Tag: engineering

Chinese pseudo-company successfully completes second rocket vertical take-off and landing

9:31 am

Ispace hopper about to land, December 10, 2023
Ispace hopper about to land, December 10, 2023.
Click for video.

The Chinese pseudo-company Ispace on December 10, 2023 successfully completed the second veritical hop flight of a rocket prototype, testing vertical take-off and landing for the eventual purpose of recovering its first stages, as done now routinely by SpaceX.

ISpace’s Hyperbola-2Y methane-liquid oxygen reusable verification stage lifted off from a pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 4:07 a.m. Eastern (1107 UTC) Dec. 10.

The Hyperbola-2Y reached an altitude of 343.12 meters, translating 50 meters to a landing zone and touching down with a velocity of 1.1 meters per second and an accuracy of 0.295 meters. The entire flight lasted 63.15 seconds, according to an iSpace press statement. The flight came just over a month after a first hop test Nov. 2. That test reached 178 meters and returned to its landing spot. iSpace says it will attempt a test at sea next year after completing ground tests.

Right now the race to become the second company or nation after SpaceX to return and reuse a first stage is between Ispace and Rocket Lab. No one else is even close, though there are a number of other Chinese pseudo-companies that are doing hop tests. Though Rocket Lab — which is not attempting a vertical engine landing but recovering the stage from the ocean — has already flown a recovered engine, as well as recovered several first stages for refurbishment, it has not yet flown a reused first stage. Based on its schedule, that might happen ’24.

Ispace meanwhile hasn’t yet flown to orbit the prototype’s rocket, Hyperbola-3. It hopes to attempt the first orbital test flight in 2025, with the recovery of its first stage in 2026.

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The Polaris Dawn private space mission now targeting an April ’24 launch

9:14 am

The Polaris Dawn private space mission, the first of a three-mission private manned program being financed by billionaire Jared Isaacman, is now targeting an April 2024 launch.

In social media posts Dec. 9, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire backing the Polaris program and who is commanding the initial mission, said the launch of Polaris Dawn is now scheduled for April 2024. “April is the goal to launch & the pace of training is accelerating,” he wrote, stating that he was at SpaceX that day for testing of extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits that will be used on the mission.

Conducting a spacewalk is one of the major goals of Polaris Dawn, requiring both development of an EVA suit as well as modifications to the Crew Dragon, which lacks an airlock. Both of those have been challenges, he suggested in a subsequent post. There is a “big difference,” he wrote, between the pressure suits worn by Crew Dragon astronauts and an EVA suit “engineered from the start to be exposed to vacuum outside the spaceship.” The lack of an airlock also requires changes to Crew Dragon software and hardware to enable depressurization of the cabin before the start of the spacewalk and repressurization afterwards.

The mission’s launch has been delayed several times from its first launch target in 2022. This first flight of Isaacman’s Polaris program will, as noted, attempt the first spacewalk by a private citizen. The second would also fly on a Dragon capsule, but its mission remains unclear. Both NASA and Isaacman’s Polaris team have been studying the possibility of a repair mission to Hubble. The third mission would be on Starship, once it begins flying operationally.

Isaacman previously paid for and flew on SpaceX’s first commercial manned flight, Inspiration4, in September 2021.

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Voyager-1 has computer issues

9:03 am

According to the Voyager-1 science team, the probe has developed a problem with one of its three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS), that is preventing it from sending back useable data.

Among other things, the FDS is designed to collect data from the science instruments as well as engineering data about the health and status of the spacecraft. It then combines that information into a single data “package” to be sent back to Earth by the TMU. The data is in the form of ones and zeros, or binary code. Varying combinations of the two numbers are the basis of all computer language.

Recently, the TMU began transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros as if it were “stuck.” After ruling out other possibilities, the Voyager team determined that the source of the issue is the FDS. This past weekend the team tried to restart the FDS and return it to the state it was in before the issue began, but the spacecraft still isn’t returning useable data.

Engineers are trouble-shooting the problem, and expect it will take several weeks at best to identify and then fix the issue. The 22-hour travel time for communications to reach the spacecraft, now beyond the edge of the solar system more than 15 billion miles away, means that it will at minimum take about two days to find out if a transmitted fix works.

