Tag: competition

Boeing’s problems are only the tip of the iceberg

1:25 pm

Most of all beware this boy.’
As noted by the Spirit of Christmas Present in Dickens’ The Christmas
Carol, ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both,
but most of all beware this boy.’

Since the beginning of this year, following the near disaster when a door of a Boeing 737-Max airline blew off during the Alaska Airlines flight, the media has been obsessed with reporting every single subsequent Boeing airplane incident as attributed to bad management and quality control at Boeing.

The problem with this shallow reporting is that it fails entirely in recognizing the real depth of the problem.

First, in most of the incidents reported, the planes involved were not recent purchases from Boeing, but had been owned by the airlines for years, sometimes decades. Thus, any maintenance issues, such as a wheel falling off after take-off or a landing gear collapsing on landing or the sudden failure of an Airbus plane’s hydraulic system, are not Boeing’s fault, but the fault of the airline the plane belongs to. In the case of these particular incidents, that airline was United, and in every case, the failure was with its maintenance department, not Boeing’s bad management and poor quality control.

A similar string of incidents has also occurred at American Airlines, involving both Boeing and Airbus airplanes. With both United and American, evidence suggests that the quality of its maintenance staff has likely declined significantly since 2020, when both companies decided to abopt Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) hiring practices, which made skin color and sex the most important qualification in hiring, rather than talent, skill, experience, or knowledge.

It is important for readers to recognize this fact when they see new stories about a Boeing plane forced to make an emergency landing, such as the story today about a United Airlines’ Boeing 787. It apparently had a cracked windshield, requiring an unscheduled landing in Chicago. The article at the link focuses a great deal on Boeing, but the focus should instead be on United Airlines, not the airplane maker, since it is United’s responsibility to keep its fleet flightworthy. When an airline fails to do so, future customers should take note, and consider other options when they need to fly.

In other words, you shouldn’t avoid flying on a Boeing plane, you should avoid flying on airlines that maintain their airplanes badly.

Having said this, I don’t want my readers to think I am trying to let Boeing off the hook. Far from it. » Read more

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Australian spaceport on sourthern coast prepares for launch

11:06 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Click for original map.

According to a report today, the first suborbital launch from a new commercial spaceport on the sourthern coast of Australia is now expected by the end of April or early May.

New launch facilities at the Koonibba Test Range, South Australia’s first permanent spaceport, are almost complete ahead of the impending inaugural launch. Located northwest of Ceduna, the range is a partnership between Southern Launch and the Koonibba Community Aboriginal Corporation. It is the largest commercial testing range in the Southern Hemisphere.

Space Industries Minister Susan Close is today visiting the site ahead of the sub-orbital test launch of German manufacturer HyImpulse’s SR75 rocket, which, subject to final regulatory approval, will go ahead at the end of April or early May. The rocket will reach an altitude of 50 kilometres before parachuting back to Earth where it will be recovered for testing.

Southern Launch, marked on the map to the right, is on south coast of Australia. Two other Australian commercial spaceports also under development are noted on the northern and eastern coasts.

We shall see if this suborbital launch occurs as planned. Recently the evidence has suggested that Australia’s regulatory state is as bad as the United Kingdom, taking forever to issue licenses for private launches.

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Russia launches Earth observation satellite

10:12 am

Russia early this morning successfully launched a new Earth observation satellite, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Baikonus spaceport in Kazakhstan.

The side boosters, core stage, second stage, and fairings all crashed in two planned drop zones within Russia. No word if any landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

32 SpaceX
13 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined in successful launches 37 to 24, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 32 to 29.

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SpaceX completes two launches in three and a half hours; third launch scrubbed

10:50 pm

And the beat goes on: Today SpaceX set a new marker for future launch companies, successfully launching twice from two different launchpads in Florida only three and a half hours apart, and then scrubbing a third launch due to weather on the opposite coast of the U.S. only a few hours after that.

First SpaceX launched a Eutelsat geosynchronous communications satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral at 5:52 pm (Eastern). Its first stage completed its twelth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

A little more than three and a half hours later, at 9:30 pm (Eastern), SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from its second launchpad at Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Finally, the third launch planned for the day, of another 22 Starlink satelites, was scrubbed at Vandenberg in California at about 10:30 pm (Pacific), or 1:30 am (Eastern) due to weather, despite multiple launch attempts during its two hour launch window. The flight will likely be rescheduled for sometime in the next few days.

