Tag: competition

Arianespace successfully completes the last launch of Avio’s Vega rocket

9:29 pm

Tonight the last launch of the Vega rocket, built by the Italian company Avio and managed by Arianespace, successfully lifted off from French Guiana, placing a European Earth observation satellite into orbit.

The launch was delayed several years because of a failure during a previous launch that required a major redesign of an engine. Further delays took place when Avio literally lost the tanks for the rocket’s upper stage, and had to improvise a solution (which has never been explained fully).

The rocket will now be replaced by the Vega-C, which after several more launches will be entirely owned and managed by Avio, which will market it to satellite customers without any significant participation of the government middleman Arianespace.

This was only the second launch by Europe in 2024, so the leader board of the 2024 launch race does not change.

86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 56, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 71.

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European rocket startup Maiaspace to begin tests of upper stage engine in ’25

9:58 am

The European rocket startup Maiaspace, a subsidary of ArianeGroup, has announced it will begin static fire tests of the upper stage engine for its Maia rocket in 2025, with a planned first launch before the end of that year.

The first stage of Maia is intended to be reuseable, and has been under development by ArianeGroup for the European Space Agency (ESA) for years.

The rocket’s first stage will essentially be the Themis reusable booster demonstrator, which is also being developed by ArianeGroup under an ESA contract. Initial hop tests of the Themis demonstrator had been expected to begin this year at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. However, the first test of the demonstrator is now not expected until 2025. MaiaSpace will, as a result, have very little wiggle room in its schedule if it is to conduct an inaugural launch attempt next year.

Transitioning this first stage to a wholly private operation will certainly speed up its development, but the transition will take time.

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Sierra Space completes acoustic testing of Shooting Star cargo module that will fly on first Dream Chaser launch

9:45 am

Sierra Space today announced that it has successfully completed acoustic testing of the Shooting Star cargo module that will fly on first ISS mission of its Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle.

During the Direct Field Acoustic Test (DFAN), the test team placed stacks of purpose-built loudspeakers – each one a highly-engineered acoustic device – in 21-ft-tall columns surrounding the spacecraft. Their goal was to test whether the structural elements of Shooting Star could withstand the acoustic environment of a launch on a Vulcan Centaur rocket. Over a four-day period, test engineers blasted the spacecraft with a controlled sound field that was 10,000x higher intensity than the volume of a typical rock concert, recreating the sonic intensity of a launch. Shooting Star withstood acoustic levels greater than 140 dB for several minutes at a time, proving its flight worthiness.

The press release however made no mention as to when the launch will actually take place. Sierra first got the contract to build Dream Chaser in 2016, and was supposed to make its first flight in 2020. That launch has been repeatedly delayed, and is now four years behind schedule. Supposedly it was to take place this year on the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket in the spring of 2024, but was removed from that launch because of delays in preparing Tenacity for launch.

As of today, no new launch date has been announced, and though Sierra says Tenacity will be ready for launch by the end of this year, don’t expect it to happen before 2025.

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Private company launches small test rocket from privately run sea-based platform

9:30 am

The rocket startup Evolotion Space on August 31, 2024 successfully launched a small test rocket from privately run sea-based platform operated by the Spaceport Company, a startup in itself.

The launch itself did not appear to reach space, but was instead designed to test both the rocket and the sea platform’s operation.

The experiment occurred approximately 30 miles south of Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. The test served to validate The Spaceport Company’s sea-based launch equipment and ground support equipment, said the company’s CEO and founder Tom Marotta. “Emerging hypersonic technologies require additional and larger test ranges to accommodate higher cadence testing campaigns,” he said. “With this new commercial facility, we will alleviate the burdens on government ranges and enable at-sea test environments that existing land-based ranges are unable to provide.”

The solid-fueled rocket meanwhile is being developed by Evolution to initially do hypersonic testing for the military.

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NASA asks space industry for proposals on using the shelved Janus probes on mission to Apophis

9:23 am

NASA has now put out a request for proposals from the space industry for refitting the two Janus planetary probes, whose asteroid mission was shelved when its launch as a secondary payload was delayed due to problems with the Psyche primary payload, as a mission to the asteroid Apophis in connection with its April 13, 2029 close approach to the Earth.

