UAE to launch probe to asteroid belt

9:01 am

The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) today announced that it is planning an unmanned probe to visit a number of asteroids in the asteroid belt.

The project targets a 2028 launch with a landing in 2033, a five-year journey in which the spacecraft will travel some 3.6 billion kilometers (2.2 billion miles). The spacecraft would need to slingshot first around Venus and then the Earth to gather enough speed to reach an asteroid some 560 million kilometers (350 million miles) away.

It appears they have not yet chosen their targets in the belt.

The big question will be how much of this project will be built in the UAE, and how much they will have to farm out to others. For their Al-Amal Mars orbiter, the satellite was mostly built by U.S. universities, as they trained UAE engineers, who now run the mission entire.

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Russia launches movie director and actor to ISS

8:40 am

Capitalism in space: Early today Russia successfully used its Soyuz-2 rocket and Soyuz capsule to launch a movie crew to ISS to begin a twelve day visit where they will film scenes for a science fiction movie.

An actress Yulia Peresild and a movie director Klim Shipenko arrived at the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft on Oct. 5, 2021, for a 12-day visit to shoot scenes of a sci-fi drama. They were accompanied by a professional cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, who had to switch to manual control during the final approach to the station due to a failure of the Kurs automated rendezvous system aboard Soyuz. Shkaplerov will remain aboard the station for nearly six months.

This is the second in a steady string of passenger commercial spaceflights that have been purchased by various people from either Roscosmos in Russia or SpaceX in the U.S. We shall see two more such flights in December, and another early in ’22, with additional flights to be scheduled beyond that. The full list, at this time:

  • September 15, 2021: SpaceX’s Dragon capsule flew four private citizens on a three day orbital flight
  • October 2021: The Russians launch two passengers to ISS for 12 days to shoot a movie
  • December 2021: The Russians will fly billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant to ISS for 12 days
  • cDecember 2021: Space Adventures, using a Dragon capsule, will fly four in orbit for five days
  • January/February 2022: Axiom, using a Dragon capsule, will fly four tourists to ISS
  • 2022-2024: Three more Axiom tourist flights on Dragon to ISS
  • 2024: Axiom begins launching its own modules to ISS, starting construction of its own private space station
  • c2024: SpaceX’s Starship takes Yusaku Maezawa and several others on a journey around the Moon.

Expect this list to grow. There appears to be plenty of demand for such commercial manned spaceflights, and with more flights and more competition (once Boeing’s Starliner enters the game) the cost will certainly drop.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

34 China
23 SpaceX
16 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

With this launch Russia has now exceeded the number of launches it completed last year. If they complete all their presently scheduled launches for ’21, Roscosmos will have its best year since 2015.

The U.S still leads China 35 to 34 in the national rankings.

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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

Worldview to once again develop stratospheric tourist balloon flights

8:55 pm

Capitalism in space: The Tucson-based high altitude balloon company Worldview has now announced that it is going to once again develop tourist balloon flights.

World View, based in Tucson, Ariz., announced Oct. 4 it is developing a passenger capsule that will be carried aloft by balloons to altitudes of about 30 kilometers. The Explorer Space Capsule will host eight passengers and two crew for flights lasting 6 to 12 hours, giving people a view of the Earth the company argues resembles that seen from space.

Tickets will cost $50,000 per person, with World View providing what it calls “flexible financing options.” The company expects the first flight no earlier than early 2024, with the nonprofit organization Space for Humanity, which offers spaceflight experiences for those who cannot afford tickets, buying the inaugural flight….

This project is a return to World View’s origins nearly a decade ago. The company originally said it would develop a stratospheric balloon system called Voyager for carrying people, offering them an aspect of the spaceflight experience without actually going to space. However, several years later the company shifted its attention to uncrewed balloons called “stratollites” that carry imaging and communications payloads into the stratosphere for weeks at a time.

The company’s CEO said they are hoping to pick up business from the suborbital market by offering a near-space experience that lasts hours for about one tenth the cost.

Worldview is now in direct competition with Space Perspectives, based in Florida and intending to fly passengers on high altitude balloon flights by ’24, but for $125k per ticket. That company was founded by the same people that founded Worldview.

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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.

Land of Martian slope streaks

12:37 pm

Land of Martian slope streaks
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 21, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a typical example of the many slope streaks found in the rough and very broken region north of the Martian volcano Olympus Mons, the largest in the solar system.

See this May 2019 post for a detailed explanation of slope streaks. While they appear to be avalanches, they do not change the topography of the ground, sometimes flow over rises, and appear to be a phenomenon entirely unique to Mars. While no theory as yet explains them fully, the two most favored postulate that they are either dust avalanches or the percolation of a brine of chloride and/or perchlorate in a thin layer several inches thick close to the surface. In both cases the streak is mostly only a stain on the surface that fades with time.

