Tag: commercial

Falcon Heavy successfully launches Psyche asteroid mission

8:25 am

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket this morning successfully launched the Psyche mission to the metal asteroid Psyche, lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The two side boosters successfully landed at their landing zones at the cape, each completing their fourth flight.

Psyche will now spend the next six years traveling to the asteroid Psyche, first flying by Mars in 2026 to gain some speed to get there. It will then go into orbit around the asteroid for almost two years.

The leaders in 2023 launch race:

72 SpaceX
45 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successfully launches 84 to 45, and the entire world combined 84 to 73. SpaceX by itself only trails the entire world combined (excluding American companies) 72 to 73.

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Astrobotic resumes suborbital test flights of assets purchased from Masten bankruptcy

8:32 am

The startup lunar landing company Astrobotic has resumed flights and testing of the suborbital spacecraft built by the company Masten Space Systems and obtained when that company went bankrupt.

Astrobotic announced Oct. 10 that it completed the first campaign of test flights by Xodiac, a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing vehicle, since acquiring it and other Masten Space Systems assets last year. Xodiac conducted four flights from Mojave, California, hovering just off the ground to test plume-surface interactions ahead of future lunar landing missions, supporting research by the University of Central Florida.

Xodiac was built several years ago by Masten Space Systems, based in Mojave, and made more than 150 low-altitude flights for a variety of technology demonstration investigations. However, the company filed for bankruptcy in July 2022 and its assets acquired by Astrobotic that September for $4.5 million.

Xodiac is now part of Astobotic’s Propulsion and Test Department, which includes other assets from Masten Space Systems as well as many of its former employees, who say they have picked up where they left off before the bankruptcy.

Astrobotic has also resumed development work on a larger Masten suborbital spacecraft, Xogdor, also designed to launch and land vertically, but actually reach space.

Because Astrobotic is mostly focused on developing lunar landers, Masten’s technology is perfect for refining that capability for landing on the Moon. It is also ideal should Astrobotic decide to develop a reusable rocket for launch from Earth.

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October 12 Falcon Heavy launch of Psyche probe faces bad weather

10:09 am

At present there is only a 20% chance that the Falcon Heavy launch of NASA’s Psyche asteroid probe will occur on October 12, 2023 at 10:16 am (Eastern) as planned out of Cape Canaveral.

The launch window only extends until October 25, 2023, after which the entire project would have to be redesigned, requiring a significant delay.

SpaceX has become very adept at threading the needle when weather restricts its Starlink launch abilities, but it has less flexibility with Psyche. To increase its chances it has scrubbed a planned Starlink launch this week from Cape Canaveral in order to give the Falcon Heavy launch more launch opportunities.

Regardless, the live stream can be accessed here.

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Aerojet Rocketdyne satellite power units are chronically failing

9:53 am

According to space insurers, problems on power units built by Aerojet Rocketdyne on four different satellites are going to cost the industry about $50 million in claims this year.

According to multiple insurance sources, Yahsat’s Al Yah 3, Avanti Communications’ Hylas 4, and Northrop Grumman’s two Mission Extension Vehicles (MEV-1 and MEV-2) are operating with reduced power to their thrusters following a problem with onboard Power Processing Units (PPUs).

The PPUs from Aerojet Rocketdyne provide the electrical power their thrusters need for station-keeping in geostationary orbit (GEO). One of the sources said Al Yah 3, Hylas 4, and MEV-2 have each lost one of two onboard PPUs since the issue emerged in 2022. The youngest of these spacecraft, MEV-2, launched in 2020.

While the article at the link focuses on the impact to space insurers for these additional claims, what I see are serious quality control problems at Aerojet Rocketdyne, now part of the company L3Harris after a summer acquisition. The new management of L3Harris better aggressively address this, or else it will find its $4.7 billion acquisition a big waste of money.

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Michael Knowles – Celebrating Columbus

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I posted this two years ago, and think it should be seen again. As I wrote then,

On this day when all should be celebrating Christopher Columbus and his willingness “sail beyond the sunset,” to use a phrase from Tennyson, this short video give us an accurate picture of the man, his times, and his achievements. It also puts the lie to the bigoted, hateful, leftist slanders that have been used in recent years to poison his legacy.

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Spanish rocket startup successfully completes first suborbital test launch

10:05 pm

The Spanish rocket startup PLD today successfully completed its first suborbital test launch, a short flight of its Miura-1 prototype rocket, lifting off from its spaceport in Spain.

I have embedded video of the launch below, cued to just before launch. Though the plan had been to recover the first stage using parachutes, it is unclear if this occurred or was even attempted. The launch was at night, making recovery difficult or much slower, and because the broadcast was in Spanish there was no translation,

Regardless, the data from this launch will be used by the company to build its orbital rocket, Miura-5.

» Read more

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ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket launches first two Kuiper satellites

11:16 am

ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket today successfully launched the first two prototype satellites of Amazon’s proposed 3,200-satellite constellation to provide broadband globally in competition with Starlink and OneWeb.

As of posting, the satellites had not yet deployed, with the rocket’s upper stage still firing its engines to bring the rocket to its proper orbit. The live stream unfortunately ended early at this point.

Though the Atlas-5 is being retired, to be replaced by ULA’s still unlaunched Vulcan rocket, about seventeen rockets remain in the company’s launch manifest. All have payloads, so any additional ULA launch contracts must rely on Vulcan.

This was ULA’s third launch in 2023, so it does not change the leader board for the 2023 launch race. The company predicted it would complete ten launches in 2023, a prediction that with less than three months left in the year seems unlikely for it to achieve.

70 SpaceX
45 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 82 to 45, and leads the entire world combined 82 to 72. SpaceX by itself still trails the rest of the world, excluding American companies, 70 to 72.

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Italy’s biggest bank will invest in SpaceX

10:02 am

Italy’s largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, announced today that is joining in SpaceX as a private investment partner.

No details of the investment deal were released, but it likely adds a significant amount to the almost $11 billion in investment capital SpaceX has already gotten from the private sector, most of which is being used to develop Starship, Superheavy, and Starlink.

Very clearly, the investment community sees value and large future profits from SpaceX and Elon Musk, and wants to support it. Contrast this with the attitude of the Biden administration and the left, which apparently prefers to squelch this progress for the sake of power.

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