October 29, 2024 Quick space links

4:13 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.

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China launches new crew to its space station

3:55 pm

China today successfully launched a new three-person crew to its Tiangong-3 space station, its Long March 2F rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s side boosters or lower stages, using toxic hypergolic fuel, crashed inside China. The crew will dock with the station mid-day tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

105 SpaceX
49 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 122 to 72, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 105 to 89.

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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, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, 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

Pushback: Workers fired from San Fran’s subway for refusing jab win $1 million jury award

3:36 pm

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

Fight! Fight! Fight! Six workers who were fired from San Francisco’s
BART subway system for refusing to get a COVID jab have won a $7.8 million judgment from a jury, with each person taking home more than a million dollars in damages.

The employees claimed religious exemptions to the vaccine mandate but say they were not accommodated by the transit agency, and subsequently lost their job.

BART did initially grant vaccine exemptions, but the plaintiffs argued they weren’t accommodated. An accommodation could have meant that they were able to work from home or get tested regularly for COVID. They argued none of that happened and they lost their jobs.

More information here and here. There were not the only fired employees who sued. Another sixteen had sued and then settled in July. It also appears that further suits by fired employees are pending.

Do not expect these stories to stop. Over the next five years we will see story after story of blacklisted individuals winning case after case, because almost all the blacklisting in the past five years due to politics, COVID, and racial bigotry has been blatantly illegal, not only breaking numerous civil rights laws but in direct violation of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the very fundamental principles of American culture. When these cases get before juries, the plantiffs are going to win, and win big, as these former BART employees have.

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A return to Phantom and the reminiscences of an Apollo astronaut

3:04 pm

Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut
Charles Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut

Yesterday I had to pleasure of getting my second tour of the Phantom Space facilities, located here in Tucson. Jim Cantrell, the founder of the Tucson-based rocket/satellite company Phantom Space, had last week graciously invited me to attend the event he was holding there, where astronaut Charles Duke, from the April 1972 Apollo 16 lunar landing, would be giving a talk to the company’s employees, investors, and customers. Duke had become an advisor for the company, and this would be his first visit to its operations.

First, the talk by Charles Duke, describing his life and Apollo 16 walk on the Moon, was as usual awe-inspiring, mostly because Duke spoke like every astronaut I’ve ever met so matter-of-factly about what he had done. During the second of three excusions on the surface with his commander John Young, they drove their rover up the slope of nearby Stone Mountain, climbing to an elevation of 500 feet, the highest any human has so far been on the lunar surface. From there he could look back and see for miles, including the entire valley where the lunar module was nestled as well as the mountains and craters that surrounded it.

When I asked him if he had had any sense of his remoteness from humanity, his response was a good-natured laugh. “We felt at home there!” They had done so much study of the terrain beforehand, including simulations, that from the moment they approached to land it all looked very familiar. This is where they were supposed to be!

Following Duke’s presentation we all were given a tour of the facility. My first visit there had been in 2022. At the time Cantrell’s effort was to aggressively succeed from his earlier failure at the rocket startup Vector, focusing this new company on building its Daytona rocket. After the tour I concluded as follows:
» 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.

Arecibo telescope collapsed because of a surprising engineering failure that inspections still should have spotted

1:41 pm

Illustration of cable failure at Arecibo

According to a new very detailed engineering analysis into the causes of the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020, the failure was caused first by a surprising interaction between the radio electronics of Arecibo and the traditional methods used to anchor the cables, and second by a failure of inspections to spot the problem as it became obvious.

The surprising engineering discovery is illustrated to the right, taken from figure 2-6 of the report. The main antenna of Arecibo was suspended above the bowl below by three main cables. The figure shows the basic design of the system used to anchor the cable ends to their sockets. The end of the cable bunches would be inserted into the socket, spread apart, and then zinc would be poured in to fill the gap and then act as a plug and glue to hold the cables in place. According to the report, this system has been used for decades in many applications very successfully.

