February 10, 2023 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Category: Behind The Black
Joan Jett & the Blackhearts – I Love Rock’n’Roll
An evening pause: Performed live 1982.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
February 10, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Blue Origin and the fast-food chain Shaq’s Big Chicken sign deal
When you read what this deal really entails, you will laugh. It is typical of the kind of engineering achievements we have come to expect from Blue Origin: Empty PR campaigns having nothing to do with actually building something that will fly in space.
- An update on the Epsilon F6 failure last October.
The release at the link is entirely in Japanese. According to Jay, “As of February 3 JAXA has now narrowed the cause of the RCS [reaction control system] failure to blockage of the diaphragm at the helium tank outlet.”
- Russian official claims his design bureau (part of Roscosmos) is beginning research on a single-stage-to-orbit rocket
The picture at the link is hilariously pure science fiction. This ain’t happening, ever.
No blacklist column today. Been too busy with personal matters.
Terraced serrated layered mesas on Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 19, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a collection of terraced mesas covered with dust of a variety of colors.
The bluish colors suggest exposed bedrock, while the different shades of tan suggest areas covered by dust and volcanic ash. That the tan areas are likely dust is strengthened in that it is found between and on these rough mesas, where dunes are also seen. The dust gets blown in but gets trapped there.
The tan colors however could also indicate different types of bedrock, especially because different terraces seem to be of different shades. We will need more data to determine which, or whether this is a combination of all these geological processes.
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Curiosity takes high resolution panorama of the canyon it will soon enter
Click for original image.
Using its high resolution camera, the Curiosity science team has now released a November 2022 panorama looking south into Gediz Vallis, the Martian slot canyon that the rover will be entering in the near future.
The panorama above, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that canyon. The red dotted line indicates Curiosity’s approximate path since the panorama was taken, circling around behind Chenapua.
The mosaic is made up of 18 individual images that were stitched together after being sent to Earth. The color has been adjusted to match lighting conditions as the human eye would see them on Earth.
Not only should you definitely look at the original, at full resolution, but also compare it with the black and white mosaic I posted in December 2022, taken by the rover’s navigation camera looking in the same direction though from a slightly different position. The color definitely underlines the spectacular nature of the landscape.
NASA awards launch contract to Blue Origin’s unlaunched New Glenn rocket
NASA yesterday awarded Blue Origin the launch contract for its smallsat ESCAPADE Mars orbiter mission, set to launch in late 2024.
ESCAPADE will launch on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket from Space Launch Complex-36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Launch is targeted for late 2024. Blue Origin is one of 13 companies NASA selected for VADR contracts in 2022. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, manages the VADR contracts. As part of VADR, the fixed-price indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts have a five-year ordering period with a maximum total value of $300 million across all contracts.
NASA’s VADR program is designed to give contracts to higher risk contractors to help those launch companies develop their rockets. Since New Glenn is years behind schedule and as-yet unlaunched, this contract is an attempt to help change that. Note however that it is fixed price, and does not set a deadline for Blue Origin to launch.
ESCAPADE will actually be two orbiters designed to study the faint artifacts of Mars’ magnetosphere left over from its past.
India successfully launches its SSLV rocket on 2nd attempt
On its second launch attempt tonight, India’s SSLV rocket (Small Satellite Launch Vehicle) successfully reached orbit and deployed all three of its smallsat payloads.
On the first launch attempt in August 2022, the engine on the fourth stage, used to put the satellites in their preferred orbits, shut down prematurely due to a failure of its guidance system. Today, all worked as planned.
The hope of India’s space agency ISRO is that this rocket can garner some of the growing smallsat business. That it is three years delayed because of ISRO’s panic over Wuhan makes fulfilling that hope more difficult, because so much of that business has now been grabbed by other companies.
The 2023 launch race:
9 SpaceX
5 China
2 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India
American private enterprise still leads China 10 to 5 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 10 to 9.
Dionne Warwick – I Say A Little Prayer
An evening pause: Performed live on the Ed Sullivan Show, January 7, 1968.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
February 9, 2023 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
February 9, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Everyday Astronaut tours Stoke Space
The video is an hour long, but well worth the watch.
- Shotwell: Ukraine used Starlink for offensive military actions, something SpaceX had not expected
I don’t believe her. You would have to be incredibly naive to not expect the Ukraine to use this tool in any way it could in its desperate fight against the Russians, especially in the early part of the war when Russia occupied gigantic parts of the Ukraine.
Pushback: Civil rights complaint filed against California school district for running segregated program
Government endorsed segregation in California
“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” A civil rights complaint has been filed by the organization Parents Defending Education against the Pajaro Valley Unified School District in Santa Cruz County, California, for offering a segregated teacher support program that specifically excluded some races from attending.
As the program’s leaflet to the right shows, the program for “people of color” would not only give only certain races beneficial training, it would also give those participants “a stipend” that was forbidden to some employees due to their race.
It also appears that the program is also discriminatory on who it hires, as the coaches shown on that flyer are all minorities. Apparently, whites (and especially white males) need not apply.
You can read the actual civil rights complaint here [pdf]. As it notes bluntly:
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SpaceX completes 33-engine static fire test today of Superheavy prototype #7
Today’s Superheavy static fire test
SpaceX today successfully completed a 7-second-long static fire test of 31 of 33 Raptor-2 engines at the base Superheavy #7. The test ran for its full duration, and it appears no damage occurred to the launchpad. One engine shut down prior to test, and one shut down prematurely during the test. If this had happened during launch, the booster would still have had enough energy to get Starship to its required velocity to reach orbit.
The company will now have to analyze the test to determine whether it was sufficient to proceed to a March orbital launch. Certainly they will roll the booster back to the assembly building to exchange out the two engines that misfired.
All in all, it appears an orbital test flight of Starship could occur sometime in the next two months, assuming the FAA gets out of the way and issues the launch license.
EARLIER UPDATE:
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Propellant loading is underway, and a rough time estimate for the actual static fire test is now 3 pm (Central).
Musk has now confirmed in a tweet that they are going to proceed to the test. It now appears that they have almost completed propellant loading. It appears they have filled the oxygen tanks, but not the methane tanks, and will probably not fill the methane tanks entirely for the test itself.
Original post:
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No specific schedule has been announced of SpaceX’s attempt today to complete the first full 33-engine static fire test in Boca Chica of its seventh prototype of Superheavy, but a live stream is available from NASAspaceflight.com. I have embedded that live stream below.
The test will validate numerous systems, including the ground systems, the launchpad, the engines, and the systems for igniting all 33 in the proper sequence. Starship prototype #24 is not stacked on top of Superheavy in order to prevent any damage to it in case this test goes ugly. If so, SpaceX already has Superheavy prototype #9 ready to go in the nearby assembly building.