Tag: competition

Ecuador becomes 26th nation to sign Artemis Accords

9:20 am

In a ceremony yesterday in Washington, Ecuador became the 26th nation to sign the Artemis Accords, a bi-lateral agreement with the United States that was designed during the Trump administration to act as a work around to the limitations to private enterprise in space created by the Outer Space Treaty.

The full list of signatories so far: Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.

Adding third world nations to the alliance strengthens it, but it is really the clout of major space players like France, Luxembourg, the UK, the UAE, Italy, and Japan that gives the United States a great deal of leverage in establishing future space legal policy, assuming the alliance is used as originally intended. Considering however the Biden administration’s general hostility to the private sector and freedom, it is unclear if that will be the goal.

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ULA launches Delta-4 Heavy rocket on next-to-last flight

9:02 am

Early this morning ULA successfully place a National Reconnaissance Office classified surveillance satellite into orbit, using its Delta-4 Heavy rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

This was ULA’s its first launch in 2023. At the start of the year, the company’s manifest listed ten launches. Whether is can complete that manifest in the remaining six months is questionable, considering it has rarely managed a launch pace exceeding one launch per month in its entire history.

This launch was also the next-to-last for the Delta-4 Heavy. ULA is retiring that rocket and replacing it with the still-not-flown Vulcan rocket. The plan had been for there to be an overlap in use as one was retired and the other was initiated. That has not happened.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race remain the same:

42 SpaceX
24 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 48 to 24 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 48 to 40, with SpaceX by itself still leading the rest of the world, excluding other American companies, 42 to 40.

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SpaceX launches another 47 Starlink satellites into orbit

12:28 am

Just after midnight tonight SpaceX successfully launched 47 more Starlink satellites, with its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. Both fairing halves completed their third flight.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

42 SpaceX
24 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 47 to 24 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 47 to 40, with SpaceX by itself still leading the rest of the world, excluding other American companies, 42 to 40.

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Two new European rocket startups sign deal with France to launch from French Guiana

11:28 am

The French space agency CNES today signed agreements with two different European smallsat rocket startups, Spain’s PLD Space and Germany’s Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), allowing each to launch from France’s old launchpad in French Guiana that was used in the 1970s by its long abandoned Diamant rocket.

From the RFA press release:

Until now, the launch pad in Kourou has only been used by CNES for its Diamant rocket in the 1970s. Now the launch complex is to be given a new purpose, in the tradition of opening access to space through innovative and groundbreaking ventures. As such, RFA is one of the first NewSpace companies to be given the opportunity to use it. The new launch pad will be upgraded and equipped in the coming years with the aim of being used for launches from 2025.

These agreements are part of a slew that have come out of Europe in the past year or so that all indicate that the European Space Agency (ESA) and its partners have finally abandoned any attempts to build rockets, and are instead looking to private enterprise to do it for them. First Germany encouraged private rocket startups, independent of Arianespace and ESA. Then Spain followed with PLD Space. Then Arianespace, the commercial arm of ESA that for decades built all rockets for ESA, announced it was making agreements with these startups to have them launch payloads instead.

These new deals today indicate that France has now joined the rush to private enterprise, which is a very significant development as France as always been the leader in having ESA build its own rockets through Arianespace. It appears it is now looking away from government-run space.

All these actions are also suggest a dim future for ArianeGoup’s Ariane-6 rocket, built under the old system but with an attempt to give private enterprise more power, with ArianeGroup, not Arianespace, owning and controlling it. Its design however was dictated largely by ESA, thus resulting in a rocket that is too expensive and therefore not competitive.

The long term result will be greater competition, both in Europe and worldwide, which in turn is going to fuel a renaissance in rocket development, which in turn is going to speed the exploration and colonization of the rest of the solar system.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Rocket Lab’s payload on its first suborbital test launch of its Electron rocket

10:00 am

Until today it was unclear whether the successful first suborbital launch of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket on June 17, 2023 carried a payload. Now we know it did:

The launch took place at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia and demonstrated the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed, or MACH-TB, program’s first suborbital flight of a hypersonic payload.

