Tag: commercial

Is the Saxavord spaceport in the UK about to finally get approved for launches?

9:22 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

According to the head of the Saxavord spaceport in the UK, it is finally poised to get all the necessary approvals from the government of the United Kingdom that will allow the first launches before the end of this year.

Following on from the CAA licence being granted just before Christmas, management at SaxaVord Spaceport is confident it will receive its ‘range licence’ later this month to finally become a “fully-fledged spaceport”. This second licence, also issued by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), allows rockets launched from SaxaVord to use the airspace.

Sounds great, eh? Except that the spaceport is still waiting approval from a local commission of its plan for allowing spectators to watch launches. In addition, no launch license has yet been issued to any rocket company. The German company Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) is planning to take over one specific launchpad at Saxaford where it hopes to do as many as ten launches per year, with the first test launch later this year. The UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has not yet issued that license.

Another rocket startup, ABL, is also waiting CAA approvals. Its first test launch (which failed in January 2023) was conducted in Alaska, with a second launch planned there in the next month or so. If successful the company hopes to launch regularly from Saxaford, assuming the CAA gives it approval.

Saxaford submitted its license applications to the CAA in November 2022, with the hope launches could begin in 2023. It took the CAA however more than a year to issue the spaceport license, and it still has not issued the range license, nor has it issued RFA any launch licenses yet. For these companies to prosper the government approval process has got to be streamlined.

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Harp & VolfgangTwins – Paint It Black

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The music is great, but I generally dislike these music videos that put the performers in some beautiful place that is also a place where it is absolutely impossible to record a performance. They then do lip synch and editing to hide the fact that the performance is faked. Ugh.

Still, as I said, the music is great, and the scenery is beautiful.

Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.

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Blue Origin is targeting a first unmanned landing of its manned lunar lander in 2025

10:36 am

Blue Origin's Blue Moon manned lunar lander
An early visualization of Blue Moon

According to one Blue Origin official, the company is now targeting its first unmanned landing of its manned lunar lander, Blue Moon, for sometime in 2025, far sooner than previously expected.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is aiming to send an uncrewed lander to the surface of the moon in the next 12 to 16 months, according to the executive in charge of the development program. John Couluris, senior vice president for lunar permanence at Blue Origin, provided an update on the company’s moon lander program on CBS’ “60 Minutes” news program on Sunday. “We’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today,” Couluris said. “I understand I’m saying that publicly, but that’s what our team is aiming towards.”

Blue Moon is shown in the graphic to the right. Though being built to provide NASA a second manned lander in addtion to SpaceX’s Starship, this first mission will simply bring cargo to the surface, as a test of the lander itself.

If Blue Origin can keep even somewhat close to this schedule, we will likely have two manned moon landers doing test flights at almost the same time.

A sidebar: Note the lander’s height, as well as the narrow footprint of its landing legs. New graphics of this lander from Blue Origin show the same high center of gravity with an even narrower footprint for the legs. One wonders why. Wouldn’t it make sense to have those legs deploy outward more?

This issue applies also to SpaceX’s Starship, which will also have a high center of gravity. When SpaceX’s rockets land on Earth (both Falcon 9 boosters and Starship), most of their fuel is gone so the bulk of the mass is near the bottom where the engines are, even though the boosters stand very high. On the Moon however these vehicles will be landing heavily loaded, with cargo and fuel. This raises a stability question that was illustrated sadly by the tipping over recently of Intuitive Machines Odysseus lander.

I am not an engineer, so I admit that my off the cuff analysis here is very questionable. Nonetheless, one wonders.

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SpaceX almost completes dress rehearsal countdown of Starship/Superheavy

10:02 am

According to a tweet from SpaceX, the company yesterday conduceted a dress rehearsal countdown of Starship/Superheavy, ending the rehearsal at T-10 seconds so that no static fire test of Superheavy’s engines occurred.

