Eric Sahlström Institute – Nyckelharpan
An evening pause: The instrument, the nyckelharpan or key harp, is played by Olov Johansson, and four of his students at Institute, Jonathan Wanneby, Elisabet Ryd and Lydia Ievins.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
Tag: commercial
FAA administrator claims SpaceX wasn’t following regulations; SpaceX says that’s false
FAA administrator Mike Whitaker today to SpaceX:
“Nice company you have there. Shame if something
happened to it.”
In a hearing today before the House transportation committee, the FAA administrator Mike Whitaker claimed repeatedly that the red tape his agency has imposed on SpaceX, as well as the fines it recently imposed on the company, were due to safety concerns as well as SpaceX not following the regulations and even launching without a license.
Mike Whitaker, the administrator of the FAA, told lawmakers on the House Transportation Committee that his decision to delay SpaceX’s launch for a few months is grounded in safety, and defended the $633,000 fine his agency has proposed against SpaceX as the “only tool” the FAA has to ensure that Musk’s company follows the rules.
… [Kevin Kiley (R-California)] argued those reviews don’t have anything to do with safety, prompting Whitaker to shoot back: “I think the sonic boom analysis [related to returning Superheavy back to Boca Chica] is a safety related incident. I think the two month delay is necessary to comply with the launch requirements, and I think that’s an important part of safety culture.”
When Kiley asked what can be done to move the launch up, Whitaker said, “complying with regulations would be the best path.”
SpaceX immediately responded with a detailed letter, published on X, stating in summary as follows:
FAA Administrator Whitaker made several incorrect statements today regarding SpaceX. In fact, every statement he made was incorrect.
The letter then detailed very carefully the falseness of each of Whitaker’s claims. You can read images of the letter here and here. The company noted:
It is deeply concerning that the administrator does not appear to have accurate information immediately available to him with respect to SpaceX licensing matters.
Based on SpaceX’s detailed response, it appears its lawyers are extremely confident it has a very good legal position, and will win in court. Moreover, the politics strongly argue in favor of fighting now. Though such a fight might delay further Superheavy/Starship test launches in the near term, in the long run a victory has a good chance of cleaning up the red tape for good, so that future work will proceed without this harassment.
Whitaker’s testimony also suggests strongly that he — a political appointee by the Biden administration –is likely the source of many of the recent delays and increased red tape that SpaceX has been forced to endure. He clearly thinks he knows better than SpaceX on these technical areas, even though his education and work history has never had anything to do with building rockets.
Blue Origin completes first static fire test of New Glenn upper stage
Blue Origin yesterday successfully conducted a 15 second static fire test of the upper stage of its orbital New Glenn rocket.
The hotfire lasted 15 seconds and marked the first time we operated the vehicle as an integrated system. The purpose of the hotfire test was to validate interactions between the subsystems on the second stage, its two BE-3U engines, and the ground control systems.
Additionally, we demonstrated its three key systems, including: the tank pressurization control system, which uses helium to pressurize the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks during flight; the thrust vector control system, which gimbals the engines and steers the rocket during flight; and validated the start-up and shut-down sequences for the BE-3U systems, which can be restarted up to three times during a mission.
In addition to testing our flight hardware, this hotfire test was also an opportunity for the launch operations team to practice launch day procedures on console and verify timing for a number of critical operations.
An actual launch date has not been announced. Previously New Glenn was to carry two Mars orbiters for NASA and launch by October 21, 2024 at the latest. Because of doubts the company could meet that data, NASA pulled the satellites from the rocket.
Prior to launch the company still has to do a full static fire test of the rocket’s first stage. Though company officials have said this would happen “very soon,” no date has been announced for the test.
Nina Simone – My Way
An evening pause: Recorded live 1971. We should all live our lives in this manner.
Hat tip James Street.
Isar begins static fire tests of its Spectrum rocket
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Isar Aerospace, one of three German rocket startups vying to the be first to complete an orbital launch, has now revealed that it has begun static fire tests of its Spectrum rocket at its launch facility at the Andoya spaceport in Norway.
