Category: Behind The Black

Taffy terrain in Mars’ death valley

2:11 pm

Taffy terrain in Mars' death valley
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and enhanced to post here, was taken on December 17, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label “banded terrain and possible breached crater.”

Banded terrain is another name for a geological feature dubbed “taffy terrain” and only found on Mars, and furthermore only found there in Hellas Basin, the deepest giant impact basin on the red planet. This taffy terrain is considered very young, no than 3 billion years old, and formed from the flow of some form of viscous material, though what that material is remains unsolved.

This image however may help solve that mystery. The breached crater is just off frame to the upper right. The two-fingered flow coming down from the picture’s top is the flow coming out of the crater’s gap.
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SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites

12:07 pm

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

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

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

48 SpaceX
19 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 55 to 31. SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 48 to 38.

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A former SpaceX employee gives a fascinating account of what it is like to work there

10:29 am

Link here. The account is everything you would expect. The work culture is open, efficient, and aggressive. You need to provide value and be self-motivated or you will not survive.

This one story reveals a lot:

[I]f I was in a meeting and it was adding value to what I did daily, stay, or if I was adding value based on my expertise, stay — but if neither of those things were happening, you should get up and respectfully walk out.

In one instance, a government customer came in with a 50-slide deck. Six slides into the presentation, 75% of the room had walked out. I had to tell him that if he didn’t get to the point, I’d be the only person left in the room — and only because I had to walk him out. He skipped ahead to his last five slides. That kind of environment makes you much more efficient.

I bet there are a lot of corporate workers reading this that fervently wish they had the right to walk out of a meeting that was wasting their time. Furthermore, consider that government customer: He or she brought a slide deck where 90% of the slides were fluff. That indicates the kind of work atmosphere he or she comes from.

For smart people who want to be creative, it would be an incredible pleasure to work in such an environment. No wonder SpaceX produces such good products.

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Webb data suggests a super-Earth might have an atmosphere

10:20 am

Using infrared data from the Webb Space Telescope, scientists now think the hot super-Earth exoplanet dubbed 55 Cancri e and 41 light years away might have an atmosphere made up not only of vaporized molten rock but other gases as well, such as carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide.

The exoplanet orbits much too close to its star, only 1.4 million miles away, for any life as we know it to exist. Its surface is thought to be molten, heated by that star.

The team thinks that the gases blanketing 55 Cancri e would be bubbling out from the interior, rather than being present ever since the planet formed. “The primary atmosphere would be long gone because of the high temperature and intense radiation from the star,” said Bello-Arufe. “This would be a secondary atmosphere that is continuously replenished by the magma ocean. Magma is not just crystals and liquid rock; there’s a lot of dissolved gas in it, too.”

As always, these results remain unconfirmed and are very uncertain.

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Redwire developing a satellite designed to fly in extremely low orbits

10:07 am

The orbital manufacturing company Redwire is now developing a satellite, dubbed SabreSat, to fly for long periods in extremely low orbits where the atmosphere would normally cause the orbit to quickly decay.

SabreSat, Redwire Space’s satellite for very low Earth orbit, looks more like a dart than a traditional spacecraft. “As you think about aerodynamics, you want the dart to be skinny and long, not stubby and fat,” Spence Wise, Redwire senior vice president for missions and platforms, told SpaceNews.

Redwire is designing SabreSat for government intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

The satellite would fly in orbits from 55 to 200 miles altitude. By flying so low it will get far better images and ground data than spacecraft in higher orbits. It will also be less vulnerable to attack compared to high altitude aerial reconnaissance balloons or airplanes.

Its dart-like shape will meanwhile reduce friction so that less fuel will be required to maintain its orbit.

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Orbital tug startup Starfish Space wins $37.5 million contract from Space Force

9:55 am

Even though problems with another company’s deployment system prevented a docking test in orbit last month of its Otter Pup tug, the orbital tug startup Starfish Space has won a $37.5 million contract from Space Force to further develop its autonomous rendezvous and docking system.

The newly announced $37.5 million Space Force contract will support the development of an Otter demonstration spacecraft over the course of the next four years. In its announcement of the fixed-price contract — which was awarded through the Strategic Funding Increase program, or STRATFI — the Department of Defense said the project’s goal is to “improve maneuverability on-orbit and enable dynamic space operations docking and maneuvering of Department of Defense assets on-orbit.”

