Category: Behind The Black

India’s space agency successfully tests prototype for controlling descent of spent 1st stages

9:38 am

IAD by ISRO

India’s space agency ISRO on September 3, 2022 successfully used a suborbital sounding rocket to test a prototype of an inflatable airbag, which it dubs an Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (IAD), that can inflate at the top of a 1st stage and slow and control its descent back to Earth after launch.

The graphic to the right was adapted from the mission brochure [pdf]. According to ISRO:

The IAD was initially folded and kept inside the payload bay of the rocket. At around 84 km altitude, the IAD was inflated and it descended through atmosphere with the payload part of sounding rocket. The pneumatic system for inflation was developed by LPSC. The IAD has systematically reduced the velocity of the payload through aerodynamic drag and followed the predicted trajectory. This is first time that an IAD is designed specifically for spent stage recovery. All the objectives of the mission were successfully demonstrated

ISRO claims this design can not only facilitate the reuse of first stages, it can also be used for science payloads to Mars and Venus.

I look at this and wonder, wouldn’t parachutes or parasails, already developed and used numerous times in similar applications, do the same job? In fact, Rocket Lab has already successfully used parachutes to control the re-entry of its Electron first stages. Meanwhile, SpaceX uses simple and lightweight grid fins to control the descent of its Falcon 9 first stages, and simply fires that stage’s engines twice to slow it down for landing.

While there may be engineer advantages to this airbag design, the whole thing smacks of many of NASA’S complex test programs that never made it past prototype tests. The ideas always looked good, but they never were practical or cost effective.

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Indian rocket startup raises $51 million in private investment capital

9:08 am

Capitalism in space: The Indian rocket startup Skyroot has just raised $51 million in private investment capital for the development of its smallsat rocket, Vikram-1.

Operating as a private aerospace manufacturer and commercial launch service provider in the country, the Hyderabad-headquartered startup has been working on its flagship Vikram series of small-life launch vehicles. The first among them, the Vikram 1, is slated to take to the skies by the end of the year and launch small satellites to space.

The $51 million is the most any private aerospace commercial company from India has ever raised in a single funding round.

Though the Modi government has publicly encouraged the development of a private, independent, commercial aerospace industry, India’s bureaucracy has generally acted to block this effort. In 2019 it convinced the government to create New Space India Limited (NSIL), a wholly government-owned entity which is designed to retain as much control over commercial market share as possible. As recently as one month ago, the NSIL webpage described itself as aiming to “capture” that commercial market. That revealed its purpose too obviously, so the website was rewritten to now say its goal is to “spur” the Indian aerospace sector.

Because NSIL gets government money and has full control over all of India’s already developed government rockets and space facilities, it has an enormous advantage, which acts to discourage investment in new private companies such as Skyroot. This is a similar situation that existed in the U.S. for more than a half century following Apollo. NASA had the resources, controlled all launches, and thus made private investment for independent companies hard to obtain.

This only changed when NASA began awarding contracts to private companies in 2008, whereby the rockets and spacecraft produced were not owned or designed by NASA. And NASA was only forced to do so because Elon Musk happened to have enough of his own money to finance SpaceX himself.

When ISRO (India’s agency) or NSIL begin awarding contracts like this, then company’s like Skyroot will begin to blossom.

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SpaceX launches another 51 Starlink satellites and orbital tug

9:47 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to place 51 more Starlink satellites into orbit, as well as a Sherpa orbital tug built by the commercial company Spaceflight.

The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The tug was successfully deployed and will carry a Boeing test satellite for a proposed 147 satellite constellation to its planned orbit.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

40 SpaceX
34 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise now leads China 55 to 34 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 55 to 52. SpaceX’s 40 launches matches the U.S.’s entire total in 2020, and was only exceeded by the U.S. six times since the dawn of the space age in 1957.

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NASA to roll SLS back to assembly building, delaying launch by weeks at minimum

3:20 pm

NASA managers today decided they will not attempt another launch of SLS during the present launch window that closes on September 6, 2022, and will bring the rocket back to assembly building for more detailed trouble-shooting.