NASA has been studying this new mission goal since early 2023, but apparently had failed to come up with a plan. It is now asking the private sector for suggestions on getting it done, including finding the funding for any plans.

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Russia claims its next unmanned Moon mission, Luna-26, is on schedule

9:09 am

Phase I of China/Russian Lunar base roadmap
The original phase I plan of Chinese-Russian lunar
base plan, from June 2021.

According to Russia’s state-run press, its next unmanned Moon mission, Luna-26, is on schedule for a planned launch in 2027, though that press also claims the launch may happen in 2026 instead.

The problem with this claim is that Russia had for years said that this lunar orbiter would launch by 2025. As expected, the mission has not launched on time, as have all of Russia’s 21st century lunar exploration plans. For example, the previous lunar mission, the Luna-25 lunar lander, was originally supposed to land on the Moon in 2021, was not launched until 2023, and ended up crashing on the Moon when the spacecraft did not function properly during a engine burn in lunar orbit.

In the first phase of the so-called China-Russian partnership to explore the Moon, is shown by the 2021 graph to the right, China continues to do all the heavy lifting, and do so pretty much on the schedule predicted. Russian meanwhile continues to do what I predicted back in 2021, get nothing done on time and when launched have problems.

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Largest corporate investor in rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg finalized deal to go private

9:12 am

The German company OHB, the largest corporate investor in the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg, has finalized its deal with the investment company KKR to go private and delist OHB from the German stock market.

OHB announced in August 2024 the deal where KKR would buy shares not owned by the Fuchs family for 44 euros ($48.70) per share. Under the deal, the Fuchs family will maintain its controlling 65.4% ownership of OHB while KKR owns 28.6%. That combined 94% ownership will allow OHB to delist from the exchange, effectively taking the company private.

It appears that both companies are committed to OHB’s investment in Rocket Factory, and by getting OHB delisted it gives them greater flexibility in doing so. It also appears that Marco Fuchs, the CEO of OHB, had decided in the last few years that for rocket startups being a public company was counter-productive in many ways.

“We saw all these SPACs fail. We see very different valuations out there. So, it’s not a good place to be, in the public market, especially in the core business model of doing space projects,” he said at the Space Tech Expo Europe conference. “It’s not exactly what capital markets appreciate.”

In a sense, this deal appears to be a show of support for Rocket Factory, even though its first launch is seriously delayed due to a recent failed static fire test of its first stage that destroyed the stage.

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That sonar-type sound heard on Starliner’s speakers was simply feedback

9:01 am

In a short post today NASA noted that the mysterious sonar-type sound heard on Starliner’s speakers over the weekend was nothing more than simple feedback caused by an “audio configuration between the space station and Starliner” and that the sound stopped when that configuration was adjusted.

The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback. The crew is asked to contact mission control when they hear sounds originating in the comm system. The speaker feedback Wilmore reported has no technical impact to the crew, Starliner, or station operations

In other words, this is not a rare event, and from the beginning was not considered by the astronauts, ground engineers, or NASA management to be a matter of concern. The fix was apparently simple and straightforward, and is part of the work done whenever any new vehicle gets docked and tied into ISS’s systems.

It appears however to have caused many in the news media and in the space world to go nuts simply because it was linked to Starliner and Boeing. This is similar to the recent pattern of assigning all blame to Boeing whenever any Boeing-built plane has technical problems, even if that plane had been purchased by the airline decades earlier and its maintenance was solely the responsibility of the airline for that long.

Boeing is definitely a company in trouble, on many levels. We shouldn’t however look for problems there in the company when they clearly don’t exist.

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China launches “remote-sensing satellites” test satellites

8:51 am

China today successfully placed a classified “group” of “remote-sensing satellites” into orbit to test “new technologies of low-orbit constellations,” its Long March 4B lifting off from the Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China.

That is all the information that China’s state-run press released. No word was released as to where
in China the lower stages crashed. As to the number of satellites launched, according to this independent site, the launch had nine payloads, which suggests but does not confirm nine satellites.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 55, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 70.

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Rocket startup ABL lays off a significant number of staff

9:52 am

As a result of a launchpad fire that destroyed its rocket — just before it was going to make the second attempt to achieve orbit — rocket startup ABL has now laid off a significant but unstated number of staff in order to save money.

