Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
The video is an hour long, but well worth the watch.
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.
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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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.
Curiosity’s view of the marker band on January 17, 2023, the red dotted line the planned future route. Click for full image.
The science team for the Mars rover Curiosity today revealed that the marker band layer where the rover present sits shows some of the best evidence of liquid water and waves yet seen on Mount Sharp, and it has been found much higher on the mountain than expected.
Having climbed nearly a half-mile above the mountain’s base, Curiosity has found these rippled rock textures preserved in what’s nicknamed the “Marker Band” – a thin layer of dark rock that stands out from the rest of Mount Sharp. This rock layer is so hard that Curiosity hasn’t been able to drill a sample from it despite several attempts. It’s not the first time Mars has been unwilling to share a sample: Lower down the mountain, on “Vera Rubin Ridge,” Curiosity had to try three times before finding a spot soft enough to drill.
Scientists will be looking for softer rock in the week ahead.
As Curiosity climbs the mountain it transitions onto new younger layers of rock. Based on Curiosity’s earlier data lower down the mountain, scientists had assumed it had gone from layers that had been under a past lake to layers that were at the lake’s shoreline to layers where only running water once flowed. They had thought the marker layer and other higher layers would only show evidence of running water. Instead, in the marker layer they have once again found evidence of an ancient lake.
This quote by Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist, sums things up nicely: “Mars’ ancient climate had a wonderful complexity to it, much like Earth’s.”
ISRO on January 30, 2023 successfully completed a static fire test of a throttleable version of its Vikas rocket engine, used in the upper stage of both its PSLV and GSLV rockets as well as in the GSLV’S first stage, running the engine at 67 percent power for a time period of 43 seconds.
The ability to adjust the power level of the engine during launch will give ISRO the ability to attempt the recovery of the first stages, as well as expand the ability of these rockets to place more satellites per launch in different orbits.
Engineers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) yesterday revealed that they are in the process of changing the orbit of their Al-Amal Mars orbiter so that it will be able to do several close fly-bys of the Martian moon Deimos.
Two of the three required manoeuvres have already been made, allowing it to reach a new orbit between 20,000km and 43,000km with a 25-degree incline towards the planet. “Previously, we didn’t have any reason to move the orbit,” Ms Al Matroushi said. “But now we’re exploring a new adventure and science mission.”
Engineers are using the probe’s three main science instruments to capture images and data of the moon. These include an exploration imager ― a high-resolution camera ― to photograph the moon, and the infrared and ultraviolet spectrometers to measure its temperature and observe its thermophysical properties, including its regolith, or dust.
The first Deimos fly-by took place in late January, and as the probe moves to its closest approach to the moon, it will take high-resolution images.
Eventually Al-Amal will dip as close as 60 miles of Deimos.
FCC has now given Amazon its license to launch the first 3,236 satellites in its Kuiper internet constellation, including with that license new de-orbiting requirements that exceed the FCC’s actual statutory authority.
The Federal Communications Commission approved Amazon’s plan Feb. 8 to deploy and operate 3,236 broadband satellites, subject to conditions that include measures for avoiding collisions in low Earth orbit (LEO).
Amazon got initial FCC clearance for its Ka-band Project Kuiper constellation in 2020 on the condition that it secured regulatory approval for an updated orbital debris mitigation plan. The FCC said its conditional approval of this mitigation plan allows “Kuiper to begin deployment of its constellation in order to bring high-speed broadband connectivity to customers around the world.” The conditions include semi-annual reports that Kuiper must give the FCC to detail the collision avoidance maneuvers its satellites have made, whether any have lost the ability to steer away from objects, and other debris risk indicators.
In the order, the FCC also requires Kuiper to ensure plans to de-orbit satellites after their seven-year mission keep inhabitable space stations in addition to the International Space Station in mind.
According to the license, Amazon must launch 1,600 of these satellites by 2026.
The de-orbit requirements are part of the FCC’s recent regulatory power grab, and has no legal basis. The FCC’s statutory authority involves regulating the frequency of signals satellites use, as well as acting as a traffic cop to make sure the orbits of different satellites do not interfere with other satellites. Nowhere has Congress given it the right to determine the lifespan of satellites, or the method in which they are de-orbited.
Right now however we no longer live in a republic run by elected officials. In Washington it is the bureaucracy that is in charge, Congress being too weak, divided, and corrupt to defend its legal power. Thus, the FCC can easily grab new powers that it has no right to have.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully unfurled a solar sail from a cubesat in order to test using that sail to help de-orbit that cubesat more quickly.
The sail was deployed from a package measuring 3.93 by 3.93 by 3.93 inches (10 by 10 by 10 centimeters). The unfurling process was captured by an integrated camera onboard the Ion satellite carrier, which is operated by the Italian company D-Orbit.
The satellite will eventually burn up in the atmosphere, providing a quicker, residue-free method of disposal, according to ESA.
A short video of that unfurling can be viewed here.
