An evening pause: Normally I hate official music videos. They are almost always boring and predictable adolescent stories that have little to do with the song. I always prefer the live performance, because then you see the artist at work.
This video is an exception, in that it doesn’t do what you expect, and is quite silly in the process.
Hat tip Mitch Masterfix.
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.
It appears Congress wants the telescope, conceived to study potential habitable exoplanets, but it is also micromanaging the project by its legislative language.
This company appears to be on a slow downhill path.
FAA today issued [pdf] the launch license for SpaceX’s fourth test orbital launch of Starship/Superheavy, effective June 4, 2024, thus allowing the company to proceed with its planned June 6, 2024 launch date.
The two-hour launch window opens at 7 am (Central). SpaceX’s live stream will begin 30 minutes earlier. From SpaceX’s Starship website:
The fourth flight test turns our focus from achieving orbit to demonstrating the ability to return and reuse Starship and Super Heavy. The primary objectives will be executing a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico with the Super Heavy booster, and achieving a controlled entry of Starship.
To accomplish this, several software and hardware upgrades have been made to increase overall reliability and address lessons learned from Flight 3. The SpaceX team will also implement operational changes, including the jettison of the Super Heavy’s hot-stage following boostback to reduce booster mass for the final phase of flight.
Flight 4 will fly a similar trajectory as the previous flight test, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This flight path does not require a deorbit burn for reentry, maximizing public safety while still providing the opportunity to meet our primary objective of a controlled Starship reentry.
This FAA approval is wonderful news, considering the red-tape delays the agency has previously caused to SpaceX’s efforts. It suggests that officials there are trying hard to speed up their paperwork. If so, the gap between this flight and fifth might be shorter than the three month gap seen between the third flight in March and this flight on June 6th.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a request for information from European rocket startups to outline their capabilities and plans so that ESA can assess whether they qualify for future launch contracts.
Currently, ESA is working towards publishing a competitive tender in early 2025 for the award of contracts to allow European launch providers to demonstrate their ability to provide the capacity to serve institutional mission needs. To better define this competitive tender and align the challenge in the best possible way to incentivize providers, ESA has published a Request for Information call. “This Campaign will let economic operators express their views and expectations on the future of European access to space and actively participate in the definition of the European Launcher Challenge,” explains the call.
The call is limited to companies in Europe. The information the companies provide will then be used by ESA to shape the actual contract offers in 2025. The long term goal is for independent and competing European rocket companies to replace the Ariane-6, and provide a fleet of rockets of all types capable of launching European payloads faster and for much less money.
The French startup Aldoria has released a short movie taken by its ground telescopes showing a Russian “inspector” satellite maneuvering close to another geosynchronous satellite.
In a recent operation, Aldoria detected a sudden close approach by the Russian Luch Olymp K-2 (Luch-2) to a satellite positioned in geostationary orbit (GEO). This manoeuvre occurred on April 12, around 35,780 km in altitude, highlighting the increasing complexity of space activities. Luch Olymp 2, known for its unusual manoeuvres was predicted, by Aldoria, to closely approach the satellite prior to the observed manoeuvre. The original Luch-1, launched in 2014, was known for similar abnormal behaviour, creating a heightened sense of vigilance within the space community. Luch-2, like its predecessor, has a history of unusual manoeuvring near other satellites in geostationary orbit, which has also generated suspicions regarding its mission.
You can see the video here.
In the past year it appears the entire aerospace industry in Europe has come alive, no longer captured by the European Space Agency’s government-owned commercial arm, Arianespace. Instead, there are companies popping up everywhere, doing the kinds of entrepreneurial work American companies have been known to do since the founding of the country.
The competition for business and the amount of innovation in space should get very brisk in the next few years.
Over the weekend SpaceX announced on X that it has now delayed by one day its targeted date for the fourth orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, from June 5th to June 6th.
No reason was given for the delay, though the company notes on its webpage for the mission that it is still awaiting regulatory approval.
Musk underlined the company’s readiness to launch however with his own tweet on June 2, stating simply that “Starship is ready to fly.”
From the FAA however we still have silence.