What the report found however was at Arecibo over time the cable bunch and zinc plug slowly began to pull out of the socket, what the report labels as “zinc creep.” This was noted by inspectors, but dismissed as a concern because they still believed the engineering margins were still high enough to prevent failure at this point. In fact, this is exactly where the structure failed in 2020, with the first cable separating as shown in August 2020. The second cable did so in a similar manner in November 2020.

The report concluded that the “only hypothesis the committee could develop that provides a plausible but unprovable answer to all these questions and the observed socket failure pattern is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope’s uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment. The Arecibo Telescope cables were suspended across the beam of ‘the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth.'”

The report however also notes that the regular engineering inspections of the telescope had spotted this creep, which was clearly unusual and steadily becoming significant, and did not take action to address the issue when it should have. It also noted the slow response of the bureaucracy, not only to the damage caused earlier to the facility by Hurriane Maria in 2017, but to obtaining the funding for any repairs.

Ray Lugo [the principal investigator for Arecibo] described to the committee how months of his time during 2018 were spent writing, resubmitting, and justifying repair funding proposals. Repairs had to go through the traditional “bid and proposal” process, described in more detail below, which added years of delay.

We can forgive the inspectors somewhat for not noting the creep when they should, as its cause appears to be very unusual, still uncertain and rare, but the red tape that prevented proper and quick repair effort after the hurricane is shameful. Had the telescope gotten the proper support on time, the creep itself might have even been addressed, because the resources would have been there to deal with it.

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Successful deployment of large array antennas on all five AST’s satellites

12:48 pm

AST SpaceMobile has now successfully unfolded the large array antennas on all five the satellites it launched in September, and did so six weeks ahead of schedule.

“The unfolding of the first five commercial satellites is a significant milestone for the company. These five satellites are the largest commercial communications arrays ever launched in low Earth orbit,” commented Abel Avellan, founder, Chairman and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, in a statement. “It is a significant achievement to commission these satellites, and we are now accelerating our path to commercial activity.”

The satellites are designed to act like cell towers in space, providing direct satellite-to-cellphone coverage and fill gaps in ground-based cell service. ATT has already signed a contract with AST to use these satellites.

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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

Lab tests suggest water brines could also exist on large asteroids

12:28 pm

Gullies in crater on Vesta
Click for original image.

In attempting to explain the existence of flow features that have been found on the interior walls of craters on the asteroids Ceres and Vesta — as shown in the image above — scientists recently performed a laboratory experiment which determined that a mixture of water and salt could produce those gullies.

The team modified a test chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to rapidly decrease pressure over a liquid sample to simulate the dramatic drop in pressure as the temporary atmosphere created after an impact on an airless body like Vesta dissipates. According to Poston, the pressure drop was so fast that test liquids immediately and dramatically expanded, ejecting material from the sample containers.

“Through our simulated impacts, we found that the pure water froze too quickly in a vacuum to effect meaningful change, but salt and water mixtures, or brines, stayed liquid and flowing for a minimum of one hour,” said Poston. “This is sufficient for the brine to destabilize slopes on crater walls on rocky bodies, cause erosion and landslides, and potentially form other unique geological features found on icy moons.”

The press release makes it sound as if this result makes the existence of subsurface water ice more likely on such asteroids as Ceres and Vesta, but previous research from the Dawn asteroid probe made that fact very clear, especially for Ceres, years ago. All this does is provide some evidence of what might be one process by which these erosion gullies form.

Hat tip to reader Milt.

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Perseverance looks across Jezero Crater from on high

11:11 am

Panorama of Jezero Crater
Click for full resolution annotated image. Click here for unannotated full resolution image.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was assembled from 44 pictures taken by the rover Perseverance on September 27, 2024 as it began its climb up the rim of Jezero Crater. If you click on it you can see the full resolution image that is also annotated to identify features within the crater as well as places where Perseverance has traveled.

The overview map below, with the blue dot showing the rover’s location when this panorama was taken. The yellow lines indicate the area covered by the panorama, with the arrow indicating the direction.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

According to the information at the link, the rover has been experiencing some slippery sandy ground as it has been climbing.
» Read more

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Two cubesats on Hera signal home

10:07 am

Engineers on the ground have now established good communications with the two cubesats that are being carried by the European probe Hera on its way to the binary asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos.

