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 launch will complete OneWeb’s constellation in orbit.
The false argument put forth is that this new department will simplify regulation. The reality is that it is simply going to add another bureaucratic layer to the regulatory process whose leaders will be pushing to build their own empires.
The tweet wonders if the problem could pop up on the Soyuz now in orbit, and wonders how long it can remain in orbit safely.
The board of trustees of San Diego Community College
They’re coming for you next: The board of trustees of San Diego Community College in late February 2023 had been moving to fire a number of teachers and employees because they all refused for various medical and religious reasons to get COVID shots or boosters.
The policy was senseless in all ways. As Tracy Kiser, a pregnant black professor who was refusing the jab because of the risk it posed to her unborn child, noted in a February 21st op-ed:
“Last year, after a decline in enrollment, the San Diego Community College District dropped the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students, but it has not been dropped for faculty and staff,” wrote Kiser, who also directs her school’s math center. [emphasis mine]
If the college’s trustees believe blindly that the jab prevents COVID (which it does not) and wants to protect its employees, why does it allow those employees to teach unjabbed students?
The board’s idiocy was further illustrated by Kiser’s description of this incident during one board meeting:
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Scientists have uncovered geological evidence of a past glacier in westernmost end of the giant Martian canyon Valles Marineris, right at the point where it transitions into the complex chaos region dubbed Noctis Labyrinthus. The white dot on the map to the right indicates the location.
The surface feature identified as a “relict glacier” is one of many light-toned deposits (LTDs) found in the region. Typically, LTDs consist mainly of light-colored sulfate salts, but this deposit also shows many of the features of a glacier, including crevasse fields and moraine bands. The glacier is estimated to be 6 kilometers long and up to 4 kilometers wide, with a surface elevation ranging from +1.3 to +1.7 kilometers. This discovery suggests that Mars’ recent history may have been more watery than previously thought, which could have implications for understanding the planet’s habitability.
“What we’ve found is not ice, but a salt deposit with the detailed morphologic features of a glacier. What we think happened here is that salt formed on top of a glacier while preserving the shape of the ice below, down to details like crevasse fields and moraine bands,” said Dr. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and the Mars Institute, and the lead author of the study. [emphasis mine]
You can read the paper here [pdf]. The research specifically suggests that near surface water ice in the dry equatorial regions of Mars could have been there much more recently that previously believed. It also suggests, by the rarity of this discovery, that there is likely almost no near surface ice in the equatorial regions, at present.
Click for full movie.
Click for interactive map.
During Ingenuity’s 47th flight on Mars on March 9, 2023, one of Perseverance’s high resolution camera’s took rapid-fire images of the helicopter’s take-off and initial flight, from which the science team created a movie.
The overview map to the right provides the context for that movie at the link. The blue dot marks Perserverance’s location, with the yellow lines indicating the approximate area seen in the movie. The smaller green dot and line indicates Ingenuity’s take-off point and part of its flight seen in the movie, with the larger green dot its landing spot. From the press release:
This video shows the dust initially kicked up by the helicopter’s spinning rotors, as well as Ingenuity taking off, hovering, and beginning its 1,444-foot (440-meter) journey to the southwest.
At take-off Ingenuity was 394 feet away from Perseverance.
Capitalism in space: Firefly announced today that it has won a $112 million NASA contract to use its Blue Ghost lunar lander to bring three instruments to the Moon, one into orbit and two on the ground on the far side of the Moon.
Before landing on the Moon, the company’s Blue Ghost transfer vehicle will deploy the European Space Agency’s Lunar Pathfinder satellite into lunar orbit to provide communications for future spacecraft, robots, and human explorers. After touching down on the far side of the Moon, the Blue Ghost lunar lander will deliver and operate NASA’s S-Band User Terminal, ensuring uninterrupted communications for lunar exploration, and a research-focused payload that measures radio emissions to provide insight into the origins of the universe.
The NASA press release provides more details about the three payloads.
