Tag: competition

SpaceX files to join FAA as defendant in lawsuit trying to shut down Boca Chica

9:01 am

SpaceX on May 19, 2023 submitted a motion to become a defendant in the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and others that demands its Starship/Superheavy launchsite at Boca Chica be shut down.

“SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy launch program hinges on the FAA’s review and licensing decision challenged here. If the Court were to rule in Plaintiffs’ favor, the FAA’s decision could be set aside, and further licensing of the Starship/Super Heavy Program could be significantly delayed, causing severe injury to SpaceX’s business,” the company said in the motion, which was filed on May 19.

The full motion can be read here [pdf].

SpaceX’s motion notes that it has followed all government regulations in the decade since it established its Boca Chica launch site, and invested more than $3 billion in doing so. The motion points out that “the FAA does not adequately represent SpaceX’s interests” and that the company must participate because the lawsuit will have direct financial impact on its business.

In other words, the big guns are now being hauled out against this lawsuit, which on its face is somewhat weak. We shall see if it can withstand the much more aggressive fight that SpaceX is certain to put up.

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Indian company joins the high altitude balloon tourist race

9:23 am

A new company from India, Space Aura, is proposing to fly tourists on a high altitude balloon by 2025, joining the global competition that already includes two American balloon companies as well as one Spanish company.

Space Aura’s capsule, christened prototype SKAP1, will be tethered to a high performance ‘space balloon system’, complete with an enormous parachute. The capsule will accommodate six tourists and one pilot with ample leg room and comfortable walking space. It will be pressurised during flight and will have environmental control and life support systems that maintain oxygen, pressure, and temperature levels.

Even though passengers will not experience microgravity, they would still need to prepare before flying. Prior to the launch, which will be from Karnataka, Maharashtra, or Madhya Pradesh, the group of space tourists will undergo a week of basic physical training. The duration of the entire flight is expected to be about 5.5 to 6 hours. Tourists will ascend for about 90 minutes, spend an hour gazing out at the earth below, and begin their 90-minute descent with the balloon and parachute.

The two American companies, Space Perspective and World View, claim they will be flying tourists by 2024, while the Spanish company, Halo Space, is targeting 2025.

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China launches two satellites yesterday, one for Macau

9:16 am

China yesterday used its Long March 2C rocket to launch two satellites into orbit, with one the first science satellite by Macau, designed to study the Earth’s magnetic field in conjunction with other satellites already in orbit.

No information that I could find was released about the second satellite. The launch, from China’s interior Jiuquan spaceport, dropped the rocket’s first stage somewhere in China. No word on whether it landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

34 SpaceX
19 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab (with a launch scheduled for tomorrow)

American private enterprise still leads China 38 to 19 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 38 to 31. SpaceX by itself now tied trails in total launches with the rest of the world, including American companies, 34 to 35.

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SpaceX launches Axiom’s second commercial manned mission to ISS

2:47 pm

SpaceX today successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch its Freedom manned capsule on its second flight, carrying four passengers on Axiom’s second commercial manned mission to ISS.

The Axiom crew included three paying passengers, one from the U.S. and two from Saudi Arabia, with the fourth crew member former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, now acting as Axiom’s commander. They plan to spend eight days docked to ISS. Making this commercial flight even more interesting is that the station already has a Middle Eastern commercial astronaut, from the United Arab Emirates. The Arab space race is clearing heating up.

The first stage was making its first flight, and successfully landed back at Cape Canaveral.

Were you aware this was happening? With my readers I expect so, but I am willing to bet that we are a very small minority. SpaceX has now made American manned spaceflight so routine almost no one pays attention.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

34 SpaceX
18 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 38 to 18 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 38 to 30. SpaceX by itself is now tied in total launches with the rest of the world, including American companies.

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SpaceX launches 5 Iridium and 16 OneWeb satellites

11:05 am

SpaceX early today successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to put five Iridium and sixteen OneWeb satellites into orbit, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The first stage successfully completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. The two fairings completed their third and sixth flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

33 SpaceX (with a launch scheduled for tomorrow)
18 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab (with a launch scheduled for tomorrow)

American private enterprise now leads China 37 to 18 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 37 to 30. SpaceX now trails the entire world combined, including American companies, by only 33 to 34.

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Starship prototype #25 is rolled to launchpad for static fire engine tests

10:02 am

Starship prototype #25 on the way to launchpad
Click for original image.

SpaceX yesterday evening rolled its 25th prototype of its Starship spacecraft to its suborbital launchpad at Boca Chica, as shown on the image to the right, for a planned static fire engine test of its six Raptor engines.

