Category: Points of Information

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

April 3, 2024 Quick space links

3:34 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.

 

 

 

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Complex ridged terrain in ancient Martian crater

2:06 pm

Complex ridges in an ancient Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Because an electronic unit for one of this camera’s filters has failed, causing a blank strip in the image center, I have filled in that gap using an MRO context camera image taken October 31, 2015.

The scientists describe this geology as “ridged terrain.” What I see is a surface that was like wet plaster once, and then a giant finger touched it and pulled away quickly, so that as it left some material pulled upward to create random ridges within the depression created by that finger.

These ridges are inside a very very ancient 110-mile-wide crater dubbed Margulis. According to the 2021 poster [pdf] of the scientists who did the first geological mapping of this crater, the crater floor “show remnants of sedimentary materials, suggesting the [crater was] subjected to widespread episodes of resurfacing and denudation.”

Though located in the dry equatorial regions, this ridged terrain suggests it formed suddenly when underground ice sublimated into gas, bursting upward to break the surface when the gas pressure became high enough.
» Read more

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An abandoned module from one of China’s manned capsules burns up over California

9:29 am

The orbital module of China’s Shenzhou-15 manned capsule, launched with three astronauts in November 2022 and then abandoned in orbit when those astronauts returned to Earth in the spring of 2023, burned up over southern California yesterday.

The fall created a blazing fireball witnessed by people from the Sacramento area all the way down to San Diego, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS). As of Tuesday afternoon, 81 people had reported sightings of the event to the AMS.

It is unlikely, though not impossible, that any pieces hit the ground. The module is considered small enough to be destroyed during descent. Nonetheless, its uncontrolled re-entry highlights China’s general irresponsibility when it comes to space junk. For example, the Russia Soyuz capsule has a similar design, but based on history Russia has for decades routinely controlled the de-orbit of its abandoned orbital module so that it does not come down over land.

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Technical issues with Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsule to delay next Artemis mission

9:20 am

It appears that technical issues with Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsule are one of the main reasons NASA has had to delay next Artemis mission, the first to put humans inside that capsule and then take them around the Moon.

In January 2024 it was reported that the mission would be delayed from a launch before the end of 2024 until 2025. We now know why:

NASA is working with Orion spacecraft prime contractor Lockheed Martin to resolve a handful of issues that came up late last year during ground testing, forcing the space agency to delay the launch readiness target date for its Artemis II circumlunar mission to September 2025. The Lockheed Martin assembly, test, and launch operations (ATLO) team at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is reinstalling some electronics and implementing workarounds for others affected by an electrical circuit flaw found in digital motor controllers on the spacecraft.

While a resolution to that issue appears to be getting closer, the Orion program and contractor teams are also working through the corrective actions process for a problem with how the Orion batteries handle the shock of an extreme abort case.

In other words, Lockheed Martin discovered these two electrical issues only last year, after spending almost two decades and more than $15 billion developing Orion.

As I predicted in January, “None of these dates will be met. I predict that further delays will be announced next year and the year after that, pushing all these missions back again, in small increments.” I also predicted that NASA will be lucky to land a human on the Moon by 2030, a mere fifteen years after its original target date of 2015, set by George Bush Jr. in 2004.

In the meantime, expect SpaceX’s Starship to begin regularly commercial and governmental flights to the Moon in the next five years. Long before SLS and Orion put humans on the Moon, Starship will be doing it privately for less cost.

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White House tasks NASA to create a clock standard for time on the Moon

9:07 am

In a policy announcement yesterday, the White House has directed NASA to establish a coordinated lunar time standard (dubbed LTC) for time on the Moon, similar to Univeral or Greenwich time (UTC) now used on Earth.

A unified time standard—Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)—will act as the established standard to enable cislunar operations and can be tied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary time standard globally used to regulate clocks and time on Earth. This policy directs NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, and Transportation to deliver a strategy for the implementation of LTC no later than December 31, 2026. NASA will also coordinate with other federal agencies as appropriate and international partners through existing international forums, including Artemis Accords partner nations.

As noted in the full policy statement [pdf]:

Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity. For example, to an observer on the Moon, an Earth-based clock will appear to lose on
average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day with additional periodic variations.

While this difference would be utterly unnoticed by people, the difference will become a problem for GPS systems and other very sensitive systems that depend on precise timing. The new policy will attempt to prevent such issues by getting ahead of the problem. It will also work to coordinate this new lunar universal time with other nations doing lunar exploration.