This is Firefly’s second NASA lunar lander contract. The first is scheduled to land in 2024 and deliver ten NASA science instruments to Mare Crisium, the large mare region in the eastern side of the Moon’s visible hemisphere. This second flight is tentatively scheduled to launch in 2026.
NASA today announced that it has given Axiom the go-ahead for its third planned commercial passenger mission to ISS, now tentatively scheduled for November 2023.
Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) is expected to spend 14 days docked to the space station. A specific launch date is dependent on spacecraft traffic to the space station and in-orbit activity planning and constraints. NASA and Axiom Space mission planners will coordinate in-orbit activities for the private astronauts to conduct in coordination with space station crew members and flight controllers on the ground.
As NASA did in announcing its agreement to Axiom’s previous flight, the agency’s press release makes believe it “selected” Axiom for this flight, as if it had the power and right to do so. Hogwash. Axiom has purchased the flight from SpaceX, and wishes to rent space on ISS for two weeks for its customers. All NASA has done is agree to the deal, while also charging Axiom very large fees for that rental.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to put a cargo Dragon capsule into orbit and on its way to ISS.
The first stage successfully completed its seventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The Dragon freighter is making its third flight, and will dock with ISS on the morning of March 16th.
The 2023 launch race:
17 SpaceX
9 China
4 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India
American private enterprise now leads China 18 to 9 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 18 to 15. SpaceX alone leads entire world, including the rest of the U.S., 17 to 16.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
The launch is from Wallops Island in Virgina, using the company’s Electron rocket.
This isn’t news, as the contract was issued to Axion in September 2022. The company and NASA are simply unveiling the suit to the public, with typical PR fanfare.
Apparently they have found from orbital images that its solar panels are dust-covered, the result of the heavy winter dust storm season. They remain hopeful that with time and the arrival of Martian summer the dust will be blown off and they can reactivate the rover.
This was first reported on in the March 8th quick links, but today’s tweet adds that the seizure is due to a Russian debt to Kazakhstan of two billion rubles. The consequences of the seizure for future Russian launches remains unclear however.
The terminals look “futuristic”, but maybe that’s because they will be like all of Jeff Bezos’ futuristic projects, only in the future.
No launch date is mentioned, though it does appear the company is getting close.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 2, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is once again a terrain sample image, taken not for any specific research but to fill a gap in the schedule so as to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.
What this picture shows is that even though Mars has a thin atmosphere that produces dust devils, the propagation of dust devils is not uniform across the red planet’s surface. In this picture there are a lot of devil tracks, going in many different directions. Yet few of the many cool images I post from MRO show this number of tracks. In many cases the ground might not be agreeable to leaving tracks, but that cannot be the entire explanation.
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They’re coming for you next: Eventbrite, an online “self-service ticketing platform”, has been routinely blacklisting conservative events, often cancelling already existing events or telling customers the event no longer exists, always for vague and often contradictory reasons.
What Eventbrite did to one Matt Walsh event is typical:
In late February, the website removed from its page for a [March 1st] Matt Walsh event on transgenderism sponsored by Young America’s Foundation at Stanford University. Organizers were forced to set up an alternative event page just before Walsh’s appearance. Not only did Eventbrite remove the page, “[h]undreds of registered attendees were surprised to receive emails from the company informing them that their tickets had been canceled,” YAF wrote in a Feb. 27 news release.
Though students at Stanford set fire to promotional flyers put up by YAF prior to the event, the event itself went off without incident.
The article at the first link above lists numerous other times Eventbrite cancelled conservative events without explanation, including several other Walsh university events, a screening of Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules that documents fraud and election tampering in the 2020 election, a event in support of the U.S. military, and a Memorial Day event honoring veterans.
All of this blacklisting contradicts Eventbrite’s own mission statement:
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The panorama above was released today by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team, and shows one of the candidate landing sites (arrow) where Starship could land as part of the Artemis-3 mission to the Moon.
