NASA buys 18 new space shuttle engines for SLS for $1.79 billion

8:09 am

NASA has awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne a $1.79 billion contract to build 18 new space shuttle R-25 engines for its still unlaunched SLS rocket.

In plain math, that equals $100 million per engine. Since SLS uses four of these engines per launch, and since that rocket is entirely expendable and will thus throw these engines away after each launch, that guarantees each SLS launch must cost no less than $400 million, about four times the price of a Falcon Heavy launch.

But wait, there’s more! Eric Berger at Ars Technica notes

NASA has previously given more than $1 billion to Aerojet to “restart” production of the space shuttle era engines and a contract for six new ones. So, according to the space agency, NASA has spent $3.5 billion for a total of 24 rocket engines. That comes to $146 million per engine. (Or 780,000 bars of Gold-Pressed Latinum, as this is a deal only the Ferengi could love.)

That means each SLS launch must cost a minimum of just under $600 million, and that’s just the price for the four engines. It doesn’t include the rocket itself, the ground systems, its upper stages, or any other component.

But wait, there’s more! Berger also reminds us that SpaceX estimates the cost to build each its Starship Raptor engines to be about $1 million, and each will be used multiple times. He also points out that the Raptor is actually more powerful than the R-25 engine.

That’s okay though. This is the federal government, run by Washington, whose goal for the few decades has been to let no project succeed, and to waste as much money as possible in the process. And if they can squelch the dreams and aspirations of everyone else as they do it, so much the better!

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Sierra Nevada names its first Dream Chaser spacecraft “Tenacity”

7:52 am

Capitalism in space: Sierra Nevada yesterday announced that it is giving the name “Tenacity” to its first Dream Chaser spacecraft.

Though the press release does not say so, this decision essentially confirms the company intention to build more Dream Chaser spacecraft, once this one proves itself in flight. And I would expect those later craft will be aimed at manned flight.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

SpaceShipTwo Unity makes first New Mexico glide flight

7:42 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic’s Unity suborbital spaceship successfully completed its first glide test flight from its New Mexico launch site yesterday.

They still have not set a date for their first commercial flights, so the company still claims those first flights will occur this year. I will believe it when I see it.

There does appear to be one apparent positive development for Virgin Galactic. It increasingly appears as if Blue Origin is slowly abandoning its effort to compete for suborbital tourism with its New Shepard spacecraft. Blue Origin has not said so, but the extreme slow down in test flights the last two strongly implies it. Moreover, that company’s success in garnering big government contracts, a billion from the military for its orbital New Glenn rocket and about a half billion from NASA for its proposed Blue Moon manned lunar lander, reinforces the sense that the company is shifting its focus away from suborbital space.

If so, that will clear the market for Virgin Galactic, assuming a viable market still exists with the coming of private commercial orbital spaceships like Dragon and Starliner.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

NASA delays 1st SLS launch again

9:55 pm

NASA has now made official what had been expected for months, announcing a new delay of the first unmanned test flight of its SLS rocket from March 2021 to November 2021.

The article tries to put a lot of the blame for this new delay on the shut down over the Wuhan panic, but that shut down will only stop work for at most two months. The new delay however adds eight months to the schedule, showing that they probably were never going to meet that March 2021 deadline, and are using COVID-19 as a cover for the program’s continuing problems, delays, and cost overruns.

Should this unmanned flight take place in November 2021, it will have taken NASA about seventeen years and about $60 billion to get to that first flight. They say the first manned mission is scheduled in late 2022 or early 2023. If true would mean it took NASA about two decades to achieve a single manned flight since Bush Jr. proposed it.

Of course, that is making the very unlikely assumption that there will be no further delays before that first manned flight. I personally am very confident there will be.

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Funding breakdown for three lunar landing contracts

3:47 pm

Capitalism in space: The contracts awarded by NASA yesterday to build manned lunar landers totaled almost a billion dollars, distributed as follows:

  • Blue Origin: $579 million
  • Dynetics: $253 million
  • SpaceX: $135 million

That Blue Origin got the biggest amount might have to do with the bid’s subcontractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. This gives these traditional big space partners, who normally rely on these kinds of government contracts and have little ability to make money outside them, some financing. This will also please their political backers in Congress.

For SpaceX, this is the first time they have taken any government money in connection with Starship. It also appears that NASA is going to stay back and generally let SpaceX develop it without undue interference.

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Scientists better constrain time frame of Mars’ active dynamo

12:33 pm

Using data from the MAVEN orbiter, scientists have now constrained the time frame when Mars’ dynamo was active and producing a global magnetic field, between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago.

Magnetism in certain rocks on Mars’ surface indicate that the Martian dynamo was active between 4.3 and 4.2 billion years ago, but the absence of magnetism over three large basins – Hellas, Argyre, and Isidis – that formed 3.9 billion years ago has led most scientists to believe the dynamo was inactive by that time.

Mittelholz’s team analyzed new data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter and found clear evidence of a magnetic field coming from the Lucus Planum lava flow that formed about 3.7 billion years ago – much later than at other areas studied.

There is of course a lot of uncertainty here.

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Europa’s mysterious stained grooves

11:18 am

Europa's jumbled icepack
Click for full image.

