An evening pause: Performed live, 1964. Also includes a short interview of Rivers afterward, who by the way wrote the song Secret Agent Man.
Hat tip Dan Steele.
Capitalism in space: Sierra Space announced today that NASA has completed, apparently for the second time, the design review for the Orbital Reef space station that the company wants to build in partnership with Blue Origin and others, thus allowing the actual design of the station to begin.
This press release announcement, on August 22, 2022, is a bit puzzling, as Sierra Space made almost the exact same announcement in April 2022. What, did NASA have to do this twice? Did issues come up after the first approval? Was the agency reviewing different things?
Regardless, NASA as usual is slowing things down considerably. Sierra Space and Blue Origin, the primary partners in this private space station project, first announced it in October 2021. It took the government almost a year to simply approve the basic concept so that the design phase could finally begin. At this pace it will be 2090 before the station is launched.
Link here. Bottom line: Engine static fire tests continue, even as the company continues to install new engines on Starship prototype #24, intended for the first orbital launch.
Two launches have just occurred in the 2022 launch race. First, SpaceX today successfully launched another 53 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage successfully landed on its drone ship in the Atlantic, completing its ninth flight.
China in turn used its Long March 2D rocket to launch three military reconnaissance satellites, at what was the early morning hours of August 20, 2022, China time. The launch path took the rocket over China’s interior as well as Taiwan, with the first stage crashing somewhere in China.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
37 SpaceX
31 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 52 to 31 in the national rankings, and the entire world 52 to 49. The 52 launches so far this year is now the fifth best total for the U.S. since the launch of Sputnik in 1957.
Capitalism in space: The Dragon cargo freighter that arrived at ISS in July 16th has now undocked from the station, with a planned splashdown scheduled for tomorrow.
To show how routine these commercial missions have become, it appears that neither NASA nor SpaceX are bothering to live stream the splashdown. NASA will simply provide updates on the web.
Capitalism in space: Having successfully completed both a full dress rehearsal countdown and static fire test of its fully stacked Alpha rocket, Firefly Aerospace has now scheduled the rocket’s launch for September 11, 2022.
These details come from a tweet by the company, so details are very limited. Nonetheless, this will be the company’s second attempt to complete an orbital launch. The first attempt, in September 2021, failed when one of its first stage engines shut down prematurely.
The company had hoped to attempt this second launch ten months ago, but was forced to delay it when the federal government demanded its chief investor, Ukrainian billionaire Max Polykov, first sell off his share in the company.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, working in partnership, have successfully flown a hypersonic missile prototype for the second time in eleven months.
For the latest test, the HAWC prototype was carried under the wing of an aircraft and flown to high altitude, where it was released. A solid rocket booster then accelerated the vehicle to supersonic speed and a scramjet ignited. An engine without moving parts, a scramjet uses its forward motion to compress the incoming air into a shockwave that burns with fuel, producing enough thrust to propel the missile to over five times the speed of sound.
The latest prototype had only minor modifications from the previous flight and met all of its objectives. The data recovered by telemetry will be used to improve the digital models using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data, which will increase the efficiency and performance as the weapon concept comes closer to practical deployment.
As this is a military project, not many details about the prototype were released, such as its size, speed, design.etc. One shouldn’t even trust the illustrations of the missile, provided by Northrop Grumman. Each shows the missile with a rounded lifting body shape on its bottom side, likely to protect and guide it on its re-entry, but there is no guarantee the illustrations’ shape matches that of the real missile.
Capitalism in space: Maritime Launch Services yesterday obtained a 20-year land lease for its Nova Scotia spaceport from the province of Nova Scotia.
The lease covers 334.5 acres, and is renewable for an additional 20 years.
Unlike other spaceports, Maritime isn’t merely providing a launch site for rocket companies. Instead the company will also launch smallsats itself, using a Ukrainian-built rocket dubbed the Cyclone-4M. Initially the plan was to fly all launches in this manner, but the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia has caused Maritime to look for other launch providers as well.
