Moniuszko School of Music Symphony Orchestra – Barber’s Adagio
An evening pause: Performed live 2015.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Tag: commercial
South Korea’s space bureaucracy attempts to encourage private sector development
South Korea’s space agency, the Korea Aerospace Administration, has announced a new effort to encourage that country’s private sector in developing rockets and satellites.
[A] plan will be established to link the National Space Council, the highest policy decision-making body overseeing government space policy, with the Aerospace Development Policy Review Committee. Systems will also be established for workforce training in aerospace and the designation of a space development mission center.
To establish an aerospace economic ecosystem, the participation of the private sector in the development and utilization of launch vehicles and satellites will be expanded. In the aviation sector, future aircraft technologies, including urban air mobility (UAM), will be secured, and localization of aircraft materials and components will be supported. To encourage smooth research and development (R&D) investments in aerospace corporations, the aerospace fund will be revitalized with improvements to regulations and support for overseas expansion.
Overall, a lot of this sounds like meaningless bureaucratic gobbledygook. The goal might be to expand the private sector, but the program still has the space agency running everything, from its new government-built Nuri rocket to its other satellite development programs.
Nonetheless, the desire to encourage the private sector is good. It could simply be that South Korea’s private sector is not mature enough yet to take the lead, and the agency by this announcement is working to push it forward.
General Atomics successfully tests fuels to be used in an in-space nuclear propulsion system
The company General Atomics announced yesterday that it has successfully tested the fuels it wants to use in an in-space nuclear propulsion system for transporting ships to the Moon and beyond much faster and more efficiently than is presently possible with chemical engines.
[General Atomics] executed several high-impact tests at NASA’s MSFC in Huntsville, AL. The nuclear fuel was tested with hot hydrogen flow through the samples and subjected to six thermal cycles that rapidly ramped-up to a peak temperature of 2600 K (Kelvin) or 4220° Fahrenheit. Each cycle included a 20-minute hold at peak performance to demonstrate the effectiveness of shielding the fuel material from erosion and degradation by the hot hydrogen. Additional tests were performed with varying protective features to provide further data on how different material enhancements improve performance under reactor-like conditions.
It has been known since the 1960s the nuclear propulsion is more efficient that chemical engines. It can burn for longer time periods at higher levels, thus making it possible to get to other planets more quickly, in some cases bypassing the need to depend on orbital mechanics.
The problem however has been political. Getting these nuclear engines into orbit has been too much of a political hot potato. The fear of such engines and radioactivity, largely irrational, has made it impossible to get them built. NASA is now trying again.
Japan’s government wants its private sector to do all its future space station work, not its space agency JAXA
In a major shift of power away from its government, the Japanese science and technology ministry is presently drafting a policy that would have that country’s private sector lead all work that Japan does on any of the future commercial private space stations being built, not its space agency JAXA as has been done now for decades.
The draft policy specifies how Japan will be involved with the next space station. According to the draft, “the private sector will have such responsibilities as managing [the new space station], and JAXA will support its use.”
JAXA is currently responsible to the management and maintenance of the ISS and serves as the point of contact for its commercial use. However, the government will select a Japanese private-sector company to be the point of contact for the next space station. When JAXA, research institutes or other companies plan to use the ISS, they will have to contact the next station’s point of contact.
While Japan wants to have one of its own modules on one of the commercial stations, as it presently has on ISS, it appears the government does not want JAXA to lead this project. Instead, it wants Japan’s private sector to run the show by working out its own deals with the private commercial stations. At present the Japanese company Mitsui is partnering with Axiom on its station, so this is likely the first station where a deal could be worked out.
It seems that Japan is trying to poke its private sector out of its doldrums. Right now that sector seems unable to take any action on its own. It sits and waits for guidance from the government before acting, and even then acts timidly, waiting to see if the government approves of each step. What the Japanese government now wants instead is some independent action, not linked to government policy.
Trump picks Janet Petro of Kennedy to be acting NASA administrator, not Jim Free of headquarters
In a surprise move, the Trump administration announced yesterday that the expected person to take over as acting administrator of NASA until Jared Isaacman is approved by the Senate would not be Jim Free. the present associate administrator at NASA headquarters, but Janet Petro, who is presently director of the Kennedy Space Center.
