Russia today completed its second launch of 2023, successfully using its Soyuz-2 rocket to send a Progess freighter on its way to ISS.
The capsule will dock with the leaking Zvezda module on ISS on February 11th.
The 2023 launch race:
9 SpaceX
5 China
2 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
American private enterprise still leads China 10 to 5 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 10 to 8.
Link here. The key takeaway is that this commercial privately built and operated lunar smallsat is doing what it was designed to do, even as its operators continue to overcome periodic technical problems.
For example, beginning January 26th the spacecraft stopped receiving commands from ground controllers. The problem solved itself when on February 6th “an automatic command-loss timer rebooted” the spacecraft. Meanwhile,
CAPSTONE has completed more than 12 orbits in its near-rectilinear halo orbit – the same orbit [that will be used by Lunar] Gateway – surpassing one of the mission’s objectives to achieve at least six orbits. The mission team has performed two orbit maintenance maneuvers in this time. These maneuvers were originally scheduled to happen once per orbit, but the mission team was able to reduce the frequency while maintaining the correct orbit. This reduces risk and complexity for the mission and informs plans for future spacecraft flying in this orbit, like Gateway.
Essentially, mission controllers are figuring out the best and most efficient methods for eventually maintaining Lunar Gateway’s orbit around the Moon, when it gets there.
Because of thruster failures shortly after its December 11, 2022, NASA’s technology test lunar orbiter cubesat Lunar Flashlight has been unable to reach its planned orbit around the Moon.
Instead, first engineers have attempted an improvisation with the one thruster that had not initially failed, and when that did not work are now hoping to instead use the Earth’s gravity to shift its present path so that it will periodically fly over the Moon’s south pole, when it could possible still use its lasers reflectometer to gather data in the permanently shadowed craters there.
[Other than the thrusters, t]he rest of the CubeSat’s onboard systems are fully functional, and the mission recently successfully tested its four-laser reflectometer. This mini-instrument is the first of its kind and is designed and calibrated to seek out surface ice inside the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s South Pole.
As a engineering test satellite, everything that has happened has been to the good, as it has allowed these engineers to push this cutting edge cubesat technology to the limit.
An evening pause: Performed live 1990, four days before her 19th birthday. As every single commenter at the youtube page correctly notes, this is an incredibly difficult piece. “Many great violinists won’t play this in public, or even record it.” Just watch and see. If you admire great guitar players, you will be astounded by some of the moves she performs.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
It appears from the tweet that the main topic was the propulsion systems to be used.
The tweet provides little information, other than a short uninformative video with stirring music.
The contract is part of the Space Force’s effort to have the ability to launch on 24 hours notice. Both Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit are competing for similar contracts.
Lots of whining about SpaceX, as well as the difficulty of rocket science. Translation: Competition and rocketry demands the best from you. Don’t complain, deliver.
Though the manned orbital mission is presently slotted for 2024, it is very unlikely that target date will be met.
For this last quick link a hat tip to reader Richard M.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on November 19, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels “Intersecting Fissures.”
These fissures stand out distinctly on this terrain. If you look at an MRO context camera image, showing a wider view, you can see that the surrounding plain is relatively featureless, with few craters. Except for some strange and inexplicable dark streaks close by to the east, some mottled but flat terrain to the north, and a long but very faint similar east-west fissure to the south, this runelike fissure is the only major topological feature for miles around.
That context camera image also shows that this fissure sits on top of a very faint bulge, with hints that material had flowed downhill from the fissure’s western and southern outlets. Located very close to the equator, it is unlikely that any of those flow features are glacial, and in fact they do not have that appearance in the context camera picture. Instead, they have the look of Martian lava, fast-moving and far less viscous than Earth-lava, and thus able to cover large areas much more quickly.
Thus, all the evidence says that this feature is a dormant volcanic vent, sitting on a flood lava plain. And the overview map below cements this conclusion.