In a post on LinkedIn Aug. 30, Harry O’Hanley, chief executive of ABL, said the company was laying off an unspecified number of people. He included the email he sent to company staff after an all-hands meeting to discuss the layoffs.

In 2021 the company had raised almost $400 million in private investment capital, but it is possible that the loss of its first two rockets, one mere seconds after launch and the second before the launch could even occur, has possibly caused some investors to pull their money from the company. It is also possible those investors also recognized that the increased red tape imposed on all rocket companies since the FAA instituted its new “streamlined” Part 450 regulatory rules in 2021 was likely going to delay the next ABL launch attempt so much it made investments in the company no longer viable.

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SpaceX resumes launches with a bang!

9:29 am

Within hours of the FAA clearing SpaceX to resume launches, the company did so most emphatically, launching twice in little more than an hour apart from opposite coasts.

First the company placed 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Then, one hour and five minutes later, the company launched 21 Starlink satellites, the Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg in California. That first stage completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

This fast return to flight underlines the unnecessary delay of at least one day in launches caused by the FAA’s red tape. SpaceX had scheduled at least one of these launches the previous night — and was clearly ready to launch — but had to cancel it because the FAA stood in the way.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

86 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 54, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 69.

2024 is now the second year in a row the U.S. rocket industry has completed more than 100 launches, something it could not do for the first three-quarters of a century after Sputnik, when our precious government used NASA to run our entire space program. Now that freedom and capitalism has managed to wrest some control away from NASA, Americans are finally doing what they would have done in the 1960s, had Congress and President Kennedy not stepped in, first requiring all space exploration be run under a “space program” controlled by NASA, and then passing the Communications Satellite Act in 1962 which forbid Americans from running private profit-oriented launches without government participation.

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NASA names revised crew for next manned Dragon mission to ISS

9:34 am

NASA today named the two astronauts who will fly on the next manned Dragon mission to ISS, to be launched on September 24, 2024 for a six month mission, where they will be joined by the two astronauts who launched on Boeing’s Starliner in June but now will return with them when their Freedom capsule returns in February 2025.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 24, on the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, previously announced as crewmates, are eligible for reassignment on a future mission. Hague and Gorbunov will fly to the space station as commander and mission specialist, respectively, as part of a two-crew member flight aboard a SpaceX Dragon.

The updated crew complement follows NASA’s decision to return the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test uncrewed and launch Crew-9 with two unoccupied seats. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard the Starliner spacecraft in June, will fly home with Hague and Gorbunov in February 2025.

With Starliner now scheduled to return on September 6th and Freedom not arriving until around September 24th, there will be an eighteen day period when Wilmore and Williams will have a limited and more risky lifeboat option on ISS. If an incident should occur that requires station evacuation there is room to squeeze them inside SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule presently docked there, but they will return without flight suits. Their Dragon flight suits will not arrive until September 24th, on the next Dragon. The suits they used on Starliner will not work on Dragon.

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First New Glenn launch, set for October 13, 2024, only has an 8-day launch window

9:16 am

According to an article from Aviation Week today, in order for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to get its payload of two Mars orbiters on their way to Mars it must launch within a very short window lasting only eight days, beginning on the present launch date of October 13, 2024.

The Oct. 13-21 launch window is an ambitious goal. The aft and mid modules of New Glenn’s reusable first stage were recently attached, clearing the path for installation of the vehicle’s seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines, CEO Dave Limp noted in an Aug. 23 update on the X social media site.

A static hot-fire at New Glenn’s Florida launch complex is planned prior to launch. The company did not release the status of the New Glenn upper stage, which is to be powered by a pair of BE-3U engines fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. A hot-fire of the second stage is also pending.

This launch will be the first ever for New Glenn. To get ready for that tight launch window it appears a great deal of work must be done in the next six weeks, some of which Blue Origin engineers will be doing for the very first time.

If there are any issues and that launch window is missed, the two NASA Escapade orbiters, built by Rocket Lab, will face a two-year delay until the next window to get to Mars re-opens. At that point New Glenn will likely do this launch with a dummy payload, since it needs to get off the ground in order to fulfill other launch contracts, including a 27-launch contract with Amazon for its Kuiper satellite constellation.

