Tag: engineering

NASA will fly a test drone on 2020 Mars rover mission

4:02 pm

NASA today announced that a test drone, dubbed Mars Helicopter, will be flown on the 2020 Mars rover mission.

Once the rover is on the planet’s surface, a suitable location will be found to deploy the helicopter down from the vehicle and place it onto the ground. The rover then will be driven away from the helicopter to a safe distance from which it will relay commands. After its batteries are charged and a myriad of tests are performed, controllers on Earth will command the Mars Helicopter to take its first autonomous flight into history.

“We don’t have a pilot and Earth will be several light minutes away, so there is no way to joystick this mission in real time,” said Aung. “Instead, we have an autonomous capability that will be able to receive and interpret commands from the ground, and then fly the mission on its own.”

The full 30-day flight test campaign will include up to five flights of incrementally farther flight distances, up to a few hundred meters, and longer durations as long as 90 seconds, over a period. On its first flight, the helicopter will make a short vertical climb to 10 feet (3 meters), where it will hover for about 30 seconds.

As a technology demonstration, the Mars Helicopter is considered a high-risk, high-reward project. If it does not work, the Mars 2020 mission will not be impacted. If it does work, helicopters may have a real future as low-flying scouts and aerial vehicles to access locations not reachable by ground travel.

The only word I can think of to express my thoughts on this is “Cool!”

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SpaceX successfully launches in Block 5 Falcon 9

1:23 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully placed in orbit Bangladesh’s first communications satellite, successfully using its upgraded Block 5 version of the Falcon 9 rocket, its first stage designed to be reused a minimum of ten times.

They successfully recovered the first stage, and will now take it apart to confirm this new version worked as planned. If so, it will be put back together and returned to service.

The leaders in the 2018 launch standings:

14 China
9 SpaceX
5 Russia
5 ULA

The U.S. and China are once again tied at 14 for the nation lead. SpaceX’s launch rate is presently double what it achieved last year, when it launched the most rockets of any private company ever.

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People object to Google’s robot call technology sounding just like a human

9:18 am

In creating its new Google assistant, called Duplex, and designing it to be able to make phone calls to schedule appointments, the company made it indistinguishable from a human and successfully hid the fact that it was a robot.

The company was then surprised that many were horrified by this and objected.

The demonstration of the technology at the conference was both impressive and startling. The first example showed Duplex calling a hair salon and scheduling an appointment. The second example involved an even more complex conversation, with the system calling a restaurant to try to make a reservation. In the course of the conversation the system is told it wouldn’t need a reservation for that many people on that particular day. Understanding this, Duplex thanks the person on the other end and hangs up.

These examples of a human-sounding AI interacting with a real person are undeniably impressive, but the technology’s ability to so blatantly fool another human being into thinking it is real has left many unnerved. From suggestions Google had failed at ethical and creative AI design to more explicit accusations that the company was ethically lost, rudderless and outright deceptive, it seems something had gone drastically wrong.

You can watch the demonstration at the link. The robocall technology is quite amazing, and it is also incredibly dishonest and morally bankrupt. Google makes no effort to identify its robot to the listener, and is actually proud that it successfully fools them into thinking they are talking to a human.

The article notes that the company has gotten a lot of negative response to this, and has since said it will always make full disclosure in the future. I have my doubts. I also expect that politicians and survey companies will soon take advantage of this as well. I now routinely hang up on surveys that use robots. To discover that they can fool us makes me want to hang up on all surveys, in all cases.

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Cracks in pedestrian bridge possible root of failure

2:42 pm

Cracks found in a Florida pedestrian bridge prior to its collapse, killing six, might have indicated the upcoming failure.

A key concrete support truss in the doomed Florida International University pedestrian bridge developed worrisome cracks 10 days before the structure was lifted into place over the Tamiami Trail, photographs and an internal email unintentionally released by the school show.

The documents, released in response to public records requests from the Miami Herald, show that FIU’s construction and engineering team discovered potentially problematic cracks in the bridge earlier than officials have previously acknowledged.