The map of the south pole to the right, created from LRO images and annotated by me, gives the context. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The terrain here is rugged, to put it mildly. As the science team notes,
Imagine the view from the summit; it rises more than 5000 meters (16,400 feet) above its base. Off in the distance, you could see a 3500 meter (11,480 feet) tall cliff. One could argue that the sheer grandeur of this region makes it a prime candidate. But then again, a landing here might be too exciting?
That 11,480-foot-high cliff is the crater wall to the right of the arrow. Make sure you go to the link to view the original image. This will be a spectacular place to visit. Whether the astronauts however will be able to find out anything about ice in the shadowed crater floor thousands of feet below them remains questionable.
Artemis-3 is presently scheduled for 2025 but no one should be surprised if it is delayed.
LeoLabs, a private commercial company aiming to provide orbital tracking of all space objects as small as two centimeters, has announced plans to establish its seventh global radar facility in Argentina.
The S-band radar, scheduled to be completed by the end of the year, will be located on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego. “The Southern Hemisphere has not been well covered for space safety and space domain awareness,” LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley told SpaceNews. “There are a lot of conjunctions close to the North Pole and the South Pole. This radar will make a very meaningful improvement in the tracking of those conjunctions.”
Currently, LeoLabs tracks objects in low-Earth orbit with phased array radars in Alaska, Australia, Portugal’s Azores archipelago, New Zealand, Texas and Costa Rica.
The company essentially competes with the Space Force in tracking object in orbit, and has raised more than $100 million in private investment capital to build its ground stations.
Because of the decision of the federal government to guarantee all deposits at the failed Silcon Valley Bank (SVB), even those above the $250K limit set by the FDIC law, several space rocket startups are no longer threatened with failure, for now.
Astra for example is now seeking to move as quickly as it can its assets, equaling about 15% of the company, to other financial institutions.
I would expect this incident will cause every company to make sure their assets are distributed more widely, as a hedge against the failure of one bank.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 3, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a number of crater splats of varying sizes. If you look at the full image, you will find several even bigger splats to the north of the one in the picture to the right. You will also see many more similar-sized crater splats to the south.
I cannot provide any confident explanation about what caused these splats, other than to assume that most here are secondary impacts from ejecta thrown out by a larger impact somewhere nearby. I also assume all these small impacts occurred at the same time because they all appear to have hit the ground when it had the same thick liquid consistency, a condition that was probably temporary. Note for example how many of the other craters in the full image do not have this same splattered look.
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Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
It is amazing how authoritarian societies so rarely come up with original ideas. Buran and the Energia rocket that launched it definitely included some improvements over the space shuttle, but they were still copies, nonetheless.
Simple, efficient, and quick.
Events in the last two weeks at three of America’s top universities, Stanford, Cornell, and Yale, have illustrated starkly how many young Americans and their teachers now either support censorship and violence against dissenters, or are too cowardly to defend the rights of Americans when their free speech rights are attacked.
At the Stanford Law School a 5th Circuit Judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan, was shouted down and then lectured by a dean at the school for daring to have opinions she disagreed with. Stanford officials have issued a weak apology, but have done nothing concrete to discipline anyone for enforcing a heckler’s veto at the school.
At Cornell, the promise of university officials to punish students who participated in a protest that shouted down Ann Coulter has apparently been put aside once the heat died down.
Cornell University’s media team has not responded to multiple inquiries in the past months on possible punishments for the student activists. The College Fix also emailed communications director Rebecca Valli on March 6 and asked for an update on investigations into the students involved and what Cornell planned to do in the future to prevent similar problems.
The silence comes despite an initial strong statement from university leadership that criticized the Nov. 9 disruption.
Finally, officials at Yale Law School have attempted to fix things after being badly embarrassed by a similar violent protest in March 2022, when students shouted down Kristen Waggoner, the president of the non-profit law firm the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). » Read more
Even as China is presently building a commercial launch facility at its Wenchang spaceport on the coast, at least four of China’s pseudo-commercial rocket companies are gearing up to launch numerous times from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the interior of China.
