Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
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To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Thanks to BtB’s stringer Jay, who trolls Twitter so I don’t have to.
He mentions ULA spent $200 million to manufacture Centaur-4. Yet, he still can’t launch the Vulcan rocket without the first stage, and the first stage depends not on his engines, but on Blue Origin’s long delayed and not yet flightworthy BE-4 engine.
I covered this in August, but now the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is setting a deadline, October 13, for the companies to explain why their merger won’t destroy Starlink. Otherwise it will initiate a full probe, blocking the merger.
Typical government stupidity. There is no way this merged company will destroy Starlink. If anything, these companies are merging to survive the competition from Starlink.
It plans to collect samples from the Moon’s far side.
This will be the first Proton launch since December ’21.
The decision was made about 30 minutes before launch, and is attributed to a desire to provide time to do more checkouts of the rocket.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 24, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “viscous flow” that has apparently carved the wide curving canyon as it slowly flows into open country to the south.
I would estimate the height of that canyon wall to be around 3,000 feet, though this is a very rough guess. I also image a trail switchbacking up the nose of that canyon wall would make for a truly stupendous hiking experience.
The flow filling the canyon floor appears very glacial, which is not surprising as this canyon is at 37 degrees north latitude, in the mid-latitude band where many glacial features are found. The overview map below provides some more detailed context.
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China today successfully launched two “navigation satellites” from a floating sea platform in the Yellow Sea, using its Long March 11 rocket.
The platform was only about two miles off shore at launch, so the view from the beach drew a large crowd. Video at the first link.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
45 SpaceX
42 China
12 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 65 to 42 in the national rankings, and the entire globe combined 65 to 62. These numbers will change again later today, with a SpaceX commercial launch scheduled for 4:06 pm (Pacific).
Carlyle Brown, censored for writing truthfully
The modern dark age: Close-minded students at the black student association at Texas Wesleyan University have forced the cancellation of a play celebrating the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the 1960s — written by black author Carlyle Brown — because it included realistic dialogue of the time, including the word “nigger”.
Students objected to the use of the n-word in a play that tries to capture the environment of hate and racism of the period. Texas Wesleyan’s Black Student Association declared the reference to be harmful and “triggering.” Calling for a boycott, the Association declared that allowing the play to be heard would “further hurt Black students and possibly students from other marginalized communities.”
The Rambler student newspaper reported that school and theater officials killed the production after a 90-minute campus discussion: “The main concern the students voiced was the ‘triggering’ effect of using the racially explicit word, which is repeated 11 separate times throughout the play, and how it can cause trauma to the black students in the audience.”
The play, Down in Mississippi, can be read here [pdf]. From the play’s summary:
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Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today successfully used its Electron rocket to place a NOAA satellite into orbit, designed to gather data from ground-based sensors.
This was the company’s eighth successful launch in 2022, the most it has achieved in any single year. No attempt was made to recover the first stage on this launch.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
45 SpaceX
41 China
12 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 65 to 41 in the national rankings, and the entire globe combined 65 to 61. The 65 successful launches so far this year is now the second most successful American year in rocketry, exceeded only by the 70 launches in 1966. With almost three months left to go in the year, 2022 looks like it will top that record, by a lot.
SpaceX meanwhile has a launch scheduled for later today, after getting scrubbed yesterday at T-30 seconds because of detected minor helium leak.
Like clockwork SpaceX’s Endurance capsule successfully docked at ISS yesterday, delivering four astronauts to the station for a six month mission.
The most interesting aspect of this launch and crew is Russian Anna Kikina.
Kikina is the first Russian to fly aboard a U.S. spacecraft in nearly 20 years. She and Rubio were launched under a new agreement between NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, that ensures at least one astronaut or cosmonaut is always aboard the space station even if a Crew Dragon or Soyuz is forced to depart early, taking its crew with it.
Without the seat-swap arrangement, a medical emergency or some other major problem could leave an all-Russian or all-NASA crew aboard without the expertise to operate the other nation’s systems.
The agreement had been stalled almost entirely by the former head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin. He is now gone however, sent by Putin to take over the fake occupation government in parts of the Ukraine. It appears his bellicose manner, that caused the loss of a billion dollars in launch contracts with OneWeb, was more than even Putin could handle.
With him gone, the new head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, quickly finalized this astronaut barter deal. He has also publicly acted to try to ease tensions between the U.S. and Russian space agencies.