Starship completed its rehearsal for launch, loading more than 10 million pounds of propellant on Starship and Super Heavy and taking the flight-like countdown to T-10 seconds.

Prior to all its launches SpaceX routinely does this kind of rehearsal, but always ends them at T-0 and a short engine burst. That it did not do so here suggests either some issue prevented it, or the company was doing tests of its propellant loading procedures. Either way, it is likely another dress rehearsal countdown will be required before the actual test flight can occur.

I also suspect the FAA is involved in this in some way, demanding certain actions by SpaceX before the agency issues the launch license. At the moment there is no word when that license will be issued, though Elon Musk keeps saying on X that it is coming “soon.”

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Australian rocket startup gets government approval for its spaceport

9:55 am

Proposed Australian commercial spaceports

The Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space has now received a spaceport licence from the Australian government, allowing launches to occur from its Bowen spaceport on the northeast coast of Australia, as shown on the map to the right.

The company describes the approval from [Ed Husic Federal Minister for Industry and Science], who is also the minister in charge of the Australian Space Agency, as a vote of confidence in Gilmour’s technical capability, paving the way for the launch of Australia’s first sovereign-made rockets, ‘bridging Country to Sky’. Gilmour Space has also secured approval from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, enabling the operation of the spaceport at Abbot Point.

Not all is unicorns and rainbows however. First, it appears Gilmour began negotiating for this approval two years ago, so the government took a looong time to say yes. The other spaceport on the map has been awaiting for a launch license for about the same length of time, and has still not gotten it.

Gilmour also wants to do its first test launch of its Eris rocket in the next few months, but it is still awaiting its launch license from the Australian Space Agency. We are therefore about to find out whether Australia’s government can issue that permit in the next few months, or will instead emulate Great Britain, and bog things down with endless red tape.

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JPL requests proposals from the private sector for Mars exploration

9:44 am

Capitalism in space: JPL, which is the lead agency running NASA’s very troubled Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, has now issued a request for proposals from the private sector for doing a variety of Mars missions.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a request for proposals Jan. 29 for “commercial service studies” for future robotic Mars mission concepts. The studies, with a value of $200,000 or $300,000, would be carried out over 12 weeks. The studies are intended to examine four specific design reference missions to explore commercial opportunities to support Mars exploration: delivery of small payloads of up to 20 kilograms to Mars orbit, delivery of large payloads of up to 1,250 kilograms to Mars orbit, services to provide high-resolution imaging of the Martian surface and communications relay services between Mars and Earth.

Missions to provide imaging or communications from Mars orbit could quite easily be provided by numerous private companies. Delivering payloads to the Martian service is exactly what SpaceX proposes with Starship, and is also what several lunar lander companies have now been doing.

Up until now, JPL has always built everything in-house, or if it didn’t it designed and managed everything very closely. The result with MSR is a project that is now poorly managed, vastly over budget and behind schedule, and very likely to fail. This proposal suggests JPL is now recognizing that private enterprise might be able to do it better, as NASA has now proven with its shift from being the builder to becoming merely a customer.

If so, this proposal might be indicating the first step at JPL and NASA in imposing a major change in MSR itself, coming as it does just days after the release of an inspector general report about that project’s many problems.

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Texas approves SpaceX land swap

9:31 am

Despite a concerted effort by a small group of activists to stop it, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission yesterday approved a proposed land swap that would give SpaceX 43 acres of state park land in exchange for receiving 477 acres in a nearby wildlife refuge.

The commission said that the land swap “would create a tenfold return,” allowing the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to begin planning for a new state park that would give the public access to fishing, kayaking, hiking and other outdoor activities.

…The 43 acres it would give to SpaceX are “noncontiguous,” with the commission noting that most of the acres “do not connect to each other or to areas offering public access at Boca Chica State Park.”

“These smaller, noncontiguous tracts do not provide beach access and are dotted among private properties or immediately adjacent to SpaceX’s facilities, meaning they aren’t readily available for public use and provide less cohesive wildlife habitat than offered by a connected and consistently managed tract of conservation land,” the announcement reads.