Though the docking test was prevented when the tug deploying Otter Pup (owned by a different tug company, Launcher) went into an unplanned spin, Otter Pup was deployed and brought under control. Those maneuvers however used up most of its fuel. Engineers were still able to work with another orbital tug company, D-Orbit, to maneuver and rendezvous with that company’s ION tug and thus succeed in demonstrating Pup’s rendezvous technolgoy.

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Chang’e-6 enters lunar orbit

9:42 am

Chang'e-6 landing zone

China’s Chang’e-6 sample return spacecraft successfully entered lunar orbit today, in preparation for its mission to land and bring back material from the the far side of the Moon. The landing zone is indicated by the red box on the map to the right, on the southern rim of Apollo Crater in the southern hemisphere. That crater is inside South Aitkin Basin, one the Moon’s largest impact basins.

The spacecraft will next adjust its orbit to prepare for sending its lander-ascender sections down to the surface. If the landing goes well, it will drill into the surface, place some material into the ascender section, which will then lift-off and dock with the orbiter-return section in orbit. The material will be transferred into the return section, which will separate and bring the material back to Earth, sometime in late June.

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Launch of first manned flight of Starliner rescheduled for May 17, 2024

9:31 am

Because ULA engineers have decided they need to replace the valve that forced a launch scrub on May 8th, the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule to ISS has now been rescheduled to May 17, 2024.

The oscillating behavior of the valve during prelaunch operations, ultimately resulted in mission teams calling a launch scrub on May 6. After the ground crews and astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams safely exited from Space Launch Complex-41, the ULA team successfully commanded the valve closed and the oscillations were temporarily dampened. The oscillations then re-occurred twice during fuel removal operations. After evaluating the valve history, data signatures from the launch attempt, and assessing the risks relative to continued use, the ULA team determined the valve exceeded its qualification and mission managers agreed to remove and replace the valve.

Replacing the valve is a somewhat routine procedure, but it will take a few days, causing the two-week delay.

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TESS resumes science operations

9:26 am

Engineers have corrected the issue that put the space telescope TESS into safe mode on April 8, 2024 and have resumed science operations.

The operations team determined this latest safe mode was triggered by a failure to properly unload momentum from the spacecraft’s reaction wheels, a routine activity needed to keep the satellite properly oriented when making observations. The propulsion system, which enables this momentum transfer, had not been successfully repressurized following a prior safe mode event April 8. The team has corrected this, allowing the mission to return to normal science operations. The cause of the April 8 safe mode event remains under investigation.

As for that April 8th safe mode, though engineers were able to return the spacecraft to normal operations after about a week, that they still do not know what caused it remains a concern.

TESS takes high resolution survey images of 93% of the sky about once per month. By comparing the data from each scan, scientists have discovered so far more than 300 transiting exoplanets as well as many supernovae and other phenomenon related to variable stars.

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May 7, 2024 Quick space links

3:30 pm

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.

 

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Sweden’s Esrange spaceport gets its first orbital customer

3:23 pm

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

Sweden’s Esrange spaceport today announced it has signed its firs orbital rocket customer, Perigee Aerospace from South Korea.

In its 7 May announcement, SSC explained that Perigee Aerospace expected to launch the first Blue Whale 1 mission from Esrange no earlier than 2025 following a successful maiden flight from South Korean soil.

…Blue Whale 1 is a two-stage rocket that will stand approximately 21 metres tall and feature a reusable first stage.

Esrange was originally built by an earlier version of the European Space Agency in 1964, then transferred to Sweden in 1972. Until until a orbital launchpad was installed 2023 it was solely dedicated to suborbital flights. It now is attempting to attract the new commercial rocket industry, as well as compete with the other new nearby spaceports, as shown on the map.

This new rocket from South Korea is also news, as it indicates that the fever for capitalism in space has even reached that country.

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Swirls of layers and dunes at the bottom of Valles Marineris

2:57 pm

Overview map

Swirls of layers and dunes
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 25, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small spot of the floor of Mars’ giant canyon Valles Marineris, the largest such canyon known in the solar system, as indicated by the white dot on the overview map above.

