Tag: capitalism

Student model rocket doubles altitude record

9:10 am

On April 16, 2023 students from the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University launched a model rocket that more than doubled the altitude record for liquid-fueled model rockets.

The rocket reached an altitude of 47,732 feet, setting multiple records, including the highest undergraduate and collegiate amateur liquid rocket launch in the United States. It more than doubled the previous record of 22,000 feet.

Named Deneb after one of the brightest stars in the northern hemisphere, the rocket had a total burn time of 26.1 seconds, reaching a velocity of 1,150 mph (Mach 1.5).

I have embedded the live stream below, set to begin just before launch.
» Read more

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ULA’s first Vulcan rocket returns to assembly building after fueling tests

9:22 am

After completing a tanking test, engineers have now moved ULA s first Vulcan rocket back to the assembly building for some additional work prior to the first wet dress rehearsal countdown and static fire test.

A ULA spokesperson said the company’s engineers “collected excellent data” during the May 12 tanking test, which mimicked a launch countdown with holds, readiness polls, and other milestones. “Based on the test, there are several parameters that will be adjusted prior to conducting the Flight Readiness Firing,” the ULA spokesperson said in a statement. “We are rolling back to the Vertical Integration Facility, where our access is better and the vehicle is protected to isolate and perform those adjustments.”

The static fire test will occur prior to attaching two strap-on solid-fueled side boosters, provided by Northrop Grumman, that are needed for the first launch. That launch is presently scheduled for sometime this summer, but first the static fire test has to take place successfully, with no issues, and these boosters need to be attached.

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Rocket Lab completes Photon transport spacecraft for Varda’s private returnable space capsule

9:20 am

The private rocket company Rocket Lab has now completed construction on the Photon transport spacecraft that the private company Varda has purchased to maneuver and then de-orbit its private returnable space capsule in which it plans to manufacture pharmaceuticals while in orbit and then return to Earth for sale.

Rocket Lab made the spacecraft at its Long Beach manufacturing site to provide power, communications, propulsion and attitude control to a capsule that will produce pharmaceutical products in microgravity. In addition to providing support during the in-space phase of Varda’s mission, the Photon will put Varda’s capsule carrying finished pharmaceuticals on a return trajectory to Earth.

This is the first of four Photon spacecraft that Varda has purchased from Rocket Lab. Varda appears to be attempting to continue the pharmaceutical work that McDonnell-Douglas did on the space shuttle, and was on the verge of flying a full-scale production mission for profit, when the Challenger accident occurred in 1986 and ended all further commercial work on the shuttle.

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Private company developing concept for resurrecting Spitzer Space Telescope

9:11 am

Using a $250K development contract from the Space Force, the small startup Rhea Space Activity hopes to develop a mission for resurrecting Spitzer Space Telescope, now several hundred million miles from Earth and out of operation for three years.

The “Spitzer Resurrector” mission would be a small spacecraft that could fit into a 1-meter-by-1-meter box and be ready to launch as soon as 2026, Usman said. It would then take about three years to cruise to the telescope, during which time the spacecraft will make observations of solar flaring. “We plan to be busy right from the start of the mission,” said Howard Smith, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, which is operated by Harvard University and the Smithsonian, who is involved in the proposed rescue flight.

Once the resurrector spacecraft reaches the telescope, it would fly around at a distance of 50 to 100 km to characterize Spitzer’s health. Then it would attempt to establish communications with the telescope and begin to relay information back and forth between the ground and telescope. This would allow scientists to restart observations.

Essentially, the servicing satellite would act as a relay communications satellite, allowing Spitzer to resume doing the limited infrared observations it had been doing in the last eleven years of its life, after its coolant ran out.

The actual mission of course has not yet been funded, nor is Rhea much more than a startup, with only ten employees. The concept however illustrates the growing practicality of flying such missions. The number of servicing missions to defunct satellites is growing in leaps and bounds, and Rhea, as well as its other partners at the Smithsonian and the Applied Physics Laboratory, are simply using that knowledge for their own benefit.

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Italy awards $256 million contract for testing in-orbit robotic satellite servicing

8:59 am

The new colonial movement: The Italian Space Agency yesterday issued a $256 million contract to a partnership of several private European companies — most of which are Italian — to fly a mission testing a variety of in-orbit robotic satellite servicing capabilities.

Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales of France and Leonardo of Italy, said the group is contracted to design, develop, and qualify a spacecraft capable of performing a range of autonomous robotic operations on satellites in low Earth orbit.

The company did not disclose details about these satellites or specifics about the mission, but said the servicer would have a dexterous robotic arm and test capabilities that include refueling, component repair or replacement, orbital transfer, and atmospheric reentry. The servicer will be launched with a target satellite, Thales Alenia Space spokesperson Cinzia Marcanio said, and both will be fitted with an interface for a refueling mission.

The partnership also includes the Italian companies Telespazio, Avio, and D-Orbit.

The significance of this deal is that Italy has gone outside the European Space Agency (ESA) to do it. For decades all European projects would be developed and flown through ESA. Italy appears to be have finally realized that it does not need that partnership, that in fact that partnership acts to hinder its own companies by requiring any mission to use companies from other nations. This deal instead keeps almost everything inside Italy.

We have seen a similar pattern in both Germany and the United Kingdom. The former has been working to encourage private German rocket companies, independent of ESA. The latter is doing the same in the UK, while also encouraging private British spaceports to launch those rockets.

These efforts strongly suggest that ESA’s monumental failure with the Ariane-6 — which is years late and will cost too much to fly — has been causing its member nations to rethink that partnership, and increasingly go it alone. ESA failed to provide them a competitive alternative for getting their payloads into orbit. They are now looking for ways to do it themselves.

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Stratolaunch’s giant airplane Roc successfully completes first drop test of payload

9:16 am

On May 13, 2023 Stratolaunch’s giant airplane Roc took off with a Talon-0 engineering test vehicle attached to its fuselage and successfully released that test vehicle, completing the plane’s first drop test.

Saturday’s outing was the 11th flight test for Stratolaunch’s flying launch pad — a twin-fuselage, six-engine airplane with a record-setting 385-foot wingspan. The plane is nicknamed Roc in honor of a giant bird in Middle East mythology.

Roc carried the Talon-A separation test vehicle, known as TA-0, during three previous test flights. But this was the first time TA-0 was released from Roc’s center-wing pylon to fly free. The release took place during a four-hour, eight-minute flight that involved operations in Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Western Range, off California’s central coast.

With this success the company appears ready to fulfill its military contract to use its Talon-1 payloads to fly hypersonic flight tests.

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SpaceX launches another 56 Starlink satellites into orbit

10:57 pm

Using its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 56 Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 7th and 8th flights, respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

31 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 35 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 29. SpaceX by itself trails the entire world, including other American companies, only 31 to 33 in launches this year.

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Intuitive Machines’ first mission to land on Moon delayed

5:52 pm

Intuitive Machines officials revealed during their quarterly report that the first mission of its Nova-C lunar lander has been delayed from June to late August or September.

The company announced in February plans for a June landing at Malapert A, a crater near the south pole of the moon. That date was a slip from a previously scheduled March launch, which the company said was linked to NASA’s decision to move the landing site to Malapert A.

Altemus said the company made “significant progress” in testing of the lander in recent months, such as structural tests to confirm the vehicle could handle the stresses of launch and cryogenic tanking demonstrations. “We have some functional testing” still to do on the lander, he said, but did not elaborate on the nature of those tests or their schedule ahead of shipping to Cape Canaveral for its Falcon 9 launch.

Two private companies have so far attempted and failed to land on the Moon, Israel’s SpaceIL and Japan’s Ispace. Two American companies, Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, are both racing to achieve this goal in the coming months. This delay now puts Astrobotic in the lead, with its launch now targeting the summer.

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Scientists rediscover the advantages of nuclear power for moving probes through the solar system

10:21 am

Scientists appear to have once again discovered the advantages of nuclear powered thrusters for moving much heavier interplanetary missions more quickly and more efficiently to the farther reaches of the solar system.

A new paper published last month in the journal Acta Astronautica argues that a fusion-powered drive, capable of delivering propulsion while powering onboard electronics, could be a way to get more power and cargo to outer moons like Titan, and designed a scenario revealing what a DFD-powered [direct-fusion-drive] Titan mission would look like.