No private company has ever attempted such a thing before, and only the Soviet Union might have done it during the height of its launch industry from 1970 to 1988, when it routinely launched between 80 and 100 times per year. Whether it ever did three launches in under nine hours however is not likely.

Even though only two of the three launches took off, what SpaceX tried to do today provides a further illustration of the company’s effort to make rocket launches as routine as airplane travel. It now launches at a pace and reliability that is unprecedented since the dawn of the space age, and was for decades considered by experts impossible. So much for experts. It always pays to ignore them when they tell you something is impossible.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

32 SpaceX
13 China
4 Rocket Lab
4 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined in successful launches 37 to 23, and SpaceX by itself leads everyone one else combined 32 to 28.

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Varda releases results of its in-orbit test for producing pharmaceuticals in weightlessness

9:48 pm

On March 20, 2024 Varda released the results from its seven-month-long flight of its unmanned capsule, claiming that the technology worked to produce pharmaceuticals in weightlessness that will be better at treating some difficult illnesses such as HIV.

From the abstract of the preprint paper [pdf]:

Despite notable progress in realizing the benefits of microgravity, the physical stability of therapeutics processed in space has not been sufficiently investigated. Environmental factors including vibration, acceleration, radiation, and temperature, if not addressed could impact the feasibility of in-space drug processing. The presented work demonstrates the successful recovery of the metastable Form III of ritonavir generated in orbit. The test samples and passive controls containing each of the anhydrous forms of ritonavir; Form I, Form II, Form III, and amorphous exhibit excellent stability. By providing a detailed experimental dataset centered on survivability, we pave the way for the future of in-space processing of medicines that enable the development of novel drug products on Earth and benefit long-duration human exploration initiatives.

More research is likely required, but I suspect Varda will be able to raise investment capital from this success, since there is a lot of money to be made from pharmaceuticals that can only be produced in weightlessness.

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Al Flores – Engraving a headstone

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This pause is a bit long, but you can watch it at a slightly higher speed and miss nothing. It is fascinating because of the high technology involved, combined with the work of a true craftsman.

Hat tip Cotour.

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March 29, 2024 Quick space links

3:25 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

 

 

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China working to save classifed lunar mission from launch failure

9:40 am

Orbital data now suggests that Chinese engineers are attempting to save a classifed lunar mission from the failure of its launch rocket to put the two satellites in their proper high orbit.

The small DRO-A and B spacecraft launched from Xichang spaceport on a Long March 2C rocket March 13. Hours later, the first acknowledgement of the mission came from Chinese state media Xinhua, which announced that the spacecraft had not been inserted accurately into their designated orbit by the rocket’s Yuanzheng-1S upper stage. “The upper stage encountered an abnormality during flight, causing the satellites to fail to accurately enter the preset orbit,” Xinhua stated. “Relevant disposal work is currently underway,” it added, citing Xichang launch center.

Data from the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron (SDS) initially showed objects associated with the launch in low Earth orbit (LEO). However, subsequent Two Line Element (TLE) data sets, a mathematical representation of a satellite’s mean orbit, from 18 SDS show an object from the launch (international designator 2024-048A) in a 525 x 132,577-kilometer, highly-elliptical, high Earth orbit. This has since been raised, with the spacecraft tracked in a 971 x 225,193-km orbit on March 26.

This indicates that at least one satellite, and perhaps both—if still attached to one another—separated from the upper stage, and that the object’s orbit has been raised.

It is very possible that further engine burns could put these satellites into lunar orbit, which would then save the mission and turn the March 13 launch failure into a success.

Why China is keeping this particular lunar mission so secret is another question, that still remains unanswered.

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Ispace, which built the lunar lander Hakuto-R1, has raised $53 million in investment capital

9:33 am

The lunar lander company Ispace, which built Hakuto-R1, the lunar lander that crashed on the Moon last year, announced yesterday that it has raised $53 million in investment capital from a sale of its publicly traded stock.

The Tokyo-based company, which went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange nearly a year ago, announced March 28 that it completed a sale of 10.25 million shares of stock, raising approximately 8.1 billion yen ($53.5 million). The shares were sold to institutional investors outside of Japan.

Most of the funding — about 7.1 billion yen — will go towards various elements of what the company calls Mission 3, a lander being developed by its American subsidiary, ispace U.S., for Draper. That APEX 1.0 lander will fly a mission in 2026 for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, going to the far side of the moon.

Before APEX flies the company has a second Hakuto-R-type mission planned, dubbed Resilience and targeting a launch late this year.