NASA had so much assumed Free had the job that it had already listed him as acting administrator today on the NASA webpage.
There has of course been speculation as to why Trump made this unexpected choice. My guess is that Trump wants to reduce significantly the size of NASA headquarters, and thus wants someone from outside to run it for the present. Petro has been at Kennedy since 2007. Before that she was in the private sector.
Free has been a working out of DC for several years, and thus has stronger ties to the workforce there.
The decision also makes it clear to the NASA bureaucracy who is in charge. Decisions will no longer be made by that bureaucracy without strong input from Trump.
SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites
Though the live stream tonight started after launch, SpaceX tonight successfully placed 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy.
The first stage completed its eighth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The 2025 launch race:
9 SpaceX
4 China
1 Blue Origin
Anna Lapwood – Hans Zimmer’s Cornfield Chase & Saint-Saëns’ Sinfonie #3 Organ finale
An evening pause: Performed live 2024. Seem celebratory enough for Inauguration Day.
Hat tip Alton Blevins, who also needs to clean out his full inbox so that he can receive emails. It has been full now for several weeks, and all emails to him thus bounce.
Veritasium – The SAT Question Everyone Got Wrong
An evening pause: Hat tip Chris McLaughlin.
Has the tourist balloon company Space Perspective gone belly-up?
Space Perspective’s Neptune balloon capsule
According to the local paper Florida Today, the high altitude tourist balloon company Space Perspective owes more than $90K rent on its facility at Florida’s Space Coast Regional Airport, and has apparently ceased activity in mid-December.
Activity appears to have largely ceased at Space Perspective’s “Mission Control” office building at the Titusville airport, where the facility has appeared largely unoccupied the past two weeks. Nobody answered the doorbell during a trio of FLORIDA TODAY visits since Jan. 6, and no vehicles were in the parking lot just before 1 p.m. Wednesday.
FLORIDA TODAY has left messages unsuccessfully attempting to contact Space Perspective executives. One vehicle was parked in the Mission Control lot Tuesday afternoon, and an employee answered the doorbell. A FLORIDA TODAY reporter passed along a written message seeking comment from company officials.
Another source notes that numerous former employees in recent weeks have been looking for new jobs in the Florida region.
The Florida Today article also documents several other cases where the company had had problems paying its bills.
It is possible the company is dead. There is also the possibility that it remains alive, but has decided to skip town because it is now setting up operations in the Middle East. In one of its last major announcements in November 2024 it revealed it is in negotiations with a number of Middle Eastern nations for flying balloon flights there.
All in all this story is very puzzling. The company had already built its Florida factory for making its balloons, and had done one test flight of a prototype manned capsule for tourist flights. It seemed poised to begin commercial operations. To shut down so suddenly now suggests a lot of things, some of which could indicate some very dishonest motives indeed.
U.S and Norway sign deal to allow U.S. companies to launch from Andøya
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
The U.S. and Norway have now signed an agreement that will make it possible for American rocket and satellite companies to launch from Norway’s Andøya Spaceport, easing State Department rules that up until now made such launches difficult if not impossible.
[The Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA)] will ensure the protection of U.S. technology, enabling the transfer of commercial launchers to Norway. Similar agreements have been established between the U.S. and other allied nations, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
Right now Andoya has only two rocket customers, the German startup Isar Aerospace and a Polish suborbital startup, SpaceForest. Both hope to do launches sometime this year. Unlike the red tape that the United Kingdom has imposed on its new spaceports, Norway appears to be doing everything it can to grease the wheels so that launches can occur quickly and on schedule.
Pink Floyd – Us And Them
An evening pause: Performed live 1994.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
Starship lost near end of its orbital burn; Superheavy successfully captured by chopsticks
Superheavy captured for the second time
In today’s seventh test flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy large rocket, the results were decidedly mixed.
First the success: Superheavy once again performed perfectly, getting Starship up to speed and releasing it for its orbital flight. It then successfully returned to the tower at Boca Chica, where the chopsticks arms caught it. This was the second catch in three attempts. While we should all expect SpaceX to continue to refine Superheavy, right now it appears to be largely ready to go.
