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An evening pause: A key moment and a forgotten man in the history of technology.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
SpaceX today successfully launched 23 Starlink, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral and using a first stage flying for a record-setting 18th time.
The first stage landed successfully on its drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
79 SpaceX
50 China
14 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise now leads China 91 to 50 in successful launches, and the entire world combined 91 to 79. SpaceX by itself is once again tied the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 79 to 79.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
This is the engine that will power the first stage that Firefly is building for Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, replacing the Ukrainian stage and Russian engines it used to use.
As Jay notes, “At least he is building something,” taking a jab at another company with the word “blue” in its name.
He says he wants to be closer to both his family and his Cape Canaveral space facilities in Florida, which as he says is “shifting increasingly to Cape Canaveral.” He also likely decided to get out because of a new state tax that will steal $70 million from him for every stock sale of $1 billion.
The units are engineering tests, designed to work out the kinks so this power source can be used on future unmanned rovers to Mars and elsewhere.
This second test vehicle will be closer to the final capsule version. According to ISRO, four total abort tests are planned before the manned mission.
The review also refined the present understanding of this alien solar system.
That’s nice, but the question is whether the Russians will stay on after ’28, and even more important, whether their modules will last until then.
Click for interactive map.
Ingenuity yesterday completed a very short 48 second flight that shifted its position only slightly to the west, by about 23 feet. The distance, time, and highest elevation (33 feet) matched the flight plan exactly.
The green dot on the overview map above indicates its present position, with the blue dot marking Perseverance’s location. This particular flight was so short that it actually fits entirely within that green dot. Furthermore, the helicopter’s next flight, scheduled for today as well, is intended to also only reposition the helicopter, but even less so, moving only two feet or so sideways while rising only ten feet.
It appears the engineering team is preparing the helicopter for the upcoming solar conjunction, when the Sun will be between the Earth and Mars and no communications will be possible for several weeks. Such conjunctions occur about every two years, with this one beginning on November 6th and lasting until November 29th. Getting the helicopter in the right spot during that down time will increase the chances for regaining communications afterward. Since Perseverance acts as a relay station, Ingenuity must get placed in a spot where there is a direct line of communications, blocked by no objects or intevening rise in land.
Note that all the Martian rovers and orbiters are preparing for conjunction right now.
Click for original image.
Today’s cool image is a perfect example of why nothing in science research should ever be taken at face value, without digging a bit deeper. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 5, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
First an important technical point. Though the electronics unit for one of the camera’s color filters is still not working — causing a blank strip down the center of all black & white images, the camera team has gotten around this problem by inserting in that strip other color filter data, thus creating a complete image as you see to the right. This work-around means that MRO’s capabilities, though showing signs of age, will continue almost as good as before.
As for the image itself, when I first looked at it, I was baffled by the striking contrast between the mottled and rough ground in the lower left, and the almost featureless and smooth terrain everywhere else. Why this sudden transition? What could cause it? That inexplicable contrast demanded I post it as a cool image.
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A 1930s Nazi youth rally, little different than
today’s pro-Hamas demonstrations
Bring a gun to a knife fight: In a letter [pdf] sent out on November 1, 2023 to all the major law schools in the country, more than three dozen law firms made it very clear they will not hire students from those schools if action wasn’t taken against the rise of anti-Semitism on those college campuses.
Rather than summarize, I think it worthwhile to let the letter speak for itself:
Over the last several weeks, we have been alarmed at reports of anti-Semitic harassment,
vandalism and assaults on college campuses, including rallies calling for the death of Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel. Such anti-Semitic activities would not be tolerated at any of our firms. We also would not tolerate outside groups engaging in acts of harassment and threats of violence, as has also been occurring on many of your campuses.
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China today successfully launched a military satellite, its Long March 7 rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.