The location of this cool image however tells us something more about them.
» Read more

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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

Today’s blacklisted American: Chief editor on Oklahoma State U’s student newspaper forced to resign for holding a dissenting opinion

10:51 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled at Oklahoma State University
No freedom of speech allowed at
Oklahoma State University.

The new dark age of silencing: Maddison Farris, the editor-in-chief for Oklahoma State U’s student newspaper The O’Colly was forced to resign her position after she wrote an op-ed opposing any mask mandate on campus and her fellow editors ganged up on her, demanding she leave.

Two days after publication the newspaper’s editorial board issued “a correction”, essentially condemning Farris’s op-ed. They followed this up two days later with a meeting where they demanded Farris resign.

Farris submitted a letter of “forced resignation,” explaining that she had been called into a September 13 meeting with the rest of the editors and pressed into leaving her post.

Farris told Campus Reform that although most students at Oklahoma State support free speech, but there is a “portion of students who value free speech until it makes them uncomfortable.”

More details here. It appears Farris wrote her op-ed as a result of being forced to leave a classroom because she would not wear a mask, even though the law apparently allows her to do so.
» Read more

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Italy switches from Arianespace to SpaceX for launch contract

9:05 am

Capitalism in space: Because of the two recent launch failures of Arianespace’s Vega rocket (built mostly in Italy), the Italian space agency (ASI) has decided to take the launch of an Earth observation satellite from Arianespace and award the launch contract instead to SpaceX.

The article at the link describes in detail the history and politics that make this decision significant. Essentially, because Arianespace in the past decade has failed to meet the challenge of SpaceX, so that its launches continue to be more expensive, this government-subsidized business has tried to force nations in the European Space Agency (ESA) to use Arianespace rockets via political agreements.

With this decision Italy is defying that pressure, which in turn is going to increase the pressure on Arianespace to finally step up its game, or die from lack of business. For example, when the ESA agreed to have Arianespace build its next generation rocket, the Ariane 6, it failed to require it to be reuseable. The Ariane 6 rocket was therefore designed as an expendable rocket, which meant that right from the start it could not compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. It has therefore failed to win launch contracts.

Expect the Ariane 6 to continue to fade as the years pass, simply because the bureaucrats in ESA and Arianespace refused to take their competition seriously.

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William Shatner to fly on next New Shepard suborbital flight

8:47 am

Capitalism in space: Blue Origin today announced that William Shatner will join three other passengers on its next New Shepard suborbital flight, presently scheduled for October 12th.

Today, Blue Origin announced actor William Shatner and Audrey Powers, Blue Origin’s Vice President of Mission & Flight Operations, will fly on board New Shepard NS-18. They will join crewmates Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries for the flight which lifts off from Launch Site One on October 12.

Powers appears to be flying as both a reward for her work at Blue Origin and as a engineer to observe the operation of the spacecraft.

Shatner, an actor for more than six decades and most famous for his role as James T. Kirk in Star Trek, is 90 years old, which will make him the oldest person to ever fly into space.

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BeppiColombo’s first images of Mercury

10:52 pm

Mercury by BebiColomo
Click for full image.

This past weekend the European/Japanese duel-orbiter mission made its first flyby of Mercury, taking its first images of that planet.

The photo to the right is one example, cropped and reduced slightly to post here. It was taken by the spacecraft’s monitoring cameras, designed for engineering purposes, which means the resolution is not very high and the camera is positioned so that parts of the spacecraft were visible in each shot. For example, the white strut in the lower right is the spacecraft’s magnetometer boom, which also was used to gather data during the flyby.

Still, the photos demonstrated that the spacecraft is pointing correctly and on course. It will complete five more Mercury fly-bys before going into orbit in 2025.

The next flyby will occur in June ’22.

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NASA issues request for commercially-built spacesuits for its Artemis program

10:39 pm

Capitalism in space: After more than a decade of delays in building its own in-house next generation spacesuits, NASA this week issued a request for proposals from the commercial space industry for new spacesuits for its Artemis program.

Bidders can use the technology NASA developed for [its unfinished upgraded spacesuits] in its proposals, or they can use their own designs, the document states. The suits must be able to meet a variety of requirements, including up to six spacewalks on the lunar surface during initial Artemis Moon missions. They must also be made of materials such that less than 100 grams of lunar regolith is brought back into the “cabin environment” after each spacewalk on the Moon. NASA plans to award a contract by next April.

The plan is comparable to what NASA has been doing across the board now for the last three years, buy the product from the commercial sector in a fixed price contract. The company that builds the suits will retain ownership of the design, and can make money selling its use to others.

This policy approach continues the agency’s acceptance of almost all the recommendations put forth in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space, a free pdf download.

It also likely means NASA might finally get the spacesuits it needs for future lunar missions quickly and at a reasonable cost, something the agency itself has been unable to do.

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