“Each CubeSat was activated for about an hour in turn, in live sessions with the ground to perform commissioning – what we call ‘are you alive?’ and ‘stowed checkout’ tests,” explains ESA’s Hera CubeSats Engineer Franco Perez Lissi.

…Travelling with Hera are two shoebox-sized ‘CubeSats’ built up from standardised 10-cm boxes. These miniature spacecraft will fly closer to the asteroid than their mothership, taking additional risks to acquire valuable bonus data.

Juventas, produced for ESA by GOMspace in Luxembourg will make the first radar probe within an asteroid, while Milani, produced for ESA by Tyvak International in Italy, will perform multispectral mineral prospecting.

This use of small cubesats in conjunction with a larger interplanetary probe is becoming increasingly routine, and provides a cheap and efficient way to increase the data and information obtained. Note too that both cubesats were apparently built entirely by private companies, thus establishing their creditionals as providers of interplanetary probes.

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ExoAnalytic now identifies more than 500 pieces from Intelsat satellite breakup

9:57 am

The private commercial space tracking company ExoAnalytic has now identified more than 500 pieces from Intelsat 33e satellite breakup.

Some of the smaller debris might actually quickly disappear as these pieces are possibly bits of solid fuel that will evaporate.

Much of the press has suddenly decided this failure is all Boeing’s fault, because the satellite was built by that company a decade ago. This seems a bit unfair, since Boeing’s problems now seem far removed from its design and construction of satellites then. At the same time one must wonder. Boeing built four of these type satellites for Intelsat, and the first was lost in 2019 when either it was hit by a meteor or had “a wiring flaw, which led to an electrostatic discharge following heightened solar weather activity.”

That means two of the four satellites have been lost, though the second, 33e, didn’t break-up until twelve years of operation, almost its expected lifespan. Furthermore, the other two satellites are still working fine.

All in all, that suggests to me that though there may be a technical cause that can be traced back to the company, it is more likely we are simply seeing a random expression of the dangers of space to engineering, by anyone.

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New issue with Voyager-1

9:41 am

The Voyager missions
The routes the Voyager spacecraft have
taken since launch.

According to a NASA report yesterday, engineers are dealing with a new technical problem that has occurred Voyager-1, flying out beyond the edge of the solar system.

On Oct. 16, the flight team sent a command to turn on one of the spacecraft’s heaters. While Voyager 1 should have had ample power to operate the heater, the command triggered the fault protection system. The team learned of the issue when the Deep Space Network couldn’t detect Voyager 1’s signal on Oct. 18.

The spacecraft typically communicates with Earth using what’s called an X-band radio transmitter, named for the specific frequency it uses. The flight team correctly hypothesized that the fault protection system had lowered the rate at which the transmitter was sending back data. This mode requires less power from the spacecraft, but it also changes the X-band signal that the Deep Space Network needs to listen for. Engineers found the signal later that day, and Voyager 1 otherwise seemed to be in a stable state as the team began to investigate what had happened.

Then, on Oct. 19, communication appeared to stop entirely. The flight team suspected that Voyager 1’s fault protection system was triggered twice more and that it turned off the X-band transmitter and switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band. While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.

Though communications with the spacecraft continue, no data can be downloaded and work is essentially suspended while engineers troubleshoot why Voyager-1 kept initiating its fault system.

It is amazing that communications were still possible using the S-band after more than forty years. I would bet that no engineers from then still work at the Deep Space Network. Kudos to the engineers there now for finding the signal.

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October 28, 2024 Quick space links

9:33 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.

This is late today because I was attending an event at the local Tucson rocket startup Phantom Space. More on that tomorrow.

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As if on cue, the Democrats now go after Musk for daring to campaign for Trump

12:56 pm

Elon Musk under attack
The target is now Elon Musk

When Elon Musk revealed in May 2022 that he had decided to switch his political allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican Party, he immediately predicted quite correctly the following: “Watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold.”

As I noted in detail a year ago, the federal campaign against Musk and his companies since then has been extensive and disgusting, with investigations opened by the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Transportation Department.