The opposition came from the same activist groups that have been attempting by lawfare in every way to shut SpaceX down. They claim in the article at the link that “SpaceX has a history of being a bad neighbor, wreaking havoc on the communities and habitat nearby,” but there is zero evidence of this. Even Fish & Wildlife was forced in its own environmental report to admit that there was no reason to block Starship/Superheavy launches at Boca Chica. And the general community is enthused about the presence of SpaceX because of the billions of dollars of new investment and tens of thousands of new jobs it has brought to the Brownsville region.

These activist groups are simply another visible expression of the irrational hatred the left now holds for Elon Musk, because he has dared defy the left in a number of ways. Sadly, these groups routinely get strong help from every media source (also part of that left), always getting quoted and always getting treated as if they are a major political force in the region, when only a tiny minority in south Texas is on their side.

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The beat goes on: SpaceX launches twice today

5:36 pm

UPDATE: This post is changed because I missed an earlier launch today from SpaceX, when it launched 53 payloads, including many smallsats using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. It then followed with a successful launch of another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

On the Vandenberg launch, the first stage successfully completed its fifth flight, landing back at its landing zone at Vandenberg. In the Cape Canaveral launch, the first stage completed its thirteenth flight. landing on a droneship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

22 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined 25 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX now leads the rest of the world, excluding American companies 22 to 19.

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SpaceX successfully launches four NASA astronauts to ISS

9:17 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched four NASA astronauts to ISS, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral on the company’s eighth operational manned mission for NASA, and the thirteenth overall manned mission launched by SpaceX since May 2020.

The Dragon capsule, Endeavour, is flying its fifth manned flight. The first stage completed its first flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The crew is expected to dock with ISS on March 5, 2024. The crew is scheduled to fly a standard six month mission.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

20 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined 23 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX now leads the rest of the world, excluding American companies 20 to 19.

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Watch video from Varda’s return capsule as its comes back to Earth

9:42 am

I have embedded below video taken from inside the capsule of the commercial startup Varda from its release from the Rocket Lab service module throughout its descent back to Earth.

The capsule had been launched in June 2023, carrying equipment to manufacture HIV drugs in space and then return them to Earth for sale. Even though the company had begun negotiations with the FAA and the Air Force two years prior for landing that capsule in the Air Force’s test range in Utah, those agencies blocked its planned return in the September of 2023, and was only able to do it last month. This mission is demo flight, with three others now scheduled.

For the video, Varda included a window looking up outside the capsule, and a camera to film everything that occurred outside that window during descent, release of parachutes, and impact on the ground. It is quite fascinating, as you can see that the capsule initially tumbles, then as the atmosphere thickens its aerodynamic shape causes it to stablize with its heat shield at its bottom.
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German rocket startup ships suborbital test rocket to Australia for launch

9:28 am

The German rocket startup Hyimpulse has now packed its SR75 test rocket for shipment to Australia for a suborbital test flight taking off from Koonibba Test Range on that nation’s southern coast.

The launch at Koonibba will also assist HyImpulse as they continue development of their SL1 Orbital Launcher. The SL1 Orbital Launcher will use ten of the SR75 rocket motors to lift payloads of up to 600kg to low earth orbit and could be launched from the Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex [part of Koonibba] in the future.

The launch campaign is scheduled to begin from mid-April with both companies targeting a launch at the end of April through to early May subject to regulatory approval. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrase immediately raises concerns, as Australia is part of the British Commonwealth, with laws based on Great Britain’s. In Great Britain the red tape from those laws has acted to stymie all launches, destroying one company (Virgin Orbit) and threatening the viability of two spaceports. In Australia there have been indications that such red tape is doing the same to new spaceports on the northern coast. We shall see if that April launch happens. If it is delayed because of “pending regulatory approvals” it will confirm that the Australian government is as much a problem as Great Britain’s.