Engineers not only need to solve the hydrogen fuel leak in a fuel line connection that caused today’s launch scrub, they will also have to replace the flight termination batteries needed in case the rocket has to be destroyed during liftoff because it is flying out of control. These batteries only have a few weeks life, and the launch delays this week caused them to reach their limit.

The next launch windows are either from September 19 to October 4, excluding September 29-30, or October 17 to October 31, excluding October 24, 25, 26, and 28.

At that point SLS’s two solid rocket strap-on boosters will have been stacked for about two years, one full year past what NASA once considered their safe lifespan. The agency has waived that rule for SLS, but waiving it for more than a full year might simply be too risky. If the boosters need to be replaced, that will delay the launch by at least another three months, at the minimum.

Right now the odds remain high this launch will not occur in 2022.

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Taking Starlink on a vacation sailing trip

11:11 am

A Starlink subscriber to the company’s RV option decided to try it on his sailing boat during a weeklong trip among the Greek islands, and found it worked surprisingly well.

They combined Starlink’s service with cellular connectivity and compared the two while using social media, Google maps, and video streaming. The outcome? Starlink and cellular complimented each other, according to Topolev.

Starlink suffered outages when it was surrounded by other boats’ masts or when the yacht made sharp turns, but worked well at sea, whereas cellular connectivity dropped out when the boat was far from the shore, Topolev said. “It was surprisingly good,” he said. “There were some outages and sometimes we had to manually reboot it … but basically it worked … almost all the time.”

The RV option is specifically for use in moving vehicles, though its use on a boat was not expected to be its prime target customers. Nonetheless, the test suggests strongly that Starlink will work quite well on the big cruise ships, one liner of which, Royal Caribbean, has already signed a deal to make Starlink operational by next year.

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Ingenuity’s flight plan for its next and 31st flight

10:22 am

Perseverance's location on September 2, 2022
Click for interactive map

The Ingenuity engineering team today released the flight plan for the helicopter’s next flight on Mars, its thirty-first since arrival.

The flight is scheduled for no earlier than September 6, mid-day on Mars, and will travel about one minute to the west for a distance of about 319 feet. The white dot on the overview map to the right shows the approximate landing spot, with the green dot marking Ingenuity’s present position. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position as it moves to the south and west after leaving the first delta cliff face it studied during the past few months.

The flight’s main goal is to reposition the helicopter to keep it close to the rover to facilitate communications. However, the engineering team has also now adjusted its goals to also practice hitting very precise landing spots. This goal is to develop the engineering and software that can be used on the helicopter that is not yet built that NASA and ESA intend to use to recover Perseverance’s core samples for return to Earth. That helicopter will not only have to very precisely land right next to those samples in a position allowing it to grab them, it must also land very precisely next to the sample return spacecraft to deposit them within it.

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China’s Long March 4C rocket launches military satellite

9:55 am

China today successfully used its Long March 4C rocket to place a military Earth observation satellite into orbit.

Launched from an interior spaceport, the rocket’s lower stages thus crashed uncontrolled in China.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

39 SpaceX
34 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 54 to 34 in the national rankings, and the entire globe 54 to 52.

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OneWeb lost $229 million when Russia canceled its launches and confiscated its satellites

9:49 am

On September 1, 2022, OneWeb revealed that Russia’s cancellation of the last six or so OneWeb launches as well as Russia’s confiscation of 36 satellites cost the company $229 million.

Russia’s actions were the response by then head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, to sanctions imposed on Russia by the west because of its invasion of the Ukraine. Rogozin’s petty response ended up shooting his space agency in the foot, because it ended up losing billions of dollars in foreign launch business, business that is not likely to return for decades.

OneWeb has since signed contracts with SpaceX, ISRO (India’s space agency), and Relativity for future launches. None of these have been firmly scheduled, though the first by SpaceX is tentatively planned for sometime before the end of the year.

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SLS test launch scrubbed again

9:18 am

NASA engineers once again were forced to scrub the launch of the SLS rocket today due to another hydrogen leak during fueling.