Nor has this harassment eased in the past year. If anything it has accelerated, with the red tape by the FAA slowing down operations at SpaceX to the point of absurdity.

Now, as the campaign season moves to its climax on election day and the polls increasingly show a major shift in the direction of a Trump win, barring any illegal vote tampering, we should not be surprised that the Democrats are now demanding that Elon Musk shut up, and are doing so by issuing new false accusations against him.

Leading the way was a Wall Street Journal report [behind a pay wall], picked up by all the usual suspects in the propaganda press, based solely on anonymous sources, that accused Musk of having private and secret phone conversations with Vladimir Putin, head of Russia. From this typical propaganda piece at NPR:
» Read more

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NASA picks nine lunar south pole candidate sites for Artemis-3 manned landing

10:37 am

The Moon's south pole, with candidate landing sites
Click for NASA’s original image.

NASA today revealed the nine candidate sites in the Moon’s south polar region for its Artemis-3 manned mission, presently targeting a 2026 launch date.

The map to the right shows the location of those nine sites, numbered in order of priority, as follows:

  • 1. Peak near Cabeus B
  • 2 . Haworth
  • 3. Malapert Massif
  • 4. Mons Mouton Plateau
  • 5. Mons Mouton
  • 6. Nobile Rim 1
  • 7. Nobile Rim 2
  • 8. de Gerlache Rim 2
  • 9. Slater Plain

The map also shows the planned landing sites for Intuitive Machine’s Athena lander in January 2025, and China’s Chang’e-7 lander in 2026, as well as where India’s Virkam lander touched down in 2023.

Cabeus B is likely the prime candidate site because its high elevation will make communciations easier, while placing it closer to the crater Cabeaus, which was impacted by the LCROSS mission in 2009 and found a significant signature of water in the ejecta plume of that impact.

To make a final decision NASA will be consulting all players, from the science community as well as the engineers. All of this however depends on other factors outside of science and engineering, mostly related to politics and practicality. The entire mission relies on the full version of the SLS rocket, the manned lunar version of SpaceX’s Starship, launched by Superheavy, and a working version of Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsule, none of which are presently flightworthy.

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Old rockets clash with new rockets in Europe

9:35 am

Two stories today from Andrew Parsonson at his website Europeanspaceflight.com today illustrate the battle going on in Europe’s vast space bureaucracy over its future rocket development, and clearly tell us who is winning.

First Parsonson described a presentation put forth by Arianespace officials at an “Ariane-6 User’s Club” meeting two weeks ago, outlining the planned and proposed upgrades Arianespace intends for the Ariane-6 rocket over the next decade. All the upgrades are focused on increasing the rocket’s payloac capacity. None will make any of the rocket reusable in order to lower its high cost which makes it uncompetitive in the modern launch market.

What was significant about Parsonson’s report is that he also noted that many of these upgrades need to be approved by the European Space Agency (ESA), and its officials won’t make that decision until 2025 during a planned conference. Thus, this presentation by Arianespace was essentially a lobbying effort to convince ESA to approve these upgrades.

Parsonson’s second story then told us what ESA is approving, right now.

The European Space Agency has selected Rocket Factory Augsburg, The Exploration Company, ArianeGroup, and Isar Aerospace to develop reusable rocket technology.

On 9 October, ESA held its Future Space Transportation Award Ceremony in Paris. During the event, the agency announced the four awardees under two initiatives focused on the development of reusable rocket technology: the Technologies for High-thrust Reusable Space Transportation (THRUST!) project and the Boosters for European Space Transportation (BEST!) project.

Except for ArianeGroup, these are new startups. The German companies Rocket Factory and Isar are developing their own rockets, while the French company Exploration has so far focused on making cargo capsules to supply future space stations.

ArianeGroup meanwhile is the joint partnership between Airbus and Safran that built and owns the Ariane-6, and actually has more say on its future than Arianespace, which is merely a government agency that in the past (but no more) managed and controlled all of Europe’s rockets. ArianeGroup hasn’t abandoned Ariane-6 by no means, but clearly is shifting its interests in new directions.