If all goes well, the company hopes to stack this prototype on top of the ninth prototype of Superheavy and complete the second test orbital flight of the entire rocket as early as June 15, 2023, with a launch window as long as six months according to the company’s FCC communications license application.

The actual launch date however remains very uncertain, for several reasons. The FAA must issue a launch license, and it won’t do that until it is satisfied the investigation into the first launch failure is complete. That launch approval will also likely be delayed because of the lawsuit against that agency for issuing the previous launch license.

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Capstone does lunar fly-by, takes first lunar pictures, completes main mission

9:47 am

The Moon as seen by Capstone
Click for original image.

The smallsat engineering test lunar orbiter Capstone has now successfully ended its primary mission, completing six months of operation in the near-rectilinear halo orbit that NASA’s Lunar Gateway manned space station intends to fly.

To put a final touch on that main mission, in May mission managers at the private company Advanced Space also completed two additional experiments. On May 3, 2023 they performed a close-fly of the Moon, using the spacecraft’s camera for the first time to take the picture of the Moon to the right.

Then, on May 9 Capstone successfully tested navigation technology in conjunction with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), also in orbit around the Moon.

During the May 9 experiment, CAPSTONE sent a signal to LRO designed to measure the distance and relative velocity between the two spacecraft. LRO then returned the signal to CAPSTONE, where it was converted into a measurement. The test proved the ability to collect measurements that will be utilized by CAPS software to determine the positioning of both spacecraft. This capability could provide autonomous onboard navigation information for future lunar missions.

The mission now enters its extended mission, planned to last at least a year.

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NASA picks Blue Origin’s partnership for building second manned lunar lander

9:25 am

Artist's concept of Blue Moon
An artist’s concept of Blue Moon

NASA today announced that it has chosen the partnership led by Blue Origin to build a second manned lunar lander for its Artemis program.

Blue Origin will design, develop, test, and verify its Blue Moon lander to meet NASA’s human landing system requirements for recurring astronaut expeditions to the lunar surface, including docking with Gateway, a space station where crew transfer in lunar orbit. In addition to design and development work, the contract includes one uncrewed demonstration mission to the lunar surface before a crewed demo on the Artemis V mission in 2029. The total award value of the firm-fixed price contract is $3.4 billion.

The other partners in the contract are Draper, Astrobotic, and Honeybee Robotics.

This is NASA’s second contract for a lunar lander, with SpaceX’s Starship the first. The idea is to have two landers available from competing companies for both competition and redundancy, similar to the approach the agency has used for its manned ferry service to ISS, using SpaceX and Boeing. I wonder if NASA’s experience on the Moon will be similar to that ferry service, whereby only SpaceX so far has been able to deliver. The track record of Blue Origin suggests it will do about as poorly as Boeing has with Starliner.

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SpaceX launches another 22 upgraded Starlink satellites into orbit

9:07 am

Using its Falcon 9 rocket SpaceX early today successfully launched another 22 upgraded Starlink satellites into orbit, lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The fairings completed their eighth flight.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

32 SpaceX
18 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 36 to 18 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 36 to 30. SpaceX by itself only trails the entire world combined, including American companies, 32 to 34.

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Final assembly of Chandrayaan-3 begins for launch still targeting mid-July

9:24 am


Click for interactive map.

Engineers at India’s space agency ISRO have begun the installation of the payloads onto its lunar lander/rover, Chandrayaan-3, which is still targeting a mid-July launch.

The map shows the landing location (red dot) near the Moon’s south pole (indicated by the cross). Nova-C is Intuitive Machines private lander, now aiming for a late summer launch at the earliest. Luna-25 is Russia’s first lunar lander since the 1970s, and is also targeting a launch in July.

India’s first attempt, Chandryaan-2, to land a rover at this spot on the Moon failed in 2019. This new mission is essentially a re-do, except that it does not include an orbiter, since the orbiter from Chandrayaan-2 is still operational and can do the job.

All in all, it increasingly looks like the next six months will see a lot of new landing attempts on the Moon.

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Student model rocket doubles altitude record

9:10 am

On April 16, 2023 students from the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University launched a model rocket that more than doubled the altitude record for liquid-fueled model rockets.

The rocket reached an altitude of 47,732 feet, setting multiple records, including the highest undergraduate and collegiate amateur liquid rocket launch in the United States. It more than doubled the previous record of 22,000 feet.

Named Deneb after one of the brightest stars in the northern hemisphere, the rocket had a total burn time of 26.1 seconds, reaching a velocity of 1,150 mph (Mach 1.5).

