Category: Behind The Black

Martian pit on top of Martian dome

12:55 pm

Dome with pit
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and was simply labeled “Pit on Top of Dome in Promethei Terra.”

The cropped section to the right shows one of two such pits visible on the entire image. Promethei Terra is a large 2,000 mile long cratered region due east from Hellas Basin, the deepest large region on Mars.

What caused these pits? The known facts provide clues, but do not really solve the mystery.

First, this image is located in the southern cratered highlands at 45 degrees south latitude. Thus, it is not surprising that it resembles similar terrain in the northern lowlands that suggests an ice layer very close to the surface.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Any business in a Massachusetts town that does not genuflect to BLM and its Marxist agenda

11:31 am

Today's modern witch hunt
Witch burning returns to Massachusetts!

The worst horror of the new leftist blacklisting that is sweeping America is how pervasive it is. This intolerance for dissent is not limited to a small number of people leading the way, but seems to instead be springing upward from that movement’s grass roots.

Today’s blacklist story illustrates this quite starkly.

In the small town of Sturbridge, Mass., a group of 200 left-leaning citizens organized on Facebook to compile a list of businesses to avoid due to insufficient wokeness. The group even planned to present every local business with a pro-Black Lives Matter statement to sign — or face a local boycott.

When the website Turtleboy Sports published that list in full, the woman who created it, Sarah Prager, as well as the administrators of that private Facebook group, Amanda Ivey and Chelsea Ann, then apparently claimed (along with others from that group) that it was merely an internal document not meant for public viewing. They also justified its existence by saying it was not a blacklist but a list of all businesses in town, and had been designed merely to record the political leanings of each so that people would know which businesses had bad political leanings and could be properly avoided. Here are some examples, as noted by Turtleboy:
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Starship prototype #15 completes static fire test

9:20 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX’s fifteenth Starship prototype successfully completed a static fire test yesterday, and the company is now hoping to do its first test flight this week, possibly as early as tomorrow.

Meanwhile, preparations continue for the first test launch of a Superheavy prototype, as well construction at Boca Chica of the orbital launchpad.

The Orbital Launch Site is a hive of activity, with work ranging from the installation of large GSE (Ground Support Equipment) tanks to continued work on the launch mount and launch and integration tower.

The latter has now started to rise into the air next to the mount, which is yet to receive its launch table.

When finished, the tower will be the tallest structure in the region, at nearly 152 meters — towering over the 120 meter tall, fully integrated Starship/Super Heavy stack. The Tower will eventually host a crane and, as crazy as it initially sounded when Elon revealed it, arms designed to catch the returning booster.

It is not yet clear what the test schedule for Superheavy will be leading to that first orbital launch. They will likely fly a prototype on a hop first, then fly it with Starship stacked above. SpaceX however has not said exactly what its plans are, and even if it had, the company has been quite willing to revise those plans should it decide a change is advisable.

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The commercial history of Russia’s Proton rocket

9:10 am

Doug Messier at Parabolic Arc today published a detailed launch history of Russia’s Proton rocket, outlining its commercial rise beginning in the 1990s and its fall in the 2010s with the arrival of SpaceX.

The fading of Proton reflected strong competition from SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket, which captured an increasing percentage of commercial launches with significantly lower prices.

There was also a global shift away from Proton’s bread and butter, the geosynchronous communications satellite, toward large constellations deployed into low and medium Earth orbits.

Proton’s reputation was also damaged by serious quality control problems that affected the entire Russian launch industry. Proton suffered 9 launch failures and one partial failure in the 10 years between 2006 and 2015. The booster was left grounded for as long as a year at a time. Insurance rates for Proton flights soared.

Proton appears to still have six launches on its manifest, but the shift in Russia to its Angara rocket likely means the end of Proton’s long history, begun at the very beginnings of the space age in the 1960s, is in sight.

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SpaceX leases bigger space at LA port for processing Falcon 9 boosters after launch

9:03 am

Capitalism in space: According to the mayor of Los Angeles, SpaceX has signed a new lease for more space at the city’s port, taking over the facilities no longer used by Sea Launch’s floating launch platform that is now in Russia.

News of the port lease broke on April 26th with a tweet from the mayor of Long Beach, California after the Port of Long Beach (POLB) Commission voted to approve SpaceX’s 24-month sublease with an effective start date of May 1st, 2021. From 2014 to 2020, a massive floating rocket launch complex and associated service ships once used by SeaLaunch called POLB’s Pier 16 home while mothballed and the company left behind a decent amount of infrastructure when it vacated the facility last year.

That includes a ~5600 square meter (~65,000 sq ft) warehouse and office space formerly used to process SeaLaunch payloads and Ukrainian Zenit rockets, as well as a pier and dock space generally optimized for loading and unloading large rockets from rocket transport ships. In other words, Pier 16 is a perfect fit for SpaceX’s needs.

SpaceX has twice before signed similar leases and then canceled them. Now it appears the deal is more firm, as the company appears to be gearing up for regular Starlink satellite launches from Vandenberg, requiring a bigger need in LA for processing Falcon 9 first stage boosters after launch.