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NASA awards Intuitive Machines a new lunar lander contract

8:55 am

NASA yesterday announced that it has awarded Intuitive Machines a new lunar lander contract for $116.9 million to carry six NASA/ESA payloads to the surface of the Moon.

The announcement stated that the landing will be in the south pole region of the Moon, but did not reveal the specific location. Of the six science packages, the most important is a European Space Agency-led drill that will obtain samples from as much as three feet down and then analyze them.

The contract calls for a 2027 landing, and will be the fourth targeting the south pole region, following Intuitive Machines first attempted landing there early this year that landed but then tipped over, preventing its science instruments from functioning as planned.

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Starliner to return unmanned on September 6

8:44 am

NASA today announced that Starliner will undock from ISS on September 6, 2024 at about 6:00 PM (Eastern) and will then land six hours later at White Sands in New Mexico.

The announcement touts Starliner’s ability to fly autonomously, but based on what we know this is really not something to brag about. All Dragons do this routinely whether they are manned or not. Starliner required an upload of software to reconfirgure it for this, since it had originally been configured for a manned return and apparently that original software was not designed for an unmanned return.

In other words, the spacecraft as presently designed doesn’t have the ability to switch from autonomous to manned in a simple manner.

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Has the FAA grounded SpaceX?

9:59 am

The FAA statement yesterday seemed quite clear — that the agency was grounding all SpaceX launches until the investigation into the failed landing of a Falcon 9 first stage was completed. That clarity was further accepted by numerous news organizations today, all of which clearly described in their reporting the FAA’s action as a grounding of further SpaceX launches for an unspecified amount of time, from days to weeks. (See here, here, and here for just a few examples.)

Nonetheless, there are strong indications that the FAA’s grounding will be very short. For example, though no dates are presently firm, SpaceX continues to list at least two Starlink launches as well as the Polaris Dawn private manned mission as targeting launches over the next few days, with one Starlink launch still aiming for a 10:18 pm (Pacific) launch tonight from Vandenberg. That liftoff might be tentative, but that SpaceX is still pushing for that launch date suggests it is trying to pressure the FAA to back off.

And SpaceX has good reason to expect that pressure to work. The FAA has already admitted there were no public safety issues from the first stage failure. In the past it has allowed launches to proceed under that condition, even if the investigation was on-going. SpaceX is almost certainly making this point known to the FAA, if its managers don’t know it already. We will find out I think by the end of today.

Even if the FAA backs down, that it even attempted any grounding in this situation was an egregious abuse of its regulatory power. There was no rational reason for it to even hint at doing so, even based on its own regulations as well as its statutory authority. If the goal was to do its job and not to harass SpaceX and Elon Musk, it would have immediately announced that no grounding was required because no issues of public safety were involved in the failure. Instead, it pushed its power, forcing SpaceX to push back.

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Lockheed Martin testing its own inflatable module design

9:40 am

Lockheed Martin recently successfully completed a test of its own inflatable module design, conceived in this case not as a full-scale module but as an airlock for ingress and egress from a space station.

In the Aug. 14 test, the inflatable airlock design was put through multiple, gas-in/gas-out cycles — essentially inflations and deflations with enough nitrogen gas to pressurize the airlock to the point it becomes as rigid as steel — to assess the extent to which its Vectran material strains over time, a process called creep. Knowing how creep affects a Vectran structure will allow Lockheed Martin to properly assess its operational life potential. Test engineers here have also put subscale softgoods habitat designs to the test, purposely bursting them to spotlight their robust nature and determine their pressure thresholds.

With the addition of Lockheed Martin, there are now at least four companies building inflatable modules for sale to space station companies. Sierra Space has the most developed module design, but a company in India recently announced it will build and sell its own. In addition, an American startup dubbed Max Space is building its own test module and hopes to launch next year.

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Chinese pseudo-company launches six satellites from off-shore barge

9:12 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy today completed a launch of six satellites, its Ceres-1 rocket lifting off from a barge off the coast of northeast China.