Because of the ongoing investigation we do not yet how the engineering company building the bridge responded to the cracks. They might have analyzed them and dismissed them. Or the might have ignored them entirely.

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Mars Odyssey looks down at Curiosity

10:39 am

Gale Crater

The Mars Odyssey team today released an image the spacecraft took of Gale Crater on January 16, 2018. This image, reduced in resolution, is posted on the right and captures the entire region that the rover Curiosity has been traversing for the past six years. If you click on the image you can view the full resolution original.

I have placed Curiosity’s full route since its landing on this image so that we can see where the rover has been. The actual peak of Mount Sharp is a considerable distance to the south and is not visible in this image. (For the full context of the crater and Curiosity’s travels see my March 2016 post, Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater)

The river-like flow feature cutting through the north rim is called Peace Vallis. Scientists think this was formed by water flowing into the crater when the climate of Mars was wetter and there was a lake inside the crater floor.

You can get another perspective of this same view by looking at the panorama looking north that Curiosity took once it climbed up onto Vera Rubin Ridge.

I have said this before, but this Mars Odyssey image once again illustrates how little of Mars we have so far seen. Curiosity has barely begun its climb into the foothills of Mount Sharp. The mile-high mountains that form the rim of Gale Crater are far away, and will not be walked for probably generations. I do not expect any space probe or explorer to enter Peace Vallis for at least a hundred years, since there are so many other places on Mars to visit and Gale Crater has already gotten its first reconnaissance by Curiosity.

The image also gives as a view of Curiosity’s future travels. Based on this October 3, 2016 press release, Curiosity will eventually head into the mouth of the large canyon directly to the south of its present position. Whether the mission will continue up this canyon wash, using it as the route up Mount Sharp, will depend on many things, including the roughness of the terrain in that canyon and the simple question of whether the rover will be able to operate that long.

If it does, the views then from inside that canyon should be quite breathtaking.

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Juno images processed by citizens highlighted at conference

9:50 am

Several Juno images that have been cleverly processed by citizen scientists are being highlighted at a Jupiter conference being held in London this week.

JunoCam images presented at the meeting by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran include an animation showing the evolution of swirling features in the giant planet’s atmosphere and a composite image of Jupiter’s cloud tops.

Gerald Eichstädt, a mathematician working as a software professional, has taken two images from JunoCam and reprojected them to the same vantage point to enable a direct comparison between the images and show the subtle motions within the atmosphere. By modelling the movement of individual pixels in the images, he has created an animation that extrapolates the swirling evolution of the vortices in the atmosphere.

Eichstädt explains: “This animation represents a ‘feasibility test’. Building on this initial work, we can add in more variables that will give us a more detailed description and physical understanding of Jupiter’s atmosphere.”

Seán Doran, in collaboration with Eichstädt, has created a new composite image of Jupiter as seen by Juno as it swung away from Jupiter’s south pole on 1st April 2018. Because Jupiter was larger than JunoCam’s field of view when the main portion of the image was taken, Eichstädt rendered four other images to the same viewing geometry to reconstruct a mosaic of the whole planet. Doran then processed the composite image to balance and blend the overlapping components, sharpen the contrast, and fill gaps.

I have myself highlighted images by both previously at Behind the Black, here and here and here and here. This press release nicely places both in the limelight at last.

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Air Force forces delay in next Falcon Heavy launch

9:07 am

Because the Air Force wishes to do more testing and review of both its payload and the rocket, the second launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy has been delayed several months.

The Falcon Heavy mission for the Air Force will be its first for a paying customer. STP-2 has a number of objectives, including demonstrating the new rocket’s capabilities and launching several satellites.

The launch had been set for June.

That the Air Force is on board Falcon Heavy now indicates that it wants to get this rocket certified for military launches as quickly as possible, thus giving it another heavy lift launch option besides the much more expensive Delta Heavy of ULA. This strategy is good for the Air Force, good for the taxpayer, and good for the launch industry. It will lower launch costs while encouraging competition.

