Category: Behind The Black

Why the release of the EU’s own space law has been delayed

10:47 am

In the fall of 2023 officials of the European Union (EU) announced that they expected to release the Union’s own space law, that would regulate the individual space laws of all member nations. Since then the release of that law has been put back several times, and in early April its release was delayed until the summer, after the EU elections in June.

This article published today provides the likely reasons why it has been delayed. Apparently, individual members of the EU have objected to the law as interfering with their own space laws as well as imposing regulations they don’t want or need.

The EU Space Law will need to overcome several obstacles to become a functional and beneficial piece of legislation. Several EU Member States already have national space legislation and are actively engaged in space activities, while an increasing number are adopting domestic frameworks and expanding their presence in the space sector. In a heavily regulated environment, where countries have long established and enforced national laws, the practical implementation of a space law at the EU level may be contested.

The article then lists three reasons for these objections. First, the EU has no experience or stake in this matter. It launches nothing and thus can only pose an additional obstacle to the growing commercial space industries in member countries. Second, an EU space law is certainly going to conflict with the space laws of member countries. Third, this law’s implementation could significantly interfere with the legal timelines established by individual member countries.

The article also lists three reasons why the EU law might be good, but these reasons really can be summed up as attempting to justify the EU’s power grab over the space efforts of the member countries.

In the end, this analysis tells us that the EU’s power grab has been met by significant opposition behind the scenes, and could very well die because of that opposition. Germany, Italy, Spain, and more recently even France have begun to encourage the development of independent competing rocket companies, and all likely fear this EU space law will only get in the way.

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The plan for SpaceX’s first demo in-orbit refueling mission of Starship

10:23 am

Link here The details come from a presentation at a public meeting by Amit Kshatriya, Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA’s Moon to Mars program, with this the key takeaway:

Kshatriya then expanded the discussion beyond the next few Starship flights and talked about the required technologies for a fuel depot in orbit and the in-orbit capabilities needed to transfer fuel. “We need an instance of the ship that is essentially long, has the endurance to stay in orbit long enough for the sequence to work.

“So, we need a ship that has at least three to four weeks of endurance in orbit. That endurance is gained through augmented power system capability, augmented battery capacity, full insulation of the cryogenic systems, vacuum jacketing of all the lines, et cetera, to make sure that the cryogens that are being stored or are meant to be stored don’t boil off.”

The challenges of a cryogenic ship in orbit include the need to prevent boil-off from the stack. To facilitate the journey to the Moon’s surface, Starship will have to be refueled. For this, the company plans to refuel a depot in low-Earth orbit (LEO), which would be resupplied by several tanker Starships. The HLS Starship would then dock with this depot before departing for the Moon.

To prove this system will require a Starship test flight that lasts several weeks in orbit, to prove the capability needed for a lunar mission. It will also require a refueling mission that will require several Starship/Superheavy launches, one to put the fuel depot into orbit, several more to fuel that depot, and a final launch of Starship for its refueling and endurance test.

According to the update, SpaceX is still aiming to be ready of the upcoming fourth Superheavy/Starship demo orbital flight in the first two weeks. The NASA official claimed it would occur no later than the end of May. I see that as a confirmation that NASA really doesn’t expect the FAA to issue a launch permit when SpaceX is ready, and that the permit might not arrive in time for a May launch. This statement is meant to soften the blow when the launch finally gets delayed into June, or later.

Whether the many required later Starship launches as described above can get FAA approval quick enough to prove out this system soon enough to meet NASA’s 2026 present target date for its manned lunar landing seems very unlikely. Moreover, even if it does it will be a major challenge for SpaceX to meet this schedule.

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Webb takes an infrared look at the mane of the Horsehead Nebula

10:01 am

Context images
Click for original image.

The mane of the Horsehead Nebula, seen in infrared
Click for original image.

The cool infrared image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Webb Space Telescope and released today. The three pictures above provide the context, with the rectangle inside the rightmost image indicated the area covered by the close-up to the right.

