Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

China and SpaceX complete launches

11:21 pm

Two launches today. First China launched four Earth observation radar satellites, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northeast China. No word where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed within China.

SpaceX then launched a GPS-type satellite for the Space Force, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. Little was released about the payload and what information was released was not very informative. The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing softly on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

130 SpaceX
62 China
16 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 149 to 94, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 130 to 113.

0 comments

December 16, 2024 Quick space links

5:01 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

  • On this day in 1984 the Soviet Union launched Vega-1
    The spacecraft not only flew past Venus on its way to flying past Halley’s Comet, it also put a lander on Venus and a French balloon in its atmosphere.
    2 comments

    On the Space Show tomorrow

    4:36 pm

    I will be doing a long 90 minute-plus appearance with David Livingston on the Space Show tomorrow evening, beginning at 7 pm (Pacific). I hope my readers will consider calling in with questions or disagreements or comments. The show is always better with listener interaction.

    I definitely plan to talk about my proposal for rethinking NASA’s Artemis program, as outlined in this two-part essay:

    Part 1 of 2: What NASA’s next administrator should do if SLS and Orion are cancelled

    Part 2 of 2: De-emphasize a fast Moon landing and build a real American space industry instead December 11, 2024

    I very much would like to hear other people’s opinions about my suggestions.

    2 comments

    A galactic eye in heaven

    12:30 pm

    A galactic eye in space
    Click for original image.

    Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a project to study the star formation processes over time in this galaxy, located about 76 million light years away.

    A prominent bar of stars stretches across the centre of this galaxy, and spiral arms emerge from each end of the bar. Because NGC 2566 appears tilted from our perspective, its disc takes on an almond shape, giving the galaxy the appearance of a cosmic eye.

    As NGC 2566 gazes at us, astronomers gaze right back, using Hubble to survey the galaxy’s star clusters and star-forming regions. The Hubble data are especially valuable for studying stars that are just a few million years old; these stars are bright at the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths to which Hubble is sensitive. Using these data, researchers will measure the ages of NGC 2566’s stars, helping to piece together the timeline of the galaxy’s star formation and the exchange of gas between star-forming clouds and stars themselves.

    To get the full picture, astronomers have also obtained infrared data from the Webb Space Telescope and millimeter/submillimeter radio wavelength data from the ALMA telescope.

    1 comment

    The Insight lander on Mars as seen from orbit over six years

    12:07 pm

    Insight as seen by MRO over six years
    Click for movie.

    Using photos taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) from 2018 to 2024, researchers have compiled a short movie showing how the dust around the Mars lander Insight changed over time.

    This video shows images taken by HiRISE between Dec. 11, 2018, just a couple weeks after InSight landed on Mars, and Oct. 23, 2024. In the images, InSight often appears as a bright, blue dot due to its reflection of sunlight. A dark halo was scorched into the ground by the spacecraft’s retrorocket thrusters; this halo fades away over time. Dark stripes that can be seen on the surface are tracks left by passing dust devils. [emphasis mine]

    You can see the movie here. The image to the right was the first picture taken by MRO only three weeks after landing.

    Insight eventually shut down because this dust accumulated on its solar panels, and the lander never was blessed with having a dust devil cross over it to blow that dust away. This video illustrates why. Out of the seven images making up the short movie, only three show dust devil tracks, and in each case only a few tracks are seen. No other tracks are detected.

    In other words, over six years this region simply did not get a lot of dust devils. The odds of one crossing over InSight was thus quite low. Ironically, the image to the right shows that a dust devil crossed very close to the lander about the time it landed in 2018, probably just beforehand since the dark scorch created by the lander’s thrusters cover the track. No dust devil ever got that close again.

    1 comment

    Another American rocket startup gets a multi-launch contract

    10:25 am

    The American rocket startup Vaya Space announced today that it has been awarded a multi-launch contract to use its proposed Dauntless rocket to place up to 250 small satellites in orbit for the satellite startup Space Telecommunications.

    Vaya has been around since 2017, has won contracts with the Air Force in connection with developing its hybrid-solid-fueled rocket, and in 2022 completed a test suborbital launch. It hopes to launch Dauntless for the first time in 2026.

    This contract is probably like most launch contracts awarded to rocket startups. It allows the company to claim progress, while giving the satellite company the right to go elsewhere at no cost should the rocket not launch on time.

    0 comments

    Ispace awarded $5.83 million loan from Japanese government

    10:01 am

    Ispace landing map

    The planetary lander startup Ispace today announced that it has been awarded a $5.83 million loan from the Japan Finance Corporation, a government corporation designed to issue loans to encourage Japanese businesses.

    The money will be issued this month, and Ispace will have ten years to pay it back. Depending on whether the company is profitable or not, the interest rate will be either 0.5% or 4.15%.

    Ispace’s one lunar landing attempt so far, Hakuto-R1, was a failure when its software thought it was close to the ground at three miles altitude and shut off its engines. The company however is going to try again, with the launch of its second lander, dubbed Resilience, scheduled for a January 2025 launch. It will also carry the company’s own Tenacious micro-rover, and will hopefully land as shown in the map to the right, in the north of the Moon’s near side.

    0 comments

    China launches first set of satellites for planned internet megaconstellations

    9:42 am

    China today successfully launched an unknown number of satellites in the first launch of one of its planned internet megaconstellations designed to compete with Starlink, its Long March 5B rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

    Not revealing the number of satellites launched is probably a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, which requires each signatory to inform others of its launches and at a minimum the number of objects placed in orbit. This constellation, dubbed Guowang, is hoping to launch as many as 13,000 satellites, and that will require some coordination to prevent it from interfering with the constellations launched by others. Not revealing the size of this satellite group makes such coordination impossible.