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Head of France’s space agency blames too many subcontractors for high cost of Ariane-6

9:26 am

At a conference yesterday the head of France’s CNES space agency, Philippe Baptiste, strongly blasted the European Space Agency’s (ESA) system of distributing contracting work to many subcontractors in its partner countries for high cost of its new expendable Ariane-6, a high cost that makes it uncompetitive in today’s launch market.

While giving his remarks, the CNES boss explained that “the European space industry, which is largely French, is in danger today. Our industry is not pivoting quickly enough. We must move quickly, reduce cycles, costs, otherwise we will all die.” It should be noted that the hyperbole towards the end of that statement may be exaggerated thanks to its translation from French to English.

On Ariane 6, Baptiste stated that “today, we are too expensive, including on Ariane 6. We are missing several tens of millions of euros, which we cannot find among European subcontractors.”

As the article then notes, this is not a new problem. ESA attempted to reduce it when it agreed in 2017 to give ownership of Ariane-6 to ArianeGroup, a joint partnership of Airbus and Safran, two of Europe’s biggest aerospace companies. The idea was that ArianeGroup would be in charge, and thus less bound to give out multiple subcontracts to many different companies scattered throughout ESA’s European partners.

This apparently did not happen, and the reason is likely because Ariane-6 was still a rocket conceived by the ESA to be run by the ESA, not a private company. That government control is also the reason Ariane-6 was designed not be reusable, even though in 2017 it was very obvious that an expendable rocket would be uncompetitive in the 2020s launch market. The bureaucrats at ESA didn’t want to take chances, so they choose a conservative design.

Baptiste’s remarks today I think help explain France’s decision earlier this week to award contracts to four rocket startups. France has finally realized that its partnership in ESA has been hindering its own space industry, and is now moving to encourage its growth outside of ESA.

There is great irony here. France led the way in creating ESA, because it wanted others to help pay for its space program. Now it rejects that partnership because its partners are simply doing what is natural, demand their own piece of the action.

Regardless, this breakup is good news. It means the European government monopoly on launch services is truly ending.

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Japan awards development agreements with four rocket startups

1:14 pm

Capitalism in space: Japan’s space agency this week awarded development agreements to four Japanese rocket startups, signaling that nation’s attempt to shift from depending on JAXA’s government-built rockets to becoming a customer of an industry of competing commercial rocket companies.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Interstellar signed a basic agreement in March. Space One, whose Kairos solid rocket exploded seconds after liftoff earlier this month, was also selected under the JAXA-SMASH (JAXA-Small Satellite Rush Program) initiative. Two further companies also signed basic agreements. These are Space BD and Mitsui Bussan Aerospace, which offer services aimed at the commercial utilization of space.

The agreements mean the companies will have priority for future contracts. These are designed to support private-sector entities capable of launching satellites developed under JAXA’s small satellite missions and advance the commercialization of space transportation services.

These deals are part of a new policy announced in November that includes $6.6 billion to help encourage the growth of a Japanese commercial space sector, independent of that nation’s space agency.

It remains uncertain whether JAXA will let go the purse strings and actually allow these new companies ownership of what they do. The deals as described sound like the agency is using its power to attempt to capture the companies, rather than encourage their independent growth.

We shall have to wait and see. On its face this announcement is very good news for Japan’s space industry, as it suggests that things might be changing.

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A detailed look at the international partners for China’s Moon base

1:03 pm

Link here. The article provides a nice summary of who has signed on to China’s project to build a Moon base in competition with the American Artemis project, prompted by the announcement that an astronomical association in Colombia has now signed on.

The contrast is stark between the nations that have signed the Artemis Accords to participate in the American project (36 so far) and the entities that have partnered with the Chinese. China at present only has seven partner nations (Belarus, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Russia, Venezuela, South Africa, Egypt), only one of which, Russia, has any space capabilities. The remaining nine partners are all academic organizations of one kind or another, all of which also have little or no major space capabilities.

Essentially, these partners are mostly PR by China to make it appear it has an international team. In reality almost all of its lunar project will be done by China. China doesn’t even expect Russia to contribute that much. As the article notes, “China has regularly omitted any mention of Russia as an ILRS partner” since the Russia invaded the Ukraine in February 2022. Before then Russia’s ability to accomplish much of anything new in space had long been questionable, and since then the doubts have escalated.

Though many of the nations who have signed the Artemis Accords are as weak, the list also includes almost all the world’s major players in space, such as France, Germany, India, Japan, and Luxembourg.

Like the Cold War, the western capitalist alliance is larger and more capable, because no one really wants to join an partnership that discourages freedom and private enterprise.

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