Webb’s new images show part of the sky in the constellation Orion (The Hunter), in the western side of a dense region known as the Orion B molecular cloud. Rising from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33, which resides roughly 1,300 light-years away.

The nebula formed from a collapsing interstellar cloud of material, and glows because it is illuminated by a nearby hot star. The gas clouds surrounding the Horsehead have already dissipated, but the jutting pillar is made of thick clumps of material and therefore is harder to erode. Astronomers estimate that the Horsehead has about five million years left before it too disintegrates. Webb’s new view focuses on the illuminated edge of the top of the nebula’s distinctive dust and gas structure.

In the close-up, note the many distant tiny galaxies, both above the mane as well as glowing throught it.

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites

3:17 pm

March on bunny! SpaceX today successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its thirteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

44 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 51 to 29, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 44 to 36.

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SpaceX launches two Galileo satellites, part of Europe’s GPS-type satellite constellation

7:50 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched two satellites of Europe’s Galileo GPS-type satellite constellation, the first of a two-launch contract awarded to SpaceX when the Soyuz rocket was no longer available because of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine and Arianespace’s Ariane-6 rocket was not yet operational.

The first stage completed its 20th flight, tying the record set by another booster only a few weeks ago. Because of the high orbit required by both satellites, that stage was not recovered, the first time SpaceX has expended a first stage since November 2022. SpaceX however also announced that the company is now working to upgrade its Falcon 9 first stages and fairings to fly as many as 40 missions. The two fairings also completed their fourth flight, which brought the total of fairings SpaceX has recovered to 200.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

43 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 50 to 29, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 43 to 36.

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ESA shuffles the management and structure of its ClearSpace-1 space junk removal mission

12:59 pm

The European Space Agency (ESA) this week did a major shake-up in the management and structure of its ClearSpace-1 space junk removal mission that had previously been awarded to the Swiss orbital tug startup Clearspace.

Moving forward OHB SE will take over the responsibility of leading the ClearSpace-1 consortium. The Bremen-based company will provide the satellite bus and will be in charge of system integration and launch. ClearSpace will be responsible for the close proximity and capture operations once the vehicle is in orbit.

In addition to the change in leadership, the mission’s target has also been adjusted, with ClearSpace-1 now expected to rendezvous and capture PROBA-1. The 94-kilogram ESA technology demonstrator was launched aboard an ISRO PSLV rocket in October 2001.

The original target, a payload adaptor from a 2013 Vega launch, had been hit by another piece of junk, damaging it and making it a much more difficult target to grab, using the four grapple arms of the Clearspace spacecraft. No timeline for when this revised mission will fly was announced.

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A molecule found by Rosetta on Comet 67P/C-G proves discovering life on exoplanets will not be easy

12:50 pm

The uncertainty of science: Scientists have long assumed that the molecule dimethyl sulfide (DMS) is an excellent biosignature of life, since it is only produced by life here on Earth. When they discovered it in the atmosphere of an exoplanet last year many thought, especially in the media, that it proved that life existed on that exoplanet.

A scientist who had worked on the Rosetta mission to the Comet 67P/C-G thought otherwise, that DMS was not a reliable biosignature and quickly proved it.

Just 1 day of data from Rosetta’s mass spectrometer, an instrument that can identify molecules by their specific weights, was enough for [Nora Hänni] and her colleagues to find DMS. She says lab experiments will now be needed to pin down exactly how DMS forms in space, where ultraviolet light and cosmic rays can power the synthesis of complex organic molecules. Another important question is whether comets could deliver significant amounts of DMS to a planet—and perhaps account for detections like the K2-18b claim. “If it impacted the atmosphere, it could contaminate the atmosphere of the planet,” Noack says, potentially complicating searches for alien life.

Like the fake news in 2020 that life was found in the atmosphere of Venus (it wasn’t), it is a big mistake to use the detection of one molecule to assume it is evidence of life on an alien world. The universe is far more complicated.

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Good news: The nature of the riots this election year suggest the leftist rioters are losing steam

3:44 pm

Don't tread on me!