As this launch was on the coast, the rocket’s lower stages likely landed in the ocean harmlessly.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
78 SpaceX
50 China
14 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise still leads China 90 to 50 in successful launches, and the entire world combined 90 to 79. SpaceX by itself is trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 78 to 79.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay for the link.
Cool image time! Using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have taken a false-color ultra-violet image of Jupiter. That picture is to the right, cropped, reduced and sharpened to post here.
This newly released image from the NASA Hubble Space Telescope shows the planet Jupiter in a color composite of ultraviolet wavelengths. Released in honor of Jupiter reaching opposition, which occurs when the planet and the Sun are in opposite sides of the sky, this view of the gas giant planet includes the iconic, massive storm called the “Great Red Spot.” Though the storm appears red to the human eye, in this ultraviolet image it appears darker because high altitude haze particles absorb light at these wavelengths. The reddish, wavy polar hazes are absorbing slightly less of this light due to differences in either particle size, composition, or altitude.
The data used to create this ultraviolet image is part of a Hubble proposal that looked at Jupiter’s stealthy superstorm system. The researchers plan to map deep water clouds using the Hubble data to define 3D cloud structures in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
By comparing this ultra-violet image with Hubble’s optical view as well as Webb’s infrared view, scientists can study Jupiter’s atmosphere much like meteologists study the Earth’s, using multi-wave satellite observations.
Sierra Space announced yesterday that its reuseable Tenacity cargo freighter, the first of its Dream Chaser mini-shuttles, is now complete and ready shipment to NASA’s test facilities in Ohio for ground testing.
The spacecraft hopefully will fly next year. Though this is four years behind schedule, it signals an important milestone for the company, and suggests its operational pace will pick up afterward. Though its arrival comes very late in ISS’s lifespan, the coming arrival of many private space stations, including Sierra’s own, will likely provide it many customers.
In a tweet yesterday, Elon Musk revealed that Starlink “has achieved breakeven cash flow,” adding that “Starlink is also now a majority of all active satellites and will have launched a a majority of all satellites cumulatively from Earth by next year.”
This means that SpaceX achieved this goal using only its Falcon 9 rocket. Originally the company thought it had to have Starship to get enough satellites into orbit to operate the constellation. Because of delays in developing Starship (right now mostly caused by red tape in the federal government), the company ramped up the launch pace using just Falcon 9, and apparently got the job done.
The profits from Starlink can now be used to further develop Starship and Superheavy, assuming the federal government ever gets out of the way.
Norway yesterday announced the opening its new Andoya spaceport in the far north of the country, where it hopes will become a hub for the emerging new commercial launch industry.
The location is indicated by the map to the right, in the Arctic and farther north than any other planned spaceport, making it excellent for satellites going into polar orbit.
The launch base, which eventually will have several launch pads, was built by Norwegian public company Andoya Space, on a site which until now has only been used for firing suborbital scientific experiment rockets.
Spectrum, a two-stage craft capable of carrying up to one tonne and developed by the German start-up Isar Aerospace, is scheduled to be the first rocket to be launched from island which is located near the idyllic Lofoten archipelago.
If Norway’s government works better than Great Britain’s in issuing launch permits, this spaceport will steal all business from the UK’s own two spaceports being built in Scotland.
Though no press announcement was ever released, it appears that Iceland signed the Artemis Accords sometime in October, according to small mention in the the press release announcing the signing of the Netherlands.
The mention was so small I missed it. In fact, so apparently did NASA, as Iceland did not issue its own press release. The U.S. likely found out about the signing through private diplomatic communications.
This brings the total number of nations now part of this American space alliance to thirty-one, as follows: Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.
R.I.P. Apollo astronaut Ken Mattingly, who flew on Apollo 16 and stayed in lunar orbit in the Apollo capsule while John Young and Charles Duke spent three days on the Moon, passed away on October 31, 2023 at the age of 87.
Ten years later Mattingly flew on the space shuttle, on its fourth flight.
