Category: Points of Information

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

India about to do first drop test of its home-built version of an X-37B

10:31 am

India’s space agency ISRO is now preparing for the first drop test of its own home-built version of an X-37B mini-shuttle, designed to remain in orbit for a period of time, return to Earth on a runway, and then be reused.

According to ISRO officials, the RLV [Reusable Launch Vehicle] wing body will be carried using a helicopter to an altitude of three to five km and released at a distance of about four to five km ahead of the runway with a horizontal velocity. After the release, the RLV will glide, navigate towards the runway and land autonomously with a landing gear in the defence airfield near Chitradurga.

A prototype of the RLV was flown on a suborbital test flight in 2016, landing in the ocean. The pending test would be the first to attempt a runway landing, essential if the spacecraft is to safely return to Earth and then be reused.

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Arizona court kills local government’s real estate deal for World View

10:19 am

The Arizona court of appeals last month ruled that a land deal between Pima County and the high altitude balloon company World View was unconstitutional, and could not go forward.

Per the agreement, the county would fund the construction of facilities, including a 135,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, with office spaces and a launch pad, on property it already owned. World View would then lease the property from the county for 20 years. In return, the company would hire more than 400 employees, with an average salary of over $55,000, and spend $32.3 million on equipment.

Twenty years of lease payments were expected to total around $14 million, estimated to be the property’s value at that time. World View would then have the option to buy the facility for $10.

Six years ago the Goldwater Institute sued, saying this deal was illegal according to the state’s constitution. Last month the court agreed, killing the deal.

Since World View remains in operation in these facilities, Pima County will have to renegotiate at market rates. How that will effect the company itself, which now hopes to begin flying near-space tourist flights by 2024, charging $50K per person, remains unknown.

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Another Indian rocket startup tests engine

10:09 am

According to India’s space agency ISRO, it recently provided the facilities for the Indian rocket startup company Agnikul Cosmos to complete a static fire engine test of its second-stage rocket engine.

The agency fired Agnikul’s fully 3D-printed second-stage rocket engine Agnilet for a duration of 15 seconds. Agnilet is a regeneratively cooled 1.4 kN semi-cryogenic engine that uses Liquid oxygen and Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) as propellants. According to Agnikul, the engine is capable of generating 3kN of thrust at sea level and would propel the upper stage of Agnibaan, the company’s under-development launch vehicle.

The company had said it hoped to complete its first launch this year, but that appears highly unlikely. Nonetheless, it has raised at least $14.1 million in investment capital.

Thus, it appears India now has two private rocket companies gearing up for launch in ’23, Agnikul Cosmos and Skyroot.

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Astra to lay off 16% of its workforce

9:59 am

Astra, having abandoned its Rocket-3.3 in order to develop its larger Rocket-4 smallsat launcher, announced yesterday that is laying off 16% of its workforce as part of this change in direction.

The decision to abandon Rocket-3.3 has at this time removed the company as an operational rocket company, and has thus put it behind several other competitors which are now gearing up for launch. Its third quarter report also showed a $41 million loss this year, 26% larger than the same quarter last year.

As a result, the company’s stock value has declined 94%, and is now selling for 58 cents per share. If that price does not rise above $1 before April of next year, NASDAQ has said it would delist it.

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German rocket startup unveils 2nd stage

9:52 am

The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg this week unveiled the second stage of its planned rocket, with its Helix engine attached.

This second stage will be used for engine tests in Sweden.

“The campaign will feature three main tests: The first test will last a few seconds, followed by one for around 10 seconds, then the full flight duration. Every engine is acceptance tested. Then each engine is fired a second time during stage acceptance and then started a third time for flight. We have already proven that we can fire the same engine 3x without switching out components with our long-duration hot-fire campaign. Now we want to repeat that achievement with a full upper stage.”

The company hopes to use this stage in the first orbital test flight of its RFA-1 rocket, targeting a launch late next year. That rocket will use nine more Helix engines in its first stage, and will thus be able to put into orbit slightly more mass than Firefly’s Alpha rocket or payload.

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Virgin Orbit’s first launch from UK delayed by red tape

9:35 am

We’re here to help you: The first launch of a satellite from the United Kingdom, launched by Virgin Orbit by taking off from a runway in Cornwall, is experiencing prolonged delays getting its license approved by the British bureaucracy.

While the company says there are no specific issues holding up approval, the permit remains unapproved. Virgin Orbit had hoped initially to launch in the summer, but could not, and this delay has also delayed its later launches and thus reduced its profits in 2022, forcing it to obtain extra investment capital from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group in order to pay the bills.

Meanwhile, the British bureaucracy struggles to issue the licenses.

The delays have attracted the attention of a House of Commons committee, which released a report Nov. 4 criticizing those delays and calling for more personnel to be assigned to reviewing license applications. “For this initial set of licence applications, the Department for Transport must provide additional resource to the CAA [Civil Aviation Authority] to ensure that the licensing process does not impede the feasibility of a launch this year,” the report stated.

A source familiar with the CAA’s licensing activities, speaking on background, noted that the CAA now had about 50 people working on license applications, up from the 35 mentioned in the report. That included one person seconded to the CAA from the U.S. Federation Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

As always, private enterprise gets it done, while government requires dozens of people and months to simply fill out forms. Worse, we all know the CAA is going to say yes. The delay is simply a game to justify its existence, not to really accomplish anything.

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Cygnus successfully berthed at ISS

9:06 am

Cygnus approaching ISS on November 9, 2022

Despite on of its two solar panels only partly deployed, astronaut Nicole Mann was able to use the robot arm on ISS to grab Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter and bring it into its port, where ground engineers successfully berthed it.