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Roscosmos approves design of Russia’s proposed new space station

8:56 am

According to TASS, Russia’s state-run press, its space agency Roscosmos has now approved the design of its proposed new Russian Orbital Station (ROS), with a targeted launch date sometime between 2027 and 2032.

The station’s core module will have six docking ports for accommodating add-on modules. Each of the station’s modules will be replaceable, if necessary, so the ROS’s service life is likely to last decades.

The station will stay in a polar orbit with an inclination of up to 97 degrees.

That last feature will make this station unique, as all other previous and planned manned space stations use orbits relatively close to the equator so they never fly over the poles. ROS’s orbit will allow it to see almost the entire Earth surface, including all of Russia.

Despite the fact that this design is essentially the same as the Mir station the Soviet Union launched in 1986 and operated until the late 1990s, do not expect this new station to launch on schedule. Based on Russia’s track record since the fall of the Soviet Union, expect many delays that will stretch development into decades. If its first module launches before 2032 I will be amazed.

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First manned Starliner mission now targeting a May 6, 2024 launch

8:47 am

In order to work around scheduling issues at ISS, NASA and Boeing have now scheduled the first manned Starliner mission to launch no earlier than May 6, 2024.

Following a review of the International Space Station operations, NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test now is targeting no earlier than Monday, May 6, for Starliner’s first launch with astronauts to the orbital complex. The date adjustment optimizes space station schedule of activities planned toward the end of April, including a cargo spacecraft undocking and a crew spacecraft port relocation required for Starliner docking. NASA and Boeing also are performing prelaunch closeout work and completing final certification for flight.

Two astronauts will fly the capsule to ISS for a two week stay, testing its systems in order to determine if it is ready for regular operations.

This launch is years behind schedule due to numerous technical problems that have cost Boeing billions in extra costs as well as lost income. In order to convince other customers besides NASA to buy seats on Starliner will likely require the capsule to fly many times without issues. Until then, I suspect anyone wishing to do a tourist flight in space will pick SpaceX instead, because of its now proven safety and reliability record.

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China launches a “remote sensing” satellite

8:27 am

China yesterday successfully launched what it described simply as a “remote sensing” satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from it Xichang launch site in the southwest of China.

No word whether the rocket’s lower stage, using toxic hypergolic fuel, crashed near any habitable areas inside China.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

33 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined in successful launches 38 to 25, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 33 to 30.

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April 2, 2024 Quick space links

4:35 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.

  • Head of France’s space agency visits Axiom

    • In recent weeks France has suddenly discovered the wonders of capitalism. This visit likely involves its recognition that ISS is soon going away, and that it will have to then deal with private commercial station operators.

 

 

 

 

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Patches of volcanic Martian ash covering patches of frozen volcanic dunes

11:30 am

Patches of volcanic Martian ash over frozen volcanic dunes

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 24, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

What makes this terrain intriguing are the series of parallel ridges that cover most of the picture, with smaller ridges at right angles filling the hollows between. It appears we are looking at two different sets of dunes, the larger ridges indicating the southeast-to-northwest direction of the prevailing winds, while the smaller ridges in the hollows suggest the wind patterns within the hollows, causing smaller ripple dunes to form at right angles.

Note however the flat patches in the lower left. The material there appears to fill the hollows, covering the dunes. We can tell this by the hollows to the east, which have an almost identical dune pattern. Those flat patches then are likely covering similar dunes, with the patched material either having been blown away to expose the lower dunes, or having been blown here to cover them in patches. That the dunes appear unchanged under this patched material when exposed also suggests strongly that these dunes are hardened into stone, no longer soft sand that can be blown by the wind.
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Sunspot update: The weak solar maximum continues

10:38 am

NOAA yesterday posted its updated monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted this graph below, with several additional details to provide some larger context.

The sunspot activity in March dropped, continuing the pattern of the last five months, where the Sun appears to be in a stable plateau after reaching a high peak in the summer of 2023. It continues to appear that we are in the middle low saddle of a double-peaked relatively weak solar maximum, with the Sun doing what I predicted in February:

If we are now in maximum, sunspot activity throughout the rest of 2024 should fluctuate at the level it is right now, with it suddenly rising again near the end of the year for a period lasting through the first half of 2025. After that it should begin its ramp down to solar minimum.

