Redd Volkaert – Only Daddy That’ll Walk The Line
An evening pause: Hat tip Judd Clark.
Tag: commercial
Momentus and Astroscale team up to propose Hubble servicing mission
Capitalism in space: The two orbital tug companies Momentus and Astroscale announced today that they have partnered to propose a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, designed to boost the telescope and extend its life.
The proposed mission concept, a commercial solution to extend the life of this important national asset without risk to humans, includes launching a Momentus Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle (OSV) to low-Earth orbit on a small launch vehicle. Once on orbit, Astroscale’s RPOD technology built into the OSV would be used to safely rendezvous, approach and then complete a robotic capture of the telescope. Once mated, the OSV would perform a series of maneuvers to raise the Hubble by 50 km. Removal of surrounding and threatening space debris in Hubble’s new orbit using the Vigoride and Astroscale’s RPOD capabilities will be prioritized after the completion of the primary reboost mission.
As I have written repeatedly, Hubble is a telescope that refuses to die. I predicted that come the 2030s, when its orbit had decayed to a point that it either had to be de-orbited (NASA’s preferred option in the past when it ran everything) or be lifted to a higher orbit to extend its life, people would find a way to lift it.
Now that private enterprise is running the show, NASA is taking advantage of that to ask for private solutions to save Hubble, and not surprisingly it is quickly getting them.
Space junk removal company ClearSpace signs deal to launch on Vega-C
The European company ClearSpace has signed a launch deal with Arianespace to fly the first test of its space junk removal robot on a Vega-C rocket set to launch some time in the second half of 2026.
The development of ClearSpace’s robot, which will use four grappling arms to surround and then capture its target, was paid for under a European Space Agency (ESA) $121 million contract which also required it to be launched on an Arianespace rocket. The problem right now is that it will fly as a secondary payload, and a primary payload has not yet been found.
Finding that primary payload is going to be difficult. First, Vega-C failed on its second launch last year and has not yet flown again. Second, it is expendable, and though cheaper than Arianespace’s other rocket, Ariane-6 (which has not yet launched), it is still more expensive than other commercial rockets now available. Third, the customer of that primary payload must also want to go into an orbit that will allow ClearSpace’s robot to reach its target, an abandoned Vega Payload Adapter from a previous launch.
As has been typical of Europe, this development is proceeding too slowly and is being hampered by requirements unrelated to profit and loss. By ’26 expect several other space junk removal companies — Astroscale and D-Orbit come to mind — to have already demonstrated their capabilities and already garnering market share, before ClearSpace even flies.
Momentus test orbital tug successfully raises orbit using water-ionized thrusters
Momentus’s Vigoride test orbital tug has successfully raised its orbit using a ion thrusters that use water as their fuel, proving that the tug can be used to bring smallsats launched as secondary payloads to their preferred orbits.
According to tracking data, Vigoride-5 is in an orbit at an average altitude of 524.3 kilometers as of late May 7, about two kilometers higher than it was in early April, when the maneuvers started. The vehicle’s orbit had been gradually decaying since its launch in early January on the SpaceX Transporter-6 smallsat rideshare mission, descending about five kilometers before the maneuvers started.
The test of the MET is a major milestone for Momentus, which is relying on the technology to propel its tugs that will deliver satellites to their desired orbits. Technical problems with its first tug, Vigoride-3, launched nearly a year ago, kept the company from testing the MET on that vehicle.
Vigoride-5 is carrying a single smallsat, for Singapore-based Qosmosys, that it will release, although the companies have not disclosed the planned orbit for that spacecraft. The tug will also operate a hosted payload from Caltech to demonstrate space-based solar power technologies for several months.
The company already has another Vigoride in orbit that launched in April, carrying its own set of payloads for orbital transport.
Chris Isaak – Wicked Game
An evening pause: Performed live I think in 2011.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
Rocket Lab successfully launches two NASA hurricane monitoring cubesats
Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket today successfully placed NASA’s two Tropics hurricane monitoring cubesats into orbit, lifting off from New Zealand ((May 8th New Zealand time).
This is the first of two Rocket Lab launches to get the entire four-satellite Tropics constellation into orbit, with the second schedule for two weeks from now.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
29 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads China 33 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 33 to 28.
Brick Experiment – 20 Mechanical Principles combined in a Useless Lego Machine
An evening pause: How many of you have heard the names of these various items when talking to your car mechanic, and have no idea what they are?
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Celestis recovers astronaut’s remains from suborbital rocket explosion
Celestis, the company that specializes in sending people’s ashes into space, has successfully recovered the remains of a former Apollo astronaut Philip Chapman (who never flew in space) after the suborbital rocket they were on exploded four seconds into flight.