China’s state-run press once again illustrated how fake these pseudo companies are, in that it made no mention of the company in its official report, stating simply that the launch was completed by “China.” The companies might raise investment capital funds and sign contracts and make profits, but in the end they only do what they are told to do by the Chinese communists, and at any point those communists can confiscate the company for the government’s own purposes.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

84 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 99 to 54, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 84 to 69.

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FAA grounds SpaceX because of first stage landing failure early today

1:36 pm


“Great business you got there! Really be
a shame if something happened to it!”

They’re coming for you next: Once again the FAA has expanded its harassment of SpaceX by now grounding the company from any further launches while it “investigates” the failed landing of a Falcon 9 first stage last night. The FAA statement is as follows:

“The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starlink Group 8-6 mission that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on August 28,” the FAA said Wednesday in a statement. “The incident involved the failure of the Falcon 9 booster rocket while landing on a droneship at sea. No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation.”

The FAA’s actions against SpaceX since Biden became president have consistently been unprecedented and biased against the company. » Read more

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Musk: Starlink will be made available to all cell phones in emergencies

9:34 am

Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX will make its Starlink internet constellation available to anyone with a cell phone should they need it during an emergency in remote areas.

The SpaceX CEO made the comments in an X post as the company, in partnership with T-Mobile, currently seeks approval from the Federal Communications Commission to operate its direct-to-cellular Starlink technology commercially. SpaceX says the satellite-based service would provide supplemental cell coverage to Americans from space that would close mobile “dead zones.” Cellular service providers AT&T and Verizon have raised concerns about the technology, including that it would disrupt their own mobile networks.

In a letter to the FCC on Friday, SpaceX said the service would connect first responders in a variety of environments and would be able to send wireless emergency alerts to everyone — not just T-Mobile customers — in places where there is no earth-based cellular coverage.

While this offer is morally correct, it is also good politics, as it acts as icing on the cake to encourage the FCC to approve that T-Moble license request. At the moment the technical details for making the proposal happen remain murky, but SpaceX’s willingness to offer this emergency service at no charge, something its competitors have apparently not, cannot hurt it in its negotiations with the FCC.

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Boom completes second flight test of one-third-scale prototype supersonic jet

9:28 am

The airplane startup Boom Supersonic on August 26, 2024 successfully completed the second test flight of its one-third-scale prototype XB-1 supersonic jet, taking off from the Mojave Air & Space Port in California.

The flight was manned by the company’s chief test pilot Tristan Brandenburg, and had as its primary engineering goal to test the retraction and deployment of the jet’s landing gear. During the fifteen minute flight the plane climbed to 10,400 feet and a maximum speed of 277 miles per hour.

The test checklist included retracting and extending the undercarriage for the first time, checking the plane’s handling, and the activation of a new digital stability augmentation system for roll damping to help maintain control in stall conditions. In addition, the right wing of the XB-1 was fitted with tufting to monitor the direction and strength of airflow over the wing.

The company plans a 10-flight test program with this prototype, eventually leading to flights exceeding the speed of sound. Boom also claims that its design will reduce the sound of the sonic boom, thus allowing its commercial supersonic jet to fly over land and increasing its commercial value. At the moment it has orders to sell as many as 96 of its full-scale plane to various airlines, including United and Japan.

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SpaceX launches 21 Starlink satellites but loses first stage at landing

8:44 am

SpaceX last night successfully placed 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in the early morning hours.

The first stage however fell over on its drone ship in the Atlantic after landing. This was its 23rd flight, which would have been a record reuse of a Falcon 9 booster had it landed successfully. Because of this failure, SpaceX rescheduled another Starlink launch, delaying it one day until August 30, 2024, as engineers assessed the stage data to determine the cause of the problem. From the video is appears that one leg on the far side, out of sight, either failed to deploy or collapsed after landing.

To be clear, SpaceX anticipates only a one day delay in all its launches because of this issue.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

84 SpaceX
35 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 99 to 53, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 84 to 68.

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Manned Polaris Dawn launch delayed due to weather

9:13 pm

SpaceX tonight scrubbed the launch of Jared Isaacman’s manned Polaris Dawn orbital mission due to poor weather predicted in the splashdown zones off the coast of Florida when the mission would have ended.

The flight has tentatively set now for August 30, 2024, but that remains a very preliminary date.