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Video shows Astra rocket exploding on launchpad during early 2020 launch attempt

9:12 am

In March 2020 the rocket startup Astra was attempting to complete its first orbital test launch. After one attempt that was scrubbed, the next ended with what the company called “an anomaly” when a fire destroyed the rocket on the launchpad.

Immediately after that failure the company furloughed one fifth of its workforce, and did not succeed in getting a rocket to orbit until November 2021, after another two failures.

Video obtained by Tech Chrunch now shows what happened on that March 2020 failure. The Astra rocket simply exploded on launchpad, destroying everything.

The company has been an example of the risks of freedom and private enterprise. It appeared to be one of the big successes, getting rockets built and launched, during which it also went public. Instead, after a few launch successes it abandoned its rocket, ran out of cash, and then the stock was purchased for pennies by the company’s two founders — taking it private once again. At the moment it is not clear if the company will ever rise from the ashes.

In other words, buyer beware. The claims of any new company is not to be trusted blindly. Sometimes their claims are filled with hubris.

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De-orbiting debris from ISS hits a house in Florida

8:58 am

It appears that a 2-pound piece of a de-orbiting “cargo pallet” from ISS bored through the roof of a house in Florida on March 8, 2024 and broke through two floors.

A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That’s an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.

This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.

NASA had taken possession of the piece to determine for certain if it is from ISS. Who is liable for the damages could become a legal tangle. The depleted batteries were owned by NASA, but were brought to ISS on a Japanese HTV cargo freighter. According to the Outer Space Treaty, the nation that launches an item is liable for any damages it causes when it crashes back on Earth. The language however doesn’t really cover a case where one nation builds the item for launch, and another nation launches it.

The owner, Alejandro Otero, had to use Twitter to get a response from NASA. According to his tweet, he had called and emailed the agency and had been ignored. Only after other news sources picked up the story did NASA respond. Furthermore, when NASA jettisoned the pallet from ISS it had insisted that the discarded batteries would burn up entirely in the atmosphere, even though other experts said differently.

The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, says a “general rule of thumb” is that 20 to 40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground. The exact percentage depends on the design of the object, but these nickel-hydrogen batteries were made of metals with relatively high density. Ahead of the reentry, the European Space Agency also acknowledged some fragments from the battery pallet may survive to the ground.

What this information tells us is that NASA knew this discarded pallet posed a risk, but made believe it didn’t.

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SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites

8:27 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully placed another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

33 SpaceX
13 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined in successful launches 38 to 24, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 33 to 29.

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April 1, 2024 Quick space links

4:45 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.

 

 

  • US court asks India to pay $132 million to Deutsche Telekom in Devas Antrix case

    • Don’t ask me to explain this. The Devas Antrix legal case has been wandering through various international courts since 2005, and I have never been able to find a clear explanation for the court battles. What I do know is that it involves Antrix, what was then the commercial arm of India’s ISRO space agency, and a number of international companies, all of which have sued when the project was canceled.

 

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Interacting galaxies

9:27 am

Interacting galaxies
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 dark energy survey. It shows two galaxies very close together, their perpheries only about 40,000 light years apart, with the larger galaxy about the size of the Milky Way.

For comparison, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is about 167,000 light years from the Milky Way, more than four times farther that this satellite galaxy. Yet the satellite galaxy here appears much larger than the LMC, having a central core that the LMC lacks. From the caption:

Given this, coupled with the fact that NGC 5996 is roughly comparable in size to the Milky Way, it is not surprising that NGC 5996 and NGC 5994 — apparently separated by only 40 thousand light-years or so — are interacting with one another. In fact, the interaction might be what has caused the spiral shape of NGC 5996 to distort and apparently be drawn in the direction of NGC 5994. It also prompted the formation of the very long and faint tail of stars and gas curving away from NGC 5996, up to the top right of the image. This ‘tidal tail’ is a common phenomenon that appears when galaxies get in close together, as can be seen in several Hubble images.

In this single picture we are witnessing evidence of a process that has been going on for likely many millions of years.

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Australian spaceport on sourthern coast prepares for launch

11:06 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Click for original map.

According to a report today, the first suborbital launch from a new commercial spaceport on the sourthern coast of Australia is now expected by the end of April or early May.

