An evening pause: From their 1941 movie, In the Navy.
Hat tip sippin_bourbon, who “actually re-enacted this for a few classmates in 7th grade, then walked out
while they scratched their heads. The teacher, who had been watching caught me in the way out the door and told me not to do that on a test.” Sadly, a modern teacher today might consider this good math.
A Colorado company, Wilson Aerospace, on June 6, 2023 filed a lawsuit against Boeing, claiming that the company conspired with Wilson’s direct competitors to steal the designs of its specialized tool for installing the core station engines on SLS.
According to the lawsuit, after some initial discussions, Boeing arranged for a “live” demonstration of Wilson’s torque device, during which participants could handle and operate it to verify the tool’s capability and performance. What Wilson claims it did not realize, however, is that some of the participants in this demonstration were not Boeing employees. “Wilson later learned that at least seven of those in attendance for the live presentation were external to Boeing and were, at the time, employees of Wilson’s direct competitors,” the lawsuit states. “This fact was concealed from Wilson who was deceived by Boeing and the ‘Bogus Boeing Employees’ into giving the presentation by falsely suggesting to Wilson that everyone was a Boeing employee.”
The complaint alleges that Boeing subsequently used information from this demonstration, as well as proprietary drawings and designs, to work with Wilson’s competitors to develop a cheaper solution. “Boeing concealed these facts from Wilson as part of its scheme to defraud Wilson and to transmit Wilson’s IP to its direct competitors,” the lawsuit states.
The company is demanding a jury trial. If its charges are proved true, it will be another piece of evidence demonstrating the level of corruption that exists at Boeing.
ULA yesterday successfully completed a full dress rehearsal launch countdown new Vulcan rocket, including a short 2-second static fire test of the rocket’s two first stage BE-4 engines.
A Vulcan rocket fired its two BE-4 engines in a static-fire test called the Flight Readiness Firing (FRF) at 9:05 p.m. Eastern from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 41. The engine start sequence started at T-4.88 seconds, ULA said in a statement an hour after the test, with the engines throttling up to their target level for two seconds before shutting down, concluding the six-second test.
The test appeared to go as planned. “Nominal run,” Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, tweeted moments after the test.
This dress rehearsal had originally been scheduled for late May, but issues on the rocket required ULA to scrub the launch and return the rocket to the assembly building.
There appear to be only three issues remaining before that first launch can occur. First there is the hydrogen leak that caused the destruction of the rocket’s Centaur upper stage during a static fire engine test in March. The company has apparently still not determined what action — if any — must be taken on this.
Second is whether the rocket’s primary payload, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, is ready for launch. It appears it has completed all ground testing, but there were questions whether its software has been adjusted for a new landing site that NASA assigned it in February.
Third is scheduling. Peregrine’s monthly launch windows are only four to five days long each month. This limitation also has to be juggled with other ULA launches on the same launchpad, using its soon-to-be retired Atlas-5 rocket.
An evening pause: An Aerosmith cover with Postmodern Jukebox.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
According to papers filed with the FCC, Firefly’s July launch attempt of its Alpha rocket, carrying a set of NASA cubesats, has now been delayed one month to August.
Meanwhile, a second launch by Firefly for the Space Force is presently tentatively scheduled for June, and the company says it is wrapping up preparations for that launch. That contract’s prime focus is to demonstrate to the military the ability to launch with only a 24-hour notice.
If so, then this new rocket company, which has only launched twice before, with the second launch barely reaching orbit, will be launching twice in only a matter of weeks, both times from its launchpad at Vandenberg.
With its full constellation of 634 satellites in orbit, OneWeb has now made its satellite constellation broadband service available to the maritime industry.
With 634 OneWeb operational satellites now in orbit, the OneWeb constellation is complete and fully operational down to 35 degrees latitude. OneWeb will have the final ground stations completed and operational requirements in place, ensuring the company remains on track to deliver full global maritime services by the end of the year. Now OneWeb will start selling services to the maritime industry, via its specialist maritime distribution partners.
OneWeb and its partners have also developed a range of hardware terminal products which are available from trusted maritime communications providers Intellian and Kymeta. Offering hardware terminal products from two established providers with different form factors enables greater choice for customers.
More information here.
NASA yesterday named the winners in its annual student rocket launch competition, which took place at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama on April 15, 2023.
The live stream of the competition is available here, cued to when the rockets begin launching.
The number of awards is a bit too many, making it seem that NASA wanted to make sure every team got some form of participation award. Nonetheless, these students demonstrated that they will soon be building real rockets, as part of the new and emerging rocket industry.
An evening pause: I posted this same song in 2022 from a different performance during the same 1977 tour. This version however was recorded as part of a documentary and includes some backstage footage that is definitely worth watching.
Has tip Rex Ridenoure, who notes that “Heart was the first rock band with female leads who also wrote all their own songs.”
An evening pause: Performed live on television 1965. A great song to start the week.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
In a test of a system to wirelessly transmit electricity from solar power stations in orbit, researchers from Caltech have succeeded in transmitting a small amount of electricity from an orbiting cubesat launched in January.
“Through the experiments we have run so far, we received confirmation that MAPLE can transmit power successfully to receivers in space,” [professor Ali] Hajimiri says. “We have also been able to program the array to direct its energy toward Earth, which we detected here at Caltech. We had, of course, tested it on Earth, but now we know that it can survive the trip to space and operate there.”
This small scale test mainly proved the technology can survive launch, operate in space, and transmit power back to Earth. Whether the rate of transmission can be profitable remains as yet unknown. Nor is it yet known the effects such energy transmissions through the atmosphere will have.
The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg on June 2, 2023 successfully completed a full duration engine test of the upper stage of its rocket.
Launch service provider Rocket Factory Augsburg AG (RFA) has successfully hot fired its upper stage for a full duration of 280 seconds. This marks the successful completion of the Integrated System Test (IST) campaign, in which a staged-combustion Helix engine was integrated into an upper stage tank system and hot fired several times up to full duration in the final test. This is the 1st time in Europe that a privately developed staged combustion upper stage has been successfully hot fired.
The company will also use the Helix engine in its first stage, so this test essentially proved its capability for that use as well. With this success, the company will now start constructing the first stage, with the first launch of the entire rocket targeting the end of this year.
Two important tidbits about this story. First, the test was done at a private testing facility in Germany. In the past all such testing was done under the control of the the European Space Agency, at its sites. Germany has essentially now broken that monopoly in its push to develop its own independent rocket industry of competing private companies.
Second, the launch is presently aiming to take off from a launchpad the company has leased and is building at the new Shetland Island spaceport in the United Kingdom. I wonder if it will have the same regulatory problems as Virgin Orbit in getting its launch permit. If so, that launch won’t happen this year.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX this morning successfully launched another cargo Dragon freighter to ISS, lifting off on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.
This cargo capsule is on its fourth flight. The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The capsule carries about 7, 000 pounds of supplies, including another set of new solar arrays for ISS, and will dock with ISS tomorrow.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
38 SpaceX
20 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads China 43 to 20 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 43 to 36. SpaceX by itself leads the world 38 to 36, but when you add other American companies it still trails everyone else combined 38 to 42.