This location is not actually at the very bottom of the canyon, but on a very large mountainous bench extending out about 20 miles from the canyon’s south rim. It seems there is a lot of dust and sand on this bench, producing many miles of swirling dunes. It also appears there are many terraced layers in the region as well, which also swirl in curves going in many different directions. Though it appears that most of the swirls in this picture are from layers in the bedrock, this conclusion is not certain. For example, are the curves on the top of the mesa dunes or bedrock layers? The answer is hardly clear.

For scale, the canyon at this location is about 80 to 90 miles wide. The northern rim rises five miles from the bottom to the top, while the south rises seven miles. And yet, though five to ten times larger than Earth’s Grand Canyon, this is only a small side spur of Valles Marineris.

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Apparently rioting in support of murderous terrorists does not win the hearts and minds of the public

1:55 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Do the protesters really believe that behaving like
Hamas will get the public to support Hamas?
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Good news: The student protests and riots on college campuses as well as at a variety of other public events in the past month in support of the terrorist organization Hamas has apparently succeeded in only one thing: tarnishing the reputations of their universities while disqualifying their own job prospects.

It appears the public really doesn’t support anti-Semitism and the killing of all Jews in Israel. Nor have the violent riots by the protesters to destroy libraries while illegally taking over campuses done anyting to change the public’s mind.

Who wudda thought it?

Instead, the public is appalled, and is showing its disgust in the past week in very public ways. For example, yesterday thirteen federal judges announced they will no longer hire law clerks from Columbia.
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Scientists: Restrict all exploration on Mars to protect our future work!

10:52 am

In a paper just published, planetary scientists Australia have proposed strict guidelines for any future exploration on Mars in order to prevent future colonists from doing anything that might interfere with any future research the scientists might want to do.

The thrust of the paper, they comment, is to ensure that locales of geological significance on Mars do not suffer the same damage as many sites on Earth have faced. Sites on the Red Planet can be practically conserved while still allowing science and exploration to continue, they say.

“Geoconservation allows humanity to protect Earth’s story and geological history,” the researchers observe, “so that present and future generations can experience Earth’s aesthetic beauty, conduct scientific research, connect with various cultures, adequately protect and ensure the functioning of Earth’s biology and ecosystems, and learn about the history of our planet.”

Let me translate: “We academics fear allowing others the freedom to explore. We come first. Let’s create rules that will allow us to do what we want, while forcing others to ask us for permission to do what they want.”

Sadly, this mentality now rules throughout all of western civilization’s intellectual community, and its not much different than the totalitarian top-down attitudes of the Russians and Chinese. Those in charge or better educated simply know better than everyone else, and are hell bent on telling everyone what they can and cannot do.

The first few generations of colonists on Mars, the Moon, and the asteroids are going to find their hands badly tied. Freedom will not exist.

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Musk: SpaceX and Starlink don’t use artificial intelligence

10:31 am

During an interview at a recent conference Elon Musk admitted that both SpaceX and Starlink have found artificial intelligence (AI) lacking, and don’t use it at all.

The irony was that prior to this admission, Musk had been extolling AI’s potential, predicting it would someday do wonderful things.

Musk, who answered questions during 27th annual Milken Institute Global Conference on Monday, spent a sizable portion of his talk extolling the benefits of artificial intelligence. At one point, he said a “truth-seeking” AI could “foster human civilization” when asked about the role the technology would play in human’s everyday lives.

But when asked whether AI could “accelerate” his efforts in space exploration, he seemed less excited about the technology. …”I mean, oddly enough, one of the areas where there’s almost no AI used is space exploration,” Musk replied. “So SpaceX uses basically no AI, Starlink does not use AI. I’m not against using it. We haven’t seen a use for it.”

Musk continued, saying that he’s been testing improved AI language models by asking them questions about space — and the results have been disappointing. “With any given variant of or improvements in AI, I mean, I’ll ask it questions about the Fermi paradox, about rocket engine design, about electrochemistry — and so far, the AI has been terrible at all those questions,” Musk said.

Here we see the visionary meet the practical engineer/businessman. Musk always looks to the future with grand visions, but when it comes time to build those visions, he never allows his vision to interfere with practicality. AI is still essentially garbage-in-garbage-out. The rush by businesses and tech-firms to blindly use has resulted in more than a few disasters.