The launch director waived off today’s Artemis I launch attempt at approximately 11:17 a.m. EDT. Teams encountered a liquid hydrogen leak while loading the propellant into the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket. Multiple troubleshooting efforts to address the area of the leak by reseating a seal in the quick disconnect where liquid hydrogen is fed into the rocket did not fix the issue.

NASA has one more chance, on September 5th, to launch this rocket before it must return it to the assembly building to replace the flight termination batteries, used to abort the launch after liftoff should something go seriously wrong during flight. As I understand it, their use-by date is September 6th, and it would require a major safety waiver by the military range officer, who is entirely independent from NASA and under no obligation to it, to allow for a launch after that date with those batteries.

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September 2, 2022 Quick space links

4:36 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

The tweet however provides no date for the test, nor any information about this particular engine itself.

This is preliminary design work involving Earth-based tests. A later phase, not yet awarded, will move on to orbital tests.

Most of this new private capital apparently came from Saudi Arabia and Greece, and the constellation will start out focused on serving those regions as well as Luxembourg.

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Sunspot update: Solar activity continues to exceed sunspot predictions

3:50 pm

It is the beginning of September and time to post another update on the Sun’s ongoing solar cycle. Below is NOAA’s monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, with the activity in August now added. I have also added some additional details to the graph to give the numbers a larger context.

Though sunspot activity dropped in August it remained significantly above the predictions of the panel of government solar scientists put together by NOAA. The predicted sunspot number for August, as indicated by the red curve, was supposed to be about 48. The actual number was 75.

» Read more

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Pushback: Maine parent wins lawsuit against school board for attempting to ban him

1:11 pm

McBreairty speaking in front of Hermon Town Council
McBreairty speaking in front of the Hermon town council about the
lawsuit against him. Click for video from which this image was captured.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Shawn McBreairty, a Maine parent who had repeatedly challenged two different local school districts, including his own, for their efforts to teach the queer agenda to little children, yesterday won a $40K settlement from one of those school boards, Regional School Unit #22, after a court judge had ruled that the board’s actions to ban and censor McBreaity clearly violated his first amendment rights.

This is an update of an earlier August 1, 2022 blacklist column. Because McBreairty had tried to read aloud at a board meeting the pornography contained in several books that the school board had approved for its school children, he was silenced, then banned from attending school board meetings, both in person and virtually, for the next eight months.

When the judge ruled entirely in McBreairty’s favor, issuing a temporary injunction against the school board’s actions, the board clearly recognized its case would not hold up in court, and it chose to settle, paying $40K for McBreairty’s legal fees. As the judge noted in her decision:
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Chinese astronauts complete first spacewalk using new Wentian module

10:05 am

The new colonial movement: Chinese astronauts yesterday completed their first spacewalk using the airlock on the new Wentian module that was recently launched to that nation’s Tiangong-3 space station.

The spacewalk lasted six hours, and was mostly designed to test the airlock itself as well as do the first tests of Wentian’s own robot arm. It appears they also installed an “extended pump set”, whatever that is, and did other work near the hatch. More here.

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NASA is paying Boeing twice as much as SpaceX for its manned flights

9:53 am

Capitalism in space: in an excellent analysis of the total amount NASA will pay both SpaceX and Boeing for all their manned flights to ISS before the station retires, Eric Berger at Ars Technica has determined that the agency will essentially pay Boeing twice as much per flight.

In 2014, NASA narrowed the crew competition to just two companies, Boeing and SpaceX. At that time, the space agency awarded Boeing $4.2 billion in funding for development of the Starliner spacecraft and six operational crew flights. Later, in an award that NASA’s own inspector general described as “unnecessary,” NASA paid Boeing an additional $287.2 million. This brings Boeing’s total to $4.49 billion, although Finch told Ars that Boeing’s contract value as of August 1, 2022, is $4.39 billion.