“All 120 flight capsules are safely in the hands of launch personnel and will be returned to us awaiting our next flight as soon as UP and Spaceport America complete their investigation and any required fixes are implemented,” Celestis said in a statement on Wednesday. The recovered payloads are set to fly again on board the company’s upcoming Perseverance Flight. The company said it only launches a “symbolic portion” of ashes or DNA sample from its participants.
Celestis has sent remains of many celebrities as well as ordinary customers on a number of orbital and suborbital flights over the years. The recovery of the remains and their expected reflight in this case enhances its business model, since none of its customers want their ashes lost in a rocket failure, before reaching space.
Lockheed Martin reorganizes its space divisions to better compete in the new commercial market
Lockheed Martin today announced that it is reorganizing its space divisions to make them better aligned with the new commercial market, and thus better able to win market share.
The company will streamline its operation from “five lines of business to three,” the first focused on commercial space, the second focused on classified military projects, and the third focused on military missile work.
As a big space company, Lockheed Martin has made a great effort in recent years to break into the commercial rocket industry. It was a major investor in Rocket Lab, and is also a major investor in the rocket startup ABL, which it is sending a lot of business. It also realigned its satellite construction business to focus on smallsats, including investing a lot of money in the smallsat company Terran Orbital.
This reorganization is clearly an effort to underline these changes. Whether it will work remains to be seen. Often such reorganizations in big older corporations end up being nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
ESA finally admits — sort of — that private enterprise can do it better
Stéphane Israël, the head of Arianespace and the
architect of its failure to compete in the field of rocketry.
Today there was a news report in which Stéphane Israël, the head of Arianespace, kind of admitted at last that the expendable design of Europe’s new Ariane-6 rocket was a mistake, and that it will take a decade more to fix it.
“When the decisions were made on Ariane 6, we did so with the technologies that were available to quickly introduce a new rocket,” said Israël, according to European Spaceflight.
He added that it will not be until the 2030s before Europe begins flying its own reuseable rocket.
Israël’s comments illustrate the head-in-the-sand approach he has exhibited now for decades. He claims the European Space Agency (ESA) chose to make Ariane-6 expandable so that it would be ready quickly, but its development has not been fast, and in fact is now more than three years behind schedule. When it finally begins flying operational it will have taken almost a decade to create it.
His comments also are his lame attempt to push back against a recent ESA report [pdf], issued in late March, that strongly rejected the decades-long model that ESA has used to build its rockets. Up until now and including the construction of Ariane-6, ESA designed and built its rockets, using Arianespace, headed by Israël, as its commercial arm. In other words, the government ran the show, much like NASA did for most of the half century following the 1960s space race. The result was slow development, and expensive rockets. Arianespace for example never made a profit in its decades-long existence, despite capturing half the commercial market in the 2000s and early 2010s.
The March ESA report rejected this model, and instead advocating copying what the U.S. has done for the past half decade by shifting ownership and design to the private sector, as advocated in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in space. To quote the ESA report:
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Hozier & Annie Lennox – Take Me to Church / I Put a Spell on You
A evening pause: Performed live 2015.
Hat tip Doug Johnson. Note too that this does not come from youtube, but from metatube. Let’s find more alternative video resources like this, just to increase some competition.
Weird dome near Starship candidate landing zone on Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as domes in Arcadia Planitia, one of the many large northern lowland plains of Mars.
This to me is a “What the heck?” image. I won’t dare try to explain the warped concentric ringed pattern at the top of the mesa, nor the bright and dark splotch that surrounds it. The small craters around it appear to have glacier material within them, and the terrain here likely has a lot of near surface ice, being at 37 degrees north latitude in a region where the data suggests such ice exists. The different colors here likely indicate the difference between dust (orange) and coarser material (aqua).
The location, as shown in the overview map below, makes this mesa more tantalizing.
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Maxar sale closes and company goes private
With the purchase today for $6.4 billion of the satellite company Maxar by two private investment firms, its stock was removed from the NY stock exchange and is no longer traded publicly.
The company was acquired for $53 per share by the U.S. private equity firm Advent International and minority investor British Columbia Investment Management Corp. in a deal announced in December. “With the closing of the transaction, Maxar will remain a U.S.-controlled, owned and operated company,” the company said. Maxar’s common stock will also be delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Maxar started trading on the New York Stock Exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2017. It officially became a U.S. corporation in 2020 when the company spun off the Canadian subsidiary MDA.
The desire of these private investors to spend so much strongly indicates that Maxar has real value. It also indicates indirectly the strength of the emerging new commercial launch market. These investors clearly believe that this launch market will continue to grow and force the launch price of its satellites to go down.
SpaceX launches 56 Starlink satellites into orbit
Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully placed 56 Starlink satellites into orbit, lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves completed their eighth and ninth flights, respectively.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
29 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 India
American private enterprise now leads China 32 to 16 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 32 to 28. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world, including American companies, 29 to 31.