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A new net for Mr. Steven

9:32 am

Photos of the ship, Mr. Steven, that SpaceX wants to use to recover its rocket fairings show that the company has installed a new net for catching those fairings.

The article theorizes that this heftier net has actually been installed for eventually catching the Falcon 9’s upper stage.

[T]he newly-installed net is by all appearances magnitudes larger, heavier, and stronger than the minimal mesh specimen it is clearly replacing. Given the fact that SpaceX thus far has self-admittedly failed to catch a gliding fairing half in the net, it seems unlikely that such a drastic upgrade would be necessitated by any field-testing that occurred since Mr. Steven’s debut late last year. Rather, a significantly more capable net seems to more readily fit alongside CEO Elon Musk’s tweet reveal three weeks prior that SpaceX would attempt to close the final major loop of Falcon reusability by recovering the orbital upper stage (S2). Estimated to weigh approximately 4000 kilograms empty, the upper stage is a minimum of four times heavier than Falcon 9’s payload fairing halves, Mr Steven’s current meal of choice.

Judging from the new net’s beefy rigging, broader bars, and general appearance, one could safely argue that it looks at least several times stronger than the mesh net before it. One could also argue that the absolutely massive metal arms installed on Mr. Steven are far larger than what might be required to catch the extremely low mass-to-area ratio payload fairings, with structural heft and bulky netting more reminiscent of safety nets present on naval vessels that are designed to catch aircraft and helicopters weighing five metric tons or more.

This is an interesting theory, but I have my doubts. At the same time, I would not dismiss Musk’s willingness to try daring engineering approaches.

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China launches Earth observation satellite

9:06 am

China’s Long March 4C rocket today launched an Earth observation remote sensing satellite.

I think I need to put together an outline of all of China’s operational rockets. The 4C appears to be similar to the 4B, but knowing how it differs from their other rockets, and why they have each, would be helpful information.

The leaders in the 2018 launch standings:

14 China
8 SpaceX
5 Russia
5 ULA

China has once again pulled ahead of the U.S., 14-13, in the national standings.

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Software issue caused self-driving car accident that killed pedestrian

7:57 pm

Sources in the investigation of an accident where a self-driving car hit and killed a pedestrian in Arizona in March now say that the car’s programming was at fault.

According to two anonymous sources who talked to Efrati, Uber’s sensors did, in fact, detect Herzberg as she crossed the street with her bicycle. Unfortunately, the software classified her as a “false positive” and decided it didn’t need to stop for her.

Distinguishing between real objects and illusory ones is one of the most basic challenges of developing self-driving car software. Software needs to detect objects like cars, pedestrians, and large rocks in its path and stop or swerve to avoid them. However, there may be other objects—like a plastic bag in the road or a trash can on the sidewalk—that a car can safely ignore. Sensor anomalies may also cause software to detect apparent objects where no objects actually exist.

Software designers face a basic tradeoff here. If the software is programmed to be too cautious, the ride will be slow and jerky, as the car constantly slows down for objects that pose no threat to the car or aren’t there at all. Tuning the software in the opposite direction will produce a smooth ride most of the time—but at the risk that the software will occasionally ignore a real object. According to Efrati, that’s what happened in Tempe in March—and unfortunately the “real object” was a human being.

I honestly do not understand the need for self-driving cars. In the end, I simply cannot see the software ever being capable of handling all the variables created by the presence of the unpredictable life that will surround it. And should it get that good, I wonder if we will then regret it.

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Craters, cones, pits, amid endless plains

12:49 pm

Pits, cones, and craters

Cool image time! Buried in the catalog of recent high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are places on Mars that are inexplicable and fascinating, while also indicative of its vastness. The image on the right, reduced in resolution and cropped to post here, shows us one such place. If you click on the image you can see the full image at high resolution.

The archive posting of this image is titled “Cones near Pits.” As you can see, to the north and east of the pits are some mesas (why they call them cones I do not know).