In response to questioning from European Spaceflight, Isar confirmed that all components of the Spectrum rocket that will be utilized for its inaugural flight had arrived in Andøya and that testing of the first and second stages had begun.
“All components of our launch vehicle Spectrum have arrived in Andøya and the final preparations for the first test flight of Spectrum are in full swing,” an Isar Aerospace spokesperson said. “We are currently performing hot fire tests of the first and second stages. These tests will determine whether the systems meet all the necessary requirements for the first test flight.”
The company has a 20-year lease at Andoya, and though it has not announced a launch date, these ground tests suggest that launch could occur quite soon. If so, Isar will have beaten Rocket Factory Augsburg and Hyimpulse to space. Rocket Factory had apparently been in the lead until a fire during a full static fire test of its RFA-1 rocket’s first stage in August destroyed the rocket.
This race is also between the spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea. Rocket Factory is launching from Saxavord in the Shetland Islands, a spaceport that has been under development the longest, since before 2020, and has been plagued with the red tape problems that appear systemic in the United Kingdom. Andoya however is a latecomer in this race. Though it has been used for suborbital tests for decades, it only started its effort to become a commercial spaceport for orbital flights in November 2023, less than eleven months ago.
SpaceX conducting salvage operations to recover a Superheavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico
SpaceX has apparently conducted salvage operations in the Gulf of Mexico to recover the Superheavy booster that had successfully completed a soft vertical splashdown during the fourth Starship/Superheavy test flight on June 6, 2024.
Confirmation of the recovery project came from a group of young, independent filmmakers who caught wind of the operation and chartered a boat for the 15-mile trip to the Ridgewind to see for themselves what was going on.
…After a two-and-a-half-hour cruise they were about a half mile from the Ridgewind when a drone buzzed toward them. It hovered for a moment before a voice announced through a loudspeaker: “There is a one mile exclusion zone in this area, please depart one mile away from vessel.”
The filmmakers retreated as requested, but then remained there for awhile, observing operations from a distance. They later contacted SpaceX.
The Interstellar Gateway crew reached out to SpaceX, which Leal said quickly confirmed it had contracted with Hornbeck to recover the giant booster. It asked the filmmakers to refrain from announcing the find until after the Ridgewind completed its work and began steaming to port. That happened Sunday.
The filmmakers are one of the number of independent live stream groups that record launches, and made it clear it announcing the salvage work that they respected SpaceX’s request because they knew it was entirely reasonable — to avoid safety problems that could be caused by others boating over — and that they had no desire to hinder SpaceX’s effort.
The article, from a mainstream Democratic Party propaganda source, however tried to slam SpaceX for its “secretive nature,” something that is so untrue only a Democrat shill could write it with a straight face. It also spent a lot of time criticizing the company for creating that one-mile safety exclusion zone around its salvage operations, questioning SpaceX’s “authority” to do so.
China and Rocket Lab complete launches
Yesterday there were two more launches. First China’s Long March 2D rocket in the very early morning hours lifted off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northern China, placing six satellites in orbit.
The satellites are part of a constellation for doing high resolution Earth observations. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuel, crashed inside China.
Next Rocket Lab successfully launched five satellites for the French satellite company Kinéis. This was the second of five planned launches by Rocket Lab to put the entire 25 satellite internet-of-things constellation into orbit. It was also the second attempt to launch, with the first experiencing a launch abort at T-0 seconds due to a ground-system issue.
The launch pace is beginning to heat up. There were four launches yesterday, two from China, one from SpaceX and one from Rocket Lab. The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
93 SpaceX
41 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 109 to 63, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 93 to 79.
Mozart – Piano Concerto No. 23: II Adagio
An evening pause: Performed in 2020 by the National Orchestra of France with a piano solo by Khatia Buniatishvili and a ballet duet by Jordan Kindell and Verity Jacobson.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Boeing replaces the head of its defense/space/security division
Ted Colbert
Boeing today announced that the head of its defense/space/security division, Ted Colbert, has been removed, effective immediately.
New Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg in his first significant move since taking over in August, said Ted Colbert would be leaving and Steve Parker, the unit’s chief operating officer, would assume Colbert’s responsibilities until a replacement is named at a later date.