I wonder too if this deal might be in connection with Starship and the two used floating oil rigs that SpaceX now owns and is refitting as Superheavy/Starship launch and landing pads. This LA facility would be ideal for these ocean platforms before and after launch.

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China launches nine satellites using Long March 6 rocket

8:51 am

China today used its Long March 6 rocket, designed to launch small satellites, to place what the country’s state-run media describes as “nine commercial satellites.”

Two satellites apparently are aimed at Earth observation, while the others are testing various satellite designs.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

11 SpaceX
9 China
7 Russia
2 Rocket Lab

The U.S. still leads China 16 to 9 in the national rankings.

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German smallsat rocket startup wins launch contract

8:42 am

Capitalism in space: The German smallsat rocket startup company Isar Aerospace has won its first launch contract, to place an Airbus Earth observation satellite using its new Spectrum rocket.

Isar is one of three new German rocket companies competing for the smallsat market that all hope to launch for the first time next year.

Along with Rocket Factory Augsburg and HyImpulse Technologies, the three startups are competing as part of the German Space Agency DLR’s microlauncher competition.

The competition, which is being run in conjunction with ESA [European Space Agency], will award one of the three startups with 11 million euros ($13 million) in funding later this year. The funding is to be used to support a qualification flight that will carry a payload for a university or research institution for free. A second prize of 11 million euros in funding will then be awarded in 2022 as the final stage of the competition.

In evaluating the three startups, the DLR panel of judges will examine the technical aspects and commercial feasibility of each launcher. As a result, each startup’s success in securing funding and signing launch contracts will play a role in their chance of winning the competition.

Rocket Factory has also won a launch contract, with that commercial launch set for 2024.

Note how ESA is shifting its approach. Previously it focused its commercial effort entirely within the government-controlled Arianespace company. Now it is awarding competitive contracts to independent private companies. It appears that the ESA, like NASA, is adopting the recommendations put forth in my policy paper Capitalism in Space. It no longer wants to be the company but is instead acting as a customer looking for a product to buy.

Hopefully more than one of these three German companies will succeed, so that the competition will increase. That in turn will force prices down while encouraging greater innovation.

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Blue Origin protests Starship contract award for lunar lander

10:09 pm

Blue Origin today filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) of NASA’s decision to award SpaceX’s Starship the sole contract for building a manned lunar lander, claiming the agency “moved the goalposts” during the award process.

Blue Origin says in the GAO protest that its “National Team,” which included Draper, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, bid $5.99 billion for the HLS [Human Landing System] award, slightly more than double SpaceX’s bid. However, it argues that it was not given the opportunity to revise that bid when NASA concluded that the funding available would not allow it to select two bidders, as originally anticipated. NASA requested $3.3 billion for HLS in its fiscal year 2021 budget proposal but received only $850 million in an omnibus appropriations bill passed in December 2020. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words kind of say it all. Blue Origin’s National Team put in a very high bid. Why should they have any expectation of winning?

Moreover, their track record, especially Blue Origin’s (the leader of the team), pales in comparison to SpaceX.
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John Woodfield RC Gliders

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Seems appropriate with Ingenuity flying about on Mars. From the youtube webpage:

This was the maiden flight of my latest design. It was a bit of a mash-up, using existing wings and tail from old models. It weighs 1.5kg and was flying in about 7-10mph of wind. I feel it will be happier in about 5mph. The all-moving tail needs changing slightly as it developed some serious flutter if I picked up too much airspeed.

Hat tip Cotour.

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ULA’s Delta-4 Heavy successfully launches NRO spy satellite

5:15 pm

ULA today successfully used its most powerful rocket, the Delta-4 Heavy, to place a National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) surveillance satellite into orbit.

ULA now only has three Delta-4 Heavy’s in its inventory. After those launch the rocket will be retired, to be replaced by the most powerful versions of its new Vulcan rocket.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

11 SpaceX
8 China
7 Russia
2 Rocket Lab

The U.S. now leads China 16 to 8 in the national rankings.

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Today’s blacklisted American: There are now so many that an online database now exists

3:04 pm

They’re coming for you next: Because of the epidemic of blacklisting and oppression that has been sweeping the United States in the past four months, a new online database now exists to track and document them all, with the total now almost 200 people long.

The site’s home page lists the following reasons for getting blackballed, all of which are absurdly unjust and intolerant:
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Study: increase in seasonal Martian streaks after 2018 global dust storm suggests dust not water is their cause

2:37 pm

Map of Mars showing location of new linneae after 2018 global dust storm
Click for full image.

The uncertainty of science: A just-published survey of Mars following the 2018 global dust storm found that there was a significant increase in the seasonal dark streaks that scientists call recurring slope lineae, providing more evidence that these streaks are not caused by some form of water seepage but instead are related to some dry process.

The map to the right is figure 2 from that paper. The white dots show the candidate lineae that appeared following the 2018 global dust storm. About half were new streaks, not seen previously.

From the paper’s conclusion:
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