From 1995 to 2003 the Galileo orbiter circled Jupiter 34 times. During those orbits the spacecraft made numerous close fly-bys of Jupiter’s moons, including eleven past the tantalizingly mysterious moon Europa.

The image to the right was taken during the eighth fly-by of Europa. It is one of three Galileo images of Europa that scientists have pulled from the Galileo archive and subjected to modern computer processing in order to improve what can be seen. The other two can be found here and here. From the release for the image to the right:

All three images were captured along the same longitude of Europa as Galileo flew by on Sept. 26, 1998, in the spacecraft’s 17th orbit of Jupiter (orbit E17). It was the eighth of Galileo’s 11 targeted flybys of Europa. High-resolution images were taken through a clear filter in grayscale (black and white). Using lower-resolution, color images of the same region from a different flyby (orbit E14), technicians recently mapped color onto the higher-resolution images.

In other words, they laid the colors from a lower resolution color image on top of the high resolution black & white image so that we could see these three images in color. The blue and white areas are made of up water ice, while the reddish areas are made up of “more non-ice materials.”

The vagueness for describing the non-ice materials is intentional, as scientists still do not know what they made of. They do believe that this material came from the planet’s interior, as the red material is always found aligned with the cracks, fissures, and grooves, as illustrated clear by this image.

What has always struck me about this surface of Europa since I first saw similar Galileo images back in 1998 and wrote about them for the magazine The Sciences is how much it resembles the Arctic ice pack as seen by early explorers during their attempts to reach the North Pole, jumbled jigsaw pieces of ice packed together but moving slowly so that the cracks between them shift and change over time.

The resemblance adds weight to the theory that there is a liquid ocean below Europa’s icepack, and the red material hints at some intriguing chemistry coming from that ocean.

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NY funeral directors: Government is padding Wuhan flu deaths

9:59 am

According to funeral directors in New York, the government is significantly exaggerating the mortality from the Wuhan flu, assigning it as the cause to practically every death

In conversations with several funeral directors across New York City, O’Keefe [of Project Veritas] uncovered a shocking narrative where, without fail, every director he spoke to expressed his or her concern that coronavirus deaths are being inflated and every death in NYC is being recorded as a COVID death with or without testing to confirm.

“They are putting COVID on a lot of death certificates because people who are going to their hospital with any kind of respiratory distress, respiratory problems, pneumonia, the flu — the flu-like symptoms lead into the COVID-19,” said Joseph Antioco of Schafer Funeral Home. “To me, all you’re doing is padding the statistics. You’re putting people on that have COVID-19 even if they didn’t have it. You’re making the death rate for New York City a lot higher than it should be.”

Such corruption in New York, a Democratically-controlled one party state for decades, is not a surprise. It tells us that we cannot trust the numbers now being issued for coronavirus coming from this state. And since New York accounts for about a third of all deaths in the U.S., the totals for the Wuhan flu in this country are highly suspect.

We are being scammed.

One other aspect of this story: Note that all Project Veritas did was some fundamental journalism. They called funeral directors and asked them what was happening. What a concept. Real journalism. I have embedded the full Project Veritas video below the fold.
» Read more

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Curiosity and other Mars orbiters threatened by budget cuts

9:25 am

The proposed budget for NASA in the Trump administrations 2021 budget request to Congress includes significant budget cuts to both Curiosity and several Mars orbiters needed to act as relay communications satellites.

The White House’s 2021 federal budget request allocates just $40 million to the mission, a decrease of 20% from the rover’s current funding. And that current funding is 13% less than Curiosity got in the previous year, said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

If the 2021 request is passed by Congress as-is, Curiosity’s operations would have to be scaled back considerably. Running the mission with just $40 million in 2021 would leave unused about 40% of the science team’s capability and 40% of the rover’s power output, which comes from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), Vasavada said.

In addition, the proposed budget will require a 50% reduction in imaging by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the end to the Mars Odyssey orbiter, and a significant but unspecified reduction in the use of the MAVEN orbiter.

I reported these facts back in March but there is no harm in noting them again.

The question is not whether there should be cuts at NASA. Considering the overall federal debt and annual budget deficit, NASA’s budget should be cut. The question is what to cut. The planetary program, probably NASA’s most successful program, is certainly not the program to cut. Instead, the Trump administration should be cutting the waste and badly run programs, like SLS, that spend billions and accomplish nothing.

If Congress and Trump did this, they could cut NASA’s total budget and still have plenty left over for the commercial manned program — including going to the Moon — and also increase the budget to the planetary program. I’ve been saying this since 2011, and nothing has happened in the past decade to change that conclusion.

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Car sales continue crash in April

9:04 pm

The beatings will continue until morale improves: According to one car industry analysis, the April sales of cars will continue to plummet.

“April auto sales took the biggest hit we’ve seen in decades,” said Jessica Caldwell, Edmunds’ executive director of insights. “These bleak figures aren’t just because consumers are holding back on their purchases — fleet sales are seeing an even more dramatic drop as daily rental business has dried up. Like many other industries, the entire automotive sector is struggling as the coronavirus crisis continues to cripple the economy.”

They hope that the end in May of some of the government shut downs imposed because of the Wuhan flu panic will ease the crash, but recognized that with millions out of work, people may no longer have the crash to buy new cars.

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