MACH-TB is led by the Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center and the Naval Surface Warfare Center’s Crane Division. The team selected Leidos as the program’s prime integrator last September, and California-based space company Rocket Lab is one of 12 subcontractors supporting the effort.

It appears the Pentagon program that funded MACH-TB is a different program — from a different Pentagon office — from the one that is funding the next suborbital hypersonic test using Electron. Nor is this unusual for the military. The duplication of these Pentagon programs, with multiple bureaucracies, says a lot more about the utter waste and incompetence and corruption in DC than it does about hypersonic suborbital testing.

For Rocket Lab however this duplication is great news, as it provides the company at least two different customers for its suborbital rocket.

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FAA finally reduces airspace restrictions for some launches out of Cape Canaveral

9:46 am

On June 15, 2023 FAA announced that it has at last reduced the airspace restrictions for some launches out of Cape Canaveral, thus allowing more launches while reducing the disruption to commercial airline traffic.

The move is part of broader efforts to address the conflicts between launches and commercial aviation, particularly in Florida’s congested airspace. In April, the FAA released a set of factors when considering whether to allow a launch to proceed or ask the launch company to identify alternative windows for the launch.

Among those factors are the timing of the launch, particularly relative to holidays or other special events that cause increases in air traffic, and the duration of the launch window. “The FAA encourages commercial space operations to take place during nighttime hours (to the extent practicable) when other flight operations tend to be reduced,” the guidelines state.

I say “at last” because SpaceX have been pushing for this reduction for years. It knows its rockets will fly very reliably, and even if a rare failure forces their destruction, the territory threatened is much smaller than what was once considered necessary in the past. It just took years to get the federal bureaucracy to recognize these facts.

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Northrop Grumman’s robotic servicing satellites gets third contract, this time from Intelsat

9:40 am

With an announced contract with Intelsat today, Northrop Grumman has now obtained contracts for all three of its robotic servicing pods that will be launched on its Mission Servicing Vehicle in 2025.

Intelsat ordered the third and last pod available on the debut mission of the company’s new servicing spacecraft, called Mission Robotic Vehicle (MRV).

Australian communications satellite operator Optus was the first customer to sign up for the Mission Extension Pods, which are propulsion jet packs that add six years to the life of geostationary satellites. Intelsat in April said it purchased one of the pods, followed by today’s announcement that it ordered a second one.

The MRV is an upgrade from Northrop Grumman’s earlier robot, the Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV), which proved that it could autonomously rendezvous and dock with the nozzle of a defunct satellite and provide it with a new thruster and fuel so as to extend its life. With the MRV, multiple revised versions of the MEV are essentially launched at the same time.

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Russia gets a launch contract!

9:31 am

In what has become a very rare event, Russia’s state-run press today announced that Roscosmos has won a launch contract for its Soyuz-2 rocket from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

“On June 27th at 3:34 p.m. UAE time [2:34 Moscow time], [UAE’s] MBR Space Centre will launch its maiden mission, PHI-Demo, from Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome using the Soyuz-2 rocket as part of the Payload Hosting Initiative,” the media office said in a statement.

The statement says that the initiative, jointly led by MBRSC [UAE’s space agency] and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), is aimed at providing space access and hastening the sustainable progression of novel space technologies.

The satellite will be a secondary payload on the launch of a Russian weather satellite.

It seems this UN office wants to help the Russians, and is working to encourage other nations to use its rockets to get into space. Because of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, it has lost all of its international launch business. UNOOSA is apparently working to recover Russia some of that business.

The UAE meanwhile appears to be trying to light the candle from both ends, working extensively with NASA and American private companies while also attempting to partner with Russia and China.

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China launches classified experimental satellite

8:40 am

Using its Long March 6 rocket, China today launched what its state-run press called a “new experimental Earth-observation satellite,” lifting off its Taiyuan interior spaceport.

No word on whether the rocket’s first stage crashed near habitable areas, or whether it used parachutes to control its descent.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

41 SpaceX
24 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 46 to 24 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 46 to 40, with SpaceX by itself still leading the rest of the world, excluding other American companies, 41 to 40.

