Tag: engineering

FAA attempts to justify its red tape

10:06 am

The FAA today responded to SpaceX’s harsh criticism of the licensing process that is delaying the next test orbital launch of Starship/Superheavy, claiming the delays were entirely SpaceX’s fault for changing the flight profile of the mission, likely involving the landing of Superheavy at the launch tower rather than in the Gulf of Mexico.

The agency also claimed that this change meant that the “environmental impact” would cover a wider area, requiring imput from “other agencies.”

An FAA official reiteriated these claims at a conference yesterday, stating that the delay was “largely set by the choices that the company makes.”

All crap and utter rationalizations. The FAA has decided that any change of any kind in the launch operations will now require major review, including bringing in Fish & Wildlife, the Coast Guard, and others to have their say. This policy however has nothing to do with reality, as there is absolutely no additional threat to the environment by these changes. Nor is there any significant increase in safety risks by having Superheavy land at Boca Chica. Even if there were, the only ones qualified to determine that risk are engineers at SpaceX. The FAA is merely rubberstamping SpaceX’s conclusions, and taking its time doing so.

This is America today. Unless something changes soon, freedom is dead. To do anything new and challenging Americans will have to beg permission from bureaucrats in Washington, who know nothing but love to exert their power over everyone else. Under these circumstances, we shall see the end of a great and free nation.

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SpaceX launches AST SpaceMobile’s first five operational cellphone satellites

9:45 am

SpaceX this morning successfully launched the first five operational satellites in the planned constellation by the company AST SpaceMobile’s for providing cellphone service from orbiting satellites, the Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its thirteenth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral.

AST’s orbital cellphone capability is in direct competition with SpaceX’s own Starlink orbital cellphone service. By launching this competitor SpaceX demonstrates that it is not using its dominance in the launch industry to squelch competition.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

90 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 105 to 58, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 90 to 73.

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Two astronauts on commercial Polaris Dawn manned mission complete spacewalk

9:37 am

Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk
Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk

Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis this morning each successfully completed short spacewalks outside their Resilience capsule, exiting about halfway into space but floating free except for a umbilical tether.

It was very evident that the goal of both EVAs was to check out the engineering upgrades created by SpaceX to make this spacewalk possible. Both astronauts worked very carefully to vent the capsule’s atmosphere, open the hatch, exit, then close the hatch, though Isaacman (who exited first) opened the hatch and Gillis closed the hatch. All in all it took a little less then two hours to complete both spacewalks, with Isaacman outside for about ten minutes, and Gillis for a little less.

Though the actual EVAs were relatively unambitious, they were very comparable to the first government spacewalks by America’s Ed White and Russia’s Alexei Leonov in the 1960s. The engineering data that SpaceX obtained from this spacewalk will allow it to refine its spacesuits, its capsule, and make later commercial spacewalks more complex.

This new SpaceX capability is now something the company can market to other future customers. It not only gives this American private enterprise another skill, it makes SpaceX’s commercial capabilities more valuable.

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A map of Io’s hot spots based on Juno data

1:12 pm

The hot spots on Io
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using the JIRAM infrared camera on the Jupiter orbiter Juno, scientists have now created a global map of volcanic activity, showing where it appears the hottest and greatest activity is located.

That data is illustrated by the graphic to the right, taken from figure 1 of the paper. The top row shows the coverage of the planet, with Io’s southern hemisphere getting the fewest observations. The bottom row shows the observed regions with the greatest heat. This quote from the abstract is most revealing:

Using JIRAM, we have mapped where volcanoes are producing the most power and compared that to where we expect higher heat flow from the interior models. Our map doesn’t agree with any of these models very well. JIRAM observed more volcanic activity at the poles than we expected to see based on previous observations. However, since the south pole was only observed twice, it’s possible that these observations don’t represent the average volcanic activity of the south pole. Very bright volcanoes that may have been continuously active for decades were also imaged during these Juno fly-bys, some of which are nearer the poles than the equator.

The conflict between the data and the theories could very well be explained simply by the short term nature of these observations. The models could very well be right, over centuries. For example, the new volcano discovered by Juno is near the equator, suggesting with time those models will turn out to be correct.