SpaceX however is not sitting on its hands while it waits for good weather for this manned mission. Tonight it has two Starlink launches scheduled a little more than an hour apart, one from Cape Canaveral in Florida followed by the second from Vandenberg in California. If the first launch is successful its Falcon 9 first stage will set a new record, flying for its 23rd time.

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D-Orbit newest orbital tug deploys four smallsats

10:24 am

The Italian orbital tug company D-Orbit has now successfully deployed four smallsats from its newest tug, having been launched on August 16, 2024 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The tug still has one more satellite to deploy, after which it will remain in orbit as it also carries four additional customer “hosted” payloads that are using the tug itself as their service module.

This is D-Orbit’s second demo mission, the first flying in 2023. It also appears be completely successful, which puts this company in an excellent position to garner future contracts from many small satellite companies. It is also a partner in a $256 million Italian project to test in-orbit robotic satellite repair.

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ABL completes investigation into launchpad fire in July

10:12 am

The rocket startup ABL yesterday released the results of its investigation into launchpad fire in July that destroyed its RS1 rocket during a static fire test prior to an orbital test launch.

In a statement, ABL Space Systems said it ignited the E2 engines in the first stage of the RS1 rocket in the test, but aborted the test after just half a second because of a low pressure reading in one engine that the company said was caused by a faulty pressure sensor. The engines shut down, but a fire then broke out under the base of the vehicle, fed by fuel leaks from two engines. That fire was contained but could not be extinguished by either water or inert gas systems, and the company started offloading kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants from the vehicle.

The launch pad the company uses at Kodiak does not have its own water supply, with the company instead using mobile tanks that ran out of water 11 and a half minutes after ignition. That caused the fire to spread “and a progressive loss of pad systems,” the company stated, including the inability to continue detanking the rocket and eventually telemetry from the rocket.

ABL’s first launch attempt of this rocket in January 2023 failed when the first stages shut down immediately after lift-off and the rocket crashed on the launchpad. It completed its investigation of that failure in October 2023 and was ready for its second launch attempt this summer when the fire described above occurred.

The company has raised several hundred million dollars, with its chief investor being Lockheed Martin, which has also signed a contract for as many as 58 RS1 launches. It increasingly appears those launches might very well go to other providers.

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Firefly delivers its first Blue Ghost lunar lander for final environmental testing

9:58 am

Blue Ghost in clean room
Blue Ghost in clean room

Firefly this week completed the integration of the ten customer payloads onto its first Blue Ghost lunar lander and shipped the lander to JPL in California for final environmental testing before its planned launch before the end of this year.

Following final testing, Firefly’s Blue Ghost will ship to Cape Canaveral, Florida, ahead of its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket scheduled for Q4 2024. Blue Ghost will then begin its transit to the Moon, including approximately a month in Earth orbit and two weeks in lunar orbit. This approach provides ample time to conduct robust health checks on each subsystem and begin payload operations during transit.

Blue Ghost will then land in Mare Crisium, a basin in the northeast quadrant on the Moon’s near side, before deploying and operating 10 instruments for a lunar day (14 Earth days) and more than 5 hours into the lunar night.

Once launched, Firefly will become the third American company, after Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, to build a privately owned lunar lander and attempt a lunar landing. Since the other two companies were not entirely successful in their landing attempts, Firefly has the chance to be the first to succeed.

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SpaceX blasts its satellite competitors for lobbying the government to shut down Starlink/T-Mobile partnership

9:45 am

SpaceX on August 22, 2024 responded harshly to the effort by its satellite competitors to get the FCC to shut down the planned partneship of Starlink and T-Mobile, whereby Starlink will fill the gaps in T-Mobile’s coverage.

You can read SpaceX’s letter here. Its language however is quite blunt:

While the petitions from AT&T, Verizon, DISH/EchoStar, and Omnispace lack technical basis or legal merit, their game is clear. AT&T and Verizon seek to hamstring their competitor T-Mobile by talking out of both sides of their mouths, on one hand demanding without technical support that T-Mobile and SpaceX operate at unnecessarily low power levels that will force Americans to sacrifice service, while giving their own partner AST a free pass. AT&T goes so far as to claim to have conducted a secret study it refuses to show the Commission to support suppressing SpaceX’s out-of-band emissions to an interference-protection level ten times below the limit sufficient to protect terrestrial networks, while allowing its partner AST to exceed that limit.

