Boeing completes full series of static hot fire engine burns on Starliner while docked to ISS

9:38 am

Boeing announced today that engineers have successfully completed a full series of static hot fire engine burns testing all of Starliner’s attitude thrusters while still dockecd to ISS.

The one-pulse firings were designed to confirm the performance of each thruster. Aft-facing thrusters were fired for 1.2 seconds and all others for .40 seconds. Between each firing, the team reviewed real-time data and all thrusters performed at peak thrust rating values, ranging from 97-102%. The helium system also remained stable. Additionally, an RCS oxidizer isolation valve that was not fully seated previously, was cycled several times during today’s testing and is now operating normally.

This is the second time the spacecraft has been hot fired successfully while docked, an integrated operation the station and Starliner teams will also conduct during future long-duration missions.

This result is not a surprise, based on the information provided during the most recent briefing. It confirms the data obtained during previous hot fire tests both on a Starliner on the ground and the Starliner docked to ISS. Not only does it appear that Boeing has enough information to fix this problem so it does not occur again, it has proven unequivocally that these thrusters as well as the helium leaks inside the thruster systems pose no unusual risk for a return in the capsule.

NASA and Boeing have a planned review of these results this coming week, when we should expect them to name a return date, likely sometime in the first two weeks of August.

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SpaceX launches another 20 Starlink satellites

9:30 am

I had my days wrong last night. In the previous post I said that SpaceX had another launch scheduled for later tonight. In actuality that launch was today, but in the wee hours early this morning. Four hours after a Falcon 9 placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral, another Falcon 9 placed 20 Starlink satellites into orbit from Vandenberg in California. That’s three launches in just one day.

The first stage completed its seventeenth launch, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

74 SpaceX
31 China
8 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 86 to 47, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world combined, including American companies, 74 to 59.

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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

SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites

10:17 pm

SpaceX tonight completed its second launch in two nights since resuming launches after a two-week halt after the July 11th upper stage launch failure, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral and placing another 23 Starlink satellites in orbit.

The first stage completed its fourteenth launch, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

73 SpaceX
31 China
8 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 85 to 47, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world combined, including American companies, 73 to 59.

SpaceX has another launch scheduled for tomorrow night.

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Local billionaire landowner renews his oppposition to the Sutherland spaceport

10:58 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

An effort by the proposed Sutherland spaceport on the north coast of Scotland to place a tracking dish on a nearby peak — where other telecommunication dishes are already installed — is now being fought by local billionaire landowner Anders Holch Povlsen, who had previously tried and failed to stop construction of the spaceport entirely.

The spaceport’s main customer, the rocket startup Orbex, has already experienced endless red tape from the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). It applied for a launch license in February 2022, and almost two-and-a-half years later still has not gotten an approval. It had previously announced a first launch that year, and has been stymied since, not only by the CAA but by local authorities who have demanded it make many changes to its construction plans.

Povlsen, who has himself invested in the competing Saxavord spaceport on the Shetland Islands, has repeatedly acted to block Sutherland, so far with no success. This new suit is especially absurd — claiming the new dish would harm the local landscape — which is why the local councils appear ready to reject it.
» Read more

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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.

To guarantee no capsule debris hits inhabited areas, SpaceX to move its manned splashdowns to Pacific

10:32 am

As part of the changes SpaceX is instituting to the de-orbit procedures of its Dragon capsules in order to end any chance parts of the service module will fall in inhabited areas (as has happened several times in the past few years) the company will be shifting all manned splashdowns to the Pacific Ocean.

Repeated issues with large chunks of debris from Dragon — “trunks” where the fuel and electrical supplies are held — have repeatedly crashed down in areas ranging from Australia to North Carolina. One measure to fix that will be tasking future spacecraft after Crew-9, perhaps as soon as Crew-10, to splash down on the U.S. Pacific coast, SpaceX said during a press conference today (July 26).

“What we’ll do is we’ll implement a software change to complete the deorbit burn before jettisoning the trunk, like we did with Dragon-1, and then the trunk will intentionally land […] in an unpopulated area of the ocean,” Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management, said in the livestreamed briefing. “So to make this change possible, we’ll move a Dragon recovery vessel to the Pacific sometime next year.”

Crew-9 is now scheduled to launch to ISS on August 18th on a six month mission, landing sometime in February 2025. Crew-10 would launch about that time and land sometime in August, 2025.

Side note: The announcement yesterday of August 18th for the launch of the next Dragon manned mission suggests NASA is now confident it can determine a date prior to that for returning Starliner. This reinforces the fact that the astronauts and Starliner are not “stranded” on the station, and any news source that states or even implies such a thing indicates it is a place where you are likely getting junk news, on all its stories.