Hyimpulse is one of three German rocket startups, with Rocket Factory Augburg and Isar Aerospace the other two. It however has been very quiet in the past few years, with the other two companies garnering the most publicity as they prepare for their own first test launches. This story suggests however it might actually be the first to fly, despite the lack of news reports about it.

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Lockheed Martin offers to buy startup satellite maker Terran Orbital

9:38 pm

Lockheed Martin now has submitted an offer to buy the startup satellite maker Terran Orbital for $293 million.

Lockheed Martin has submitted a nonbinding offer to buy satellite maker Terran Orbital’s 223 million outstanding shares for $1 each and pay $70 million for its outstanding warrants.

Lockheed Martin also offered to cover about $313 million of the company’s outstanding debt.

Lockheed already owns 28.3% of Terran Orbital, and uses the satellite maker to produce its military satellites, so this deal seems a good fit. It also fits the overall long term strategy of Lockheed, which has been investing in a number of other startups (such as rocket startups Rocket Lab and ABL). The company has clearly seen the future. Rather than continue working like an old-style bloated big space company, it has been using these new companies as models for its future work.

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NASA shuts down Goddard $2 billion demo refueling program

3:43 pm

After more than a decade of work and more than $1 billion spent, NASA yesterday shut down a Goddard Space Flight Center program, dubbed On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1), that would have attempted to refuel a defunct the Landsat-7 satellite.

This Space News article details the program’s long history:

OSAM-1 started about a decade ago as Restore-L, with the goal of launching as soon as 2020 to refuel Landsat 7. The mission was renamed OSAM-1 in 2020 with the addition of payloads to perform in-space assembly and manufacturing activities.

The mission, though, suffered significant cost overruns and delays. As of April 2022, the mission’s total cost, once projected to be between $626 million and $753 million, had grown to $2.05 billion and its launch delayed to December 2026. NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), in an October 2023 report, concluded the project would likely suffer additional overruns, with an estimated cost at completion as high as $2.17 billion and a launch of between March and June 2027.

The program was originally conceived by Frank “Cepi” Cepollina, who had run the program in the 1980s to use the shuttle and standard parts on satellites to successfully repair the Solar Max satellite, and then headed the program at Goddard that ran all the repair missions to the Hubble Space Telescope. It was his correct contention that designing satellites and spacecraft with standard modular parts would not only allow for replacement and repair, it would reduce the cost of getting into space while increasing increasing profit margins.

The problem was that Cepi’s operation was a government program, divorced from cost controls and profit. Unlike the many private orbital tug companies that are now building and flying the same technology, developed quickly and for relatively little, the Goddard program experienced endless delays and cost overruns. In the end, private enterprise has overtaken the government, and made this program superfluous. Kudos to NASA’s management for making the hard decision to shut it down finally.

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Local county now in full support of SpaceX land swap

8:41 am

According to a local Cameron county judge, who had previously expressed opposition, county officials including himself are now in full support of the proposed land swap, giving SpaceX 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park land in exchange for 477 acres at a national wildlife area about 10 miles away.

A special meeting of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission to vote on this land swap is now scheduled for March 5, 2024 in Austin, and it appears it is ready to approve. That meeting however should be entertaining, because it also appears that the small minority of leftist activists organizations in the area that oppose everything SpaceX is achieving are organizing carpools to attend the meeting. Expect them to perform the typical shennigans of the left, screaming and shouting and attempting to take over the venue to prevent the vote.

What these activists of course refuse to recognize, or simply don’t care, is that the change of opinion by local officials is because the local community and in fact the majority of Texans support what SpaceX is doing. It has revitalized the Brownsville area, bringing billions of new investment capital and tens of thousands of new jobs to the region. It has also demonstrated repeatedly it is being a good steward to the environment at Boca Chica, and will do much as a launch site to help preserve the coastal wildlife there, just as NASA has done at Cape Canaveral for three quarters of a century.