Musk doesn’t do anything blindly. He tested AI first, found it wanting, and thus put it aside, despite believing it will someday do wonderful things.

If only more companies used this approach. If they had, they might not have blindly pushed DEI and ESG requirements that have done nothing but harm to their companies, their work forces, and their bottom lines.

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A quarter century after it was lost in orbit an American military test satellite has been rediscovered

10:17 am

A target satellite launched in 1974 as part of a military test of its surveillance satellite technology has been rediscovered in orbit twenty-five years after it was last tracked.

The Infra-Red Calibration Balloon (S73-7) satellite started its journey into the great unknown after launching on April 10, 1974 through the United States Air Force’s Space Test Program. It was originally contained in what was called “The Hexagon System” in which S73-7, the smaller satellite, was deployed from the larger KH-9 Hexagon once in space. S73-7 measured 26 inches wide (66 centimeters) and began its life heading into a 500 mile (800 kilometers) circular orbit.

While in orbit, the original plan was for S73-7 to inflate and take on the role as a calibration target for remote sensing equipment. After this failed to be achieved during deployment, the satellite faded away into the abyss and joined the graveyard of unwanted space junk until it was rediscovered in April.

After it first drifted out of contact after launch in 1974 S73-7 has been been lost and rediscovered several times, first in the 1970s, then in the 1990s, and now. It appears its radar profile makes it hard to pick up, which means it will likely be lost again.

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SpaceX unveils the spacesuit Jared Isaacman will use to do the first private spacewalk

10:05 am

SpaceX this past weekend unveiled the spacesuit that Jared Isaacman will use on his Polaris Dawn mission, presently scheduled for this coming summer, to do the first spacewalk by a private citizen.

This spacewalk suit is based on SpaceX’s flight suits that astronauts presently wear when inside Dragon, but is much more capable. From SpaceX’s webpage:

Developed with mobility in mind, SpaceX teams incorporated new materials, fabrication processes, and novel joint designs to provide greater flexibility to astronauts in pressurized scenarios while retaining comfort for unpressurized scenarios. The 3D-printed helmet incorporates a new visor to reduce glare during the EVA in addition to the new Heads-Up Display (HUD) and camera that provide information on the suit’s pressure, temperature, and relative humidity. The suit also incorporates enhancements for reliability and redundancy during a spacewalk, adding seals and pressure valves to help ensure the suit remains pressurized and the crew remains safe.

Creating this suit was the main reason Isaacman’s five day orbital Polaris Dawn mission was delayed by almost two years.

I wonder what it cost SpaceX to develop this new suit. I strongly suspect it was much cheaper than the spacesuits NASA has hired Axiom and Collins Aerospace to create. It certainly has been built faster.

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Rocket Lab delays first launch of new Neutron rocket

9:41 am

Rocket Lab has delayed the first launch of its new larger Neutron rocket from late 2024 to mid-2025 in order to complete the testing of that rocket’s new methane-fueled Archimedes engine.

Many component, subsystem, and all-up system tests will be conducted throughout the test campaign. These tests will validate Archimedes’ transient start-up, steady-state, and shut down performance. The engine test and development campaign is a key driver of the schedule for Neutron’s first launch, which the Company today confirmed is now expected to take place no earlier than mid-2025.

That testing will also certify it for use in as many as twenty flights, as the Neutron rocket is being designed from the get-go to be reusable.

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China successfully completes first launch of new Long March 6C rocket

9:33 am

China today successfully completed the first launch of its new Long March 6C rocket, lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in the north interior of China.

The rocket uses kerosene as its fuel, rather than the toxic hypergolic fuels used in its older rockets, and is part of an effort to replace all those older rockets. Thus, when its lower stage crashes inside China, the risks of it harming anyone is reduced somewhat. China released no information on where that first stage crashed on this first launch.

The rocket placed four satellites in orbit.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

47 SpaceX
19 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 54 to 31, with SpaceX by itself leading the rest of the world, including other American companies, 47 to 38.

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Starliner launch scrubbed due to valve issue

9:21 am

Yesterday’s Starliner launch was scrubbed before launch because ULA had detected an issue with a valve on the Atlas-5’s Centaur upper stage, causing that valve to flutter because it had not closed in the proper position.