As the spacecraft was launched in 1977, most of the engineers now working on it were not even born then, and must deal with a technology that was designed before personal computers, no less smart phones, even existed. Like the entire 1960s space race, the two Voyager craft now beyond the solar system were built by engineers using slide rules.

Voyager-2 also had problems in August that engineers were able to fix, so the prognosis here is not bad.

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Craters in a row

11:20 am

Craters in a row
Click for original image.

Cool image time from Mars! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It highlights a string of craters, all lined up in an almost straight line.

Were these craters caused by the impact of an asteroid that broke up as it burned its way through the thin Martian atmosphere? The lack of any raised rims argues instead that these are sinks produced not from impact but from a collapse into a void below, possibly a fault line.

Yet, almost all of the craters in this image, even those not part of this crater string, show no raised rims. If sinks, the voids below don’t seem to follow any pattern, which once again argues in favor of random impacts, with the string produced by a bolide breaking up just prior to hitting the ground.
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Galaxies in a row

9:18 am

Galaxies in a row
Click for original image.

Cool image time from Hubble! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nearby “pecular” galaxies. What makes it unusual is the line of distant galaxies below the largest on the left.

The wonderful quality of this image also reveals several further galaxies, not associated with this system but fortuitously positioned in such a way that they appear to be forming a line that approaches the leftmost (in this image) component of Arp-Madore 2105-332, which is known individually as 2MASX J21080752-3314337. The rightmost galaxy, meanwhile, is known as 2MASX J21080362-3313196. These hefty names do not lend themselves to easy memorisation, but they do actually contain valuable information: they are coordinates in the right ascension and declination system used widely by astronomers to locate astronomical objects.

Both larger galaxies are thought to be about 200 million light years away, with the smaller ones far more distant. If you look at the full resolution image, you will see that there are at least six galaxies in that line, one that appears to be an elliptical galaxy with all the rest a variety of different types of spiral galaxies. The detail provided by Hubble is truly astonishing.

Though they are not linked to the larger galaxies, it is not clear if they are linked to each other.

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ULA likely to delay first Vulcan launch to January launch window

8:31 am

According to a tweet yesterday by ULA’s CEO, Tory Bruno, the final dress rehearsal countdown of its new Vulcan rocket had some “routine” issues that will require a redo and thus prevent the planned launch on December 24, 2023.

WDR [wet dress rehearsal] update: Vehicle performed well. Ground system had a couple of (routine) issues, (being corrected). Ran the timeline long so we didn’t quite finish. I’d like a FULL WDR before our first flight, so XMAS eve is likely out. Next Peregrine window is 8 Jan.

Peregrine is Astrobotic’s lunar lander, which must launch within certain time frames to get to the Moon as planned.

As many news sites are noting (almost certainly because they read my launch race reports), ULA will likely complete 2023 with only three launches, its lowest total since it was formed in 2007 from a merger of the launch divisions of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Prior to 2017 the company had averaged about one launch per month. In 2017 however SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket finally reached full operations, hitting 18 launches and steadily since then increasing that total. Its success (and lower prices) shifted the business from ULA, causing its annual launch totals to drop significantly, as shown in my 2022 global report.

Once Vulcan begins launching finally ULA should recover, especially because of its large contract with Amazon to launch the Kuiper constellation totalling almost fifty launches. A large percentage of those launches must be completed before 2026 for Amazon to meet the requirements of its FCC license.

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China’s Long March 2D rocket launches classified remote sensing satellite

8:57 pm

Early on December 10, 2023 (Chinese time) China successfully launched a classified remote sensing satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in the south of China.

The state-run Chinese press released almost no information. Nor did it say where within China the lower stages of the rocket, using toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed.

As expected, China’s launch pace in December has picked up, as it has routinely in recent years. The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
58 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches, 103 to 58, and the entire world combined 103 to 92. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies), 91 to 92, though it plans two launches on December 10th.

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Momentus fails to deploy three satellites on SpaceX’s multi-smallsat launch

10:06 am

The orbital tug company Momentus failed to deploy the satellites of three of its customers following November’s SpaceX multi-smallsat Transporter launch.