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NASA official in charge of its manned program denigrates the idea of fixed-price contracts

9:32 am

Jim Free, apparently hostile to commercial space despite running the NASA manned program dependent on it
Jim Free, apparently hostile to commercial space despite
running the NASA manned program dependent on it

Eric Berger on June 16, 2023 wrote up a careful analysis of comments made by NASA official Jim Free, who is in charge of its Artemis manned program, when he appeared on June 7, 2023 before the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board in Washington, DC.

During that appearance, in which Free provided an update on the program’s status, including admitting that the manned lunar landing will not happen in 2025 but in 2026 — something that everyone in the space industry has known for years but NASA had been denying — Berger then noted this further comment by Free:

Oddly, Free also questioned the value of the contract mechanism that NASA used to hire SpaceX and its Starship lander. “The fact is, if they’re not flying on the time they’ve said, it does us no good to have a firm, fixed-price contract other than we’re not paying more,” he said.

Free did this after trying to place the entire blame for the launch delay on SpaceX, made worse by the regulatory delays being imposed on it by the FAA.

Berger than proceeded to outline in great detail why fixed-price contracts work far better than cost-plus contracts — also known widely in the space industry and detailed myself in Capitalism in Space. To sum up, cost-plus contracts produce very little but cost gobs of money, while fixed-price contracts save money while guaranteeing results. He then asked, “What’s going on here?” and answered it as follows:
» Read more

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SpaceX successfully launches Indonesian broadband satellite

8:48 am

SpaceX yesterday successfully launched an Indonesian broadband satellite, using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its twelfth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The fairing halves completed their seventh and ninth flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

41 SpaceX
23 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 46 to 23 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 46 to 39, with SpaceX by itself still leading the rest of the world, excluding other American companies, 41 to 39.

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Rocket Lab completes first suborbital test launch of its Electron rocket

8:42 am

As part of its contract for providing the Defense Department with a testbed for hypersonic testing, Rocket Lab on June 17, 2023 successfully completed the first suborbital test launch of its Electron rocket.

The HASTE suborbital launch vehicle is derived from the Company’s Electron rocket but has a modified Kick Stage for hypersonic payload deployment, a larger payload capacity of up to 700 kg / 1,540 lbs, and options for tailored fairings to accommodate larger payloads, including air-breathing, ballistic re-entry, boost-glide, and space-based applications payloads. By leveraging the heritage of Rocket Lab’s low-cost Electron – the world’s most frequently launched commercial small launch vehicle – HASTE offers true commercial testing capability at a fraction of the cost of current full-scale tests.

Because of its military nature, Rocket Lab’s press release was generally terse in providing details. Sources in the industry tell me that this launch was designed to prove out the required suborbital capabilities of Electron prior to the first hypersonic test flight. When that flight takes place, it will carry a hypersonic test vehicle built by another company, Hypersonix.

Rocket Lab with this launch demonstrated again the smart flexibility of the company. It only announced this suborbital concept for Electron in April. Only two months later it has test flown it. It is now ready to fly an actual hypersonic test flight, and waits only for the test vehicle to be provided by Hypersonix. The speed of this program leap-frogged Stratolaunch, which is also offering its Roc airplane and Talon hypersonic test vehicle to the military but started its project in late 2020 and is still not ready for flight.

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PLD’s first suborbital test launch aborted just prior to launch

1:07 pm

According to company officials, the first suborbital test launch of PLD Miura-1 rocket was aborted today just prior to launch because some of the umbilical fuel and power lines failed to disconnect as planned.

The launch was from PLD’s launch site in Spain. No word when the company will try again. Before it can build its orbital Miura-5 rocket it needs the test data from this suborbital launch.

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Rocket Lab about to launch a secret mission

9:27 am

Rocket Lab is gearing up to launch a rocket from Wallops sometime between June 15th and June 20th but it will provide no live stream and no press access.

The article at the link then speculates that this launch might be the first military hypersonic test flight using a suborbital version of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket.