At the press conference that followed, ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno explained that during an unmanned launch, engineers would have simply cycled the valve, which almost always works to get it to seat properly. ULA launch rules however forbids it from doing so on a manned launch, because that would be the equivalent of fueling the tank with people on board the rocket. The Atlas-5 was initially not built for manned flights, and though it has been upgraded to man-rate it, those upgrades did not permit ULA this capability, unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which get fueled entirely after the crew boards Dragon.

They are reviewing the data to see if the valve will need to be replaced. If not, the launch could happen quickly. If it does, the launch will be delayed slightly longer, but not significantly. Right now ULA, NASA, and Boeing are targeting a May 10th launch.

It is worth listening to Tory Bruno’s explanation of the situation because of its clarity. I have embedded his comments below, time-stamped to when he began speaking.
» Read more

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The long delay in Israel’s final Gaza offensive has harmed everyone except the terrorists

5:32 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Even the Arabs recognize these facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Despite several months of delay forced on it by the Biden administration in its effort to placate the Democratic Party’s Islamic wing, Israel today began its final offensive against Hamas’s last Gazan stronghold in the southern city of Rafah.

According to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), “The IDF is currently conducting targeted strikes against Hamas terror targets in eastern Rafah in southern Gaza.” It has also dropped leaflets throughout Rafah telling the general population to evacuate to the west and north into areas that Israel has set up to hold non-combatant refugees.

The initiation of this offensive is likely linked to Hamas’s actions this weekend. First Hamas proudly took credit for bombing the border crossing used to bring humanitarian aid to the city. That attack killed three Israeli soldiers, and put an end to the aid. Hamas also continued to stall and refuse to negotiate, and then when it was clear the offensive was about to start it suddenly announced it had accepted a ceasefire deal offered to it by Qatar and Egypt that Israel had no part in negotiating and had already rejected.

What will happen next is somewhat unclear. Israel will without doubt be able to take Rafah and likely eliminate the remaining four or so battalions of Hamas terrorists. Will it be able to do so without a large number of civilian casualties is unclear, as Hamas has a policy of using those civilians as shields. It will likely try to do so again.

The ramifications of the long delay in this offensive are however important. It occurred partly because Israel’s army wanted to regroup, but mostly because the Biden administration has been desperately trying to prevent it. The White House has threatened Israel in a number of ways if it moved forward with the attack, most recently by putting a hold on a shipment to Israel of ammo. Biden officials have also stated several times that they are considering a major change in its policy towards Israel if the Rafah offensive occurs.

Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly made it clear that Israel has no intention of making any peace deal with Hamas. In the past month however it did appear the Israeli government was holding off on the offensive in order to placate the White House and hopefully work out a deal to get the hostages released.

In the end, the delay has served no good purpose, and in fact has had many negative consequences, against Biden, the Gazan people themselves, and the United States.
» Read more

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May 6, 2024 Quick space links

3:18 pm

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.

 

 

 

  • Chang’e-6 is carrying a surprise mini-rover

    • The rover is very simple, and likely capable of only a few tasks and a short life span on the surface. Nonetheless, it shows that China continues to push the envelope, taking every opportunity to improve its space capabilities.

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Another non-story about Venus

12:33 pm

Venus as seen in ultraviolet by Mariner 10, February 5, 1974
Venus as seen in ultraviolet by Mariner 10,
February 5, 1974. The identity of the material
that causes the dark streaks still remains unknown.

The uncertainty of science: In the next few days you might see a few news articles in the mainstream press touting a new study that “Now for the first time!” explains why there is no water on Venus.

Be warned. You are reading bad reporting of relatively insignificant research that some specialists studying Venus might find of interest but for everyone else is hardly news. Prior to the internet age most science reporters would have read the press release and tossed it aside. And if they tried to sell it as a story their editors would have quickly told them to find something better to write about.

How do I know this? The press release‘s title gives it away: “Venus has almost no water. A new study may reveal why.”

First, any press release that uses qualifiers like “may” or “could” or “might” guarantees a finding of less interest. Almost invariably such “discoveries” are nothing more that a new computer simulation or model that shows interesting output, but has nothing to do with new observations of actual data. In essence, this is garbage in, garbage out. The computer models might help explain things, but no one should take the results that seriously. Good scientists (of which there appear to be fewer and fewer) never do. Good journalists should do the same.