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SpaceX and China complete launches

10:40 pm

Two successful launches today, first from China and then from SpaceX.

First, China launched what it called a”high-orbit internet services” satellite into orbit, its Long March 3B rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China. No word where the rocket’s four strap-on boosters or core stage crashed in China.

Then SpaceX launched another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage successfully completed its 11th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

19 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined 22 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX remains tied 19-19 with the rest of the world, excluding American companies.

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Marilyn Monroe – Happy Birthday/Thanks For The Memories

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Another bit of cultural history from the 1960s. From the Youtube webpage:

Marilyn footage singing to JFK on his gala birthday bash on May 19th 1962. The running joke for the evening, as planned, was that Marilyn was late! it was planned that way for the event. Everything we see Marilyn do on stage was rehearsed right down to her arm movements and jumping up and down at the end of the song as we can see in the rehearsal photos before the event. so Marilyn did this spot on as planned.

Sadly, she would be dead by August, and Kennedy by November of the next year.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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“Thar’s gold in them there asteroids!”

11:44 am

Actually, the “gold” in the quote refers less to the actual element and more to the potential wealth lurking within the resources available in many asteroids in space. I base this optimistic assessment, which is looking at the very long term and not the near future, based on the following chart, just published in a new white paper report [pdf] dubbed “Asteroid Mining: Key to Large-Scale Space Migration or Rocky Road?” The chart itself comes from this October 2023 research paper.

The estimated resources in the metallic asteroids, compared to Earth

Except for gold, the estimated abundances in metallic asteroids of all these important minerals exceeds the entire reserves contained on Earth, by many times. And even though the asteroid reserves of gold do not exceed that of Earth, that in-space gold is likely far easier to access and mine. As the report notes:
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Rocket Lab unveils a family of four different service modules for all kinds of satellites

9:54 am

Rocket Lab continues to expand its product line beyond just rockets, today unveiling a family of four different types of service modules, designed to provide maneuvering, communications, and power to satellites.

The four service modules, dubbed Photon, Lightning, Pioneer, and Explorer, are each designed to serve different types of satellites, from low orbit to geosynchronous. The company is also developing a larger rocket, Neutron, in addition to its Electron rocket.

Presently only Electron and Photon are operational, both having serviced multiple customers. Neutron is still scheduled for a first launch later this year, though a delay into 2025 is expected. It is not clear when Lightning, Pioneer, and Explorer will make their first flights.

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Update on Starship/Superheavy preparations at Boca Chica

9:41 am

Link here. After two separate but aborted dress rehearsal countdowns, the rocket has been destacked with Superheavy rolled back to the assembly building.

After two Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) aborts, SpaceX opted to destack Ship 28 before removing Booster 10 from the Orbital Launch Mount (OLM). The Booster has since rolled back to the Production Site, while Ship 28 conducted standalone testing on Pad B, opening with a Spin Prime test on Monday.

A March launch of Flight 3 for Starship is still possible, pending the completion of full stack testing and approval from the FAA.

While the aborts suggest some technical issues occurred that need addressing, the destacking and additional work could also be for other reasons. The FAA has still not issued a launch license, and is demanding certain actions before doing so. It could be that the company is being forced to make certain upgrades on these prototypes it would have rather left to the next test launch with more advanced prototypes.

Either way, it now appears that a March launch is possibly threatened.

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Astra’s founders slash their offer price to buy the company

9:31 am

The two founders of the startup Astra have now slashed their offer price from $1.50 to $0.50 per share to buy the company and take it private.

Kemp and London cited several reasons for cutting the share price. They included continued cash burn by the company since they tendered the original offer and higher “non-operating expenses” as the company used multiple third-party advisers to assess options. They also said the special committee, as well as customers and investors, sought a plan that ensured a sufficient cash balance to support company operations once the deal closed.