New launch facilities at the Koonibba Test Range, South Australia’s first permanent spaceport, are almost complete ahead of the impending inaugural launch. Located northwest of Ceduna, the range is a partnership between Southern Launch and the Koonibba Community Aboriginal Corporation. It is the largest commercial testing range in the Southern Hemisphere.

Space Industries Minister Susan Close is today visiting the site ahead of the sub-orbital test launch of German manufacturer HyImpulse’s SR75 rocket, which, subject to final regulatory approval, will go ahead at the end of April or early May. The rocket will reach an altitude of 50 kilometres before parachuting back to Earth where it will be recovered for testing.

Southern Launch, marked on the map to the right, is on south coast of Australia. Two other Australian commercial spaceports also under development are noted on the northern and eastern coasts.

We shall see if this suborbital launch occurs as planned. Recently the evidence has suggested that Australia’s regulatory state is as bad as the United Kingdom, taking forever to issue licenses for private launches.

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Russia launches Earth observation satellite

10:12 am

Russia early this morning successfully launched a new Earth observation satellite, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Baikonus spaceport in Kazakhstan.

The side boosters, core stage, second stage, and fairings all crashed in two planned drop zones within Russia. No word if any landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

32 SpaceX
13 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined in successful launches 37 to 24, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 32 to 29.

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SpaceX completes two launches in three and a half hours; third launch scrubbed

10:50 pm

And the beat goes on: Today SpaceX set a new marker for future launch companies, successfully launching twice from two different launchpads in Florida only three and a half hours apart, and then scrubbing a third launch due to weather on the opposite coast of the U.S. only a few hours after that.

First SpaceX launched a Eutelsat geosynchronous communications satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral at 5:52 pm (Eastern). Its first stage completed its twelth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

A little more than three and a half hours later, at 9:30 pm (Eastern), SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from its second launchpad at Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Finally, the third launch planned for the day, of another 22 Starlink satelites, was scrubbed at Vandenberg in California at about 10:30 pm (Pacific), or 1:30 am (Eastern) due to weather, despite multiple launch attempts during its two hour launch window. The flight will likely be rescheduled for sometime in the next few days.

No private company has ever attempted such a thing before, and only the Soviet Union might have done it during the height of its launch industry from 1970 to 1988, when it routinely launched between 80 and 100 times per year. Whether it ever did three launches in under nine hours however is not likely.

Even though only two of the three launches took off, what SpaceX tried to do today provides a further illustration of the company’s effort to make rocket launches as routine as airplane travel. It now launches at a pace and reliability that is unprecedented since the dawn of the space age, and was for decades considered by experts impossible. So much for experts. It always pays to ignore them when they tell you something is impossible.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

32 SpaceX
13 China
4 Rocket Lab
4 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined in successful launches 37 to 23, and SpaceX by itself leads everyone one else combined 32 to 28.

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Varda releases results of its in-orbit test for producing pharmaceuticals in weightlessness

9:48 pm

On March 20, 2024 Varda released the results from its seven-month-long flight of its unmanned capsule, claiming that the technology worked to produce pharmaceuticals in weightlessness that will be better at treating some difficult illnesses such as HIV.

From the abstract of the preprint paper [pdf]:

Despite notable progress in realizing the benefits of microgravity, the physical stability of therapeutics processed in space has not been sufficiently investigated. Environmental factors including vibration, acceleration, radiation, and temperature, if not addressed could impact the feasibility of in-space drug processing. The presented work demonstrates the successful recovery of the metastable Form III of ritonavir generated in orbit. The test samples and passive controls containing each of the anhydrous forms of ritonavir; Form I, Form II, Form III, and amorphous exhibit excellent stability. By providing a detailed experimental dataset centered on survivability, we pave the way for the future of in-space processing of medicines that enable the development of novel drug products on Earth and benefit long-duration human exploration initiatives.

More research is likely required, but I suspect Varda will be able to raise investment capital from this success, since there is a lot of money to be made from pharmaceuticals that can only be produced in weightlessness.

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March 29, 2024 Quick space links

3:25 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.

 

 

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Arizona city shuts down church program that fed the hungry for the last 25 years

2:43 pm

Nieves Riedel, mayor of San Luis, Arizona
Nieves Riedel, mayor of San Luis, Arizona, and
very hostile to churches feeding the hungry

They’re coming for you next: In 2022 a new mayor and administration arrived in San Luis, Arizona, and immediately thereafter the food program of Gethsemani Baptist Church in San Luis, Arizona, came under harassment, with repeated citations and bureaucratic demands that it limit its operations, to a point that the threatened fines (more than $4,000) and potential jail terms for its pastor forced the church stop the program, despite operating peaceably and acceptably for a quarter of a century.