The image to the right is a screen capture from NASA TV as Cygnus approached. You can see the problematic panel at the bottom. Though it has folded out from its initial stored position, it has not opened up fully.

The freighter will stay docked to ISS until late January, during which the crew will unload about four tons of cargo and then fill it with garbage before sending it to burn up over the ocean. We should expect NASA and Northrop Grumman to also plan a spacewalk to not only inspect the panel to figure out what failed, but to see if it can still be deployed.

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Cygnus freighter continues to target ISS rendezvous tomorrow

5:19 pm

Though one of its two solar panels remains undeployed, engineers and Northrop Grumman and NASA have proceeded with four engine burns so as to rendezvous with ISS tomorrow, November 9th, with arrival in the early morning hours.

Expedition 68 NASA astronaut Nicole Mann will capture Cygnus with the station’s robotic arm, with NASA astronaut Josh Cassada acting as backup. After Cygnus capture, ground commands will be sent from mission control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for the station’s arm to rotate and install it on the station’s Unity module Earth-facing port.

According to this NASA update, it appears that NASA managers are confident that the stuck solar panel is not blocking the grapple point, preventing the arm from grabbing the capsule. At the same time, the wording in the update is just a bit vague, and also suggests that before this capture occurs they will be inspecting Cygnus very carefully.

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Pushback: Doctors sue to kill California law making it illegal to disagree with government

1:18 pm

What the Democrats want to repeal
What the Democrats want to repeal.

I think today’s blacklist story about a lawsuit by five California doctors against a state law that was passed by the Democrat-controlled state legislature and signed by Democrat governor Gavin Newsom, is a perfect blacklist story for today, election day.

Two years ago, at the beginning of the Biden administration, I noticed an immediate change in the behavior of Democratic Party politicians and their supporters. No longer were they whispering about their desire to silence their opponents. Suddenly they were open and aggressive about it, calling for blacklists and commissions, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) enthused, “…to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.” Here is what I suggested they do:

Hey, Alexandria, I’ve got the perfect name for your congressional commission. Why not call it the House Un-American Activities Committee? You could subpoena right-wing writers and journalists to testify against their will in Congress, demanding to know their party affiliations. You could also set up lists of these proven conservatives so that businesses nationwide can blacklist them and keep them from working.

As it turned out, the Democrats did exactly this, though their commission was instead named the January 6th commission, supposedly focused on punishing anyone involved in the entirely legal demonstrations that occurred in DC that day. At no time in the past two years has that commission, or Biden’s Department of Justice, showed the slightest interest in investigating actual political violence. No, instead, the goal has been to persecute ordinary people and slander entirely innocent politicians.

Nor has the Democratic Party’s campaign against free speech and personal liberty been limited to this commission. I started my blacklist column at that time because the number of examples of blacklisting, censorship, and abuse of power by the left, both in and out of that party and among its supporters, had become so numerous I realized if I reported every case as it happened, my website would be swamped. Instead, I decided to cover one per day, to make it clear how much these thugs were normalizing this goonlike behavior. After two years, that column now lists more than four hundred examples of blacklists and abuse of power, almost all of which were done by the Democratic Party or its supporters on the left.

The law under dispute in California is a perfect example. Passed in September, 2022, it forbids any doctor from saying anything the government doesn’t like, or face the loss of their medical license for “unprofessional conduct.” Below is the bill’s specific but very vague wording, designed to allow the government to punish almost all medical professionals for anything they might say or publish, merely because someone in the government disagrees with it:
» Read more

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Japan issues license allowing Ispace to do private business on Moon

9:51 am

With the launch of Ispace’s first lunar lander, Hakuto-R, only two weeks away, the private company has obtained a license from the Japanese government to conduct private transactions on the Moon.

The license allows Ispace to complete a contract awarded by NASA in December 2020, to acquire regolith from the lunar surface to sell to the space agency. During M1, Ispace is expected to collect regolith that accumulates on the footpad of the landing gear during the touchdown on the surface, photograph the collected regolith and conduct an “in-place” transfer of ownership of the lunar regolith to NASA. After ownership transfer, the collected material becomes the property of NASA, under the Artemis program. Under the contract, the lunar regolith will not be returned to Earth.

Under a second contract awarded to Ispace’s subsidiary [Ispace EU] … Ispace EU will acquire the lunar material on its second mission scheduled for 2024 as part of the HAKUTO-R program. An application for Mission 2 will be submitted to obtain a separate authorization.

This mission will also land the UAE’s first lunar rover, Rashid.

According to the Outer Space Treaty, it is the responsibility of each nation to regulate the private operations of its citizens in space. This action thus follows the laws that Japan has passed to supervise commercial space companies.

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Bad news for Branson

9:43 am

Two stories today suggest that Richard Branson’s space empire continues to totter.

First, a judge ruled that the fraud lawsuit against Branson by other stockholders in the suborbital tourist company Virgin Galactic can go forward.

The suit claims Branson concealed safety problems while he sold off the bulk of his own stock at top dollar. Only after he had dumped his stock were those problems revealed, and the stock price plummeted, now trading at less than 10% of the peak in February 2021, when Branson sold.

Second, it appears that though Branson’s satellite orbital company Virgin Orbit is operational, it is not going to launch as many satellites this year as expected, and thus required an investment of $25 million on November 4th from Branson’s Virgin Group to stay liquid.

Branson clearly wanted to be a major player in space. In the end, he has mostly failed, though once again Virgin Orbit remains a viable launching company for smallsats.

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