That launcher is called HASTE, short for “Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron.” As that name suggests, HASTE is derived from the workhorse Electron and is designed to help test technologies for hypersonic craft — highly maneuverable vehicles capable of flying at least five times the speed of sound.

HASTE can haul up to 1,540 pounds (700 kilograms) of payload aloft, whereas Electron can deliver a maximum of 660 pounds (300 kg) to low Earth orbit. The suborbital rocket also features a modified version of Electron’s “kick stage” specialized for the deployment of hypersonic payloads, Rocket Lab said in an April 17 statement that announced HASTE’s existence.

The suborbital rocket is scheduled to make its debut right about now, on a mission whose details are hard to come by, according to that statement.

If so, we will only find out some limited details after launch, based on what the military decides to release publicly.

Regardless, the HASTE project demonstrates the ability of Rocket Lab to quickly improvise in order to find new ways to make money from its existing assets. For its stockholders, it is another piece of evidence that the company is a good investment.

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ESA transfers its Artemis-2 Orion service module to NASA

9:18 am

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday officially handed over to NASA its second completed Orion service module, to be used in 2024 on the first manned Artemis mission, dubbed Artemis-2, that will carry four astronauts on a mission around the Moon.

The European Service Module-2 will power the Orion spacecraft on the Artemis II mission that will see NASA astronauts commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch with Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen complete flyby of the Moon and return to Earth.

The crew will fly Orion to 8889 km beyond the Moon before completing a lunar flyby and returning to Earth. The mission will take a minimum of eight days and will collect valuable flight test data, in the first time for over 50 years that humans have voyaged to our natural satellite.

The odds of this launching in 2024 are relatively slim. It will also be the first time NASA will be flying Orion’s environmental systems (the systems that keep the astronauts alive). We all hope those system work perfectly this first time, since people will be on board.

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Axiom delays launch of first space station module to ’26

9:08 am

Buried in a Space.com article today about Axiom was the important revelation that the company has now officially delayed the launch of its first space station module that will be attached to ISS from 2024 to 2026, with the rest of its follow-up modules delayed as well.

In January 2020, Axiom won NASA’s contract to construct the first commercially manufactured module for the ISS. “Our first module is going to be in 2026,” David Zuniga, senior director of in-space solutions at Axiom, told Space.com. This is an update to the company’s previously stated target of 2024.

Axiom’s first station component will attach to the forward port of the ISS’ Harmony module and serve as the springboard for the remaining pieces of the company’s planned space station architecture. Axiom is planning to attach a second module in 2027 and a third module a year later. Finally, a thermal power module, scheduled for sometime before 2030, will allow Axiom’s space station to detach from the ISS and become a free-flying, commercially run low Earth orbit (LEO) destination.

This schedule puts Axiom at some risk. ISS is likely going to be retired in 2030. Axiom has to therefore be able to detach its space station before that happens. It seems however with this new schedule that it might not be ready. And if it can’t, it will then need to arrange some deal with NASA and ISS’s international partners to either take over operations of ISS temporarily or convince these nations to operate it a little longer.

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A private Russian rocket?

9:01 am

According to two short stories in the Russian state-run press (here and here), a private Russian company, dubbed SR Space, is developing a private orbital rocket, and has already completed two launches of a test rocket, though neither launch reached suborbital space.

It is now assembling its first suborbital rocket intended to reach space.

As the SR Space press office specified for TASS, the new sub-orbital rocket is set for its launch at the end of the year. “The launch is scheduled for the end of the current year to deliver a signal transmitter payload,” the press office said. The transmitter’s signal sent to Earth is expected to be received by drones engineered by the company. “This is necessary to test interaction with remotely piloted aircraft systems and the technology of their remote control and flight control of a swarm in automatic mode,” it explained.

This will be the first launch of a private sub-orbital rocket in Russia to an altitude of over 100 km (the altitude where outer space begins). The carrier rocket will measure 5.17 meters in length and 0.45 meters in diameter and weigh 253 kg.