Next the failure: Shortly after stage separation Starship fired its own engines and proceeded upward towards orbit. At one point close to when it was suppose to shut off its engines to begin its orbital coast phase, something went wrong. Some engines cut off, but one did not, at least according to data projected on the screen. At that point all telemetry from the ship ended.
After another ten minutes of analysis flight controlers declared the ship lost. What happened remains unclear, but it is certain SpaceX engineers are digging hard to find out.
One unfortunate question remains that must be asked: Where is the ship, and is there a chance it will come down somewhere unexpected? Its orbit is such that it will naturally fall in the Indian Ocean, but the engine issues might have changed that orbit somewhat.
UPDATE: Locals in the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean post videos on X (here and here) of Starship breaking up overhead. It appears that if any debris reaches the ground it will land in the Atlantic.
Live stream of the 7th test orbital flight of Starship/Superheavy
I have embedded below the live stream of today’s attempt by SpaceX to complete the 7th orbital flight of its giant rocket Starship/Superheavy. The stream goes live at around 3:15 pm (Central), 45 minutes before the start of the one hour launch window beginning at 4 pm (Central).
For embed purposes I am using the youtube version provided by Space Affairs. Once SpaceX’s feed goes live on X you can then switch to it, found here.
The flight’s goals:
Superheavy: Complete the second catch of the booster at the launch tower using the chopsticks. The booster will also be reusing an engine from the fifth test flight to confirm its viability for reuse.
Starship: Test new avionics, a new fuel feed system, and new heat shield tiles as well as the ablative material used underneath the tiles. Test a different placement and configuration of the flaps. The ship will also test engineering that will eventually lead to it being captured by the chopstick tower on return.
There will be an engine restart during Starship’s orbital cruise phase to further confirm the Raptor-2 engines can work reliably when needed during a full orbit de-orbit burn.
Finally, the ship will test its Starlink deployment system, releasing 10 dummy Starlink satellites.
» Read more
Rocket Factory Augsburg gets conditional licence for launching at Saxavord
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
After years of delays and multiply approvals that in the end turned out to be meaningless, the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced today that it has finally issued a launch license to the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg to do an orbital test launch from the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands.
The license however is not entirely without strings.
The licence is effective immediately, but a number of conditions need to be met before a launch can take place — including insurance arrangements and international agreements. The company is also required to give the CAA 60 days’ notice before launching.
Rocket Factory had hoped to launch last year, but it lost its RFA-1 rocket during a static fire test in August. It was planning a subsequent launch on the assumption the CAA would approve its licence in 2024. That assumption was wrong however. Even if the rocket had not been destroyed and was ready to go, the CAA was not, and continued to twiddle its thumbs until 2025. It is this twiddling that caused another German rocket startup, Hyimpulse, to abandon its plans to do launches from Saxavord, and switch to a new spaceport in Australia.
Rocket Factory now says it will attempt its first launch before the end of this year. Let’s see if the CAA lets that happen.
Blue Ghost operating as expected on its way to the Moon
Blue Ghost selfie. Click for original.
Firefly has announced that all is well with its Blue Ghost lunar lander, now in an ever expanding Earth orbit on its way to the Moon. Engineers have acquired signal and completed its on-orbit commissioning.
With a target landing date of March 2, 2025, Firefly’s 60-day mission is now underway, including approximately 45 days on-orbit and 14 days of lunar surface operations with 10 instruments as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
…Firefly’s Blue Ghost will spend approximately 25 days in Earth orbit, four days in lunar transit, and 16 days in lunar orbit, enabling the team to conduct robust health checks on each subsystem, calibrate the propulsion system in preparation for critical maneuvers, and begin payload science operations.
NASA today released the first picture downloaded from the spacecraft, shown to the right. The view looks across the top deck of the lander, with two NASA science instruments on the horizon.
Once it lands it is designed to operate for about two weeks, during the lunar day. It will attempt to further gather some data during the long two-week long lunar night, but is not expected to survive to the next day.
Stoke Space raises another $260 million, more than doubling its private capital
Stoke’s Nova rocket
The rocket startup Stoke Space, which is attempting to develop its own fully reusable two stage rocket, announced yesterday that it has successfully raised $260 million of private investment capital in its most recent funding round, more that doubling what it had raised previously and bringing the total raised by the company to $480 million.