NASA yesterday evening confirmed that the agency, ULA, and Boeing are now targeting June 5, 2024 at 10:52 am (Eastern) for the launch of the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule carrying two astronauts to ISS for a two week checkout mission.
Technicians and engineers with ULA (United Launch Alliance) worked overnight and on Sunday to assess the ground support equipment at the launch pad that encountered issues during the countdown and scrubbed the June 1 launch attempt. The ULA team identified an issue with a single ground power supply within one of the three redundant chassis that provides power to a subset of computer cards controlling various system functions, including the card responsible for the stable replenishment topping valves for the Centaur upper stage. All three of these chassis are required to enter the terminal phase of the launch countdown to ensure crew safety.
On Sunday, the chassis containing the faulty ground power unit was removed, visually inspected, and replaced with a spare chassis. No signs of physical damage were observed. A full failure analysis of the power unit will be performed to better understand root cause. Meanwhile, ULA has completed functional checkouts of the new chassis and the cards, and all hardware is performing normally.
These kinds of technical issues happen too often on ULA launches. Company engineers always fix them, but it never appears they fix them permanently. Too often on launches they pop up again, causing more scrubs.
The goal should be to fix them so they never pop up again, and your launches can begin to launch reliably, on time. And we know it can be done, because SpaceX has done it.
The Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa, today announced he has canceled his “Dear Moon” Starship mission that was supposed to take him and a bunch of artists and writers on a fly-by mission to the Moon.
Maezawa suggested the cause of the cancellation was uncertainty over the project development, saying he signed the contract in 2018 based on the assumption the launch would come by the end of 2023. “It’s a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch,” Maezawa said. “I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time.”
This decision really suggests to me that Maezawa’s whole project was simply a PR stunt. It seems strange to cancel now, when actual test launches of Superheavy/Starship are taking place and showing solid and speedy progress.
No matter. I have no doubt others will show up and buy flights. I also would not be shocked in the slightest if another billionaire shows up to and offers to fly the artists and writers who won seats on Maezawa’s proposed flight.
Go bunny! Last night SpaceX successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its 14th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
58 SpaceX
26 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 66 to 40, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including other American companies, 58 to 48.
UPDATE: The launch is now scheduled for June 5, 2024 at 10:52 am (Eastern).
For reasons that appeared related to the ground system’s of ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket, the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner’s capsule was scrubbed today at T-3:50.
It appears they want to try again tomorrow at 12:03 pm (Eastern), assuming ULA can figure out what happened.
The repeated scrubs and delays that have so far prevented this launch are beginning to remind my of my childhood watching the early NASA launch attempts during the Mercury program. Then, they hadn’t done this before, and were being very careful about everything.
Now, it seems that NASA, ULA, and Boeing are acting the same way, and that is probably because they are very nervous about Starliner and don’t want anything to go wrong.
I had intended to embed the live stream, but slept late (it IS the weekend, y’know). Sorry.
An evening pause: Those familiar with the original series, The Prisoner, will find this quite amusing. As the filmmaker notes on the youtube webpage, “And yes, this is cheesy as crap. I made it that way on purpose. Be seeing you!”
And if you aren’t familiar with the original, which was a truly unique and very surreal spy TV show of the 1960s, watch the original opening first. It is amazing how close this new version matches, in a ridiculous way, the shot angles and action of the actual opening sequence.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
NASA has now announced the broadcast schedule for tomorrow’s 12:35 pm (Eastern) launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its first manned mission to ISS.
NASA will provide live coverage of prelaunch and launch activities for the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test, which will carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to and from the International Space Station.
Launch of the ULA (United Launch Alliance) Atlas V rocket and Boeing Starliner spacecraft is targeted for 12:25 p.m. EDT Saturday, June 1, from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Starliner will dock to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at approximately 1:50 p.m., Sunday, June 2.
The live stream will begin on NASA TV at 8:15 am (Eastern). I will embed that live stream here tomorrow. As this start time is more than four hours before launch, expect there to be endless NASA propaganda for most of that time. My advice is to tune in at around noon.
Let us all pray that all goes well on this flight. Boeing’s recent track record has generally be horrible. We can only hope its engineers have gotten all of the kinks out of this capsule.
