Category: Behind The Black

Update on the development of a new first stage for Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket

9:01 am

Link here. The first stage of the Antares rocket has previously relied on Russian engines in a Ukrainian-built body. The Ukraine War made getting both impossible, and thus Northrop Grumman hired Firefly to provide it a new first stage, presently targeting mid-2025 for its first flight. In the meantime in order to meet its contractual obligations with NASA, it has hired SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to fly the next three Cygnus freighters to ISS.

The report at the link gets some interesting details about Firefly’s engines and first stage. Both will raise the payload capabilities of Antares, which as yet has failed to garner any commercial payloads outside of Northrop’s own Cygnus capsule. That increase in capability might make it more appealing to commercial satellite companies.

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Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy launches seven satellites

8:52 am

China's spaceports
China’s spaceports

One of China’s pseudo-companies, Galactic Energy, yesterday successfully placed seven small satellites into orbit, using its Ceres-1 solid-fueled rocket that lifted off from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert.

Considering that a launch two days ago from the Taiyuan spaceport apparently dropped sections of its first stage near habitable areas, I though it worthwhile to post again the map to the right, showing which Chinese spaceports expose China’s inhabitants to risk.

It also appears that even the state-run press of China knows Galactic Energy really isn’t a privately owned commercial company, as it doesn’t even mention the company’s name in its news report at the link. While it gets investment capital and functions kind of like a private company, everything it does is supervised by the Chinese government, which can take full control of the company whenever it wants. Moreover, the technology of its solid-fueled rocket was derived entirely from military technology, which means the Chinese government supervised its development every step of the way.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

54 SpaceX
33 China
10 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
6 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 62 to 33, and the entire world combined 62 to 54, while SpaceX by itself is now tied the world (excluding American companies) 54 to 54.

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Smothers Brothers – Hippie Chick Clip

6:01 pm

An evening pause: A wonderful moment from the 1960s, performed brilliantly by actress Leigh French and resulting in some wonderful and gentle satire of the hippie culture of the time. Context is also important, because the Smothers Brothers were constantly having problems with their television censors.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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August 9, 2023 Quick space links

3:34 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

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Pushback: Judge rules that libel suit against two black professors for slandering white real estate assessor can proceed

12:38 pm

Mott (l) and Connolly, eager to defame whites
Mott (l) and Connolly, eager to use race to
defame an innocent white man

Bring a gun to a knife fight: A U.S. district judge on August 2, 2023 ruled [pdf] that the defamation lawsuit of real estate assessor Shane Lanham against two black Johns Hopkins professors can now proceed.

And boy, does Lanhan stand a good chance of winning. This is a followup of an earlier blacklist story from February. The two professors, Nathan Connolly and Shani Mott, had publicly accused Lanham on national television of being a bigot because they had not liked the value he placed on their house. As I wrote then:

This story began when Connolly and Mott asked Lanham (who is white) and his company, 20/20 Valuations, to appraise their house. When they were unhappy with his appraisal, they decided to get another appraisal, but this time do what they themselves called a ““whitewashing experiment.” For the second appraisal they removed all evidence that a black family owned the house, to the extent of having a white friend present himself as the owner instead. The second appraisal, done months later, came up with a higher price.
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Martian craters or volcanoes?

11:52 am

Martian craters or volcanoes?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 30, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists label these features “cones” because many of the depressions sit on top of a mound or hill, suggesting some form of volcanic feature, either from erupting lava, ice, or mud.

Yet, are they volcanoes? Some or even many could instead be impact craters, created when a asteroid broke up during infall, creating a spray of bolides. Erosion of surrounding terrain can create what scientists call pedestal craters, but if all these craters were from an impact than all would either be pedestal craters, or not. Instead, we have a mix of some craters above and others level with the terrain.
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Ingenuity snaps picture of Perseverance during 54th flight

10:13 am

Perseverance as seen by Ingenuity on August 8th
Click for original image.