Or not. A lot more observations will have to be made of Io before any model of its volcanic activity can be considered trustworthy.

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Juno discovers new volcano on Io

10:24 am

New volcano on Io
Click for original image.

By comparing images taken twenty-seven years apart by the the Jupiter orbiters Galileo and Juno, scientists have discovered that during that time a new volcano appeared on the volcano-strewn Jupiter moon Io.

The two pictures to the right show the surface change on Io during those 27 years.

Analysis of the first close-up images of Io in over 25 years, captured by the JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno mission, reveal the emergence of a fresh volcano with multiple lava flows and volcanic deposits covering an area about 180 kilometres by 180 kilometres. The findings have been presented at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) in Berlin this week.

The new volcano is located just south of Io’s equator. Although Io is covered with active volcanoes, images taken during NASA’s Galileo mission in 1997 did not see a volcano is in this particular region – just a featureless surface.

If anything, it has been somewhat surprising how little change the new Juno images have found on Io’s surface, considering its intensely active volcanic geology, with volcano plumes from eruptions captured in images repeatedly. Some volcanoes have shown change, but new features such as this new volcano have not previously been identified.

At the same time, the amount of high resolution imagery of the planet’s surface has been somewhat limited. Galileo sent back far fewer pictures than planned because its main antenna never deployed, and Juno had only a handful of close fly-bys. It will take a mission dedicated to studying Io to better map its violent surface.

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Russia launches three astronauts to ISS

9:45 am

Russia this morning successfully launched a new crew to ISS, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan.

With this launch there are now nineteen humans in orbit, a new record. This includes the three Chinese astronauts on China’s Tiangong-3 space station, the four astronauts on the private Polaris Dawn mission, the three astronauts on this Soyuz, and the nine astronauts on ISS (four from a Dragon launch, two from the Starliner launch, and three from a previous Soyuz launch).

The Soyuz capsule will dock with ISS this afternoon.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

89 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
10 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 104 to 58, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 89 to 73.

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Space industry and Congress blast FAA for its so-called “streamlined” regulations

9:32 am

At hearings yesterday before the House Science committee numerous space companies as well as elected officials heaped numerous complaints about the FAA’s regulartory framework, called Part 450, that it adopted in March 2021 supposedly to “streamline” and “speed up” the licensing required to launch.

The result has been the exact opposite, as predicted by many in the industry when the agency was writing these regulations.

Many in the launch industry have warned since the regulations went into force in March 2021 that it was difficult for companies to obtain licenses under Part 450. Industry officials raised concerns about Part 450 at an October 2023 hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee, with one witness, Bill Gerstenmaier of SpaceX, warning the “entire regulatory system is at risk of collapse” because of the difficulties getting licenses under the new regulations.

Witnesses at the House hearing made clear those concerns have not abated. “The way it is being implemented today has caused severe licensing delays, confusion and is jeopardizing our long-held leadership position,” said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group whose members include several launch companies.

He cited specific concerns such as a long “pre-application” process with the FAA where companies, he said, “get stuck in an endless back-and-forth process” with the agency to determine how they can meet the performance-based requirements of Part 450 with limited guidance. “This process is taking years,” he argued.

It first must be noted that this hearing was not called in connection with the FAA’s stonewalling of SpaceX Starship/Superheavy test program. It was called because since 2021 the entire new rocket industry in the U.S. has ground to a halt, with launches from new rocket companies practically ending because of the red tape imposed on them by Part 450. If something is not done to fix this, new companies in Europe and India will quickly grab market share, choking off profits for the new American companies.

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Polaris Dawn successfully reaches highest orbit for a human since Apollo

9:23 am

The view from 870 miles
The view from 870 miles. Click for video.

Polaris Dawn yesterday successfully climbed to an altitude of 870 miles yesterday, the farthest any human has been from Earth since the Apollo missions to the Moon, and the highest Earth orbit since Gemini 11 flew an apogee of 853 miles in 1966.

The four members of the Polaris Dawn mission, riding aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft “Resilience,” climbed into an elliptical orbit with a high point, or apogee, of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) on Tuesday (Sep. 10). They reached the record distance about 15 hours after lifting off at 5:23 a.m. EDT (0923 GMT) from Florida earlier in the day and circling the planet about eight times in an initial orbit of 118 by 746 miles (190 by 1,200 km).