Amid the illegal protests by pro-Hamas anti-Semitic new Nazis on college campuses, a wider looks suggests some encouraging trends, though hard to spot amid the chaos promoted by these genocidal rioters, most of whom are students but led it appears by many outside agitators.

There is no question these college rioters are causing havoc as they spread fear and hatred on numerous college campuses, including Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, NYU, Cal Poly Humboldt, USC, and UT-Austin, to name jsut a few.

In every case the protesters arrived with tents and a definitive plan to illegally occupy part of the campus, using almost identical tactics of the Occupy Wall Street crowd in 2011. Very clearly they wanted to establish themselves in a prominent position on each campus, where they could daily interfere with campus life while harassing anyone they saw as either Jewish or a potential enemy. Their tactics also mimicked the actions of the 2020 BLM and Antifa rioters, not only acting to keep out Jewish students from campuses, but working together violently to exclude anyone they wanted excluded. Reporters were routinely blocked with banners, umbrellas, and their bodies. In at least one case these terrorists even attacked one reporter, stabbing her in the eye with the pole of a Palestinian flag.

There is also no question that these riots have the same ulterior motives that existed in 2020, to disrupt the upcoming November election so that the Democrats could win. Many of the 2020 riots were specifically aimed at Trump election rallies, often causing their cancellation. The riots also provided Democratic Party officials in many key swing states reasons to justify the arbitrary changing of election laws — done also in conjuntion with the COVID panic — to allow the illegal use of very insecure ballot measures, such as unsupervised drop boxes and the misuse of mail-in ballots.

The differences today from 2020 and 2011 however are quite significant, and suggest these violent tactics are no longer working, that the country is beginning to push back hard against such insurrectionist behavior.

The pushback
» Read more

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Martian dunes with frost and a sublimating dry ice mantle

2:21 pm

Martian dunes surrounded by frost
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It was released today as a captioned picture from MRO’s camera team. As noted in the caption, written by the camera’s principal investigator Alfred McEwen:

This image shows a field a sand dunes in the Martian springtime while the seasonal carbon dioxide frost is sublimating into the air. This sublimation process is not at all uniform, instead creating a pattern of dark spots.

In addition, the inter-dune areas are also striking, with bright frost persisting in the troughs of polygons. Our enhanced-color cutout is centered on a brownish-colored inter-dune area.

Each winter the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere falls as snow, mantling the surface in the latitudes above 60 degrees with a clear coat of dry ice. When spring arrives the sunlight passes through the mantle to heat the ground below, which in turn causes the base of the dry ice mantle to sublimate into gas. When the pressure builds enough, the gas breaks through the mantle at its weak points, spewing out and bringing with it dust from below, which stains the mantle with the dark spots.
» Read more

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Scientists: computer modeling suggests one lunar crater is the origin of a nearby asteroid

11:02 am

The uncertainty of science: Using computer modeling some scientists now suggest that the nearby asteroid 2016 HO3, also known as Kamo’oalewa, that has a solar orbit that periodically flips around the Earth, came from an impact a million years ago that created the Giordano Bruno crater on the moon’s far side.

According to the simulations, it would have required an impactor of at least 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) in diameter to launch a large fragment like Kamo’oalewa beyond the moon’s gravitational pull. According to the group’s model, the impact would have dug up Kamo’oalewa from deep beneath the moon’s surface, leaving behind an impact crater larger than 10 to 20 kilometers (6-12 miles) in diameter. Additionally, the crater would have to be younger than the average lifetime for near-Earth objects, which spans about 10 million to 100 million years, a very short and recent period in the history of the solar system.

While the lunar surface is riddled with thousands of craters from impacts spanning the moon’s 4.5 billion year-history, only Giordano Bruno with its 14-mile diameter and estimated 4 million years of age fits the bill in terms of size and age, making it the most probable source of Kamo’oalewa’s origin. The team also showed that this scenario is feasible from an impact dynamics perspective.

To say that this conclusion is uncertain is an understatement of monumental proportions. However, the possibility is real. A Chinese asteroid mission, dubbed Tianwen-2, will likely found out, as it is planning to bring samples back from this asteroid by 2027.

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