It appears that they are willing to let the company go into bankrupty rather than pay their original offer. The new offer of $0.50 per share however remains significantly below the present trading price of about $1.76.

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ULA begins stacking Atlas-5 rocket for launching the first manned mission of Starliner

9:26 am

ULA has begun to assemble the Atlas-5 rocket that will hopefully launch Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its first manned mission to ISS, presently targeting a late April lift-off.

The rocket’s main stage was transferred from the nearby Advanced Spaceflight Operations Center to the integration facility Wednesday, Feb. 21, where it will await integration with the rocket’s upper Centaur stage and Starliner. The spacecraft will carry NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the orbiting laboratory for a short stay of about one to two weeks before returning to a landing site in the southwest United States.

The late April date appears to be a slight delay from previous announcements.

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Major layoff expected at Northrop Grumman’s facility at Redondo Beach, California

9:20 am

On February 26, 2024 Northrop Grumman issued a required notice to its employees at its facility at Redondo Beach, California, that a major layoff of about a thousand employees, about 14% of its workforce at this location, is upcoming.

No reason was given for the cuts, nor did the notice indicate what divisions at the facility would be most affected. However, the cancellation only two weeks ago of a $733 million satellite contract with the Space Force — due to scheduling issues and budget overages — is likely a factor. In addition, the cost overruns in building the habitable module for NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station probably also contributed.

The company has also had problems with its Antares rocket, which relied on Russian engines and a Ukrainian-built first stage. It is presently grounded while Firefly designs and constructs a new American-built first stage. Northrop has had to also spend extra money to buy launch services from SpaceX to get its Cygnus cargo capsule to ISS.

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Odysseus’ tip-over likely caused because it landed without good elevation data

9:08 am

It appears that the improvised switch to a NASA range finder instrument just before landing only partly worked during Odysseus’s landing attempt on the Moon, causing the spacecraft to hit the ground at too great a speed with too much laterial motion, resulting in the snapping of one leg and the lander tipping over.

Apparently, Odysseus could no longer process altitude data from the NASA instrument once it was within 15 kilometers of the surface. It had to rely on its optical cameras, a poor substitute.

By comparing imagery data frame by frame, the flight computer could determine how fast it was moving relative to the lunar surface. Knowing its initial velocity and altitude prior to initiating powered descent and using data from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) on board Odysseus, it could get a rough idea of altitude. But that only went so far. “So we’re coming down to our landing site with no altimeter,” Altemus said.

Unfortunately, as it neared the lunar surface, the lander believed it was about 100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was. So instead of touching down with a vertical velocity of just 1 meter per second and no lateral movement, Odysseus was coming down three times faster and with a lateral speed of 2 meters per second.

Though the spacecraft landed upright, the high speed and sideways motion caused one leg to snap, and the spacecraft then fell over. In this sideways position Odysseus’ main solar panel could not get enough sunlight, forcing the mission to end prematurely.

A final press conference summing up the mission is scheduled for 2 pm (Eastern) today.

Was the mission a success? The failures and problems during touchdown illustrated engineering and management issues that must be addressed before the next flight. At the same time, the mission’s number one goal was to soft land on the Moon, and it did do so, even with those serious engineering problems.

More important, this flight’s first and foremost goal was an engineering test of that technology. In this sense that mission succeeded brilliantly, revealing those last technical issues.

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FAA announces it has rubber-stamped SpaceX’s investigation of the November Starship/Superheavy test launch

9:56 am

The FAA yesterday announced that it has completed its review of SpaceX’s investigation of the November Starship/Superheavy test launch and has approved the company’s conclusions.

The Federal Aviation Administration has concluded its review of SpaceX’s investigation of the second Starship launch in November, with the regulator saying Monday that it accepted the “root causes and 17 corrective actions” identified by the company.