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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 resumes launches, successfully launching 23 Starlink satellites

11:44 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully resumed launches of its Falcon 9 rocket after a July 11, 2024 launch was a failure due to an engine leak in the upper stage. The rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, successfully placing 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.

The first stage completed its seventeenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

72 SpaceX
31 China
8 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 84 to 47, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world combined, including American companies, 72 to 59.

SpaceX has additional launches scheduled for tomorrow and the next day, so these numbers are only temporary.

2 comments

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

July 26, 2024 Quick space links

3:13 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.

 

2 comments

Report: Law enforcement officers nationwide no longer trust the FBI, and will not work with it

12:51 pm

Kamala Harris joking about killing Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Jeff Sessions
Kamala Harris as she enthusiaticallly joked on television
about killing Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Jeff Sessions

A just released scathing and horrifying report put together by the National Alliance of Retired and Active Duty FBI Special Agents and Analysts has found extensive nationwide evidence that local law enforcement officers so distrust the FBI they will no longer cooperate with it in any way.

You can read the report here. It came to the following ten conclusions:

  • Local law enforcement officers do not trust the FBI
  • Local law enforcement no longer share actionable, substantive information with the FBI
  • FBI National Academy graduates are troubled by bias
  • Routinely poor management and ineffective leadership found in FBI-led task forces
  • The FBI is isolated and unresponsive to local law enforcement
  • Local law enforcement officers feel disrespected by FBI special agents
  • Today’s tone-deaf FBI disregards the value of retired FBI special agents
  • The new generation of FBI special agents are seen as “completely worthless”
  • FBI management is too transitory and obsessed with self-promotion
  • The FBI’s cult of narcissism begins at the FBI Academy

For conservatives who have been paying attention for the past decade, none of these conclusions are a surprise. The FBI, as well as the CIA, ATF, the Secret Service as well as the entire intelligence and security community in the federal government have not only demonstrated obvious incompetence in their basic jobs since Obama was president, these agencies have clearly become partisan weaponized tools for the Democratic Party.
» Read more

21 comments

Perseverance finds intriguing geology, and the press goes crazy

9:58 am

Intriguing Martian rock
Click for original image.

A press release from JPL yesterday described an intriguing rock (image to the right) that the Mars rover Perseverance science team has recently been studying, and in doing so repeatedly hinted that its features suggest the possibility of past Martian life. From its first two paragraphs:

A vein-filled rock is catching the eye of the science team of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” by the team, the arrowhead-shaped rock contains fascinating traits that may bear on the question of whether Mars was home to microscopic life in the distant past.

Analysis by instruments aboard the rover indicates the rock possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life. The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water. Other explanations for the observed features are being considered by the science team, and future research steps will be required to determine whether ancient life is a valid explanation.

Not surprisingly the press immediately went crazy. Here are just a few headlines:
» Read more

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Do Kepler’s sunspot drawings tell us the length of the solar cycle in the 17th century?

9:19 am

Kepler's first sunspot drawing
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Scientists have done a new analysis of Johannes Kepler’s three drawings of sunspots on the Sun in 1607, and have concluded that the solar cycle at that time — just before the start of the Maunder grand minimum of no sunspots for decades — was about the same length, 11 years, that has been measured since the 1700s onward.

You can read the peer-reviewed paper here. The drawing to the right is figure 1 in that paper, and shows Kepler’s first drawing of the Sun’s surface showing sunspots. From the paper’s conclusion:

In combination with sunspot drawings in the 1610s–1620s, it is reasonable to suppose that the duration of the Solar Cycle −13 was between 11 and 14 yr. This does not support Miyahara et al.’s claim of anomalously long/short durations for Solar Cycle −13 (16 yr) and Solar Cycle −14 (5 yr) but supports Usoskin et al.’s reconstruction of regular durations of Solar Cycle −13 (11 yr) and Solar Cycle −14 (14 yr).

In other words, the solar cycle prior to the sixty-plus yearlong Maunder Minimum, when few to none sunpots occurred, was about eleven years long, like now, and not five years or sixteen years long, as some scientists have theorized. Knowing the length and nature of the cycle before the Maunder grand minimum would help scientists predict when the next minimum might occur. It would also help them better document the Sun’s long term behavior.

There is however great uncertainty in this result, since there really is so little data about sunspots prior to the Maunder Minimum. Before Galileo’s first use of the telescope in astronomy in 1609, such observations like Kepler’s were rare and very difficult. The conclusions here are intriguing, but hardly convincing.

In fact, it is really impossible to get a defiinitive answer from this data. We really won’t know how the Sun behaves just prior to a grand minimum until it happens again and scientists can use modern technology to observe it.

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