Capitalism in space: Sky Perfect JSAT, a Japanese satellite communications company, today awarded SpaceX a launch contract using its giant Starship/Superheavy rocket to put its Superbird-9 communications satellite into orbit in 2024.
Superbird-9 will be launched by SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle in 2024 to geosynchronous transfer orbit. SpaceX’s Starship is a fully reusable transportation system that will be the world’s most powerful launch vehicle. SKY Perfect JSAT and SpaceX will continue to work together ahead of the launch of Superbird-9 Satellite.
Sky Perfect is the first communications satellite company to choose Starship for a satellite launch. It is however the rocket’s fourth signed customer. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa made a deal in 2018 for a flight around the Moon, while NASA chose Starship in 2021 as the manned lunar lander in its Artemis program. UPDATE: SpaceX also has a second private manned customer, Jared Isaacman, whose present deal with SpaceX calls for two Dragon flights followed by a Starship flight.
Sky Perfect is not a new company, with sixteen satellites already in orbit providing communications, broadband, and entertainment to Japan and the Far East. It likely made this deal because it got a very good launch price, with options to back out if the rocket’s on-going development gets delayed by too much. It also made the deal because it helps to solidify Starship’s future, something Sky Perfect probably sees as a win considering the significant reduction of launch costs expected from Starship/Superheavy.
Click for full figure.
Capitalism in space: In partnership with scientists at MIT, the Planetary Science Institute, and others, Rocket Lab engineers this week published a detailed description of the company’s planned privately funded mission to Venus, presently targeting a launch in May 2023.
From the paper’s abstract:
The Rocket Lab mission to Venus is a small direct entry probe planned for baseline launch in May 2023 with accommodation for a single ~1 kg instrument. A backup launch window is available in January 2025. The probe mission will spend about 5 min in the Venus cloud layers at 48–60 km altitude above the surface and collect in situ measurements. We have chosen a low-mass, low-cost autofluorescing nephelometer to search for organic molecules in the cloud particles and constrain the particle composition.
The figure above is figure 6 from the paper. It shows the probe’s planned path through Venus’s atmosphere. If the mission launches in May ’23 the probe would enter the atmosphere in October ’23.
Capitalism in space: Astrobotic, a startup focused on building lunar and planetary unmanned landers, has now made a formal bid to buy the remaining assets of Masten Space Systems, which had also been a startup focused on planetary missions but recently went bankrupt.
In a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Delaware Aug. 14, Masten said it received a “stalking horse” bid of $4.2 million for Masten’s assets, including a SpaceX launch credit worth $14 million, from Astrobotic. The agreement, in effect, sets a minimum price for the sale of those assets but does not prevent Masten from seeking higher bids through an auction process that runs through early September.
The agreement appears to supersede an earlier agreement between Masten and a third lunar lander company, Intuitive Machines, included in Masten’s Chapter 11 filing July 28. That agreement covered the SpaceX launch credits alone and Masten did not disclose the value of it in its original filing.
Masten’s long term specialty has been vertical take-off and landing, something it has successfully done for the last several years on suborbital flights. This technology would be of great value to both Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines in developing their own first lunar landers.
Capitalism in space: The merger deal between the Italian orbital tug company D-Orbit and the special purpose acquisition investment company (SPAC) Breeze has been canceled.
The Italian company had hoped to raise $185 million from the deal to expand staff and accelerate investments in ION Satellite Carrier, its orbital transfer vehicle (OTV) that completed its first commercial mission in late 2020.
However, “financial markets have changed substantially” since the deal was announced Jan. 27, Breeze CEO Douglas Ramsey said, amid rising interest rates, soaring inflation, and an ongoing war in Ukraine. “As we look ahead, we remain focused on identifying another value creating opportunity for Breeze shareholders,” Ramsey added.