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Bruce Gilley of Portland State University
They’re coming for you next: Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University in Oregon, who previously had a peer-reviewed paper on colonialism withdrawn from publication because of death threats, has now sued the university because the former communication manager for its Division of Equity and Inclusion blocked him from an internal college Twitter discussion group because he had the nerve to tweet “all men are created equal.”
You can read his lawsuit complaint here [pdf]. Gilley not only sued the university’s Division of Equity and Inclusion, he also sued directly Tova Stabin, the communications manager who blocked him.
What makes the case interesting is that the day after he filed his lawsuit, the university unblocked him and its lawyer sent him an apologetic letter. Here is part of that letter, as quoted in the lawsuit complaint:
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Click for interactive map.
The approximate landing sites for two different lunar landers have now been revealed.
The map to the right, with the south pole indicated by the white cross, shows both, plus the planned landing site for Russia’s Luna-25 lander, presently targeting a summer ’23 launch. The green dot marks Luna-25’s landing site, inside Boguslawsky Crater.
The red dot marks the landing site in for India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander/rover, now tentatively scheduled for launch by the end of ’23. This mission will put a small rover on the surface, and is essentially a redo of the failed Chandrayaan-2 mission from 2019.
The yellow dot in Malapert-A crater is now the likely landing site for Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander. This site is a change from the spacecraft’s original landing site in Oceanus Procellarum (where Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is now going). In making this change, the launch of Nova-C also slipped to late June 2023, from the previously announced launch date of early 2023.
ULA’s new Vulcan-Centaur rocket has finally been stacked in the company’s assembly facility at Cape Canaveral, ready to be rolled out for its first launchpad fueling tests prior to its first launch, tentatively scheduled for the end of March.
The odds of that launch date being met is quite uncertain. Right now neither the rocket’s payloads nor its solid rocket strap-on boosters have been added, and before that will happen the company plans to first roll the rocket out to the launchpad, do fueling and countdown tests. It will then roll it back to the assembly building to stack those components, and then roll it back to the launchpad for launch.
To meet that launch target everything must go perfectly during these preliminary operations, something that is generally unexpected for a rocket’s first launch. ULA however has an advantage, in that it has already done much of this testing using a dummy Vulcan, and it also has decades of experience launching rockets.
Much rides on this first launch. The payloads include Astrobotic’s first lunar lander, Peregrine, as well as Amazon’s first two test satellites for its Kuiper internet constellation. Also, ULA needs to complete two successful launches in order to get certified to begin its commercial launches for the military.
Though its investigation is not completed, Virgin Orbit has narrowed the cause of its January 9th launch failure from Cornwall to a $100 component in the second stage engine of its LaunchOne rocket.
Speaking on a panel at the SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View, California, Dan Hart said it was still premature to formally declare the root cause of the failed Jan. 9 flight of the company’s LauncherOne rocket on the “Start Me Up” mission from Spaceport Cornwall in England. However, he said while that investigation continues, evidence was pointing to a component in the rocket’s second stage engine.
“Everything points to, right now, a filter that was clearly there when we assembled the rocket but was not there as the second stage engine started, meaning it was dislodged and caused mischief downstream,” he said. He didn’t go into details about that component, other than to say that it was not an expensive item. “This is like a $100 part that took us out.”
Hart said the company would no longer use that filter and was “looking broadly” at other potential fixes.
No timeline as to when the company will complete the investigation or resume launches has been released. Since both the FAA and the UK’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch are involved, we should expect it to take longer than necessary.
Relativity has once again stacked its Terran-1 rocket on its launchpad at Cape Canaveral for its final ground tests prior to first launch, hopefully later this month.
The launch date has not been announced, nor has a specific schedule for those tests, which will likely include several dress rehearsal countdowns where the rocket will be fueled as if for launch.
Terran-1 is a smallsat rocket, most of which has been 3D printed. If successful, Relativity plans to follow it in 2024 with the 3D printed Terran-R, which would be comparable in size and power to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The company also claims that rocket will be entirely reusable.
An evening pause: From a 1981 live performance.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