The pits are unusual, and appear to be some form of collapse. In the larger image several additional mesas can be seen at farther distances, but most of the overall terrain is remarkably flat and featureless, except for numerous small craters that appear either partly buried by dust or significantly eroded.

I am not going to guess at the geology that caused the pits and mesas. What I do want to focus on is the vastness of Mars. This location is on the southern edge of Utopia Basin, the second deepest basin on Mars. It is part of the planet’s endless northern plains, an immense region covering almost half the planet that tends to be at a lower elevation, is relatively smooth, and is thought by some scientists to be evidence of what was once an intermittent ocean. The global map of Mars below indicates the location of the above image with a black cross.
» Read more

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Another company enters the smallsat rocket competition

10:00 am

Capitalism in space: Another new smallsat company, Rocket Crafters, has entered the competition, focusing on the development of 3D-printed rocket engines using hybrid fuels.

The company’s Cidco Road facility is notable for what is not there, Gutierrez said. Unlike a more typical rocket engine site, there are no signs warning of explosive materials, no use of super-cold or toxic propellants, and no engines equipped with turbo pumps.

Instead, the rocket fuel consisted of plastic tubes made from the same base materials as Legos, measuring two feet long and weighing about five pounds, that were stacked on shelves and safe to touch. Combined with nitrous oxide — commonly known as “laughing gas” — the small-scale test engine on Monday generated about 200 pounds of thrust firing at half-power. It was one of more than 20 such firings over the past year at the facility Cocoa officials rezoned to allow the tests, which were deemed safe to the surrounding people and environment.

“We’re not the noisiest neighbor in the area,” joked Robert Fabian, senior vice president of the propulsion division.

Most rockets rely on super-cold or “cryogenic” propellants such as liquid oxygen or liquid hydrogen, or solid fuel like the space shuttle’s twin solid rocket boosters used.

Hybrid motors have suffered from uneven burns producing bumpy rides, Fabian said. But Rocket Crafters believes it has found a low-cost solution providing a smooth, consistent burn: 3-D printed cylinders of fuel formed in ridged and beaded layers.

We shall see. They hope to fly by 2020, at the earliest. They will be joining an increasingly crowded field. If their design works, however, they will certainly carve out a significant market share, as hybrid fuels are so much safer and easier to handle than traditional propellants.

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The two Mars cubesats flying in formation with InSight

9:24 am

Even as the InSight lander heads to Mars, it is being accompanied by two test cubesats, the first such smallsats to ever fly an interplanetary mission.

The MARCO mission objective is a challenging one. The team will provide a dedicated relay during Mars InSight’s descent to the surface of the Red Planet on November 26, 2018. Rather than entering orbit, the CubeSats will pass 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) from Mars during the larger mission’s crucial landing phase. Mars will be 97.5 million miles (157 million kilometers) away at the time, making for an 8.7-light-minute communications lag from Mars to the Earth. The lag means that NASA engineers will need to wait 8.7 minutes to see whether the landing was successful, equivalent to Curiosity’s “seven minutes of terror;” meanwhile, if all goes well, MARCO will have a front-row seat to the show. While the success of the InSight mission isn’t dependent on MARCO, the CubeSats will provide a black box data recorder of all aspects of the mission’s descent.

If these cubesats succeed in accomplishing their engineering test missions, their true innovation will not be engineering but cost reduction. If they prove that cubesats can be designed as interplanetary probes, the costs to build and launch such missions will be drastically reduced. Not only do cubesats routinely use cheaper off-the-shelf components, they are far lighter than standard satellites, which means a smaller, cheaper rocket can launch them.

The data-relay test of these cubesats however is quite important, nonetheless. See my post above.

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SpaceX sets May 10 for next launch, the first for Falcon 9’s final design

9:13 am

Capitalism in space: After analyzing the data from Friday’s static fire dress rehearsal, SpaceX has now scheduled the launch of Bangabandhu-1, Bangladesh’s first communications satellite, for May 10.

