April 5, 2024 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Category: Behind The Black
Jean Harlow
An evening pause: A look back at early Hollywood, and someone who was then a big star and a great comic actor but who is mostly forgotten today.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
April 5, 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 releases 28-page comic book about the origins of the Vulcan rocket
The link lets you download or view a pdf of the comic book.
- Space Force reiterates its requirement that ULA fly Vulcan twice before awarding it any launch contracts
According to Jay, rumors are now suggesting that the delay for the next Vulcan launch is not due to preparing Sierra’s Tenacity Dream Chaser cargo ship, but Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines that Vulcan requires. I doubt this. Tenacity only started its environmental testing a few weeks ago, and this testing can take at minimum two months, and more if anything goes wrong and needs fixing.
- One of the two test smallsats launched to lunar orbit with China’s Quequao-2 communications relay satellite, Tiandu-2, has now completed two of its engineering tests
The satellite has tested “key propulsion techniques [and using] a 3D printed storage box.” That’s all they tell us.
- Virgin Galactic counter-sues Boeing over broken deal
A true battle of insects. Boeing had been hired by Virgin to build a new mother airplane for its suborbital flights. After doing some work, Boeing decided the job couldn’t be done, withdrew, but then sued to get paid. Virgin is now claiming Boeing’s work was “shoddy and incomplete” and so poor it doesn’t deserve any payments.
- SpaceX’s head Gwynne Shotwell says the federal bureaucracy is slowing their work significantly
She thus confirms what I have been saying now for several years, since Biden took power. The federal government is now a major obstacle to private enterprise and innovation.
- On this day in 1990, Orbital Sciences flew its air-launched Pegasus rocket for the first time
Pegasus was intended to reduce orbital costs, but it never did so, and is now defunct because its cost can’t compete with SpaceX and others.
The taffy terrain in Mars’ death valley
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled “banded terrain and layering,” it actually is a good example of “taffy terrain,” a weird Martian geological formation unique to the Red Planet that scientists as yet don’t quite understand. This 2014 paper only says this:
The apparent sensitivity to local topography and preference for concentrating in localized depressions is compatible with deformation as a viscous fluid. In addition, the bands display clear signs of degradation and slumping at their margins along with a suite of other features that include fractured mounds, polygonal cracks at variable size-scales, and knobby/hummocky textures. Together, these features suggest an ice-rich composition for at least the upper layers of the terrain, which is currently being heavily modified through loss of ice and intense weathering, possibly by wind.
Mitsubishi joins private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station
The Japanese big space company Mitsubishi has now joined the private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station for NASA, teaming up with Voyager Space and Airbus.
At this moment it appears that Voyager, the lead company in this station, is attempting to capture the international market that up to now has been part of ISS. Airbus gets it direct access to European companies and the Europeans Space Agency (ESA). Mitsubishi now gets it direct access to Japanese government financing.
The other stations being built with NASA financing, Axiom and Orbital Reef, so far seem more focused on getting American business, as is Vast’s Haven-1 station, being built entirely from private funds.
Thailand joins China’s partnership to build a lunar base on the Moon
Thailand today signed an agreement with China to become the eighth nation to join its partnership to build its lunar base on the Moon, dubbed the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).
The partners so far are Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, and Venezuela. In addition, another nine academic organizations of one kind or another have signed on. Except for Russia, the partners in China’s program are mostly there for public relations purposes, and will contribute little to the project. And Russia itself will likely not contribute much either, considering its inability to get any major new projects launched for the past two decades.
Voyager-1 still out of commission
Though engineers have now confirmed the cause of the computer problem that has prevented Voyager-1 from sending back readable data, a fix has not yet been attempted and the spacecraft remains in safe mode.
In early March, the team issued a “poke” command to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS [Flight Data Subsystem] memory, which includes the computer’s software code as well as variables (values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status). Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.
The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working. Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.
Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again.
Considering that Voyager-1’s power supply will run out sometime in 2026, after almost a half century of operation, the engineers really don’t have that much time to fix the problem and resume science operations.
SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites
Like an Energizer bunny: SpaceX last night successfully placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage successfully completed its 14th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
34 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined 39 to 25, while SpaceX by itself leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 34 to 30. SpaceX also has another launch scheduled for tonight.
April 3, 2024 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
The Doobie Brothers – Long Train Runnin’
An evening pause: Performed live 1981.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
April 4, 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.
- Starlink soon to be approved for Indonesia
There appears to be a lot of red tape still in the way, but it is expected the service will be available by the end of the year.
- Sierra Space once again touts the environmental testing its Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle is undergoing in prepartion for launch
Meanwhile, there are rumors this testing is delaying the launch until the fall, and that ULA wants to bump Tenacity from its second Vulcan launch because of these delays. ULA needs that second launch quickly in order to begin doing military launches.
- Chinese pseudo-company Landspace moves up first launch of its Zhuque-3 rocket six months to mid-2025
Officials also say it might recover the first stage before the end of ’25 if “they get lucky.”
Pushback: The legislative effort in Texas to end DEI in state colleges is beginning to work
Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the Texas state legislature passed a law last May (subsequently signed by Governor Greg Abbott) to ban all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in state colleges, I expressed some doubts about whether this legislature would work.
The universities have simply been told the money they formally spent on DEI can no longer be spent on such racist operations. Since they have the cash anyway, what will prevent college administrators to create a new office with a new name, let’s call it the “Openness and Support Office”, and hire the fired DEI staffers that have been terminated from a different college. By simply rearranging the chairs, these administrators — who apparently all enthusiastically support DEI’s Marxist and racist program — can recreate it without making it obvious. And the legislature has agreed to give them the funds for doing so.
It appears the DEI house-cleaning is beginning
in Texas’ universities.
Since then, Texas university administrations have been responding to the legislation in a variety of ways, all of which suggest that, though my doubts continue to have merit, the bill is having a laudatory effect. This week the University of Texas at Austin announced that it is shuttering its DEI offices and terminating around sixty people associated with these bigoted programs. From the email announcement by the university president, Jay Hartzell:
[F]unding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17’s effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.