I have embedded the live stream below, set to begin just before launch.
» Read more

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ULA’s first Vulcan rocket returns to assembly building after fueling tests

9:22 am

After completing a tanking test, engineers have now moved ULA s first Vulcan rocket back to the assembly building for some additional work prior to the first wet dress rehearsal countdown and static fire test.

A ULA spokesperson said the company’s engineers “collected excellent data” during the May 12 tanking test, which mimicked a launch countdown with holds, readiness polls, and other milestones. “Based on the test, there are several parameters that will be adjusted prior to conducting the Flight Readiness Firing,” the ULA spokesperson said in a statement. “We are rolling back to the Vertical Integration Facility, where our access is better and the vehicle is protected to isolate and perform those adjustments.”

The static fire test will occur prior to attaching two strap-on solid-fueled side boosters, provided by Northrop Grumman, that are needed for the first launch. That launch is presently scheduled for sometime this summer, but first the static fire test has to take place successfully, with no issues, and these boosters need to be attached.

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China’s Long March 3B puts another GPS-type satellite into orbit

8:58 pm

China early on Wednesday, May 17, 2023 (China time) used its Long March 3B to successfully launch a GPS-type satellite, adding one more satellite to its constellation of similar satellites.

As the launch was from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in the interior, the rocket’s core stage and four strap-on boosters crashed somewhere inside China. No word on whether they landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

31 SpaceX
18 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads China 35 to 18 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 30. SpaceX by itself trails the entire world, including other American companies, 31 to 34 in launches this year.

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Rocket Lab completes Photon transport spacecraft for Varda’s private returnable space capsule

9:20 am

The private rocket company Rocket Lab has now completed construction on the Photon transport spacecraft that the private company Varda has purchased to maneuver and then de-orbit its private returnable space capsule in which it plans to manufacture pharmaceuticals while in orbit and then return to Earth for sale.

Rocket Lab made the spacecraft at its Long Beach manufacturing site to provide power, communications, propulsion and attitude control to a capsule that will produce pharmaceutical products in microgravity. In addition to providing support during the in-space phase of Varda’s mission, the Photon will put Varda’s capsule carrying finished pharmaceuticals on a return trajectory to Earth.

This is the first of four Photon spacecraft that Varda has purchased from Rocket Lab. Varda appears to be attempting to continue the pharmaceutical work that McDonnell-Douglas did on the space shuttle, and was on the verge of flying a full-scale production mission for profit, when the Challenger accident occurred in 1986 and ended all further commercial work on the shuttle.

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Private company developing concept for resurrecting Spitzer Space Telescope

9:11 am

Using a $250K development contract from the Space Force, the small startup Rhea Space Activity hopes to develop a mission for resurrecting Spitzer Space Telescope, now several hundred million miles from Earth and out of operation for three years.

The “Spitzer Resurrector” mission would be a small spacecraft that could fit into a 1-meter-by-1-meter box and be ready to launch as soon as 2026, Usman said. It would then take about three years to cruise to the telescope, during which time the spacecraft will make observations of solar flaring. “We plan to be busy right from the start of the mission,” said Howard Smith, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, which is operated by Harvard University and the Smithsonian, who is involved in the proposed rescue flight.

Once the resurrector spacecraft reaches the telescope, it would fly around at a distance of 50 to 100 km to characterize Spitzer’s health. Then it would attempt to establish communications with the telescope and begin to relay information back and forth between the ground and telescope. This would allow scientists to restart observations.

Essentially, the servicing satellite would act as a relay communications satellite, allowing Spitzer to resume doing the limited infrared observations it had been doing in the last eleven years of its life, after its coolant ran out.

The actual mission of course has not yet been funded, nor is Rhea much more than a startup, with only ten employees. The concept however illustrates the growing practicality of flying such missions. The number of servicing missions to defunct satellites is growing in leaps and bounds, and Rhea, as well as its other partners at the Smithsonian and the Applied Physics Laboratory, are simply using that knowledge for their own benefit.

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Italy awards $256 million contract for testing in-orbit robotic satellite servicing

8:59 am

The new colonial movement: The Italian Space Agency yesterday issued a $256 million contract to a partnership of several private European companies — most of which are Italian — to fly a mission testing a variety of in-orbit robotic satellite servicing capabilities.

Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between Thales of France and Leonardo of Italy, said the group is contracted to design, develop, and qualify a spacecraft capable of performing a range of autonomous robotic operations on satellites in low Earth orbit.

The company did not disclose details about these satellites or specifics about the mission, but said the servicer would have a dexterous robotic arm and test capabilities that include refueling, component repair or replacement, orbital transfer, and atmospheric reentry. The servicer will be launched with a target satellite, Thales Alenia Space spokesperson Cinzia Marcanio said, and both will be fitted with an interface for a refueling mission.