The link above shows the launch sites being built at Jiuquan by pseudo-companies Landspace, Expace, CAS Space, and Space Pioneer. The map to the right illustrates what these interior launches will mean. Since none of these pseudo-companies will be vertically landing their first stages — at least not for several years — it means that numerous first stages will be coming down in many areas in China and Mongolia, most of which will be uncontrolled descents.
Eventually the Wenchang launch facility on the coast will become available, but based on past Chinese actions, do not expect these pseudo-companies to end their operations at Jiuquan at that time. All are controlled by the Chinese government, which has made it very clear it really doesn’t care if first stages crash near habitable areas.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay for this story.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a continuing project to capture high resolution images of every nearby galaxy, which in this particular case the caption describes as follows:
UGCA 307 hangs against an irregular backdrop of distant galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The small galaxy consists of a diffuse band of stars containing red bubbles of gas that mark regions of recent star formation, and lies roughly 26 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Corvus. Appearing as just a small patch of stars, UGCA 307 is a diminutive dwarf galaxy without a defined structure — resembling nothing more than a hazy patch of passing cloud.
The red regions of star formation are significant, as they indicate that even in a tiny galaxy like this it is possible for there to be enough gas and dust to coalesce into new stars.
Astronomers living on a world inside this galaxy have an advantage over astronomers on Earth. There is no large galaxy like the Milky Way blocking their view of the cosmos in one direction. They can see it all, even in directions looking through UGCA 307.
Two launches today in Russia and China.
First China used its Long March 2C rocket to launch a “remote sensing satellite” into orbit. No other information about the satellite was released. Nor was any information about whether the rocket’s first stage landed near habitable areas.
Next Russia used its Proton rocket to launch a classified satellite, likely a military surveillance satellite, into orbit. Like China Russia launches from an interior spaceport, with its first stage falling “in Karaganda Region of Kazakhstan,” with the second stage landing in drop zones in Russia. Russia, which has been doing this regularly for more than a half century, has always done a good job either avoiding habitable areas with the first stage crash, or keeping such stories out of the international press.
The 2023 launch race:
16 SpaceX
9 China
4 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India
American private enterprise still leads China 17 to 9 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 17 to 15. SpaceX alone is now tied with the entire world, including all other American companies, 16 all.
Click for high resolution version. For original images, go here and here.
How about a bonus weekend cool image! The panorama above, created from two pictures taken on March 11, 2023 by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, gives us a wonderful view of the alien Martian terrain that the rover is presently within. It also shows us the dilemma mission planners have in planning the rover’s future travels.
The red dotted line on both the panorama and the overview map to the right indicates the planned route. The yellow lines on the map indicates the approximate area viewed by the panorama. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, where it is presently in the middle of a drilling campaign in the marker layer where it sits.
The plan had been to travel to the east of what I like to call the the hill of pillows (in the middle of the panorama). Yet, it appears from this navigation image that the terrain might be less difficult to the west. Both routes will get the rover to its goal in Gediz Vallis.
I have no idea what the mission planners will decide to do. I am just a tourist going along for the ride, and sharing the journey with my readers. This is the first time any human spacecraft has ever traveled through such mountainous terrain on any planet.
Relativity today was once again unable to complete the first launch of its Terran-1 prototype rocket.
The failure to launch was not for want of trying. The first countdown was first put on hold at T-1:10 when a boat entered the range. Once removed, the launch team picked up the count from that point without any recycle, but at T-0 the rocket’s internal computer sensed an issue and aborted the launch.
The launch team then reassessed, adjusted that issue, and tried again for a launch at the last second of the launch window, essentially duplicating the circumstances of an instantaneous launch window. The count this time got down to T-45 seconds when once again the rocket’s internal computer sensed an issue and aborted the launch.
No word yet on when the company will try again. If anything, Relativity’s launch team is getting a lot of practice and training with each launch attempt, critical knowledge needed for future launches.
Link here. The companies mentioned in the article are Astra, BlackSky, Planet, Redwire, Rocket Lab, and Space Perspective.