During its November 1, 2023 fly-by of the asteroid Dinkinesh the asteroid probe Lucy surprisingly discovered that the asteroid was actually a binary, with a second smaller asteroid orbiting it.
The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by Lucy’s camera within a minute of the probe’s closest approach of 270 miles. The second asteroid is partly blocked by Dinkinesh.
In the weeks prior to the spacecraft’s encounter with Dinkinesh, the Lucy team had wondered if Dinkinesh might be a binary system, given how Lucy’s instruments were seeing the asteroid’s brightness changing with time. The first images from the encounter removed all doubt. Dinkinesh is a close binary. From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, the team estimates that the larger body is approximately 0.5 miles (790 m) at its widest, while the smaller is about 0.15 miles (220 m) in size.
The nature of both asteroids appears to lie between a rubble pile (like Bennu) or a solid smooth rock (like Eros), suggesting we are now beginning to see aspects of the overall evolution of asteroids over time.
So far only a few images from this fly-by have been released. It will take a week for the rest of the data from the fly-by to beamed back to Earth. However, these images prove that the prime purpose of this fly-by was successful, proving that Lucy is operating as planned, able to point, manuever, and obtain its data during such a fly-by. When it arrives in the Trojan asteroids in 2027 it will be able to do its prime mission.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
Without question this hire is to help Rocket Lab get military contracts.
The story is in Spanish, but based on Jay’s translation it is targeting a 2029 launch, with suborbital tests of a smaller version first in 2026. All launches will take place in Argentina.
The video is in French. Images of the company’s test suborbital rocket can be seen at the 5 minute mark. It certainly does not look much like a real rocket when looked at closely.
The artist’s rendering looks cool, but that isn’t how one builds real engineering.
This is essentially its version of SpaceX’s Grasshopper. Ispace appears to be making good progress towards developing a reusable first stage for its Hyperbola rocket. More information here.
It shouldn’t be necessary to have to spend any time proving the bigoted, Jew-hatred of Hamas, considering the horrible murder of about 1,400 Israeli men, women, children, and babies on October 7, 2023, with many burned alive, decapitated, tortured, and raped. Their actions that day were right out a Nazi handbook, and any sane decent human being should be able to easily see it.
And yet, it sadly is necessary, because that barbaric behavior is now being justified and excused by too many very ignorant people, not just in Gaza and the West Bank but worldwide, even in the most famous colleges in the U.S.
The map to the right is a good first data point. Hamas officials have gone on television and arrogantly claimed “We did not have any intention or decision to kill any civilians.” This lie is proven unambiguously by the map. The red dots indicated the locations of bodies. The black dots those who have been kidnapped. The locations of both illustrate how well planned this Hamas operation was, and its outright intention to kill civilians. These are not military facilities, but Jewish settlements where civilians live. Hamas mapped those locations, and targeted them precisely, including the Re’im music festival, which was a specific event and contained nothing but civilians.
This map, titled “Mapping the Massacres”, is available online, and provides close-ups of the murder maps for each massacre. If go to the link and click on the “Walkthrough” button on the bottom right, it will not only zoom in step-by-step to each massacre, it then provides detailed descriptions of what happened at each location. For example:
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A closer look at imagery during the descent by parachute of China’s manned Shenzhou capsule, bringing three astronauts back from Tiangong-3 after a five month mission on October 31, 2023, shows that the capsule’s single parachute had a ripped hole.
In some of the footage, a patch of blue sky can be seen through the red-and-white-banded parachute. Inside the capsule were Shenzhou 16 mission commander Jing Haipeng and crewmates Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao — the latter pair returning to Earth after their first mission to space.
Such a sizable hole, which was visible before a white cloud of vented propellant left the Shenzhou capsule, has not been reported during earlier missions. It did not, however, seem to affect operations.
The landing however was very rough, with the capsule tumbling several times after hitting the ground.