The new colonial movement: A Canadian startup smallsat rocket company, C6 Launch Systems, has not only signed a spaceport deal with Brazil to build its own launchpad at that country’s Alcantara Space Center, it has also won its first launch customer.
First, the launchpad is for C6’s rocket, which is unnamed and designed to launch cubesats. The company webpage says they are aiming for suborbital flights in 2021 and orbital flights in 2022, but it is unclear if it has launched anything at this point.
Nonetheless, Brazil is very clearly teaming up with C6. The Brazilian air force hired it to build a launch pad, a Brazilian company, Concert Technologies, has awarded it a launch contract.
Concert Technologies S.A. who are developing a new small satellite constellation have signed a a non-exclusive letter of intent to launch three small satellites with C6 Launch. The broad agreement allows for Concert Technologies to schedule more launches to maintain and expand their high-resolution Earth Observation (EO) constellation.
It appears Concert’s satellites will be targeting both the Earth imagery market as well as communications services in the “internet of things.”
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
His job is “Chief Information Officer,” which sounds like pr.
Apparently the concept art at the link is wrong, as it does not show the knock-off’s twin tails, like the X-37B
This will be NSIL’s first commercial launch of India’s GSLV-MK3 rocket, its largest. It will also be the first in OneWeb’s effort to replace the Russia Soyuz-2. SpaceX had signed the first contract with OneWeb after the Ukraine War started, but apparently OneWeb wants to fly first on India’s rocket.
This rocket is designed to only need two weeks to prep for flight, so the launch could happen this month.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 15, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a crater whose ejecta has been sculpted to the east into a teardrop-shaped mesa by some ancient flow, coming from the west.
The crater itself is located in one of several outflow canyons draining out from the volcanic Tharsis Bulge into the northern lowland plain of Chryse Planitia, the biggest of which is Valles Marineris. This particular canyon is one of the smaller and is dubbed Ravi Vallis.
The overview map below illustrates why many scientists think the flow that shaped this mesa came from a catastrophic flood of liquid water, billions of years ago.
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In a clear sign of the distinct change in atmosphere since the removal of Dmitry Rogozin as head of Roscosmos, the executive director of human space flight programs at Roscosmos, Sergei Krikalev, yesterday endorsed the longstanding cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in space.
Krikalev’s comments came after the launch yesterday of Endurance with one Russian astronaut as part of its four-person crew.
At a briefing after the Oct. 5 launch of the Crew-5 mission from the Kennedy Space Center, Sergei Krikalev, executive director of human space flight programs at Roscosmos, emphasized long-running cooperation between the United States and Russia in civil space, cooperation that has been strained since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
“We just continue what we started many years ago in 1975 when the Apollo-Soyuz crew worked together, and now we continue our cooperation,” he said after mentioning a “new phase of cooperation” with the exchange of seats between NASA and Roscosmos.
To understand the importance of Krikalev’s comments, you must also understand the context. First, Krikalev is a very significant figure in the history of Russia. He was called the last Soviet citizen, having been stranded on Mir an extra few months when the Soviet Union fell in 1991. Then he was the first Russian to fly on the shuttle, followed later by being on the first mission to ISS, when it was only two modules.
Since his retirement as an active astronaut, he has become the man in charge of Russia’s manned program, where he clashed with Rogozin several times over policy. His opposition to Rogozin almost certainly was a factor in Rogozin’s removal.
Krikalev’s endorsement of continuing the U.S-Russian partnership only cements that partnership, especially because Krikalev himself is a dyed-in-the-wool communist at heart. At least, he said so emphatically when I interviewed him at length in 2003 for Leaving Earth. I doubt his mind has changed in this matter, though his relentless honesty as an engineer has probably shaken his dedication to that failed ideology in subsequent years.
Nonetheless, his standing in Russia gives any statement he makes great weight. Expect more efforts by the Russians to ease tensions with the U.S., though their chances of success will be limited as long as Russia is continuing its unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine.
Yale Law School’s instruction guide
Bring a gun to a knife fight: Following the public announcement by Judge James Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that he would no longer hire Yale graduates as law clerks because of that school’s enthusiasm for blacklisting and censorship, it appears that a dozen other judges have joined his boycott as well.
“Students should be mindful that they will face diminished opportunities if they go to Yale,” said a prominent circuit court judge, whose clerks have gone on to nab Supreme Court clerkships. “I have no confidence that they’re being taught anything.”
With one exception, the judges made clear this is a policy they are imposing on future—not current—Yale Law School students.
Ho’s public speech was even more harsh.