The significance of this launch is that it will be the first of what SpaceX calls the Block 5 version of this Falcon 9 first stage, a final design intended for many reuses and quick turnaround.

The star of the show is the new, unflown first stage core 1046, which is the first “Block 5” Falcon 9 first stage. Block 5 is the final major upgrade to the Falcon 9, the culmination of over 10 years of development and evolution of SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.

Block 5 has numerous advantages over past versions of the Falcon 9, notably including higher thrust engines, improved and more resilient recovery hardware, and the ability to be reflown within 48 hours of landing after a previous mission. Block 5 was also designed to meet – and in some cases exceed – NASA’s strict Commercial Crew Program requirements, which SpaceX must follow in order to be able to fly NASA astronauts, expected to begin in early 2019.

Block 5 cores are also expected to be reused 10 times before undergoing any major refurbishment, and SpaceX hopes to fly each booster up to 100 times before it is retired.

NASA has demanded that SpaceX fly at least seven different launches with the Block 5 stages before it will permit its astronauts on board (unlike SLS, where NASA has even considered flying astronauts on board with no previous test flights). Thus, getting this rocket flying is crucial to getting Americans back in space, on an American-made rocket.

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ULA workers go on strike

7:39 am

ULA’s workers went on strike today, their union rejecting the company’s final contract offer.

A major point of contention, the union said, were changes made to the contracts that offered employees less general flexibility, most notably when it comes to travel. Teams often travel between Vandenberg and the Cape to support missions, such as Saturday’s successful Atlas V launch of NASA’s InSight spacecraft now bound for Mars.

“A big part of it is how they have people travel from different locations to launch,” said Jody Bennett, chief of staff and aerospace negotiator for the union. “It doesn’t give them a lot of family time. They can force you to pack up, leave and go someplace for 30 days.”

“A month away from home is a long time, especially if it’s forced on you,” Bennett said, noting that travel beyond 30 days is voluntary.

This travel clause might relate to ULA’s effort to compete with SpaceX. They have trimmed their workforce, which means they might need to bring workers in from other locations when they do a launch, rather than hire more at each launch location and have them on standby all the time.

Either way, the timing of the strike is interesting, as it arrives just after a launch with the next ULA launch not scheduled until the end of July. It seems everyone, both company and union, have timed this to do as little harm to the company as possible.

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Atlas 5 successfully launches Mars lander InSight

8:01 am

ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket early this morning successfully launched NASA’s newest Mars lander InSight.

InSight will drill a seismic probe into the Martian surface and monitor earthquake activity. This will be the first time such monitoring will occur, and the probe is planned to do it for at least two years.

The launch puts the U.S. back in a tie with China for the lead in launches this year. The standings:

13 China
8 SpaceX
5 Russia
5 ULA

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Volcano or Impact?

11:34 am

Elliptical crater with flow features

Cool image time! Yesterday the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) team released its monthly image dump of more than 500 new photographs, taken by the spacecraft’s high resolution camera. As I have started to do in the past few months, I am reviewing this collection and plan to post a few of the more interesting images over the next month. On the right is the first of this series. I have cropped and reduced the resolution to show here, but you can see the full resolution version if you click on the image.

The MRO team labels this image an “elliptical crater with flow features.” The first impression one gets from the image is that the impact that caused the crater came from the side and hit the ground obliquely, creating the crater’s oval shape and the lava-type flow features in the crater’s floor.

As is almost always the case with Martian geology, beware of first impressions. You need to give any feature both a more detailed look as well as a broader view to have any chance at understanding its context and geology.
» Read more

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Russian to fly on Orion?

9:12 am

In negotiations between NASA and Roscosmos on their hoped-for partnership to build the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G), it has been proposed that when SLS carries Orion and the platform’s Russian airlock to lunar orbit a Russian will go as well.