For the same services, development of Crew Dragon and six operational missions, NASA paid SpaceX $2.6 billion. After its initial award, NASA has agreed to buy an additional eight flights from SpaceX—Crew-7, -8, -9, -10, -11, -12, -13, and -14—through the year 2030. This brings the total contract awarded to SpaceX to $4.93 billion.

Since we now know how many flights each company will be providing NASA through the lifetime of the International Space Station, and the full cost of those contracts, we can break down the price NASA is paying each company per seat by amortizing the development costs.

Boeing, in flying 24 astronauts, has a per-seat price of $183 million. SpaceX, in flying 56 astronauts during the same time frame, has a seat price of $88 million. Thus, NASA is paying Boeing 2.1 times the price per seat that it is paying SpaceX, inclusive of development costs incurred by NASA.

Despite the larger payments to Boeing, the company could very well lose money on Starliner. The higher cost to NASA from Boeing is due almost entirely because the agency was absorbing more of its initial development cost. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule had already been flying cargo missions to ISS when these manned contracts were awarded. SpaceX merely had to upgrade its manned capsule. Boeing had to design and build it from scratch. Moreover, the contracts were fixed price, which means Boeing had to absorb more than a half billion in additional costs when it had to refly the unmanned demo flight of Starliner.

Finally, because of the delays, Boeing won less NASA business. It also has gotten none of the private commercial manned flights that are going on right now. Those contracts went to SpaceX, including all the profits. Whether Boeing can eventually win some private contracts down the road is unknown. It will certainly have to lower its price to compete with SpaceX.

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Rocket Lab completes first static fire test of previously flown rocket engine

9:34 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has successfully completed for the first time a full duration static fire test using one of its Rutherford rocket engines that had been flown on a launch earlier this year, recovered, and refurbished.

The engine was previously successfully launched to space and returned to Earth during Rocket Lab’s recent recovery mission, ‘There And Back Again’, launched on May 2, 2022. The mission was the first time Rocket Lab attempted a mid-air capture of Electron’s first stage, using parachutes on the rocket to slow its descent from space before a helicopter plucked the rocket from the sky as it approached Earth’s surface. The Electron stage was ultimately released for a soft ocean splashdown, before it was collected by vessel and returned to Rocket Lab’s production complex.

The refurbished Rutherford engine passed all of the same rigorous acceptance tests Rocket Lab performs for every engine, including 200 seconds of engine fire and multiple restarts. Data from the test fire shows the engine produced full thrust of 21kNs within 1000 milliseconds of ignition and performed to the same standard of a newly-built Rutherford engine. This Rutherford engine will now continue as an engine life-leader for future Rutherford development.

I have embedded a video of the full test below. This achievement makes Rocket Lab only the third company to successfully refire a previously flown engine, after SpaceX and NASA’s space shuttle engines. It might also be the first time an engine recovered from the ocean has been successfully refurbished. SpaceX had tried to do the same with early Falcon 9 first stages, before they could land vertically, but all accounts suggested the salt water made the engines unusable.

Based on the the quote above, however, this engine will not be used on a future flight, but for testing only. The company still intends to catch the stages as they descend by parachute with a helicopter, which will then transport them safely to land. Further attempts to do so will take place in later launches this year.

» Read more

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On Mars you can find glaciers everywhere in the mid-latitudes

12:42 pm

Glacial material in Mars' rift zone
Click for full image.

Cool image time! If you ever decide to have some fun exploring the archive of images being sent back to Earth by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), always remember that the latitude of the image will almost immediately help to explain the strange features that you see in each picture.

The hi-res photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on May 22, 2022 and provides us a great example. The jumbled features in the depression on the image’s right half surely look like the glacial features seen routinely in the 2,000-mile-long strip found in the 30 to 60 degree band in the chaos terrain of the northern lowland plains. In fact, it is likely that cycles of ebb and flow of those glaciers helped shape this chaos of buttes and mesas and cross-cutting canyons.

This picture however is nowhere near any chaos terrain, or that 2,000 long strip. In fact, it is instead in an area that appears mostly formed by tectonic and volcanic activity, as the overview map below shows.
» Read more

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