A SPAC is a shell company designed solely to gather investment capital that is then used to either buy or merge with another company. In the process the company that is taken over goes public, its stock available on the stock market for trade. There have been a number of such takeovers in the space sector in the past few years, but most have turned out poorly for the investors in those SPACs, as noted in the article:
Of the nine space companies that went public through SPAC mergers in 2021, only Rocket Lab’s shares finished the year trading above their price when the merger closed. [Ed: both Virgin Galactic and Astra are examples of these failures.]
Demand for new SPAC deals has also been waning amid declining investor appetite for risk and increasing regulatory scrutiny over how these blank check firms operate. More than 40 SPAC mergers have been canceled so far this year, reported Bloomberg.
To put it more bluntly, investors have found these SPACs to be poor investments, and are bailing from them. This is likely what happened at Breeze, thus forcing the cancellation of the deal with D-Orbit.
An evening pause: This has been going around, but with a French narration that has no translation. The version below overlays a pleasant music track that I think enhances it nicely.
Hat tip Rex Ridenoure.
From Jay, BtB’s stringer:
As Jay notes, it looks like an obvious knockoff of SpaceX’s Merlin engine.
The army however will continue to build instruments and payloads for satellites, as well as continue to maintain its 1st Space Brigade, which monitors satellite data and health during military deployments.
Some weekend news from BtB’s top stringer, Jay.
Of the 1,784 objects tracked, 1,132 have burned up in the atmosphere, with the orbits of another 539 to decay in the next three years. The fate of the remaining 113 objects is unclear, but they will clearly be a threat for longer.
A professional software hacker not only recently succeeded in hacking the terminals SpaceX sells customers to use its Starlink satellite internet service, he first got a bounty from SpaceX for doing so, then made his technique freely available on the web for everyone else.
[Lennert] Wouters is now making his hacking tool open source on GitHub, including some of the details needed to launch the attack. “As an attacker, let’s say you wanted to attack the satellite itself,” Wouters explains, “You could try to build your own system that allows you to talk to the satellite, but that’s quite difficult. So if you want to attack the satellites, you would like to go through the user terminal as that likely makes your life easier.”
The researcher notified Starlink of the flaws last year and the company paid Wouters through its bug bounty scheme for identifying the vulnerabilities. Wouters says that while SpaceX has issued an update to make the attack harder (he changed the modchip in response), the underlying issue can’t be fixed unless the company creates a new version of the main chip. All existing user terminals are vulnerable, Wouters says.
Starlink says it plans to release a “public update” following Wouters’ presentation at Black Hat this afternoon, but declined to share any details about that update with WIRED prior to publication.
Wouters is a researcher at the Belgian university KU Leuven.
While it can certainly help SpaceX to figure this out, by publishing the hack to the world Wouters looks like a blackmailer unsatisfied with his payoff who is now following through with his blackmail threat. One also wonders why SpaceX, as part of its bounty payment, did not require Wouters to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
An evening pause: This short analysis of a spectacular race track crash right at the start of a Formula 1 race illustrates well the sophistication of modern technology, not only in protecting the driver’s life but in providing the information for reconstructing the cause of the accident. And it all happens during an ordinary sports broadcast.
You’ll probably want to watch this more than once to catch how one car gets flipped over on its back.
Hat tip Tom Wilson.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch another 46 Starlink satellites into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its 10th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. It was also the fourth flight for both fairing halves. During the live stream the announcer also mentioned that because SpaceX has recently switched to using Starlink for transmitting its launch video feeds, the loss of picture signal that use to occur during the landing of the first stage on the drone ship has almost completely vanished.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
36 SpaceX
30 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 51 to 30 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 51 to 48.
I should also add that the United States has now matched the number of launches achieved in 1962, the nation’s fifth highest total of successful launches in a single year.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX engineers yesterday conducted a second static fire engine test of the 7th prototype of its Superheavy first stage booster, firing a different engine for 20 seconds.