This flight was intended as a proof of concept. Thus, ESA like many similar NASA test projects will now close the project down, which is dubbed ADEO, having no specific plans to do anything with what was learned. Private cubesat companies, however, might adopt this solar sail deployment technology, but I suspect less for de-orbit purposes but instead as a method of maneuvering their satellite in orbit.
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an uneven ring encircling the dwarf planet Quaoar, orbiting far enough from the planet that, according to present theories, the ring should have quickly coalesced into a small Moon.
At 1,110 km (690 miles) in diameter Quaoar is one of the largest objects known in the outer solar system. Its single moon, named Weywot, spans about 160 km and was discovered in Hubble images in 2007. But the first signs of material around Quaoar didn’t come until 2018; even then, evidence was insufficient to call it a ring, says Morgado. He began studying Quaoar in 2020 with the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS space telescope, originally designed to find and characterize exoplanets. Rather than looking for exoplanet transits, Morgado used CHEOPS to observe stellar occultations, when Quaoar passed in front of distant stars and momentarily blocked their light.
Now Morgado has extended his work, working with others to observe Quaoar’s stellar occultations using other telescopes. The team first predicted a few occultations and recorded them. Then, after those observations hinted at a ring, the researchers went back through previous occultation records. “We saw the ring in nine different regions, from observations taken between 2018 and 2021,” Morgado explains.
In Nature, the team reports the presence of a ring 4,100 kilometers from the center of Quaoar, far beyond its classical Roche limit of 1,780 km. Morgado says the ring is dense and irregular. “It has a very thin region about 5 km wide and also a large region about 300 km wide, depending on which part of the ring was probed,” he notes. If the material could all be collected into a single moon, it would be about 10 km in diameter, less than a tenth of Weywot’s size.
According to astronomers, they would expect such a ring at that distance to coalesce in just a matter of decades. Either their theories of the Roche limit are incorrect, or the creation of this ring is very very recent, caused by the collusion of two objects that were orbiting Quaoar.
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.
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.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
Eric Berger essentially repeats my initial one sentence analysis, just in more detail.
If all goes as planned, this Jupiter orbiter will arrive at Jupiter in 2029.
Jay thinks the the theme from “Love Boat” would be better background music for the video at the link.
Previously the Russians and NASA had said there would be no more dockings at Zvezda’s port to reduce the possibility of more stress fractures to the hull of that module. Apparently, they and NASA have changed their minds. It would be nice to know the reasoning behind that decision.
The breakup was tracked by U.S. Space Defense Squadron, and occurred on January 4, 2023.
Ryan Hall
They’re coming for you next: English instructor Ryan Hall, a self-described leftist “who has never voted for a conservative in my life,” was fired by Western Kentucky University when he questioned its leftist and racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda that was also leaving students fearful to speak their minds out of fear of being punished.
From the second link:
“While I may not categorize myself as a conservative, the assaults on free speech, self-reliance, meritocracy, the family, science, and truth should alarm everyone,” Hall said in an email interview this month with The College Fix. “Many have pointed out that our institutions of higher education increasingly look like the temples for a state religion attempting to create hierarchies based on byzantine and bogus ideas; such systems have never worked out well historically, no matter how many newly minted sinecures suggest otherwise,” he said.
Hall told The Fix he had canceled all of his classes, five of them, for a week while he confronted his university about its bias in February 2022. “They fired me that same month after a few days of discussion. … They fired me because I would not return until we reached an agreeable solution, not because of the classes I had canceled, according to the email I received,” Hall said.
The first link above goes to an op-ed Hall wrote for an organization called the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, which appears to be a loose coalition of Substack writers opposed to the bigoted policies of most universities. In that op-ed Hall added these facts as to why he challenged his superiors at Western Kentucky:
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To see the original images, go here and here.
Click for interactive map.
After two years of detailed exploration on the floor of Jezero crater, the rover Perseverance and its Mars helicopter scout Ingenuity have finally begun the climb up onto the delta that in eons past flowed into Jezero Crater.
The panorama above was created from two Perseverance images taken by its right navigation camera on February 7, 2023 (Sol 699) (here and here), looking forward and uphill. On the overview map to the right the blue dot marks Perseverance’s location, with the yellow lines indicating the approximate area covered by this mosaic. The red dotted line in both images indicate approximately the rover’s eventually path.
Ingenuity’s present position is marked by the green dot. This is where the helicopter landed after completing its 42nd flight on February 4, 2023. Planned to fly 823 feet for 137 seconds, Ingenuity actually flew a slightly shorter distance, 814 feet, in that length of time. The difference is probably the result of Ingenuity’s need to find a good landing spot, and the one it found was slightly closer to its take-off point.
The flight however took the helicopter uphill, scouting the terrain that Perseverance plans to drive. While there is no terrain here that is much of a challenge for the rover, having the helicopter’s ground images in advance allows its operators to plan longer drives, as those images will help tell them what obstacles to avoid and route to choose.
The green oval indicates the area that Perseverance has left its first ten core samples for later pickup and return to Earth.
