport. Once again, little information was released about the satellites.
At this moment China leads SpaceX 2 to 1 in the 2023 launch race. However, there are three more U.S. launches planned for today. First Virgin Orbit hopes to finally launch from Cornwall. You can watch the broadcast here.
Then SpaceX has two launches from opposite coasts within an hour, first launching a batch of Starlink satellites from Vandenberg at 9:15 pm (Pacific), then following with a launch from Kennedy of a batch of OneWeb satellites.
January 6, 2023 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Styropyro – The brightest laser pointer in the world!
An evening pause: Much of the electronics described here is over my head, but the final result is quite astonishing.
Hat tip Tom Wilson.
January 6, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of Jay, BtB’s stringer. I am still under the weather, so this might be the last post of the day.
- Anthony Zak’s predicts major additional cuts in Russia’s space program
This only confirms what I have been saying for about a decade, since Putin consolidated the entire space industry into a single government-controlled corporation and thus ended all competition. His war in the Ukraine has only underlined his poor judgment. These cuts also continue the downward budget spiral for Roscosmos that has been ongoing for about a decade.
- Perseverance completes one full Martian year, 687 days
This is Northrop Grumman touting its part in running Perseverance, which has really barely begun its work on Mars.
General Atomics wins Air Force contract to build technology test lunar satellite
General Atomics yesterday announced that it has been awarded an Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) contract to build a satellite to test a variety of technologies in near lunar space.
The AFRL Oracle spacecraft program is intended to demonstrate advanced techniques to detect and track objects in the region near the Moon that cannot be viewed optically from the Earth or from satellites in traditional orbits such as geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO). The anticipated launch date for the Oracle spacecraft is late 2025.
While this is good business for General Atomics, the company is not selling its product to the Air Force, but building what the Air Force wants, making the spacecraft government owned. This is how the space industry functioned in the United States for almost a half century after Apollo, generally accomplishing little for great cost. Much better in the long run if the military bought this kind of product from private companies, who developed it for profit and for sale not just to the military.
Private lunar rover to fly on private lunar lander
Yaoki deployed from Nova-C
The Japanese based robot company Dymon has now purchased payload space on Intuitive Machines second lunar lander, Nova-C, in order to fly its own lunar rover, dubbed Yaoki, to the Moon.
Yaoki is expected to be flown to the lunar south pole on board Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander in the second half of 2023. After landing, Yaoki is expected to deploy from Nova-C to demonstrate Dymon’s lunar mobility technology designed by its Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Shin-ichiro Nakajima.
The agreement with Dymon leverages Intuitive Machines’ Lunar Access Services and Lunar Data Services business segments to land the Yaoki rover on the Moon and control it via secure lunar communications.
The main passenger on this mission is NASA, but Inituitive Machines is free to make money by selling payload space to others. The graphic, from the press release, is intriguing, as it does not show how the rover will be deployed.
Impulse’s first demo space tug scheduled for launch
Impulse Space announced on January 4, 2023 that it has now scheduled the launch of its first demo space tug, Mira, for the fourth quarter of 2023.
Impulse Space said its LEO Express-1 mission, using a transfer vehicle it is developing called Mira, is manifested for launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare mission currently scheduled for launch in the fourth quarter of 2023. LEO Express-1 will carry a primary payload for an undisclosed customer.
Barry Matsumori, chief operating officer of Impulse Space, said in an interview that the mission can accommodate additional payloads, like cubesats. The mission profile is still being finalized, but he said the vehicle, after making some initial deployments, may raise its orbit, then lower it to demonstrate operations in what’s known as very low Earth orbit, around 300 kilometers.
After this demonstration flight the company has plans for additional flights in 2024. This tug will then join a growing fleet of companies offering this orbital transport capability to cubesats.