SR Space appears to be the same kind of pseudo-company that China allows. It has obtained private funding, and is operating with some independence hoping to win contracts from the Russian government in order to earn a profit. At the same time, it without doubt does nothing without that government’s permission and approval, and can be taken over at any time by that government, as happened to Russia’s last commercial rocket company S7 that wanted to use the Sea Launch ocean platform to fly commercial launches.

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Tomorrow’s final launch of Europe’s Ariane-5 rocket delayed indefinitely

2:01 pm

Arianespace officials today cancelled tomorrow’s final launch of its Ariane-5 rocket — supposedly to be replaced by the not-yet-flown Ariane-6, citing issues with “three pyrotechnical transmission lines that are associated with the Ariane 5’s solid rocket boosters.”

No new launch date has been set. There is the possibility that to resolve this issue the rocket will have to be rolled back to its assembly building and destacked. If so, the launch will be delayed months.

At the moment, Europe has only managed one launch in 2023, a far cry from the seven to twelve launches it used to do annually, before SpaceX came along and offered a cheaper rocket that could launch more frequently and quicker.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Cape Canaveral, version 2.0

11:45 am

Falcon 9 first stage hauled back to the cape after launch
Falcon 9 first stage hauled back to the cape after launch

Last week BtB’s intrepid stringer Jay was unable to send me any “Quick Space links” because he was working at Cape Canaveral at the Kennedy Space Center, involved in a project involving, as he noted, “infrastructure,” giving him only a limited access to the center.

He did however have time to drive around and take pictures. For example, we have the picture on the right. On his way to lunch on his second day there he “had to pull over for a semi carrying something large. At first I thought it was a fuel tank, but it was the first stage of a Falcon-9 that lifted off on June 4th.”

This picture alone illustrates how things have changed at Kennedy since the retirement of the shuttle in 2011. Then, local officials and NASA managers all thought the sky was falling in, and that the economy of Cape Canaveral was about to die forever with that retirement.

Instead, it is now entirely routine for a private rocket company to drive its used first stages back and forth in between launches. Cape Canaveral hasn’t died, it has been reborn.

More pictures by Jay are below, all of which illustrate the resurgence of space activity that private enterprise is bringing to America’s first spaceport. To quote Jay,
» Read more

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Taiwan company issues letter of intent to build cubesat facility in California city

9:27 am

The city of Paso Robles in California has now received an official letter of intent from the Taiwan cubesat company Gran Systems, describing its desire to build spaceport there.

The CEO of Gran Systems recently toured the proposed Paso Robles Spaceport and tech corridor area and met with Paso Robles Airport Manager Mark Scandalis to discuss opportunities for establishing its California facility in Paso Robles.

Though the news article refers to this as a “spaceport,” I don’t think this has anything to do with launching rockets. Instead, this spaceport is part of Paso Robles’ effort to establish an industrial park at its airport, including space companies such as satellite builders, and Gran Systems has decided to rent space there, probably to widen its market in the U.S.

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Arianespace signs deal with Spanish rocket startup PLD

8:58 am

Following up with its agreement with the UK rocket startup Orbex, Arianespace yesterday also signed a deal with the Spanish rocket startup PLD to study using that company’s as-yet-unflown Miura-5 rocket.

Like the Orbex deal, this agreement makes it possible for Arianespace to arrange launches using PLD’s rocket. It also tells us that Arianespace and the European Space Agency are shifting from designing and building their own rockets — a process that has failed to produce any profit and had presently left Europe with no launch capability — to acting simply as a customer buying that capability from independent competing private companies.

For this to work however both Orbex and PLD will have to get their rockets off the ground.

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China launches 41 satellites on single launch, a record for that country

8:49 am

China today successfully used its Long March 2D rocket to place 41 satellites in orbit, a new record for that country, lifting off from its interior Taiyuan spaceport in north China.

No word on where the rocket’s first stage crashed within China, or whether it landed near any habitable areas. The Chinese state-run press also provided no information about any of those 41 satellites.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

40 SpaceX
23 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads China 45 to 23 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 45 to 39, with SpaceX by itself still leading the rest of the world, excluding other American companies, 40 to 39.