Considering that China presently as three astronauts on Tiangong-3 that have to come home in their own Shenzhou capsule, using this same parachute system, finding out what happened seems imperative. Developing its next generation larger capsule, which will return using three parachutes, also appears essential.
The Senate on October 31, 2023 passed a bill that requires NASA to develop several space junk removal projects while giving the Commerce department the responsibility of identifying what space junk needs to be removed.
The central part of the bill would direct NASA to establish an active debris removal program. Tnat includes creating “a demonstration project to make competitive awards for the research, development, and demonstration of technologies leading to the remediation of selected orbital debris.” It would also require NASA to enter into a partnership to fly a demonstration mission to remove debris.
The debris that could be removed by those demonstrations would come from a list developed by the Department of Commerce to identify debris “to improve the safety and sustainability of orbiting satellites and on-orbit activities.” The Department would also lead work on best practices for space traffic coordination. The bill directs the National Space Council to lead an update of the federal government’s Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices.
Though unstated, this bill appears to be a direct slap at the FCC’s effort under the Biden administration to claim the power to regulate space junk, despite its lack of statutory authority to do so. In fact, the Senate underlined that slap in the face by also passing a bill that demanded the FCC streamline its regulatory overreach rather than expand it.
Neither bill is law yet, and it is unclear whether the House will agree to either. The Senate has sent the space junk bill to the House previously without passage.
Click for original image.
Though Mars’ very thin atmosphere (1/thousandth that of Earth) is generally clear, it does have clouds that come and go. A project begun in 2022 using citizen scientists to identify these clouds and the seasons they appear the most, dubbed Cloudspotting on Mars, has now published its first paper, available here.
The graph to the left, Figure 9 in the paper, shows two seasonal Mars maps, one indicating the daytime seasonal frequency of clouds and the other their nightime frequency. From the paper:
The seasonal evolution of all clouds as a function of latitude for both daytime and nighttime are shown in Fig. 9. During the clear season until [mid-summer in the northern hemisphere] … there are several regions where clouds occur frequently: in the equatorial region (annotated as 1), at mid-latitudes (2), in the southern polar region (3), and to a lesser extent in the northern polar region [at the start of summer]. From [late fall to mid-autumn in the north], daytime clouds occur primarily at mid-latitudes, but are observed at nearly all latitudes between 70°S and 60°N (4). At night, there is one broad population from 30°S to 30°N (clouds are more frequent in the equatorial region at night), but [in autumn], clouds occur frequently between 30°N and 50°N as well. [In mid-spring] the number of observed nighttime clouds increases in the southern hemisphere, especially near 50°S. There is a strong decrease in the number of peaks just before [the late northern autumn and the late southern sping] at nearly all latitudes except around 50°S and 20°N at night. [Once northern winter arrives], clouds are observed between about 60°S and 60°N as well as both polar regions, although nighttime clouds between 0°N and 30°N occur relatively less frequently.
The low-latitude clouds during the clear season (1), which are observed more frequently at night, occur at high altitudes, 65–80 km during the day and 55–70 km at night; this is the aphelion equatorial mesospheric cloud population studied in depth by Slipski et al. (2022) and in which previous observations have spectrally confirmed CO2-ice.
The bracketed words indicating seasons above replace the longitudal numbers the scientists use to indicate the seasons, and are used on these two graphs. The figure to the right shows what the longitude numbers represent in the graphs’ X-axis.
The project continues if any of my readers want to join in.
Space Force yesterday awarded both SpaceX and ULA new launch contracts worth $2.5 billion and totaling 21 launches over the next two to three years.
The final batch of assignments were split almost evenly, according to Col. Doug Pentecost, the deputy program executive officer of the Space Force’s Space Systems Command. ULA received 11 missions, valued at $1.3 billion, and SpaceX received 10 missions, valued at $1.23 billion.