“Within the framework of talks, draft plans of future manned missions to the lunar stations have been made. Among other issues, the possibility to send one Russian cosmonaut as part of the crew of the Orion spacecraft that will drag the Russian airlock module to the moon is on the agenda. The Russian cosmonaut will have to ensure the integration of the module with the station,” the source said.

A source in Russia’s Rocket and Space Corporation Energia (RSC Energia) that would produce the module confirmed this information to Sputnik, saying that four manned missions were expected to be sent to the station and the Russian cosmonaut should accompany the Russian-made module during its transportation to the Earth satellite.

This all sounds so wonderful. Too bad it is so unconnected with reality. Congress has yet to provide any funds for LOP-G. At the moment, SLS/Orion is only funded through its first manned mission.

At the same time, I am getting the feeling that both NASA and Congress expect SLS/Orion’s $4 billion-plus annual budget that it has gotten since the program started in the late 2000s will simply continue, giving them the money to build this Potemkin Village in orbit around the Moon while funding the Russian contributions.

That’s what happened with ISS. The U.S. footed most of the bills for the Russian portion of ISS, and the Russians are now hoping we will do the same for LOP-G. Sadly, I also expect our corrupt Congress will go along, focused as they are in only distributing pork to local districts while encouraging a global international village having nothing to do with American interests. They see LOP-G not as exploring space, but as a jobs program, both here in the U.S. and in Russia.

And a jobs program is exactly what it is. Just like it will take SLS/Orion almost two decades to complete its first manned launch, LOP-G will likely not get anything built in orbit around the Moon for more than a decade. Don’t expect anything substantial assembled in lunar orbit before the mid-2030s, at the earliest.

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Serious fire at ISRO facility

8:55 am

An extensive fire at one of India’s main satellite testing facilities caused extension damage yesterday.

Top sources at SAC said the fire has caused serious damage to the “antenna test facility” as some specialised equipment have been damaged. The hi-tech “antenna test facility” of Isro is of paramount importance as antennas are the most crucial communication component in satellites. Moreover, the testing is also critical to space operations and requires very expensive and hi-tech equipment.

A top official said, “Space programmes are expensive but the silver line is that no satellite payload was damaged in the fire inside the antenna test facility.”

While an inquest will be held to probe what caused the fire, the fire service department said that it could be due to a short circuit. However, the SAC sources say, “The police will probe the cause of the fire. The facility has a strong protocol to battle fire caused due to short circuits. That is why the probe will cover the possibility of foul play and even sabotage.”

This is a serious. Space facilities and their operations have to be far strongly protected against fire than ordinary facilities due to the presence of volatile fuels. For a space facility to experience such an extensive fire suggests either someone was getting very sloppy, or (as suggested above) there was sabotage.

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More problems uncovered during testing of the James Webb Space Telescope

8:42 am

During ground tests of the James Webb Space Telescope engineers have discovered an additional quite astonishing problem that will certainly delay the project again.

In a presentation at a meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board here May 3, Greg Robinson, the JWST program director at NASA Headquarters, said some “screws and washers” appear to have come off the spacecraft during recent environmental testing at a Northrop Grumman facility in Southern California.

Technicians found the items after the spacecraft element of JWST, which includes the bus and sunshield but not its optics and instruments, was moved last weekend from one chamber for acoustics tests to another to prepare for vibration testing.

“Right now we believe that all of this hardware — we’re talking screws and washers here — come from the sunshield cover,” he said. “We’re looking at what this really means and what is the recovery plan.” The problem, he said, was only a couple of days old, and he had few additional details about the problem. “It’s not terrible news, but it’s not good news, either,” he said. [emphasis mine]

The absurd spin expressed by the program director above is garbage. This is unbelievable and entirely unacceptable. On spacecraft, especially those that are not planned for in-space maintenance like Webb, screws are routinely sealed with some form of glue so that they will not unscrew themselves during the vibrations of launch. This is standard space engineering and has been for more than a half century.

That some screws came off Webb during testing suggests a quality control problem at Northrop Grumman that is beyond comprehension.