    In a bit of good news, it appears China has solved the problem of its Long March 5B rocket, which in the past had used its core stage to place objects in orbit. After payload deployment that core stage would be in an unstable an orbit that would quickly decay, allowing the stage to crash uncontrolled, thus threatening habitable areas worldwide. The rocket’s new upper stage now takes the payloads into orbit, so the core stage can drop off sooner and fall into the ocean harmlessly.

    The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

    129 SpaceX
    61 China
    16 Russia
    13 Rocket Lab

    American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 148 to 93, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 129 to 112.

    0 comments

    FAA eliminates a stupid licensing requirement imposed when it “streamlined” its launch licensing regulations

    9:18 am

    We’re from the government and we’re here to help! The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced last week that it will stop demanding rocket companies redo a flight safety analysis that have already been done by the rocket’s spaceports, a new bit of red tape that was apparently added when the agency introduced its Part 450 “streamlined” licensing regulations in 2021.

    The FAA announced Dec. 13 that it will accept flight safety analyses performed by federal launch ranges in California, Florida and Virginia in applications for launch licenses under regulations known as Part 450. That decision means that companies will no longer have to perform similar analyses specifically for the FAA as part of the licensing process. Launch companies had complained of the duplication of work needed to carry out FAA analyses in addition to those required by the ranges they were launching from.

    The FAA’s own bureaucracy had recognized the stupidity of this requirement (as well as many others) in July 2023 report [pdf], but the agency’s management did nothing. Apparently the political appointees who ran the agency during the Biden administration either liked this red tape — slowing American business — or were too dense to take action.

    Trump’s election victory has now obviously forced some action. Not only has the agency suddenly recognized this particular problem, one week after Trump’s victory it announced the formation of an independent committee of industry and academia to review, once again, its Part 450 regulations.

    It seems this committee is largely a Potemkin Village to make the Trump leadership think the agency is doing something. Instead, the FAA should do what it did last week, and adopt the many recommendations of the July 2023 report, now. The committee can then move forward cleaning up Part 450 in other areas instead of simply repeating that past work.

    4 comments

    Boeing to take more than a decade to refit two 747s for Air Force One

    7:30 pm

    Utter incompetence: According to recent news reports, Boeing will not be able to deliver the two 747s it is refitting to be the president’s Air Force One fleet until 2029, even though it signed a $3.9 billion contract to do so in 2018.

    The delay is startling given that Boeing isn’t building the planes from scratch. During Trump’s first term, Boeing started to overhaul two 747s that were built for a Russian airline that never took the jets.

    This is more than absurd, it is obscene. Boeing is handed two flightworthy 747s and almost $4 billion, and it can’t refit the two planes in less than a decade? It seems one of the first things Trump should do once he returns to office next month is cancel this contract entirely, demand a refund from Boeing, and simply convert his present fleet of “Trump Force One” airplanes that he has been using since 2020 for use as president. Cheaper, faster, and certainly a wiser use of taxpayer money.

    As for Boeing, this story illustrates once again how far this company has fallen. Remember, it was Boeing that conceived, designed, and built the 747. Moreover, its 747 has been used for decades for Air Force One. For its engineers now to be incapable to refitting another two 747s for this purpose seems inconceivable, and suggests those same engineers should not be trusted on any new planes they build.

    22 comments

    Juno spots changes on Io’s surface in just a two-month span

    10:57 am

    Before and after images by Juno of volcanic ring on Io
    Click for original image.

    New photos taken just two months apart by Juno of a region dubbed Nusk Patera on the Jupiter moon Io showed the appearance of a distinct ring that had hardly been there before.

    The pictures, taken during two recent fly-bys of the moon, are above, and show the change. From the caption:

    A red ring formed around Nusku Patera in the two months between the spacecraft’s 58th flyby on Feb. 3, 2024, and its 60th on April 9, 2024. The ring obscures some nearby features like Creidne Patera. This ring, 683 miles (1,100 kilometers) wide is likely from a Pele-type plume rich in sulfur. Similar transient red rings were observed by NASA’s Galileo mission around Grian Patera and Surt and were associated with intense but short-lived thermal “outburst” eruptions.

    In other words, sulfur from eruption from the central vent/caldera was flung into the sky enough that when it eventually settled back down it landed in a ring about 340 miles away from the center.

    Other data from Juno, also released this week here and here, detected fresh lava flows at another volcanic region of Io dubbed, Zal Patera.

    0 comments

    SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites

    9:39 pm

    SpaceX today successfully launched 22 Starlink satellites, 13 of which were for its direct-to-cell constellation. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg in California, its first stage completing its ninth flight by landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific.

    According to a tweet by SpaceX at the end of October, only five more launches were necessary to complete the first version of its direct-to-cell Starlink constellation. Today’s launch meets that criteria. Since the FCC has approved the constellation’s license, this means T-Mobile can start offering the service to customers, filling in all dead spots worldwide.

    What makes this launch even more unique is that for the first time in quite awhile there was a four-day-plus gap between SpaceX launches. The company has been launching so often that it has been rare for more than two days to pass this year without a launch.

    The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

    129 SpaceX
    60 China
    16 Russia
    13 Rocket Lab

    American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 148 to 92, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 129 to 111.

    1 comment
    1 … 211 212 213 214 215 … 2,413