“Yale presents itself as the best, most elite institution of legal education. Yet it’s the worst when it comes to legal cancellation.” The school “sets the tone for other law schools, and for the legal profession at large. I certainly reserve the right to add other schools in the future. But my sincere hope is that I won’t have to. My sincere hope is that, if nothing else, my colleagues and I will at least send the message that other schools should not follow in Yale’s footsteps.”
Ho’s message to law schools was clear: “If they want the closed and intolerant environment that Yale embraces today, that’s their call. But I want nothing to do with it.”
Nor is Ho exaggerating about Yale’s intolerant track record. » Read more
Though its batteries are now getting charged by the Sun, engineers have still not regained full control of the smallsat lunar orbiter CAPSTONE, presently on its path towards the Moon.
As per the latest update:
The CAPSTONE mission team is continuing to work towards recovery of the spacecraft full three-axis control. This work includes collecting information from the spacecraft, running simulations, and refining recovery plans. The vehicle remains stable and power positive in its current configuration.
In other words, they’ve got the spacecraft oriented so that its solar panels can gather enough sunlight to charge the batteries, but its attitude remains incorrect and they do not yet have CAPSTONE fully under their control.
The spacecraft arrives in lunar orbit on November 13, 2022. At that time however it will have to do an engine burn to enter lunar orbit, and if full control is not regained by then this burn will not be possible because engineers will not be able to point it correctly.
After three years of delays due to payload issues, it now appears that the next Falcon Heavy launch will likely occur near the end of October.
The tentative date is October 28th, but this is not yet confirmed. Though a manifest of a half dozen Falcon Heavy launches has existed since 2019, and most were originally scheduled for launch in 2020-2021, none has taken place, all supposedly because of payload delays not issues with the rocket itself.
SpaceX officials are now saying that it plans to complete six Falcon Heavy launches within the next twelve months. Two are for the military, three for commercial communications companies, and the last is the Psyche mission for NASA. This last launch is delayed because of software issues discovered in June, only a few weeks before launch. Whether it can fix these issues in time for a new July 2023 launch window remains questionable.
Capitalism in space: A Boeing cubesat satellite launched last month is about to burn up as it returns to Earth because the Spaceflight Sherpa orbital tug that was supposed to raise its orbit has as yet done nothing.
Spaceflight planned to use a chemical propulsion system on the Sherpa, provided by Benchmark Space Systems, to raise the orbit of the vehicle to an altitude of 1,000 kilometers. The Sherpa payload, initially not disclosed by Spaceflight, is a V-band communications demonstration by Boeing called Varuna.
However, tracking information from the U.S. Space Force shows that Sherpa has yet to raise its orbit. Atmospheric drag has caused that orbit to gradually decay, and the spacecraft was most recently tracked in an orbit of 283 by 296 kilometers. That raised concerns that the spacecraft could reenter in a matter of weeks if it does not start firing its thrusters.
Spaceflight officials explain the lack of action is because they are still “commissioning” the tug, whatever that means. It also appears that problems was this same propulsion system caused SpaceX to ban Spaceflight in March as a customer on future rideshare launches.
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To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Capitalism in space: SpaceX this afternoon successfully completed its second Falcon 9 launch of the day, placing 52 Starlink satellites into orbit from Vandenberg..
The seven hour gap between launches was a record for the shortest time between two SpaceX launches. The first stage landed successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific, completing its fifth flight.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
45 SpaceX
41 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 64 to 41 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 64 to 61. The U.S. total, 64, ties the total from 1965, the second most active year in American rocketry. The record of 70 successful launches, set in 1966, will almost certainly be broken sometime in the next month.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 28, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists label “unique terrain.”
I have increased the contrast to bring out the details. It appears that we have a flat plain of criss-crossing ridges that in large areas have somehow gotten flattened across their top. Imagine someone laying plaster on a wall and using a scraper tool to smooth the surface, but only partially. In this case on Mars, our imaginary worker only smoothed the surface a little, and only in some areas. To try to come up with a geological process however to explain this seems daunting.
And what created the criss-crossing ridges? The overview map provides only a little help in answering these questions.
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Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who reads Twitter so I don’t have to.
Jay says, “I bet you a Coke it will not launch on that date.” I wouldn’t take that bet if I were you.
My question: Why did they name it after an Israeli city?
They join Canada, Germany, Japan, and New Zealand, making seven total, including the U.S.
According to Anatoly Zak, this is a major redesign.
Might be true. Might not. Nothing that comes from Iran’s state-run press can be trusted.