During Ingenuity’s 54th flight, a short vertical hop sixteen feet up and down that lasted only 25 seconds, the helicopter’s color camera managed to get a picture of the rover Perseverance, only about 200 feet away to the north.

That picture, cropped and enhanced to post here, is to the right. It shows Perseverance just inside the picture’s upper edge. Its graininess illustrates in a sense the engineering test nature of Ingenuity. It was never expected to last this long and to take actual scouting or science imagery. It was supposed to complete a 30 day program of a handful of test flights, proving it was possible to fly in Mars’ very thin atmosphere (1/1000th that of Earth). Instead, it has lasted years, and completed 54 flights, keeping ahead of Perseverance and providing the rover team scouting images of the ground they wish to travel.

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South Korea’s KARI space agency releases new images taken by its Danuri lunar orbiter

10:02 am

To celebrate the anniversary of its launch, South Korea’s KARI space agency today released new images taken by its Danuri lunar orbiter.

Images include views of Reiner Gamma, a so-called swirl, which features a localized magnetic field and marks a bright spot within the Oceanus Procellarum region. Another shows shadows inside Amundsen Crater, close to the lunar south pole and a potential landing site for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, which is slated to put astronauts on the moon in late 2025.

Another southern feature captured by Danuri is Drygalski Crater, showing the central peak inside the impact crater.

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ESA official confirms first Ariane-6 launch will not occur until 2024

9:45 am

The head of ESA yesterday confirmed what had been known since May, that the first test flight of its Ariane-6 rocket will not take place this year but will be delayed until 2024.

In an update on the Ariane 6 program also posted Tuesday, the ESA said that it could not complete a short hot firing test — which mimics the environment in space to provide data to operators — of Ariane’s Vulcain 2.1 engine system in a July attempt, with plans to try again on August 29.

Aschbacher said the tentative plan is to carry out a long hot fire test of the assembled core stage and engine on September 26 at the agency’s spaceport in French Guiana. If those tests are successful, it should then be possible to set a more precise timeline for getting the rocket system ready for launch next year.

It seems the inability of engineers to complete that July engine test — which ESA officials claimed was because they simply ran out of time — added at least a six-week delay to the entire program.

There delays leave Europe without any large rocket to launch payloads, and has forced its various governments to hire SpaceX to get those payloads into space.

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First stage of Chinese rocket crashes in Chinese city

9:34 am

Remains of Long March 2C, in Chinese city

Locals in the city of Shangluo, population over two million located in central China, today released video images of the remains of the first stage of a Long March 2C rocket that launched yesterday and apparently crashed in the city.

The image to the right is a screen capture. Since this two-stage rocket uses extremely toxic hypergolic fuels in both of its stages, those citizens wandering around the rocket’s remains are in great health danger.

China has in recent years has appeared taken actions to block the release of such videos by its citizens, but apparently failed in this case.

The irony is that this rocket supposedly launched what China called “a disaster reduction” satellite. That maybe so, but in the process it also dumped toxic materials on its own citizens.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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NASA engineers still struggling to understand why Orion’s heat shield ablated so much

9:10 am

NASA engineers still do not understand why the heat shield on its Orion capsule ablated as it did during its return to Earth on the first unmanned Artemis-1 mission.

The agency is still running tests. It also expressed confidence that the issue will not delay the Artemis-2 mission, the first intended to carry humans on SLS and in Orion and still scheduled for late 2024.

At the same time, agency officials hinted that the third Artemis mission, which has always been planned as putting humans on the Moon for the first time since Apollo, might not achieve that goal. It is still not clear whether the mission’s lunar spacesuits as well as SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander will be ready on time. The latter is facing serious regulatory problems imposed by the Biden administration that is generally preventing it from flight testing the spacecraft.

That second Artemis mission, the first planned to carry humans, is one that actually at present carries the most risk. It will not only use a heat shield that at present engineers do not entirely understand, it will be the first Orion capsule to have the environmental systems necessary for its human cargo. NASA is putting humans on the first test flight of those systems.

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