The partnership also includes the Italian companies Telespazio, Avio, and D-Orbit.

The significance of this deal is that Italy has gone outside the European Space Agency (ESA) to do it. For decades all European projects would be developed and flown through ESA. Italy appears to be have finally realized that it does not need that partnership, that in fact that partnership acts to hinder its own companies by requiring any mission to use companies from other nations. This deal instead keeps almost everything inside Italy.

We have seen a similar pattern in both Germany and the United Kingdom. The former has been working to encourage private German rocket companies, independent of ESA. The latter is doing the same in the UK, while also encouraging private British spaceports to launch those rockets.

These efforts strongly suggest that ESA’s monumental failure with the Ariane-6 — which is years late and will cost too much to fly — has been causing its member nations to rethink that partnership, and increasingly go it alone. ESA failed to provide them a competitive alternative for getting their payloads into orbit. They are now looking for ways to do it themselves.

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Stratolaunch’s giant airplane Roc successfully completes first drop test of payload

9:16 am

On May 13, 2023 Stratolaunch’s giant airplane Roc took off with a Talon-0 engineering test vehicle attached to its fuselage and successfully released that test vehicle, completing the plane’s first drop test.

Saturday’s outing was the 11th flight test for Stratolaunch’s flying launch pad — a twin-fuselage, six-engine airplane with a record-setting 385-foot wingspan. The plane is nicknamed Roc in honor of a giant bird in Middle East mythology.

Roc carried the Talon-A separation test vehicle, known as TA-0, during three previous test flights. But this was the first time TA-0 was released from Roc’s center-wing pylon to fly free. The release took place during a four-hour, eight-minute flight that involved operations in Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Western Range, off California’s central coast.

With this success the company appears ready to fulfill its military contract to use its Talon-1 payloads to fly hypersonic flight tests.

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SpaceX launches another 56 Starlink satellites into orbit

10:57 pm

Using its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 56 Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 7th and 8th flights, respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

31 SpaceX
17 China
6 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 35 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 29. SpaceX by itself trails the entire world, including other American companies, only 31 to 33 in launches this year.

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Intuitive Machines’ first mission to land on Moon delayed

5:52 pm

Intuitive Machines officials revealed during their quarterly report that the first mission of its Nova-C lunar lander has been delayed from June to late August or September.

The company announced in February plans for a June landing at Malapert A, a crater near the south pole of the moon. That date was a slip from a previously scheduled March launch, which the company said was linked to NASA’s decision to move the landing site to Malapert A.

Altemus said the company made “significant progress” in testing of the lander in recent months, such as structural tests to confirm the vehicle could handle the stresses of launch and cryogenic tanking demonstrations. “We have some functional testing” still to do on the lander, he said, but did not elaborate on the nature of those tests or their schedule ahead of shipping to Cape Canaveral for its Falcon 9 launch.

Two private companies have so far attempted and failed to land on the Moon, Israel’s SpaceIL and Japan’s Ispace. Two American companies, Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, are both racing to achieve this goal in the coming months. This delay now puts Astrobotic in the lead, with its launch now targeting the summer.

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Scientists rediscover the advantages of nuclear power for moving probes through the solar system

10:21 am

Scientists appear to have once again discovered the advantages of nuclear powered thrusters for moving much heavier interplanetary missions more quickly and more efficiently to the farther reaches of the solar system.

A new paper published last month in the journal Acta Astronautica argues that a fusion-powered drive, capable of delivering propulsion while powering onboard electronics, could be a way to get more power and cargo to outer moons like Titan, and designed a scenario revealing what a DFD-powered [direct-fusion-drive] Titan mission would look like.

A 2021 study from an international research team revealed that a DFD could transport 2,220 lbs to Titan in 31 months. Right now, the Dragonfly mission [to Saturn’s moon Titan] weighs in at about 990 lbs. This new paper says that the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) concept developed at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is essential for powering the mission.

The irony of this story is that scientists and engineers knew these obvious facts and proposed many versions of nuclear-powered thrusters back in the 1960s. NASA even had a very successful project called NERVA in the late 1960s, with plans to begin using the technology by the 1980s.

All such research was canceled however in the 1970s, partly because of budget cutbacks but mostly because of the paranoia that began developing at that time against using nuclear power for anything. The idea of launching a rocket into space that carried a nuclear rocket engine was considered environmentally too risky.

Has that fear now subsided? We shall see. There are plenty of environmental activist groups that we can expect to immediately oppose such technology. The question will be whether a large enough private industry will evolve capable of exerting its own political weight to resist that opposition.

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