Rocket Lab has about 8% of its cash assets now trapped by the closure. All the companies had loans from Silicon Valley Bank, some of which were paid off prior to the crash. This quote suggests the situation is critical for some space startups:
“It’s a very serious situation,” said a space sector entrepreneur who asked not to be identified. “Our balance is suddenly only $450. There has been no communication from SVB even after the event became known. Our primary SVB liaison, who has been very attentive in the past, is unreachable by any means. It’s appalling.”
UPDATE: Capsule has successfully splashed down and it recovery is underway, with no issues so far apparently.
SpaceX’s Endurance capsule has undocked from ISS, carrying a four-person crew with a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico planned for 9:02 pm (Eastern).
The live stream will go live at 8 pm (Eastern), which I have embedded below the fold.
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I have embedded below the live stream of the first launch attempt of Relativity’s Terran-1 rocket, presently scheduled with a three hour launch window that opens at 1:00 pm (Eastern). The live stream will go live at noon.
The first launch of a new rocket is exceedingly challenging, and almost never succeeds. The key however is the data obtained that can be used to make the next launch attempt a success.
A lot rides on this launch. Relativity already has obtained $1.2 billion in launch contracts plus more than $1 billion in private investment capital, despite having never launched anything. Moreover, the Terran-1 rocket is really a prototype for its larger Terran-R rocket, which is intended to compete directly for the larger payloads that companies like SpaceX and ULA launch.
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 payloads and (it appears) the upper stage is not yet stacked. The plan is to do some propellant loading tests.
The launch had been planned for the first quarter of this year, but no launch date as yet has been set.
According to the company’s webpage, the rocket, dubbed Miura-1, is suborbital and will be recovered for resuse by parachute after splashing down in the ocean.
They hope to launch in the second quarter of 2023 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.
Nicoletta-Solas testifying to Congress
They’re coming for you next: Nicoletta Solas, a Rhode Island mother of a 5-year-old, was harassed by her school board and sued by the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teacher’s union in the nation, for simply requesting her child’s kindergarten curriculum. As she stated bluntly during her testimony at House hearing on March 2, 2023,
If you ask questions about public education, they will come after you. … My school district and my teachers’ union didn’t want to just hide the curriculum from me, they wanted to ruin my life.
Below is video of her full testimony. All she wanted to know was whether the school would be teaching queer theory to her 5-year-old. The ugly and vicious response to this request, by the school, the school board, and the NEA, is striking.
» Read more
Click for original image.
Click for interactive map.
Though the science team has not, as of this posting, added the flight to Ingenuity’s flight log, according to the interactive map showing the positions of both Ingenuity and Perseverance on Mars, the helicopter completed its 47th flight yesterday as planned.
An annotated version of that map is to the right. The larger green dot marks Ingenuity’s new position. The smaller green dot marks its position when the panorama above was taken on February 27, 2023, capturing the helicopter in the distance (as indicated by the arrow). The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by that panorama. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position.
The flight’s planned distance was to go 1,410 feet to the southwest and “image science targets along the way.” As the helicopter also flew above Perseverance’s planned route, as indicated by the red dotted line, it also provided the rover team information about the ground Perseverance will travel along the way. Since the terrain here is generally not very rough, the information is not critical for route-picking. It might however spot some geological feature that bears a closer look that would not have been noticed by the rover alone.
In releasing its proposed federal budget for 2024 with many major spending increases, the Biden administration has also proposed a significant increase in NASA’s budget. the third year in a row it has done so.
The shortened summary version of the Biden budget proposal [pdf] covers its proposals for NASA in two pages, with the most important proposals as follows:
The last two items will likely be money offered to many new commercial startups.
Though we can expect some resistance by the Republican House to most of the budget increases in the overall Biden budget proposal, expect Congress to rubber stamp the NASA increases, as it has done routinely in recent years. Congress might shift or reject some of these ideas, but generally, when all is said and done, it will only make superficial changes. NASA will likely more money.