Rollerman – Downhill extreme
An evening pause: More road stuff, of an entirely different kind.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Exploring Arizona’s Abandoned Highway 60 and the Claypool Tunnel
An evening pause: Better late than never. I forgot to schedule some pauses. This one is fascinating because of the history of technology it reveals.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Irish startup lobbies for Irish spaceport
According to an official from the startup SUAS Aerospace, Ireland is an ideal location for the creation of a new spaceport.
Mr O’Halloran, who is now vice chairman of Irish space company SUAS Aerospace, said space vehicles could be launched from Ireland for telecommunications, environmental monitoring, or medical experiments.
…He later told the Irish Examiner: “There are loads of companies in Europe that need to have a facility of a launch pad, or a spaceport, and by and large they are all heading towards the Azores. The UK is now starting to set up spaceports, but they are now outside the EU. Ireland is ideal as a launching site.”
This Irish company’s focus, according to its website, is “…to build a leading European Space Port providing flexible commercial satellite launch facilities with provision for engine and rocket testing.” And it wants to do it in Ireland. O’Halloran’s speech was an effort to gin up both private and government support for the project, including a commitment of the Irish government to provide it the land it needs for such a site.
There are already three spaceports under development within the EU, in Spain, Norway, and Sweden, all of which at the moment are for suborbital rockets exclusively. Ireland’s location could make it a better choice for orbital launches, as it has many more options for flight paths over the Atlantic without crossing land.
Suborbital rocket explodes four seconds after launch in New Mexico
An UP Aerospace suborbital rocket exploded yesterday only four seconds after launch in New Mexico, destroying a number of private and NASA science and commercial payloads.
An UP Aerospace rocket, 20 feet tall and carrying a NASA payload, exploded moments after liftoff today. The unfortunate event not only affected the NASA TechRise Student Challenge payloads but also delayed a poignant tribute to the late NASA astronaut, Phillip K. Chapman, and chemist Louise Ann O’Deen.
The rocket was set to launch the cremated remains of Chapman, NASA’s first Australian-born American astronaut, finally granting him his long-awaited journey to space.
Chapman and O’Deen’s remains were payloads from the commercial company Celestis. The thirteen NASA payloads were part of its TechRise Student Challenge program for 6th to 12th grade students.
AC/DC – Thunderstruck
An evening pause: A bit of energy to start the week. Performed live 1991. For those unfamiliar with this rock piece (like me), I think it helpful here to turn on captions to find out what the performers and audience are singing.
Hat tip James Street.
Environmentalists sue FAA, demanding it shut down Boca Chica and Starship
Starship/Superheavy at T+4:02, just after the self-destruct command
was issued on April 20, 2023. It also appears to be the fate of SpaceX’s
entire Boca Chica operation, if the environmental radicals get their way.
A group of environmental groups as well as a non-profit corporation calling itself the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc, today filed a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration FAA), demanding it shut down SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility and block all further Superheavy/Starship launches.
You can read the lawsuit here [pdf]. Its essence is contained in these two paragraphs:
The area surrounding the SpaceX facility at Boca Chica is a biologically diverse and essential habitat area for many species, including federally protected wildlife and animals that are considered sacred to the Carrizo/Comecrudo People, such as the critically endangered ocelot. The SpaceX facility is smack in the middle of publicly owned conservation, park, and recreation lands, including a National Wildlife Refuge, two State Parks, a State Wildlife Management Area, and a State Coastal Preserve. These lands are of extraordinary conservation value for a range of federally and state lists wildlife and other protected species such as migratory birds. Bird species from both the Central and Mississippi flyways converge there, making it an essential wintering and stopover area for migratory birds as they move north and south each year.
SpaceX activities authorized in the FONSI/ROD [the environmental reassessment issued last year] have and will adversely affect the surrounding wildlife habitat and communities. In addition to harm from construction activities and increased vehicle traffic, rocket launches result in intense heat, noise, and light pollution. Furthermore, the rocket launches and testing result in explosions which spread debris across surrounding habitat and cause brush/forest fires — including one that recently burned 68 acres of adjacent National Wildlife Refuge. The FAA calls these explosions “anomalies,” but in fact they occur frequently, with at least 8 over the past 5 years. FAA acknowledged that many more such “anomalies” are expected over the next 5 years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has found that prior SpaceX rocket explosions harmed protected wildlife and designated habitat in violation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
In other words, rockets and launch sites should never be placed inside wildlife refuges, because such activity is detrimental to wildlife.
A more false statement cannot be made. Under this conclusion the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, which have been operating in the middle of a wildlife refuge now for more than six decades, should be shut down immediately. All the wildlife there must certainly be dead!
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