The funding round involves new and existing investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Industrious Ventures, Leitmotif, Point72 Ventures, Seven Seven Six, the University of Michigan, Woven Capital, and Y Combinator, among others.
The company’s Nova rocket will use what has become the standard for first stage re-use, a vertical take-off and landing. Its second stage however will also be reusable, something no one has yet succeeded in doing, and Stoke intends to do it in a radical manner. Rather than use a single nozzle on its upper stage, it has instead gone with a new design whereby thrust is released through a string small nozzles placed in a ring on the bottom outside of the stage. The base of the stage can thus get a heat shield. The plan is to have the stage return much like many returnable capsules, with the small nozzles then used to provide control and thrust during landing.
This new influx of cash indicates renewed confidence in the company among the investor class. Its recent successful test of its Zenith first stage engines probably help fuel that confidence.
It had hoped to do its first test launch this year from Cape Canaveral, but has recently been burdened with new environmental red tape that might impact those plans.
Blue Origin successfully launches New Glenn
New Glenn 18 seconds after liftoff
Better late than never! After almost a decade of development and five years behind schedule, Blue Origin tonight successfully launched its massive New Glenn orbital rocket, placing its second stage into orbit carrying a demo version of the company’s Blue Ring orbital tug.
It appears the first stage had a problem during what Blue Origin calls its “booster reentry burn”, which appears somewhat equivalent to SpaceX’s entry burn. Unfortunately no camera views were made available. From that point no further telemetry came down from the first stage, suggesting something had gone wrong enough to require initiation of the flight termination system so the stage would not crash on the landing barge.
The second stage will operate in orbit for six hours, testing Blue Ring.
For Blue Origin this success, though late, is a grand achievement. The company has a full launch manifest, with a 27-launch contract with Amazon for its Kuiper internet constellation. It also has a deal with the Space Force to get the rocket certified for military launches, once it completes two successful launches. Once certified the Space Force very much wants to use it, a lot.
America now has three major rocket companies, SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin. It also has Rocket Lab, which has a smaller rocket but intends to introduce its own larger version in 2025.
The 2025 launch race:
8 SpaceX
2 China
1 Blue Origin
Nor is the launch action over. Tomorrow SpaceX will attempt the seventh orbital test launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, the one-hour launch window opening at 4 pm Central.
Live stream of first New Glenn launch
I have once again embedded below Blue Origin’s live stream of its attempt tonight to complete the maiden launch of its orbital New Glenn rocket.
The launch window of three hours opens at 1 am (Eastern). It would be nice if Blue Origin’s announcers showed some improvement in their delivery tonight but I have doubts. Expect as always lots of “This is so exciting!” and “Aren’t you excited?” and “Isn’t this the most exciting evening yet!” Blah.
As I’ve said, their audience doesn’t want emotion, it wants detailed information provided coolly. If they do that, they will do more to sell their rocket than anything.
UPDATE: It appears Blue Origin management might have seen the blistering criticisms of its launch coverage yesterday. Instead of starting the live stream an hour before, they are now going to start it at T-20 minutes, but have also placed the count on hold at T-20:50. This avoids blather, especially if mission control is not going to provide the announcers any concrete information, as they did yesterday.
The change from simply recycling the count to an actual hold is also a positive change. Simply recycling the count (by adding 20-30 minutes periodically while they work out issues) puts pressure on the launch team unnecessarily. Better to work under a hold.
The count now has been recycled to 30 minutes and is rolling. We shall see if the podcast goes live at 20 minutes.
» Read more
Cicely Parnas & Annie Jacobs-Perkin – Barber of Seville
An evening pause: You can tell they are not only utterly focused on what they are doing, they are having a great deal of fun as they do it.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
7th Starship/Superheavy test launch delayed one day
SpaceX has delayed its planned seventh test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket one day, from today to tomorrow, with the one-hour launch window now beginning at 4 pm (Central) on January 16, 2025.
It appears high winds and rain today were the main factor in the delay. Tomorrow will be better, with the weather continuing to improve over the next few days. We should not be surprised thus if the launch gets delayed one more time for weather.