Interestingly, the final decisions on some of these reusable projects will be made at that same 2025 conference.

Want to bet that ESA at that conference shifts its focus from upgrading the non-reusable Ariane-6 and instead goes whole hog for reusability? I expect that, especially because all recent political signs at ESA has indicated no interest in maintaining Arianespace any longer. For example, ESA has taken the Vega family of rockets away from Arianespace and given it back to Avio, the Italian company that manufactures it. ESA has also returned management of French Guiana from Arianespace to France’s space agency, which owns the site.

Designed as the commercial arm of ESA, it no longer has a function, now that Europe is shifting from the Soviet-model of its rocket operation run by the government (Arianespace) to a capitalism model where competing independent companies provide products and services to that government.

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ISRO head unveils new timeline for major missions

10:06 am

The head of India’s space agency ISRO, S. Somanath, yesterday unveiled a new timeline for several of that nation’s major missions, both manned and unmanned.

The new timeline is as follows:

  • 2025: NISAR: a joint Indian-American radar orbiter, long delayed
  • 2026: Gaganyaan-1, India’s first manned orbital mission
  • 2028: Chandrayaan-4, an unmanned sample return mission to the Moon
  • 2028: Chandrayaan-5, a joint lander-rover to the Moon

The last project will be done in partnership with Japan, with India building the lander and Japan the rover.

2028 will be a very busy year for India in space. The Indian government had previously announced that ISRO would launch in 2028 the first module of its space station as well as a Venus orbiter.

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Unidentified astronaut from recent ISS mission released from hospital

9:54 am

Though NASA’s press release provided little informationto protect the astronaut’s privacy, including his or her name, the unidentified astronaut who was held overnight for observation after returning from a seventh-month stay on ISS mission has now been released from the hospital.

After an overnight stay at Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola in Florida, the NASA astronaut was released and returned to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston Saturday. The crew member is in good health and will resume normal post-flight reconditioning with other crew members.

This has happened before. Readapting to a 1G environment after months in weightlessness can be difficult, even if one does all the exercises required while in orbit.

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SpaceX yesterday launched another 23 Starlink satellites

5:34 pm

SpaceX yesterday successfully launched 23 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

While the video link above says 23, a UPI report said the launch placed 22 satellites in orbit. I have no idea which is right, as the number of Starlinks on these launches range from 20 to 23.

The first stage completed its 19th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

105 SpaceX
48 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 122 to 71, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 105 to 88.

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Space News buries the lede

9:42 am

In reporting the information revealed in an audio report of two SpaceX engineers to Elon Musk, Space News completely misses the main reason Musk posted this video.

The focus of Jeff Foust’s report is the technical problems the engineers revealed that occurred during the descent of Superheavy during the last flight. According to them, one particular parameter related to the Raptor engines was one second away from demanding an abort, whereby the rocket would not attempt to be captured by the tower chopsticks but instead crash along side it. In addition, these engineers reported the worrisome consequences when a chine on the booster ripped off shortly before landing.

All interesting, but the real reason Elon Musk posted this clip from a much longer audio report is what one engineer says about two thirds of the way through:

Given that that is the first launch [#6] in a long time — well, really, ever — that we’ve not been FAA driven, we’re trying to go do a reasonable balance of speed and risk mitigation on the booster, specifically.

Musk wished everyone to know without question the perspective of his employees when it comes to the red tape of the FAA. It hasn’t been our imagination. For the past three years the FAA has determined the test schedule, slowing it down significantly while costing SpaceX a lot of money.

Space News, which generally has been in the tank for the regulators and the FAA, puts this quote to the very end of its article, almost as an aside. I suspect the outlet would have liked to leave it out.

I have posted the video below, so my readers can listen at their leisure.
» Read more

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One unidentified astronaut hospitalized after return to Earth today

9:04 pm

Though NASA has released very little information, including the indentity of the astronaut, one of the four crew who were brought back to Earth early today has ended up in the hospital.

NASA said Friday one its astronauts is in a hospital in Florida for medical observation after a “normal” predawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico inside a SpaceX capsule.

The mission’s other three crew members were cleared to return to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston after their own medical evaluations, NASA said.