After new officials took over in San Luis, the city sent a letter last fall ordering the church to stop using semi-trucks for food delivery at its property. Attempting to resolve the order, the church offered to use smaller trucks. The city denied the request and told the church it must stop the food ministry entirely. These limitations make it functionally impossible to carry out the ministry in the same way.

Since receiving the city’s letter, Pastor Jose [Castro] had to significantly cut back on the food ministry. He’s tried to continue feeding the hungry as best he can under these limitations. But this wasn’t enough for the city of San Luis and its new Mayor, Nieves Riedel. Just a few weeks ago, while Pastor Jose passed out emergency food supplies to a small group of people at the church, a city code enforcer showed up unannounced and issued him four citations. Less than a week later, when a third party parked a truck in front of the church for just five minutes, the code enforcer returned and issued Pastor Jose four more citations. Not only will Pastor Jose have to pay fines in municipal court, each future violation may result in criminal charges.

These aggressive tactics have now forced Gethsemani to pause its ministry, as the church and Pastor Jose cannot afford the heavy fines or to relocate. Because of the City and Mayor Riedel’s intimidation tactics, the church cannot feed the hungry. That means people are going hungry right now.

» Read more

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The Martian view from high on Mount Sharp

11:47 am

The Martian view of mountains
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was downloaded today from left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity.

The image looks to the north from the lower foothills of Mount Sharp. The view is downhill across the floor of Gale Crater. The intermittent dotted red line that weaves between those foothills marks the approximate route that Curiosity took to climb through them to reach this point.

About 20 to 25 miles away the mountainous rim of the crater can be seen dimly. The air is filled with dust, because its is almost the peak of the dust season at Gale Crater, located just south of the Martian equator.

The overview map below provides some further context.
» Read more

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China working to save classifed lunar mission from launch failure

9:40 am

Orbital data now suggests that Chinese engineers are attempting to save a classifed lunar mission from the failure of its launch rocket to put the two satellites in their proper high orbit.

The small DRO-A and B spacecraft launched from Xichang spaceport on a Long March 2C rocket March 13. Hours later, the first acknowledgement of the mission came from Chinese state media Xinhua, which announced that the spacecraft had not been inserted accurately into their designated orbit by the rocket’s Yuanzheng-1S upper stage. “The upper stage encountered an abnormality during flight, causing the satellites to fail to accurately enter the preset orbit,” Xinhua stated. “Relevant disposal work is currently underway,” it added, citing Xichang launch center.

Data from the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron (SDS) initially showed objects associated with the launch in low Earth orbit (LEO). However, subsequent Two Line Element (TLE) data sets, a mathematical representation of a satellite’s mean orbit, from 18 SDS show an object from the launch (international designator 2024-048A) in a 525 x 132,577-kilometer, highly-elliptical, high Earth orbit. This has since been raised, with the spacecraft tracked in a 971 x 225,193-km orbit on March 26.

This indicates that at least one satellite, and perhaps both—if still attached to one another—separated from the upper stage, and that the object’s orbit has been raised.

It is very possible that further engine burns could put these satellites into lunar orbit, which would then save the mission and turn the March 13 launch failure into a success.

Why China is keeping this particular lunar mission so secret is another question, that still remains unanswered.

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Ispace, which built the lunar lander Hakuto-R1, has raised $53 million in investment capital

9:33 am

The lunar lander company Ispace, which built Hakuto-R1, the lunar lander that crashed on the Moon last year, announced yesterday that it has raised $53 million in investment capital from a sale of its publicly traded stock.

The Tokyo-based company, which went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange nearly a year ago, announced March 28 that it completed a sale of 10.25 million shares of stock, raising approximately 8.1 billion yen ($53.5 million). The shares were sold to institutional investors outside of Japan.

Most of the funding — about 7.1 billion yen — will go towards various elements of what the company calls Mission 3, a lander being developed by its American subsidiary, ispace U.S., for Draper. That APEX 1.0 lander will fly a mission in 2026 for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, going to the far side of the moon.

Before APEX flies the company has a second Hakuto-R-type mission planned, dubbed Resilience and targeting a launch late this year.