The action ramped up on Thursday (Aug. 11) for Booster 7, which conducted a much longer static fire on Starbase’s orbital launch mount. The burn, which occurred at 3:48 p.m. EDT (1948 GMT), lasted for 20 seconds, SpaceX said via Twitter (opens in new tab).
The long-duration burn aimed to “test autogenous pressurization,” according to a tweet posted by Musk (opens in new tab) shortly before Booster 7 fired up.
Expect these engine tests to occur on a regular basis over the next few weeks, as engineers ramp up their operations in preparation for the first orbital flight of both prototype #7 with Starship prototype #24 stacked on top.
An evening pause: Another clever musical repurposing of household electronic gear.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
Capitalism in space: The FCC yesterday approved SpaceX’s communications license for one or more Starship orbital launches, with a six month launch window beginning on September 1, 2022.
This FCC approval is not a launch license, which must be given by the FAA. It does tell us that SpaceX will not attempt the first orbital launch of Starship before the end of this month. It also tells us that the company likely plans on an aggressive test program from September ’22 through February ’23, assuming the FAA and the federal bureaucracy finally stops blocking that program.
The FCC today canceled a $900 million subsidy it had awarded to SpaceX in December 2020 as part of a federal program to help establish broadband service in rural communities.
The reasoning for canceling the award given at the link is very unclear. However, since the award a lobbying effort by Starlink’s competitors — teamed up with Democrats in Congress — to cancel the award has been on going. It now seems to have succeeded.
Another clue to explaining this cancellation is timing. The award was announced at the end of the Trump administration, when his appointees controlled the FCC. The cancellation took place during the Biden administration, with the FCC now controlled by Democrats who are increasing revealing themselves to be very hostile to private commercial space in general and Musk and SpaceX in particular.
Nonetheless, it seems absurd to give SpaceX any such subsidy, regardless of the politics. As I said in February 2021:
No one, including SpaceX, should get these funds. SpaceX is proving they aren’t necessary to get the job done (bringing fast internet service to rural communities). Moreover, the federal government really doesn’t have the cash, deep in debt as it is.
Sadly, just because the FCC cancelled its award to SpaceX we should not expect as modern taxpayers that the money won’t be spent. Expect the Biden administration to instead dole it out to its preferred vendors.
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) yesterday opened an investigation into the purchase of InMarsat by Viasat, announced in November ’21, to see it that merger would “result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”
This investigation will clearly delay the merger. It also appears somewhat counter-productive, considering that Inmarsat has been having trouble making money in recent years due to the market’s shift from its big geosynchronous satellites to constellations of smallsats in low Earth orbit, such as SpaceX’s Starlink. Viasat meanwhile has been desperately trying to block Starlink because of that very competitive threat.
By merging, these two satellite companies might survive and compete with the new orbital constellations. Otherwise, they might both go out of business, thus reducing competition. It seems the CMA will be shooting itself in the foot if it blocks this merger.
Click for original photo.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX engineers yesterday performed static fire tests of both its Superheavy prototype #7 and its Starship prototype #24.
The Superheavy prototype fired one engine, and did so only a few weeks after that prototype experienced an explosive event the launchpad during earlier fueling/engine tests. Yesterday’s engine test was the first time any Superheavy prototype had fired its engines on the launchpad.
The Starship prototype meanwhile fired two engines on a nearby vertical test stand.
SpaceX’s plan is to stack #24 on top of #7 and attempt an orbital launch test that will have the Superheavy prototype land in the Gulf of Mexico while the Starship prototype reaches orbit and then returns to Earth in the Pacific northeast of Hawaii. Based on the company’s normal pace of operations, that flight is probably only weeks away. However, before that flight engineers will have to do a full static fire test of all 33 of #7 engines, and then like do it again with Starship #24 stacked on top.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch another 52 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The first stage completed its third flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The fairings also completed their third flight.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
35 SpaceX
29 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 50 to 29 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 50 to 37.