The hospitalized astronaut “is in stable condition and under observation as a precautionary measure,” a NASA spokesperson said in a statement. The agency did not identify the astronaut or provide any more details about their condition, citing medical privacy protections.

That the other three astronauts returned to their home base at Johnson in Houston strongly suggests the hospitalized astronaut is the one Russian, Alexander Grebenkin, Normally Russians head back to Russia relatively quick after landing.

This remains speculation. We will have to wait for more information.

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October 25, 2424 Quick space links

6:12 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.

  • NASA delays decision of cutting budgets for both Chandra and Hubble
    No surprise, The announced cuts were originally announced to apply pressure on Congress to fund both telescopes. With the election upcoming the agency wants to get Congress on their side. Cutting these popular telescopes just before the election will not servie its insterets.
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Gina Lollobrigida – Pagan dance

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I think this makes a great start to the weekend. Clips from the 1959 movie Solomon and Sheba, centered on Gina’s pagan dance as Sheba, and edited to a piece of music by Dead Can Dance, called Cantara, which the youtube website labels “genuinely pagan music.” If you want to see the original film, go here and go to about 90 minutes. In the original, God steps in to stop all this hanky-panky.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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Taking the day off…

12:19 pm

Yesterday I came down with a head cold, which is draining me of energy. I am going to take a few hours off to take a nap. I should post some more later in the day but don’t expect much.

A sidenote: When I mentioned I had a head cold to someone, the first question that person asked was “Covid?” I laughed and responded, “Who cares? Covid has been nothing more than a cold since around 2021.”

This obsession with Covid has got to stop. From a infectious disease perspective the only valuable thing it taught us is that every new and harsh flu strain that comes through eventually mutates downward utnil it is nothing more than the common cold. Covid did exactly that, no matter how much the Chicken Littles of the world tried to claim otherwise.

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Boeing considering selling its space division

11:55 am

According a Wall Street Journal exclusive today (behind a paywall), the company is now exploring the possibility of selling off its space division.

The NASA business that Boeing is exploring a sale of includes the troubled Starliner space vehicle and operations that support the International Space Station, but excludes the unit building NASA’s Space Launch System, the newspaper reported.

The U.S. planemaker’s shares rose 0.6% in afternoon trading.

Boeing’s space division includes its Starliner capsule and its work on NASA’s SLS rocket, as well as building many of the modules on ISS and operating it for NASA.

If this is so, it appears the new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, has decided that in order to get the company back on track it needs to focus on Boeng’s first and central business, building airplanes. Space is a distraction that is not helping the company bottom line right now in any way. Furthermore, NASA in 2020 told Boeing it would not entertain any new project bids from the company because its past bids were so poorly conceived. That decision remains in effect now, four years later. Since then Boeing has only have gotten a renewal contract to build more SLS rockets, plus a contract to develop a new airplane wing, but little else.

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Using spectroscopic data, astronomers create 3D map of ancient supernova remnant

10:55 am

Supernova 1181
Click for original image.

Astronomers have now createdsdft a 3D map of the remnant formed by a supernova that occurred in 1181, using detailed spectroscopic data to determing which remnant filaments are moving towards us and which are moving away.

The picture to the right is from figure 1 of their paper, and shows how the filaments radiate out from the center in straight lines, something that is unusual for such remnants. It was taken in 2023 by a ground-based telescope at Kitt Peak in Hawaii. From simple optical data it is impossible however to determine which filaments are in the rear, expanding away from us, and which are in the front, expanding towards us.

To probe the three-dimensional structure of the supernova remnant, the astronomers turned to KCWI, an instrument that can capture multiwavelength, or spectral, information for every pixel in an image. This is like breaking apart the light captured in every pixel into a rainbow of colors. The spectral information enabled the team to measure the motions of the filaments poking out from the center of the explosion and ultimately create a 3D map of the structure. The filament material that is flying toward us shifted toward the blue higher-energy portion end of the visible spectrum (blue-shifted), while light from material moving away from us shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (red-shifted).