A 2021 study from an international research team revealed that a DFD could transport 2,220 lbs to Titan in 31 months. Right now, the Dragonfly mission [to Saturn’s moon Titan] weighs in at about 990 lbs. This new paper says that the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) concept developed at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is essential for powering the mission.

The irony of this story is that scientists and engineers knew these obvious facts and proposed many versions of nuclear-powered thrusters back in the 1960s. NASA even had a very successful project called NERVA in the late 1960s, with plans to begin using the technology by the 1980s.

All such research was canceled however in the 1970s, partly because of budget cutbacks but mostly because of the paranoia that began developing at that time against using nuclear power for anything. The idea of launching a rocket into space that carried a nuclear rocket engine was considered environmentally too risky.

Has that fear now subsided? We shall see. There are plenty of environmental activist groups that we can expect to immediately oppose such technology. The question will be whether a large enough private industry will evolve capable of exerting its own political weight to resist that opposition.

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Ariane-6’s first launch now likely delayed again, until 2024

9:49 am

According to officials from the German company OHB, which makes parts of Europe’s new Ariane-6 rocket, its first launch will not take place before the end of this year, as presently scheduled by Arianespace, the commercial arm of the European Space Agency (ESA).

In a May 10 earnings call, executives with German aerospace company OHB predicted that the rocket will make its long-delayed debut within the first several months of 2024, the strongest indication yet by those involved with the rocket’s development that it will not be ready for launch before the end of this year.

“It’s not yet launched, but we hope that it will launch in the early part of next year,” said Marco Fuchs, chief executive of OHB, of Ariane 6 during a presentation about the company’s first quarter financial results. A subsidiary of OHB, MT Aerospace, produces tanks and structures for the rocket. Later in the call, he estimated the rocket was no more than a year away from that inaugural flight. “I am getting more and more confident we will see the first launch of Ariane 6 early next year,” he said. “I think we are within a year of the first launch and that is psychologically very important.”

These delays seriously impact many projects of ESA and other European companies. Ariane-6 was originally supposed to launch by 2020, overlapping the retirement of its Ariane-5 rocket by several years. Ariane-5 now has only one launch left, presently scheduled for June. Once that flies, Europe will have no large rocket available until Ariane-6 begins operations. This situation is worsened for Europe in that its other smaller rocket, the Vega-C, failed on its last launch and has not yet resumed operations.

It is not surprising therefore that many European projects have been shifting their launch contracts away from Ariane-6 to SpaceX and others. It is also not surprising that there is now an increasing move in Europe to develop new competing private rocket companies, rather than relying on a government-owned entity like Arianespace.

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Space Perspective buys ship to use for launching and recovering its passenger balloons

9:38 am

The high altitude balloon company Space Perspective has now purchased a 292-foot long ship to use as both a launch and recovery vessel for its planned flights of its Neptune capsule carrying tourists to 20-plus miles above the Earth.

Named in honor of the Voyager 1 space probe, the vessel was acquired to allow the company to launch and recover its spacecraft capsule Neptune from anywhere in the world, starting with pre-approved locations near Florida. The company completed its first test flight in June 2021, launching from land near Kennedy Space Center. The capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico roughly seven hours later. On that occasion, the capsule was recovered from the water using a chartered commercial vessel, GO America.

Building on that first recovery, Voyager will have the capability to both launch and recover the spacecraft in an integrated, flexible solution that can also relocate to avoid bad weather — a problem that often plagues traditional rocket launches and marine capsule recovery operations. Space Perspective has previously stated it expects Voyager to be the first in a fleet of marine spaceports globally.

It is now expected that Voyager will begin operations late this year, when Space Perspective begins test flights of Neptune.

The article also notes near the end the growing congestion at Port Canaveral due to the numbers of space-related ships, either already operating or anticipated. It appears a marina for these ships will soon become necessary, as the port does not want them taking up docking space when not in use.

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SpaceX successfully launches another 51 Starlink satellites

1:18 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched another 51 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage successfully completed its third flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. Both fairings completed their second flight in space.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

30 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 34 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 34 to 29. SpaceX by itself trails the entire world, including other American companies, only 30 to 33 in launches this year.

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