Momentus announced Dec. 5 that three of the five satellites that it flew on the Transporter-9 launch Nov. 11 did not appear to deploy from the Falcon 9’s upper stage. The company used a third-party deployer, rather than its own Vigoride tug, on that mission, and said that it was able to confirm that the Hello Test 1 and 2 satellites from Turkish company Hello Space were released.

The Momentus deployer remained attached to SpaceX’s upper stage, which as planned fired a de-orbit burn after completing the deployment schedule of its 90 satellites. All the satellites that used SpaceX’s deployment system apparently deployed properly.

In 2022 Momentus’s own orbital tug, Vigoride, had problems deploying some satellites on its first test launch, though its second flight in July 2023 was completely successful.

The failure here will not only pose problems for that third-party deployment company as well as Momentus, it will do serious harm to the startups that launched the three lost satellites. One was American, while the other two were South Korean and Polish. The American company, Lunasonde, has been trying to develop a constellation of satellites designed to look for underground resources.

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China launches three satellites using methane-fueled rocket

9:54 am

China's spaceports
China’s spaceports

The Chinese pseudo-company Landspace yesterday successfully used its methane-fueled Zhuque-2 rocket for the third time, placing three satellites into orbit from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

As China’s state-run press is now consistently doing, its report fails to mention this pseudo-company at all, recognizing the reality that it is actually controlled and owned by the Chinese government, though structured to function like a private company to enhance competition within China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
57 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches, 103 to 57, and the entire world combined 103 to 91. SpaceX by itself is now tied with the rest of the world (excluding other American companies), 91 to 91, though it plans two launches tomorrow.

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Hubble to resume science operations using three gyros

9:02 am

Engineers have apparently figured out the issues with one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s three gyroscopes, and plan to resume science operations today using all three gyros.

After analyzing the data, the team has determined science operations can resume under three-gyro control. Based on the performance observed during the tests, the team has decided to operate the gyros in a higher-precision mode during science observations. Hubble’s instruments and the observatory itself remain stable and in good health.

This is excellent news. If it had been determined that the funky gyro was no longer functional, the telescope would have shifted into what the engineers call “one-gyro mode.” By using only one of the two remaining gyros, Hubble’s life could be extended. However, while it would allow the telescope to point and continue observations, the images would no longer be as sharp.

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SpaceX launches 22 more Starlink satellites

1:17 am

SpaceX early in the morning on December 8th successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage successfully completed its twelfth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
56 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches, 103 to 56, and the entire world combined 103 to 90. SpaceX by itself has once again taken the lead over the rest of the world (excluding other American companies), now leading 91 to 90.

At this moment, based on the pace SpaceX is setting, the chances it will make its goal of 100 launches in 2023 seems very likely. Not that it matters should the company fall short by one or two launches. At this moment it already has achieved more launches in a year than the entire world managed per year for most of the history of the space age, since Sputnik in 1957. It has also established that it can do this, which means its goal of 144 launches next year is quite reasonable.

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The steep mountain slopes inside Valles Marineris

1:28 pm

Overview map

The steep mountain slopes inside Valles Marineris
Click for full image.

Time for another cool image showing the dramatically steep terrain of Valles Marineris on Mars, the largest known canyon in the solar system. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on October 31, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists rightly label this picture “Steep Slopes in West Melas Chasma”. The red dot marks the high point on this ridgeline. The green dot at the upper left marks the lowest point in the picture, about 4,800 feet below the peak. The blue dot on the right edge marks the low point on the ridge’s eastern flank, about 4,600 feet below the peak. The cliff to the east of the peak drops quickly about 1,300 feet in less than a mile.

On the overview map above, the white dot marks the location. The inset is an oblique view, created from a global mosaic of MRO’s context camera images, with the white rectangle indicating approximately the area covered by the picture above.

The immense scale of Valles Marineris must once again be noted. The elevations in this picture are comparable to the descent you make hiking down from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. They pale however when compared to Valles Marineris. In the inset I have indicated the rim and floor of Valles Marineris in this part of the canyon. The elevation distance between the two is 18,000 feet.

In other words, the canyon to the east of this ridge is quite comparable in size to the Earth’s Grand Canyon, and it is hardly noticeable within the larger canyon of Valles Marineris.

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