One project that Colbert was in charge of was Starliner, a program that has cost the company at least $1.6 billion in overruns because of numerous faulty engineering problems.
Colbert might not be to blame for the endless problems at Starliner, but the fish stinks from the head. He also might be very qualified, but sadly, as his picture shows, he is a minority, and since Boeing went all in on DEI racist hiring quotas a few years ago, which makes the skin color and gender of an applicant a major qualification in hiring, one can’t help wondering if he was a DEI (Didn’t Earn It) hire. At Boeing that policy created a goal to increase black staffing by 20%. Its full report [pdf] makes it very clear it no longer made talent, experience, or skill the primary qualification for getting hired, but skin color and sex took precedence.
As I said, one cannot help wondering if Colbert was hired not because of his great management and engineering knowledge, but because he happened to born with a dark skin color. If so, that might help explain the failures in this paricular division.
A review of Firefly’s new launch facilities in both the U.S. and Sweden
Link here. The company already has leases for launchpads at both Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, though only the Vandenberg pad is presently operational. It now building new pads in Viriginia at Wallops Island and in Sweden at the commercial Esrange spaceport.
Regarding the purpose of offering a launch site in Europe, Firefly stated to NSF, “The launch cadence will largely be driven by customer demand. With the inaugural Alpha launch from Esrange as early as 2026, the new complex can support commercial customers in the broader European market and enable tactically responsive space missions to further advance national security for NATO countries.”
The company has already completed five launches from Vandenberg, with a sixth upcoming.
SpaceX finds a way to extend the launch window for Europa Clipper
The launch window for SpaceX’s launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper to Jupiter has now been extended a full week because the company has revised the launch process and made hardware changes.
The new launch window runs from October 10th to November 6th.
Usually the two side boosters come back to land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station so they can be reused and sometimes the core booster is recovered at sea, but not this time. All their fuel will be used to get Europa Clipper on its way to Jupiter. Piloto said SpaceX “made some hardware modifications that enable the launch vehicle to utilize all the fuel in the boosters,” but couldn’t go into detail about what they are because the information is proprietary.
[The NASA official] added that SpaceX has gained experience in flying this configuration — it’s the 11th Falcon Heavy launch — and the company has “come up with a strategy to optimize throttling of the launch vehicle to get more performance out of it.”
NASA and SpaceX have also decided to use NASA’s orbiting communications constellation during the launch instead of ground stations, which increases their flexibility and margins.
I wonder if the FAA has approved these changes. Or even if anyone there even understands them.
SpaceX and Elon Musk blast the FAA’s red tape again
Fight! Fight! Fight! Yesterday both SpaceX and Elon Musk renewed their attack on the FAA’s apparent arbitrary harassment of the company, both by slowing down development of Starship/Superheavy as well as imposing fines and delays on the company for petty issues relating to Falcon 9 launches.
First, Elon Musk sent out a tweet on X, highlighting a successful static fire launchpad engine test of the Starship prototype the company plans to fly on the sixth Starship/Superheavy orbital flight. As he noted with apparent disgust, “Flight 5 is built and ready to fly. Flight 6 will be ready to fly before Flight 5 even gets approved by FAA!”
Second, and with more force, the company released a public letter that it has sent to the leading Republican and Democratic representatives of the House and Senate committees that have direct authority over space activities, outlining its issues with the FAA’s behavior. The letter details at length the irrational and inexplicable slowdown in FAA approvals that caused two launches last summer to occur in a confused manner, with SpaceX clearly given the impression by the FAA that it could go ahead which the FAA now denies. In one case the FAA claims SpaceX removed without its permission a poll of mission control during its countdown procedure. SpaceX in its letter noted bluntly that the regulations do not require that poll, and that the company already requires two other polls during the count.
In another case involving SpaceX’s plan to change to a new mission control center, the company submitted its request in June, and after two months the FAA finally approved the control center’s use for one launch, but had still not approved it for a second. The first launch went off, so SpaceX thus rightly assumed it could use the control center for the second. Yet the FAA is now trying to fine SpaceX for that second launch.
The third case of FAA misconduct appears to be the most egregious. » Read more