DISH/EchoStar repeats its demand to siphon proprietary information from SpaceX to aid its own flailing ambitions, while stoutly refusing SpaceX’s repeated requests to engage in actual good faith coordination the way a company with actual technical concerns would.

And although it still has no commercial satellite service anywhere in the world, Omnispace continues to make unfounded claims of prospective harmful interference to prop up a decade-old spectrum play that it fears will lose financial value if American consumers can enjoy ubiquitous mobile connectivity using the PCS G Block downlink.

Fortunately, none of these unfounded arguments present any reasonable basis to delay swift grant of SpaceX’s request to bring ubiquitous mobile connectivity to American consumers.

The FCC has not yet responded to any of these demand letters. Nor has it yet issued the waiver SpaceX had requested in June 2024 allowing its Starlink system to operate beyond its licensed radio frequencies in order to facilitate cell surface with T-Mobile.

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Rocket Factory Augsburg releases footage of 1st stage failure during static fire test

9:03 am

The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg today released the film footage it took during the failed 9-engine static fire test of its 1st stage last week.

I have embedded that footage below.

As the company’s CEO noted two days ago, the company has identified the cause as a fire in an oxygen pump which they think was unrelated to the engine design. This explanation remains puzzling, however. If the problem was not engine design, it suggests instead some other quality control error, which it is even more important to identify in order to prevent such errors in the future.

The video provides numerous angles of the failure, including one that captured the moment when the first stage fell over. As the CEO noted, it fortunately fell in the right direction, missing critical launchpad equipment and thus reducing significantly the damage to the pad.
» Read more

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Starliner will return unmanned; crew will return in February 2025 on Dragon

10:51 am

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS.

In a briefing today, NASA’s administrator Bill Nelson announced that Boeing’s Starliner capsule, launched in June on its first manned mission, will return unmanned and that the two astronauts it brought to ISS — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — will return in February 2025 as part of the crew of the next Dragon manned mission, scheduled to launch in late September.

Nelson made it a point to note that NASA’s past inactions to protect astronauts on two different shuttle missions, thus leading to their deaths, was a factor in this decision. The agency now decided safety must come first, and since Starliner’s return abilities still carry uncertainties that relate directly to safety, it decided to use a more reliable and tested Dragon capsule to return those astronauts back to Earth. During the entire briefing and Q&A session it became very clear that NASA is now paying very close attention to its engineers and their conclusions, rather than dismissing those conclusions because of other management concerns, as it did during those previous two shuttle failures.

Nelson also stated that NASA still wants to use Starliner as a second crew vehicle to ISS. He noted that he has spoken to Boeing’s new CEO, who apparently committed to getting Starliner fixed and operating. It remains undecided whether another test manned flight will be required of Boeing (at Boeing’s cost) before NASA certifies it as an operational vehicle. Whether any other customers will be willing to use the capsule remains unlikely until Boeing has flown a lot of Starliner NASA flights with no problems.

At this moment they are looking to bring Starliner back in early September, using a simplified undocking system to get the vehicle away from ISS quickly. The next Dragon mission will launch no earlier than September 24th carrying two astronauts and two empty flight suits that Wilmore and Williams use during their return.

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NASA adds three orbital tug startups to its contract bid list

9:55 am

NASA yesterday added three orbital tug startups to its contract bid list, allowing these companies to bid on projects that require the deployment of NASA smallsats to different orbits after launch.

NASA announced Aug. 22 that it selected Arrow Science and Technology, Impulse Space and Momentus Space for its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract. That selection allows them to compete for task orders for launching specific missions, typically small satellites willing to accept higher levels of risk in exchange for lower launch costs.

Arrow provides small satellite companies the deployment equipment used to release the satellite after launch. Impulse and Momentus have orbital tugs that not only deploy smallsats, but move them to their preferred orbit after the tug’s release from its launch rocket.

This NASA announcement allows its smallsats to be launched on either a dedicated small rocket that puts the satellite in its desired orbit or as part of a larger rideshare launch with many satellites that then uses the tug to get the satellite where it needs to be.

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