While this means the investigation is now closed, SpaceX must implement all the corrective actions and apply for a modified launch license before it can fly Starship again. “The FAA is evaluating SpaceX’s license modification request and expects SpaceX to submit additional required information before a final determination can be made,” the regulator said in a statement Monday.

You can read a SpaceX update of its investigation here. As previously reported, when Starship vented the extra oxygen carried to better simulate a payload it caused “a combustion event” and fires that cut off communications.

This resulted in a commanded shut down of all six engines prior to completion of the ascent burn, followed by the Autonomous Flight Safety System detecting a mission rule violation and activating the flight termination system, leading to vehicle breakup. The flight test’s conclusion came when the spacecraft was as at an altitude of ~150 km and a velocity of ~24,000 km/h, becoming the first Starship to reach outer space.

Despite SpaceX’s report, which states the company “has implemented hardware changes” to prevent a reoccurance, the FAA has still not yet issued a launch license. Based on these updates and Elon Musk’s own prediction, it appears a license will be forthcoming in the next two weeks, matching my December prediction of a March launch. Expect SpaceX to quickly launch, as it has “more Starships ready to fly,” and it wants to fly them fast in order to refine the engineering so as to move to operational flights.

It is also possible that the FAA will continue to slow-walk its approvals, and SpaceX might be left hanging for more than two weeks. Had the government not been involved, all signs suggested that SpaceX would have done its third test flight in January, and would have now been gearing up for its fourth flight. That was the kind of pace SpaceX set when it was doing its first Starship test flights during the Trump administration. The government under Joe Biden’s presidency however is not allowing that kind of launch pace.

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Have modern space engineers forgotten the importance of keeping things simple?

5:11 pm

SLIM on its side
The Japanese lander SLIM, on its side.
Click for original image.

In the past four years a number of different companies and nations have attempted eight times to soft land an unmanned lander on the Moon. Sadly, the track record of this new wave of lunar exploration, the first since the 1960s space race, has not been good, and might possibly suggest some basic fundamental design errors, based not so much on engineering but on our modern culture and management. To review:

  • April 11, 2019: Beresheet, built by an Israeli non-profit, failed just before touchdown when a command from the Earth caused its engines to shut down prematurely.
  • November 21, 2019: India’s government-built Vikram lander failed just before touchdown when it began to tumble and ground controllers could not regain control.
  • April 25, 2023: Hakuto-R1, built by the commercial Japanese company Ispace, failed just before touchdown when its attitude sensors mistakenly thought it had reached the surface when it was still three miles high and shut down the engines, causing it to crash.
  • August 20, 2023: Luna-25, built by Russia, crashed on the lunar surface when its engines fired for longer than planned when it began its descent, due to quality control errors during construction.
  • August 23, 2023: India’s succeeded on its second landing attempt, its Vikram lander touching down several hundred miles from the Moon’s south pole and successfully releasing its Pragyan rover. Both operated for about two weeks, until the onset of the harsh lunar night.
  • January 8, 2024: Peregrine, built by the private company Astrobotic, experienced a major fuel leak shortly after launch, making a landing attempt on the Moon impossible. It managed to operate in space for several days, reaching the distance of lunar orbit before coming back to Earth and burning up in the atmosphere.
  • January 25, 2024: SLIM, built by Japan’s space agency JAXA, successfully touched down, though it landed on its side because the nozzle on one of its engines fell off during descent, causing an unbalanced thrust. The spacecraft still functioned, and has now even survived one lunar night, something no one expected.
  • February 23, 2024: Odysseus, built by the private company Intuitive Machines, touched down somewhat softly on the Moon near the south pole, but upon landing then fell over on its side, blocking some antennas so that full communications has so far not been possible (though the spacecraft is functionable and in touch with Earth). This issue has meant that no significant data or images from the lander have so far been transmitted to Earth.

Of these eight attempts, only one mission has been entirely successful, India’s second. Of the seven others, five crashed or failed before even reaching the Moon, while two managed to soft land but with significant problems.
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