Our modern dark age: Faced with a storm of criticism from donors, alumni, and the public, the removal of a bust of Abraham Lincoln from the library at Cornell University, has been cancelled, and Lincoln will once again be given an honored place at the university.
The bust’s removal, along with a plaque celebrating Lincoln’s Gettysburg address (to the right), were removed in 2021 because some unnamed individual had filed a complaint. As I noted in June:
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Capitalism in space: Shortly after Firefly completed the first successful orbital launch of its Alpha rocket, the U.S. Space Force awarded the company its first military launch contract.
The VICTUS NOX mission will demonstrate an end-to-end Tactically Responsive Space capability, including the launch segment, space segment, ground segment, and on-orbit operations. VICTUS NOX will perform a Space Domain Awareness (SDA) mission from Low-Earth Orbit (LEO).
The next Alpha mission, a demonstration launch of a climate smallsat for NASA, presently hopes to launch before the end of the year, though more likely early next year.
Capitalism in space: Virgin Orbit announced today that it has completed its preparations for its first launch from Cornwall, United Kingdom, which would also be the first launch ever from British soil.
An actual launch date has not yet been set, due to the “launch permitting regulatory process” in the UK. At the moment Cornwall is vying with two new spaceports in Scotland for the honor of that first launch.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX this morning successfully launched two NASA astronauts, one Japanese astronaut, and one Russian astronaut into orbit for a mission to ISS, with the docking scheduled for tomorrow.
The capsule, Endurance, is making its second flight. This was SpaceX’s eighth manned launch. The first stage, making its first fight, landed successfully on the drone ship in the Atlantic. This was the first new first stage launched since May 2022, and only the second this year. All other launches in 2022 were completed using SpaceX’s existing fleet of boosters. The company also continues to hold to the pattern of last year for maintaining that fleet, by adding two new boosters each year.
That this achievement is now becoming as routine as SpaceX’s unmanned launches proves the company’s success. And SpaceX did it in less than a decade, something NASA with its government-built shuttle was never able to accomplish.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
44 SpaceX
41 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 63 to 41 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 63 to 61.
Capitalism in space: ULA today successfully used its Atlas-5 rocket to place two SES communications satellites into orbit.
Satellite deployment will occur in about five hours, after the rocket gets them to their proper geosynchronous orbit.
43 SpaceX
41 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 62 to 41, and the entire globe combined 62 to 61. This lead will grow before the week is out. SpaceX has scheduled two launches on October 5th, first a manned mission to ISS followed a few hours later by an unmanned launch of 52 Starlink satellites. Rocket Lab follows on October 6 with another Electron launch.
The launch is presently scheduled for November 6, 2022.
The first on the list is their attempt to copy or beat SpaceX’s Raptor-2 engine. I wonder if their academic spies in the U.S. have managed to steal some juicy engineering data.
Too early to say if these experiments are a success, but they follow many similar planet experiments on the Salyut stations, Mir, and ISS.
According to the state-run press, the rocket, dubbed Saman, tested an “orbital transmission system and … its capability to change the orbit of satellites in near-space conditions.”
Company officials try to paint a rosy picture, but the future does not look good for this established geosynchronous satellite company.
Though OneWeb signed first with SpaceX to replace the Russians launch services, it appears the company wants to launch first with India.
Becoming Judenfrei at UC-Berkeley
Persecution is now cool! Nine different law school clubs at the University of California-Berkeley have now made it their official policy to ban all “pro-Zionist” speakers, and are doing so with the full support of the college administration.
And these are not groups that represent only a small percentage of the student population. They include Women of Berkeley Law, Asian Pacific American Law Students Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Law Students of African Descent and the Queer Caucus. Berkeley Law’s Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a progressive Zionist, has observed that he himself would be banned under this standard, as would 90% of his Jewish students.
Zionism has always been used by leftist hate-monger groups as a euphemism for Jew. Its meaning is generally unclear and vague, and in the end usually ends up covering anyone who is support of Israel’s existence. Since this opinion fits the description almost every Jew, banning Zionism essentially bans Jews.
The university’s support and backing of this anti-Semitic ban has come from Dean Chemerinsky himself, who admits he would be banned under these rules but in a rebuttal posted at the link above, expresses full support for the anti-Semitic policy of these clubs.
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Chandra’s X-ray view of the Cartwheel Galaxy
Webb’s infrared view of the Cartwheel Galaxy
Click for full image.