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World Economic Forum decides its business is running space too!

8:13 am

We’re the government and we’re here to help you! The World Economic Forum (WEF) yesterday released its proposed new set of guidelines for mitigating space junk in orbit, even though some of the most important commercial satellite operators (SpaceX and Viasat) have not signed on.

The Space Industry Debris Mitigation Recommendations document, released by the WEF June 13, outlines recommendations to avoid collisions that can create debris by limiting the lifetime of satellites in orbit after they have completed their missions and improving coordination among satellite operators.

Among those recommendations is to establish a success rate for “post-mission disposal,” or removal of satellites from orbit after the end of their missions, to 95% to 99%. That disposal should be completed no more than five years after the end of each satellite’s mission.

You can read the guidelines here [pdf], which the WEF is pushing governments worldwide to adopt. Though SpaceX and Viasat have not signed on, 27 companies have endorsed the guidelines, including OneWeb, Airbus, Axiom, and a host of orbital tug and space junk removal startups, the latter of which all benefit from these guidelines.

While the proposals makes some sense, everyone in the space industry should remain skeptical, and resist the call for more government regulation. Once this power is given to government it will never be recanted, and will only grow with time. Moreover, all signs indicate that such interference by law by government is unnecessary. Both satellite operators and most rocket companies (the exception mostly China) have been making strong efforts to deal with the issue of space junk, for profit. The fact that there are a host of orbital tug and space junk startups right now illustrates this. Investors have realized there is money to be made removing satellites and space junk. They don’t need government telling them what to do.

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Boeing gets NASA contract to develop new airplane wing design

10:22 am

In its effort to reduce fossil fuel use and thus save us from being burned to death by global warming in only a decade, NASA has now awarded Boeing a contract to develop new airplane wing design that it predicts will lower fuel use by up to 30%.

The X-66A is the X-plane specifically aimed at helping the United States achieve the goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To build the X-66A, Boeing will work with NASA to modify an MD-90 aircraft, shortening the fuselage and replacing its wings and engines. The resulting demonstrator aircraft will have long, thin wings with engines mounted underneath and a set of aerodynamic trusses for support. The design, which Boeing submitted for NASA’s Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, is known as a Transonic Truss-Braced Wing.

While developing a more efficient wing design is certainly worthwhile, having skepticism about this project is certainly reasonable. First of all, it seems somewhat strange to award Boeing such a contract at this time, considering NASA own experience with the company with Starliner, as well as that company’s problems with other government contracts for the military.

Secondly, the press release makes a big deal about the project getting an X-plane designation, an entirely superficial and PR related title that if anything suggests there is very little steak to this sizzle.

Third, it is unclear the nature of this contract. Is is cost-plus, or fixed price? The press release says NASA will “invest $425 million over seven years, while the company and its partners will contribute the remainder of the funding, estimated at about $725 million.” If cost-plus, this means nothing. Boeing will use any excuse to go over budget in order to get more money from NASA.

Finally, half a billion dollars to develop and test a new airplane wing design, using an already existing airplane, seems incredibly exorbitant. And to require seven years to build it seems ridiculously long.

All in all, I suspect the real goal of this project is to funnel tax dollars to Boeing to help keep it afloat, not to build a new green airplane.

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Forgotten Weapons – Girardoni Air Gun

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The air rifle that Lewis & Clark took on their expedition to impress the American Indians they met. When I recently read their memoirs, I was baffled that an air gun existed in the early 1800s. This video shows it in detail, noting that it was actually invented in 1780 for the Austrian Army.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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SpaceX launches 72 smallsats; lands a Falcon 9 1st stage for the 200th time

3:22 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched 72 smallsats using its Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

With this launch, SpaceX achieved a significant milestone, successfully landing a Falcon 9 first stage for the 200th time, an achievement that for more than a half century all managers and most engineers in the rocket business claimed was not only impossible, but impractical. They insisted that the first stage would not be able to be reused because of the stress of launch. SpaceX has proved these close-minded fools very wrong. This particular first stage completed its ninth mission on this flight, a number that has become very routine for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stages. The stage landed back at Vandenberg,

As of posting the satellites have not all deployed.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

40 SpaceX
22 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 45 to 22 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 45 to 38, with SpaceX by itself leading the rest of the world, excluding other American companies, 40 to 38.