…The results showed that the filament material in the supernova is flying outward from the site of the explosion at approximately 1,000 kilometers per second. “We find the material in the filaments is expanding ballistically,” says Cunningham. “This means that the material has not been slowed down nor sped up since the explosion. From the measured velocities, looking back in time, you can pinpoint the explosion to almost exactly the year 1181.”

The 3D information also revealed a large cavity inside the spindly, spherical structure in addition to some evidence that the supernova explosion of 1181 occurred asymmetrically.

Using this data, they were able to create that 3D map, shown below in a coarse animation video.
» Read more

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Sutherland spaceport submits another revised plan to local council

10:41 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

We’re from the government and we are here to help you! The long-delayed proposed Sutherland spaceport on the north coast of Scotland has now submitted another revised plan to its local Highlands council for approval.

The amended plans for Sutherland Spaceport include a smaller launch pad and launch services facility, and realigning an access road to avoid an area of deep peat. Highland Council planners said the changes would mean reducing the amount of peat that would have to be excavated by more than half. The soil is seen as important because it absorbs CO2.

Highland councillors meeting next week have been asked to approve the amendments. In a report, officials said the amount of peat to be dug up could be cut from 24,046 cubic metres to 9,895 cubic metres.

This is the second time the spaceport has had to submit revised plans to this council. It did so in December 2023, but apparently the council was not satisfied.

Meanwhile Sutherland’s main launch customer, Orbex, has still not gotten its launch licence from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority, first applied for in February 2022. Orbex, which has a fifty year lease at Sutherland and has built its rocket factory nearby, had planned to do its first test launch of its Prime rocket two years ago. Didn’t happen.

Adding to these bureaucratic delays, Anders Holch Povlsen, a local billionaire — who is an investor in the Saxaford spaceport on the Shetland Islands — in July 2024 filed what appeared to be an absurd harrasment lawsuit against Sutherland, and this was the second time he had done so.

I think Orbex picked the wrong spaceport horse in this race, and is likely going to be killed by this red tape and opposition.

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The uncertainty of science: New research suggests first image in ’22 of Milky Way’s central black hole is likely not accurate

10:25 am

Sagittarius A*
The original interpretation. Click for full image.

The new interpretaion
The new asymmetrical interpretation. Click for original image.

Surprise, surprise! A new analysis of the data behind the 2022 false-color radio image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, posted to the right, suggests that image was not accurately interpreted from the data.

Astronomers led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) say their analysis points at Sagittarius A* having an elongated accretion disk, as opposed to the ring-like “doughnut” image released in 2022 by an international team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration.

The EHT image shows a central dark region where the hole resides, circled by the light coming from super-heated gas accelerated by immense gravitational forces.

But a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that part of this appearance may actually be an artefact because of the way the image was put together. … Assistant professor Miyoshi Makoto, of the NAOJ, said: “Our image is slightly elongated in the east-west direction, and the eastern half is brighter than the western half. We think this appearance means the accretion disk surrounding the black hole is rotating at about 60 per cent of the speed of light.” He added: “Why, then, did the ring-like image emerge? Well, no telescope can capture an astronomical image perfectly. We hypothesise that the ring image resulted from errors during EHT’s imaging analysis and that part of it was an artefact, rather than the actual astronomical structure.”

It must be noted that this false color radio image was assembled from eight different radio telescopes across the globe, and to bring the data together required a great deal of massaging. While most astronomers appear to favor the top picture, it is just as likely that the bottom picture is a better representation. Either way, both must be considered in any future studies of Sagittarius A*’s environment and structure.

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Four astronauts complete 7-month mission and return to Earth

9:54 am

In the early hours of the morning today SpaceX’s Endeavour capsule safely splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola, Florida, bringing three Americans and one Russian back from ISS after seven months in orbit.

After launching March 3 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, spent 232 days aboard the space station.

Recovery teams from NASA and SpaceX quickly secured the spacecraft and assisted the astronauts during exit. The crew now will head to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, while the Dragon spacecraft will return to SpaceX facilities at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for inspection and refurbishment for future missions.

This completed Endeavour’s fifth flight to ISS, ranging in length from 17 to 235 days in length.

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