Space Force officials yesterday announced that it will to do major cleanup of the diesel fuel spill that occurred on the top of the mountain Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui last week.
The plan is to remove about 200 cubic yards of fuel-tainted soil, test the base of the dig, and then determine if more soil has to be removed.
The official making this announcement apologized repeatedly for the spill, so much so it was almost as if he was on his face on the ground, kow-towing. It of course made no difference. The leftist race-baiters in Hawaii made it clear where they stood on the matter.
On Friday, the Hawaiian rights group Kākoʻo Haleakalā called for the removal of all telescopes from the peak of Haleakala. The military “showcased their incompetence and lack of human decency when they allowed more than 700 gallons of diesel fuel to be spilled atop Haleakalā,” the group said in a statement.
“This is just the most recent example of how U.S. imperialism and military hegemony is protected in the Pacific while Hawaiians are ignored and our ʻāina is violated,” the statement said, using the Hawaiian term for land.
Let me translate: “We hate whites and America, and we want you out of Hawaii, now. And if you don’t go, we want you to cede all control to us, so that we treat you as the inferior beings we consider you to be.”
Note too that this group’s agenda is identical to the agenda of the race-baiters on the Big Island who are blocking construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope and are forcing the removal of telescopes there.
Japan’s space agency JAXA announced today that it will delay the first launch of its new H3 rocket for two days, to February 15, 2023, in order to fix an unidentified problem in the rocket’s “flight system.”
The H3 rocket’s first launch is already three years behind schedule. In 2022 the launch was delayed for a full year due to the discovery of defects in its main engines.
This government-controlled rocket was supposed to allow Japan to compete in the international launch market. It does not appear at this point that it will be able to do a very good job at that task. Though Mitsubishi is the main contractor, it appears JAXA is in charge and owns it. Such arrangements rarely produce a cheap, efficient, and reliable product for the commercial market.
Virgin Galactic yesterday rolled its WhiteKnightTwo mother ship from its hanger after a 15-month overhaul in preparation for taxi and flight tests.
After some initial taxi and flight tests in Mojave in California, the plane will fly to New Mexico for further flight tests with Unity attached. Company officials hope to complete these test flights by the end of March, and then begin commercial flights shortly thereafter.
In comparing the pictures released yesterday at the link above with this 2009 picture, it appears the company completely replaced the central bar that connects the plane’s two passenger sections. In the older picture, that bar was not straight, but was built like a very shallow upside-down “V”, with the center point where a SpaceShipTwo spacecraft was attached.
The new bar is straight, and appears more robust.
Russian engineers yesterday concluded that ISS is technically capable of being operated through 2028.
However, Russia’s committee system for making any decisions is not done. This first analysis was done by Roscosmos’ top managers and its lower level engineers.
The proposed decision will now be considered at a meeting of the Scientific and Technical Council of Roscosmos. Based on its results, the state corporation will draft a message the Russian government.
At that point the Putin government will have to decide on an exit date from ISS. According to the article by Russia’s state-run press, “the minimum configuration of Russia’s own orbital outpost” will be in orbit by 2028, thus giving the government the option to leave ISS. We shall see.
SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to place a commercial geosynchronous satellite into orbit for the company Hispasat.
The first stage successfully completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The 2023 launch race:
9 SpaceX
5 China
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 Russia
American private enterprise now leads China 10 to 5 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 10 to 7.
ULA has announced that it is shutting down its facility in Harlingen, Texas, that makes parts for the company’s soon-to-be retired Atlas-5 rocket.
The facility will shut down at the end of this year, with a loss of about 100 jobs.
This closure is actually a very positive sign for ULA. It indicates that it is streamlining its operations. For example, construction of the Vulcan rocket that replaces the Atlas-5 is all done in Alabama. One of the reasons Atlas-5 cost so much was the widespread distribution of its ULA facilities, probably done to satisfy congressional demands.
With Vulcan, ULA has instead been much more focused on making it less expensive so it can compete with SpaceX. Thus, it simplified its construction, putting everything in Alabama. (Choosing Alabama was likely to satisfy the most powerful senator at the time, porkmeister Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), who has now retired.)
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
Blue Origin abandoned the idea of using this ship for landings last year. What it will do instead however remains entirely unclear.
The press release says this deal calls for multiple satellite launches, but does not specify the number. The deal also suggests that this company thinks Virgin Orbit will survive its present hard times.
I read this press release this morning, decided the story was mostly NASA fluff designed to sell Webb, and rejected giving it a full post. Discoveries like this happen all the time with all telescopes. Webb didn’t do anything special here. However, Jay is right that it deserves some mention, so here it is as a quick link.
You must click on the link. Trust me, you will find it worthwhile.
The launch is presently scheduled for the summer of 2023.
The largest engines for its heavy lift Long March 9 Starship/Superheavy copy will test here.
Though it has previously touted its desire to launch high altitude balloon tourist flights, it is pushing the surveillance capabilities of its balloons at this time.