They maintained this high orbit for about ten hours in order to gather radiation data for future exploration, and then dropped down to a lower orbit where the planned spacewalk will occur on September 12th.

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Engineers successfully switch thrusters on Voyager-1

9:14 am

The Voyager missions
The routes the Voyager spacecraft have
taken since launch.

Because of an increasing number of clogged thrusters on the almost half-century old Voyager-1 spacecraft, now flying just beyond the heliosphere of the solar system, engineers needed to switch thrusters recently, and successfully did so in a complex dance of engineering.

They had to switch from one thruster, in which a fuel line has become increasingly clogged in the last few years due to age, to an another thruster in a different system. The switch however required other careful preparations, since Voyager-1’s nuclear power supply has dropped to a point where they have been forced to shut down almost all operations. Thus, the thrusters are not getting heated as they once were, and turning on the replacement thruster in this condition could damage it.
» Read more

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The reasons why Mars two polar caps are so different

1:06 pm

The Martian north pole
The Martian north pole.

The Martian south pole
The Martian south pole.

Elevation scale bar
What the colors mean in terms of elevation

A new paper, in review for the past year, has now been published describing the differences between the north and south poles of Mars, the most fundamental of which involve the planet’s orbit and the different elevations of the two poles, with the south pole three to six miles higher in altitude (as indicated by the colors on the maps to the right).

The cumulative data has allowed the researchers to explain why — when the thin winter cap of dry ice sublimates away in the spring — the process at the south pole results in spiderlike features that get enhanced from year to year, but in the north pole that sublimation process produces no such permanent features.

In both cases, the spring sunlight passes through the clear winter mantle of dry ice to heat its base. The sublimated trapped CO2 gas builds up, until the pressure causes the mantle to crack at weak spots. In the south that trapped gas flows uphill each spring along the same paths, carving the riverlike tributaries dubbed unofficially as “spiders” and officially as “araneiform terrain.”

Geophysicist Hugh Kieffer described that process in 2006. A few years later, [Candice] Hansen [the new paper’s lead author] followed up with her own model for the north polar cap, which also displays fans in the spring.

She found that the same phenomena occur in the north, but rather than relatively flat terrain, these processes play out across sand dunes. “When the Sun comes up and begins to sublimate the bottom of the ice layer, there are three weak spots – one at the crest of the dune, one at the bottom of the dune where it meets the surface and then the ice itself can crack along the slope,” Hansen said. “No araneiform terrain has been detected in the north because although shallow furrows develop, the wind smooths the sand on the dunes.”

There is also a lot more dust in the north, including a giant sea of dunes that circles the polar cap. In addition, the northern winter is shorter due to the planet’s orbit, and takes place during the annual dust storm season, causing there to be more dust concentrated within the northern ice. All of these factors make the the dunes and general surface in the north is more easily smoothed by the wind.

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A cloud atlas of Mars

10:58 am

Different clouds on Mars interacting
Click for original image.

Using data obtained from one of the instruments on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, scientists have now published an atlas of the clouds of Mars and made it available to the public.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is just one example of the images in the atlas. From the caption:

This image displays two atmospheric phenomena: the white curved lines are gravity wave clouds, while the brown areas are dust lifted from the ground by wind. The colour shift visible in the dust lifting event might be indicative of very fast winds, a phenomenon currently under investigation by other members of the team.

The atlas contains more than 300 images of various Martian cloud formations, from the one to the right to images of cirrus clouds on the top of Olympus Mons, Mars’ largest volcano. You can download it here (the file is a very large spreadsheet).

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FAA delays launch license approval of next Starship/Superheavy test launch until late November

9:51 am


The White House to SpaceX: “Great business you got there! Really be
a shame if something happened to it!”

According to an update today on SpaceX’s Starship webpage, the FAA has told the company to not expect a launch license for its next Starship/Superheavy orbital test launch until late November.

We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis. The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.

This two month delay is actually a four month delay, since SpaceX had previously stated it was ready to launch in early August. » Read more

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