Space Systems Command said the missions are scheduled to launch over the next two to three years. ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, will use its soon-to-debut Vulcan rocket for the 11 missions, while SpaceX will fly seven missions with its Falcon 9 rocket and three missions with its Falcon Heavy rocket.
For SpaceX this award is no surprise. The ULA contract is more puzzling. Supposedly the Space Force was not going to award any launch contracts for ULA’s new Vulcan rocket until it successfully launched twice and was certified by the military as operational. Yet, it has now awarded ULA this contract for Vulcan launches. Has the military awarded the contract on a contingency basis? What happens if Vulcan has a failure on one of its first two launches?
The Space Force’s present arrangement limits bidding for launches to just these two companies. If Vulcan fails will it open bidding to other companies, or will it transfer launches to SpaceX?
Confirming what it announced in early October, the Netherlands yesterday officially signed the Artemis Accords, becoming the thirtieth nations to join.
The full list of signatories to the Artemis Accords is now as follows: Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.
We now have the rough outline of the national alliances that will compete with each other in space. On one hand are the nations above, generally from the west with a larger focus on private enterprise and ownership. On the other hand are the authoritarian nations, led by China and Russia with a few failed communist nations like Venezuela.
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To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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NOAA today posted its updated monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted this graph below, with several additional details to provide some larger context.
In October the sunspot count dropped so much from the activity in September that the total count was for the first time since the middle of 2021 actually very close to the predicted numbers first put forth by NOAA’s solar science panel in April 2020.
The podcast of my appearance last night on the Space Show with David Livingston is now available. You can download it here.
The discussion almost entirely centered on the delays getting government approvals for the next Starship/Superheavy test launch. The best part I think was the conversation between myself and Charles Lurio, publisher of the very well-respected space newsletter The Lurio Report.
Also, I think one of my regular readers and commenters here at BtB called in with some good questions, but I am not sure. If so, please confirm in the comments below.
Lucy’s route through the solar system
The Lucy science team has confirmed that the spacecraft has successfully completed its fly-by of the asteroid Dinkinesh (the white dot in the lower left of the main asteroid belt in the graphic to the right) and is in good health.
Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter. It will take up to a week for all the data collected during the encounter to be downlinked to Earth.
Though the images and data of Dinkinesh obtained during this fly-by have science value, the real purpose of the fly-by was to test the operations of Lucy for when it reaches the Trojan asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit, as shown by the graphic. The spacecraft will now do a flyby of Earth in 2025 to slingshot it to the orbit of Jupiter, where it will do its main work exploring the Trojan asteroids there. On the way it will fly past a second main belt asteroid, dubbed Donaldjohanson.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
Silly stuff for a slow day in space news.
So far no webpage launched yet, and almost no information about the company or its rocket, but as Jay says, “Always good to see a new small sat rocket launcher company.”
These are preliminary tests, which appear to show that the design works.
Jaiden Rodriguez reacting with bemused
disbelief by the ignorance of the school
official behind him. Click to watch the video
In August 2023 the Vanguard School in Colorado Springs demanded that 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez remove patches on his daypack showing the Gadsden flag as well as some funny Pac-men holding guns or he would be banned from classes. Jaiden refused, and the resulting uproar — forcing the cancellation of a scheduled parents night — caused school officials to quickly back down and give Jaiden permission to attend classes with the daypack and Gadsden flag patch.
For the school the most embarassing part of the story was how it illustrated the total ignorance of school officials about American history as well as the First Amendment. School officials, who are supposed to teach history to their students, knew less about American history than Jaiden. They falsely claimed that the Gadsen flag had “its origins in slavery and the slave trade,” when it was actually created during the American Revolution as a symbol against tyranny. In addition, they ignorantly claimed they had the right to censor Jaiden, simply because his patches “might” offend some students, when the Supreme Court has consistently ruled for more than a half century that they did not have that right.
The uproar caused the school’s board of directors to issue a retraction, though they did not waive the ban on the armed Pac-men patches. Moreover:
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