Hubble’s optical view of the Cartwheel Galaxy. Click for original image.
Astronomers have now taken X-ray images using the orbital Chandra X-ray Observatory of four of the first Webb Space Telescope observations. The four targets were the Cartwheel Galaxy, Stephan’s Quintet, galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.3–7327, and the Carina Nebula.
The three images to the right illustrate the importance of studying astronomy across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Each shows the Cartwheel Galaxy as seen by three of the world’s most important space-based telescopes, each looking at the galaxy in a different wavelength.
The top picture is Chandra’s new X-ray observations. As the press release notes,
Chandra data generally show higher-energy phenomena (like superheated gas and the remnants of exploded stars) than Webb’s infrared view. … X-rays seen by Chandra (blue and purple) come from superheated gas, individual exploded stars, and neutron stars and black holes pulling material from companion stars.
The middle picture was produced by Webb, shortly after the start of its science operations. It looks at the galaxy in the infrared.
In this near- and mid-infrared composite image, MIRI data are colored red while NIRCam data are colored blue, orange, and yellow. Amidst the red swirls of dust, there are many individual blue dots, which represent individual stars or pockets of star formation. NIRCam also defines the difference between the older star populations and dense dust in the core and the younger star populations outside of it.
The bottom picture was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. I have rotated the image to match the others. It looks at the galaxy in optical wavelengths, the wavelengths that our eyes perceive.
Note how bright the central galactic region is in the infrared and optical, but is invisible in X-rays. Chandra is telling us that all the most active regions in the Cartwheel are located in that outer ring, not in its center.
Capitalism in space: Spinlaunch on September 27, 2022 successfully completed the 10th test launch of its radical spin launch centrifuge, this time accelerating test components to approximately 35k feet for other potential customers, including NASA.
Flight Test 10, which had a similar flight trajectory as previous campaigns, was witnessed by more than 150 partners, government officials, and industry advocates. It was SpinLaunch’s tenth flight test in just under eleven months since the Suborbital Mass Accelerator came online in late 2021.
…Four partner payloads, as well as two instrumentation payloads, were flown on the Suborbital Accelerator Flight Test Vehicle. For partners, the flight test provided critical data on the launch environment and payload integration process.
As part of the pre-flight qualification process, SpinLaunch accelerated payloads up to 10,000G in SpinLaunch’s 12-meter Lab Accelerator at its Long Beach headquarters. Payloads were inspected post-spin and subsequently integrated into the Flight Test Vehicle in preparation for Flight Test 10.
It remains to be seen whether this technology will work for launches to orbit. Even if it does, because of the stress produced during spin up this launch technique will really only work for bulk payloads to orbit, such as water and oxygen. If it works however it could reduce launch costs for these items tremendously.
All but the first provided by stringer Jay, who trolls Twitter so I don’t have to. A lot of launches by the U.S. in the next four days.
The link goes to the live stream, which goes active five minutes before the scheduled 4:56 pm (Pacific) launch time.
The live stream will be here.
The link goes to the live stream, set to begin five hours before launch.
It will place a NOAA satellite into orbit. The company will not attempt a recovery of the rocket’s first stage. That same day SpaceX also has a launch planned, the third for the company in a little more than three days.
The recruitment video at the link is like a television commercial.
Based on numerous sources, including at least one owner of a payload, this is not true. The second stage under performed. Instead of a 300 kilometer orbit, the second stage deployed at a lower orbit, either 223×283 kilometers, or 210×270 kilometers, depending on source. (The latter is likely more accurate, as it is more recent.)
Not a good look for new CEO Weber, or Firefly. The under performance is something that can be fixed. To make believe it didn’t happen only makes you look disingenuous and unable to face reality.
Click for full image.
Using a telescope in Chile, astronomers photographed the ejecta two days after the impact of DART into the 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphus, and detected a tail of dust extending out more than 6,000 miles.
The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that tail.
In this new image, the dust trail — the ejecta that has been pushed away by the Sun’s radiation pressure, not unlike the tail of a comet — can be seen stretching from the center to the right-hand edge of the field of view. … At Didymos’s distance from Earth at the time of the observation, that would equate to at least 10,000 kilometers (6000 miles) from the point of impact.
Didymos is the larger parent asteroid that Dimorphus orbits.
It is still too soon to get the numbers on how Dimorphus’s path in space was changed by that impact. In fact, we still really don’t have a clear idea what is left of Dimophus itself. The ejecta cloud needs to clear somewhat to see what’s hidden inside it.
