Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

Engineers in Europe have now successfully used lasers to melt the top surface of a simulated lunar regolith in order to turn that lunar soil into paving materials for roads and landing pads.

Though the experiement used a laser, that was only a surrogate for what would be done on the Moon, using sunlight focused by a magnifying lens.

Proceeding through trial and error, they devised a strategy using a 4.5 cm (1.8 inch) diameter laser beam to produce triangular, hollow-centred geometric shapes approximately 20 cm (8 inches) across. These could be interlocked to create solid surfaces across large areas of lunar soil which could serve as roads or landing pads.

Advenit adds: “It actually turned out to be easier to work with regolith with a larger spot size, because at millimetre scale heating produces molten balls that surface tension makes hard to aggregate together. The larger beam produces a stable layer of molten regolith that is easier to control. The resulting material is glasslike and brittle, but will mainly be subject to downward compression forces. Even if it breaks we can still go on using it, repairing it as necessary.”

The press release however noted almost as an aside what might be the most important result from this work: “The most practical response is to keep dust at bay by paving over areas of activity on the Moon, including roads and landing pads.” Lunar dust is very abrasive, is found everywhere, and is considered a fundamental and entirely unsolved problem for any future lunar base. This melting process, by sunlight, could conceivably eliminate the problem entirely at any base location by melting the surface dust.

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

• Sierra Space reiterates its commitment to Orbital Reef and its contracts with NASA

Based on the statement, which makes no mention of Blue Origin, this suggests that the rumors about a break-up between Sierra Space and Blue Origin on this project were really referring to Blue Origin getting kicked out, which will be especially embarrassing for Jeff Bezos as he and his company were the originators of the Orbital Reef space station concept.

• Mission team for UAE’s Al-Amal Mars orbiter get award at 2023 International Astronautical Congress

Well deserved, though in this day and age one can’t help wondering how much of this award was given for political reasons beyond the team’s actual achievement.

• A news source other than BtB notices China dropping any mention of Russia in its latest presentation about its lunar base

Jay and I both noted this change by China in the October 4, 2023 quick space links, one week ago. Nor was this a surprise, as from the beginning I predicted Russia would not contribute much of anything to this partnership, and China began leaving Russia out of its presentations as early as September 2022.

• China’s Hubble-class space telescope to enter “final prototype phase” in April 2024

This date suggests that the telescope is delayed, and will not launch next year as previously announced as recently as February 2023.

Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 11, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The picture was what the camera team call a “terrain sample,” which usually means the picture was taken not as part of any specific research request, but because there was a gap in the camera’s schedule, and in order to maintain the camera’s temperature the team then picks something to fill that gap.

Because of the relative randomness of such pictures, they sometimes show little of immediate interest. More often than not, however, the camera team chooses well, and snaps something cool.

In this case they achieved the latter. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country. Everything in this region seems covered with glacial and ice debris, and this picture is no different. Rather than a glacier however we have what looks like a broken ice sheet, surrounded by that utterly unique and as-yet unexplained Martian geological feature dubbed brain terrain.

For the third time in less than a year, a Russian spacecraft at ISS has developed a coolant leak, this time in Russia’s newest module to ISS, Nauka.

The Nauka radiator actually has been in space for over a decade waiting for Nauka to arrive so whether there is any commonality to the failures is difficult to assess. Roscosmos acknowledged the leak, but said the module itself is working fine and there is no cause for concern.

The previous two leaks were on a Progress freighter, and later on a Soyuz capsule. Though Nauka was only launched to ISS in 2021, its development began in the 1990s and was originally scheduled for launch in the early 2000s. Because of the delays this radiator was launched to ISS ahead of the module, in 2012. It sits outside the module where it can release its excess heat into space.

The Russians say that the leak is in a backup coolant system, but according to a statement by Anatoli Zak quoted at the link, this statement is too vague. At the moment the location of the leak remains unknown.

ArianeGroup is now in negotiations with the European Space Agency (ESA) to get a significant increase in the money ESA is pays for the new as-yet unlaunched Ariane-6 rocket.

A few weeks before a space summit which will take place on November 7 in Seville, [ArianeGroup] is negotiating a very clear reassessment of support for the operation of Ariane 6. [It] is asking 350 million euros per year from the States members of the ESA. That’s an incredible increase of 150%.

The problem for ArianeGroup and ESA is that Ariane-6 is expendable (a joint decision by ESA and ArianeGroup back in 2015 that was then a bad mistake), and thus is too expensive. It can’t compete in the modern launch market with SpaceX, and has thus had trouble finding customers.

As a result, ESA will likely pay out these big bucks for the next few years, but the situation creates a big opening for the new European startup rocket companies (PLD, Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar, and HyImpulse) that are right now developing new small rockets. Like SpaceX in 2010, they have an opportunity to undercut the established government rockets of ESA, and grab market share. To do this however they need to become operational as soon as possible.

Since there are strong signs that ESA is looking to help these new companies, we should see some interesting competitive action in European rocketry in the next few years.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

Azerbaijan has signed an agreement with China to cooperate and partner in China’s lunar base project.

No details were released, other than empty PR promises to work together.

So far the only ones to sign on with China are not likely to contribute much, with Russia the only possible exception. The others, South Africa and Venezuela, don’t have any major space capabilities, and like Azerbaijan hope to use the partnership to gain some. A number of individual organizations in Hawaii, Thailand, and Switzerland have also signed agreements, while there are also rumors that Pakistan has or will sign on also.

Liam Morrison, wearing the evil shirt that he wore the
second time teachers at Nichols Middle School sent
him home.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: An federal appeals court last week ruled that schools cannot cancel the First Amendment rights of students by censoring or suspending or punishing them if they should refuse to use the preferred pronouns that advocates of the queer agenda demand.

The St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction Monday against an Iowa school district policy that threatens suspension and expulsion for “intentional and/or persistent refusal … to respect” a peer’s gender identity, finding it’s likely too vague to survive legal scrutiny.

“A school district cannot avoid the strictures of the First Amendment simply by defining certain speech as ‘bullying’ or ‘harassment'” as did the Linn-Mar Community School District, the three-judge panel ruled in a case that drew friend-of-the-court briefs by dozens of conservative and religious groups and 18 Republican-led states in favor of the plaintiffs.

The picture above shows Massachusetts student Liam Morrison, who was banned from school because he first wore a shirt that said “There are only two genders,” then sent home again for wearing a second shirt, as shown. His case is presently in the courts. This ruling in Iowa will strengthen his case considerable.

Nor was the Iowa case the only recent case where the courts ruled against the queer agenda in schools. The article at the link notes that this same week a state court in Wisconsin also ruled against the queer agenda, stating that “the Kettle Moraine School District’s policy of hiding gender transitions as an intrusion on parents’ rights to control ‘medical and healthcare’ decisions about their children.”

Such rulings are going to come more and more often. Of the five hundred-plus blacklist stories I have covered in the past three years, there has been one overarching pattern: » Read more