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Head of France’s space agency blames too many subcontractors for high cost of Ariane-6

9:26 am

At a conference yesterday the head of France’s CNES space agency, Philippe Baptiste, strongly blasted the European Space Agency’s (ESA) system of distributing contracting work to many subcontractors in its partner countries for high cost of its new expendable Ariane-6, a high cost that makes it uncompetitive in today’s launch market.

While giving his remarks, the CNES boss explained that “the European space industry, which is largely French, is in danger today. Our industry is not pivoting quickly enough. We must move quickly, reduce cycles, costs, otherwise we will all die.” It should be noted that the hyperbole towards the end of that statement may be exaggerated thanks to its translation from French to English.

On Ariane 6, Baptiste stated that “today, we are too expensive, including on Ariane 6. We are missing several tens of millions of euros, which we cannot find among European subcontractors.”

As the article then notes, this is not a new problem. ESA attempted to reduce it when it agreed in 2017 to give ownership of Ariane-6 to ArianeGroup, a joint partnership of Airbus and Safran, two of Europe’s biggest aerospace companies. The idea was that ArianeGroup would be in charge, and thus less bound to give out multiple subcontracts to many different companies scattered throughout ESA’s European partners.

This apparently did not happen, and the reason is likely because Ariane-6 was still a rocket conceived by the ESA to be run by the ESA, not a private company. That government control is also the reason Ariane-6 was designed not be reusable, even though in 2017 it was very obvious that an expendable rocket would be uncompetitive in the 2020s launch market. The bureaucrats at ESA didn’t want to take chances, so they choose a conservative design.

Baptiste’s remarks today I think help explain France’s decision earlier this week to award contracts to four rocket startups. France has finally realized that its partnership in ESA has been hindering its own space industry, and is now moving to encourage its growth outside of ESA.

There is great irony here. France led the way in creating ESA, because it wanted others to help pay for its space program. Now it rejects that partnership because its partners are simply doing what is natural, demand their own piece of the action.

Regardless, this breakup is good news. It means the European government monopoly on launch services is truly ending.

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March 28, 2024 Quick space links

3:15 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also tipped me off to the China and Japan stories immediately below. 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.

 

 

 

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Leftist students take-over building illegally and by force at Vanderbilt

2:38 pm

Leftist protesters break into Vanderbilt building
Anti-Israel protesters assault a security guard (grey jacket)
at Vanderbuilt. Click for full video.

The lawless left: Because Vanderbilt University officials canceled a vote on a student amendment to the student government constitution, on March 25, 2024 about thirty students broke into the chancellor’s office, assaulting a security guard as they did so, and occupied it about 22 hours before police forced them out.

The university canceled the amendment vote because it would require the boycott of any businesses linked with Israel, and thus would likely violate federal and state laws and would make the university “ineligible for new state contracts and could have existing contracts voided.”

Whether or not the cancellation was right, the violence of the students is typical of the spoiled-child tantrums of the left, that assume it has the right to do anything at all, including violence and trespass, if it doesn’t get what it wants.

In a statement, the Vanderbilt spokesperson said the protest was “not a peaceful one.”
» Read more

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Japan awards development agreements with four rocket startups

1:14 pm

Capitalism in space: Japan’s space agency this week awarded development agreements to four Japanese rocket startups, signaling that nation’s attempt to shift from depending on JAXA’s government-built rockets to becoming a customer of an industry of competing commercial rocket companies.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Interstellar signed a basic agreement in March. Space One, whose Kairos solid rocket exploded seconds after liftoff earlier this month, was also selected under the JAXA-SMASH (JAXA-Small Satellite Rush Program) initiative. Two further companies also signed basic agreements. These are Space BD and Mitsui Bussan Aerospace, which offer services aimed at the commercial utilization of space.

The agreements mean the companies will have priority for future contracts. These are designed to support private-sector entities capable of launching satellites developed under JAXA’s small satellite missions and advance the commercialization of space transportation services.

These deals are part of a new policy announced in November that includes $6.6 billion to help encourage the growth of a Japanese commercial space sector, independent of that nation’s space agency.

It remains uncertain whether JAXA will let go the purse strings and actually allow these new companies ownership of what they do. The deals as described sound like the agency is using its power to attempt to capture the companies, rather than encourage their independent growth.

We shall have to wait and see. On its face this announcement is very good news for Japan’s space industry, as it suggests that things might be changing.

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