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SpaceX launches another 52 Starlink satellites

12:21 am

Just after midnight tonight (Pacific) SpaceX successfully launched another 52 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic, the 199th time that SpaceX has accomplished this so-called impossible task. The two fairing halves completed their fourth and fifth flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

39 SpaceX
22 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 44 to 22 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 44 to 38, with SpaceX by itself leading the rest of the world, excluding other American companies, 39 to 38.

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China tests parachutes on recent Long March 3B launch

10:17 am

During a May 17, 2023 launch of a Long March 3B rocket, China tested the use of parachutes to better control the descent and landing of the rocket’s boosters.

The system was used on a Long March-3B rocket carrying a BeiDou navigation satellite into orbit on May 17 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province, according to the academy.

Developed by the academy, the parachute brought down the rocket boosters to a predetermined location, narrowing the range of the landing area by 80 percent.

Based on the limited information provided by China’s state-run press, it appears this system was only tested on the four strap-on boosters, not on the first stage core. Regardless, such a system, which appears to be a copy of the system Rocket Lab has been developing for the last four years, will significantly reduce the hazards to Chinese inhabitants who live in the drop zones of these rockets.

Note too that China previously tried to copy SpaceX’s grid fins. Apparently its engineers found it difficult if not impossible to reverse engineer that concept, so they apparently decided to try copying Rocket Lab’s parachute methods instead.

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Firefly buys orbital tug company Spaceflight

10:21 am

Firefly Aerospace announced yesterday that it has purchased the orbital tug company Spaceflight, and will now offer its Sherpa tug as part of its launch services.

Spaceflight Inc. was known as a leader in arranging launches of small satellites on small launch vehicles or as secondary payloads on larger launch vehicles, deploying more than 460 payloads. Spaceflight had also developed its own series of orbital transfer vehicles called Sherpa, using a mix of chemical and electric propulsion systems.

Spaceflight has worked with a wide range of launch providers, although at one point it ran afoul of one of its largest partners, SpaceX. However, Firefly said that Spaceflight’s services will, going forward, be used only with Firefly’s vehicles.

Though Firefly will honor the contracts Spaceflight arranged for smallsats to be launched on other rockets, it appears it will be no longer be acting as a launch arranger. Instead, it will offer smallsats a package launch deal, including both its Alpha rocket and the tug. For this deal to pay off however Firefly has got to get Alpha operational. The two launches scheduled for this summer should do this, assuming they fly with no problems.

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Space Force awards SpaceX and ULA contracts for six launches each

10:09 am

As part of its long term launch agreement with SpaceX and ULA, the Space Force today awarded both companies contracts for six launches each, all to occur beginning in 2025.

According to the overall agreement, each company got five-year contracts to launch as many as 40 missions. ULA won 60% of the missions and SpaceX 40%. However, the delays to ULA’s Vulcan rocket will likely change those numbers:

In a report released June 8, the Government Accountability Office noted that the NSSL program office continues to order launch services from ULA and SpaceX amid concerns about Vulcan’s delays. “ULA delayed the first certification flight of the Vulcan launch system … to accommodate challenges with the BE-4 engine and a delayed commercial payload, nearly two years later than originally planned,” said GAO. “In the event that Vulcan is unavailable for future missions, program officials stated that the Phase 2 contract allows for the ability to reassign missions to the other provider.”

One of the reasons that ULA has not hurried its effort to make Vulcan reusable and more competitive with SpaceX is that is already has this guaranteed military launch commitment. It doesn’t need to be as competitive.

What needs to happen is a third or fourth company has to enter the market, giving the military other options. The military also has to cancel this long term launch agreement, which limits the number of companies it will do business with to just SpaceX and ULA. It would be much better to open the competition up to everyone. The ULA would be forced to compete.

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