In this case that is exactly what we have. To quote:
» Read more

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites

11:22 am

It just keeps going and going: SpaceX today successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

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

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

47 SpaceX
18 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 54 to 30. SpaceX by itself now leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 47 to 37.

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A supernova factory

9:44 am

A supernova factory

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2023 as part of a survey of galaxies where recent supernovae have occurred. One occurred in 2020 in this galaxy, which is about 240 million light years away and dubbed UGC 9684.

Remarkably, the 2020 supernova in this galaxy isn’t the only one that’s been seen there — four supernova-like events have been spotted in UGC 9684 since 2006, putting it up there with the most active supernova-producing galaxies. It turns out that UGC 9684 is a quite active star-forming galaxy, calculated as producing one solar mass worth of stars every few years! This level of stellar formation makes UGC 9684 a veritable supernova factory, and a galaxy to watch for astronomers hoping to examine these exceptional events.

This image provides scientists a high resolution baseline should another supernova occur. It will not only make it easier to spot a future supernova, it also increases the chances that the progenitor star that went boom could be identified.

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Watching the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule

9:30 am

UPDATE: Launch scrubbed due to an issue on the upper stage. When a new launch date is announced I will put up a new post.

———————–
The first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule is presently targeting a 10:34 pm (Eastern) launch tonight from Cape Canaveral, lifting off on ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket.

The flight will carry two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, and will dock with ISS a little over 24 hours later for a week of testing docked to the station.

The live stream for tonight’s launch is embedded below. Though that coverage will include several prelaunch and post launch press conferences, the key coverage of the launch itself will begin at 6:30 pm (Eastern) on May 6th, about four hours before the launch itself. It will also include the capsule’s docking with ISS on May 8th. Most of the prelaunch coverage will be NASA PR, even though the only time NASA is participating significantly is when ISS is involved. Boeing is operating the capsule and ULA is operating the launch.

» Read more

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Another Starship/Superheavy update

9:15 am

Link here. The report details the extensive work being done by SpaceX engineers and construction crews at Boca Chica, not only upgrading and testing the 30th Starship and 11th Superheavy prototypes that will fly on the fourth orbital test flight but also improving and expanding the launch facilities there.

A static fire test of both vehicles could happen in the next week or so, though this remains uncertain.

Though it appears that SpaceX will be ready to fly by mid- to late-May, the key factor on when that fourth test flight occurs remains this:

…there is still no news on when Flight 3’s mishap investigation will be completed.

That investigation is being conducted by SpaceX. Once submitted to the FAA that agency will have to review it and issue its own conclusions (essentially rubber-stamping it), something that is guaranteed to take time. In the past it took the FAA from two to seven months to do this rubberstamping, with the time shortening after each flight. There have been indications that it hopes to reduce that time even further with this and later flights. We should therefore expect it to take anywhere from one to four weeks this time.

Thus, a May launch remains unlikely, as I predicted from the get-go. Expect the launch to occur in June, which though delayed will still be an improvement over the FAA’s past red-tape approval processes.

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Russia to NASA: We’ll wait a bit before putting our astronauts on Starliner

8:54 am

Even though Russia and NASA have a barter deal whereby one astronaut from each country flies free on each flight of its spacecraft, Russia it appears will forego flying any Russians on Boeing’s Starliner capsule for the immediate future.

At the May 3 briefing, though, NASA officials said it was unlikely that a Russian cosmonaut would be assigned to Starliner-1 [the first operational flight after the first manned demo flight launching today]. “We expect, on the Roscosmos side, they’re more likely to want to see a long-duration flight also, so we think they’ll want to start to fly with us on Starliner-2,” said Dana Weigel, NASA ISS program manager.

That would appear to disrupt the ongoing series of seat exchanges between NASA and Roscosmos. “We’re still working through that with our Roscosmos counterparts. It’s our desire to continue to do integrated crew,” she said, adding that NASA and Roscosmos don’t have an agreement yet in place for exchanging crews in the timeframe that will include Starliner-1.

This isn’t a surprise. Russia made the same decision with SpaceX’s Dragon manned capsule, waiting until it had flown a few times before agreeing to allow its astronauts on it. With Boeing Russia might be more hesitant, consider the problems Starliner has had in development plus the overall quality control issues known to exist at Boeing.

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