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China’s Long March 3B rocket puts communications satellite in orbit

8:29 am

China successfully placed a communications satellite into orbit yesterday using its Long March 3B rocket, that country’s second most powerful rocket.

The article says that the Long March 3B is China’s most powerful rocket, but I think this is based on the assumption that the Long March 5 is not yet operational. Since the 5 has had one successful launch, I am counting it as the most powerful, with the 3B second.

The updated leader list for the 2018 launch standings:

13 China
8 SpaceX
5 Russia
4 ULA.

China now leads the U.S. 13 to 12 in the national rankings. I expect these numbers to change a lot in May.

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GAO predicts more delays and cost increases in NASA’s big projects

10:30 am

The Government Accountability Office is predicting more delays and cost increases for most of NASA’s big projects in its tenth annual report.

The cost and schedule performance” of NASA’s major projects “has deteriorated, but the extent of cost deterioration is unknown” because NASA does not have a cost estimate for Orion. Orion is “one of the largest projects in the portfolio” and NASA “expects cost growth.”

As for schedule, “the average launch delay for the portfolio was 12 months, the highest delay GAO has reported in its 10 years” of making these assessments. GAO said the 12-month average delay is up from 7 months in last year’s assessment.

Further, NASA faces the risk of more cost and schedule growth because of “new, large, complex projects that will enter the portfolio and expensive projects remaining the portfolio longer than expected.” Europa Clipper, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, and Europa Lander are cited as examples of those future large, complex projects. GAO did give NASA credit for putting processes in place to control the costs of Europa Clipper and WFIRST.

GAO identified nine existing projects as the biggest contributors to the poor cost and schedule performance: SLS, Exploration Ground Systems (EGS), the Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment (SGSS) cited in the 2017 report, Mars 2020, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), ICESat-2, NISAR, ICON, and GRACE-FO (GRACE-Follow On).

Orion has cost already cost the taxpayer about $15 billion, all of which will only buy the taxpayer three capsules (two unmanned test flights and a single manned flight). And yet they don’t have enough money yet, and NASA can’t provide a total cost estimate? To me, this appears to be outright theft. Building three capsules simply shouldn’t cost that much. (Note: the report claims Orion has cost about $6.6 billion. My number above comes from actual appropriations by Congress specifically for Orion. I think my number is a far more accurate reflection of the project’s true cost.)

Though the report expresses concerns about schedule delays in the commercial crew program, it is with the NASA-run projects that the report finds the worst cost overruns and delays. All of the usual suspects above come in for criticism: Webb, WFIRST, SLS (and its associated ground facilities), Orion, LOP-G.

I will make a prediction: All these NASA projects will be cited for further cost overruns and further delays in next year’s GAO report. By that time, we shall have also seen the first test flights of the commercial crew capsules by Boeing and SpaceX.

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NASA tests new small fission power plant for future space missions

10:08 am

NASA has successfully completed a full test of a new small fission power plant that it hopes to use in future space missions.

The prototype power system uses a solid, cast uranium-235 reactor core, about the size of a paper towel roll. Passive sodium heat pipes transfer reactor heat to high-efficiency Stirling engines, which convert the heat to electricity.

According to David Poston, the chief reactor designer at NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory, the purpose of the recent experiment in Nevada was two-fold: to demonstrate that the system can create electricity with fission power, and to show the system is stable and safe no matter what environment it encounters. “We threw everything we could at this reactor, in terms of nominal and off-normal operating scenarios and KRUSTY passed with flying colors,” said Poston.

The Kilopower team conducted the experiment in four phases. The first two phases, conducted without power, confirmed that each component of the system behaved as expected. During the third phase, the team increased power to heat the core incrementally before moving on to the final phase. The experiment culminated with a 28-hour, full-power test that simulated a mission, including reactor startup, ramp to full power, steady operation and shutdown.

Throughout the experiment, the team simulated power reduction, failed engines and failed heat pipes, showing that the system could continue to operate and successfully handle multiple failures.

This power plant appears similar in concept to the fission RTG nuclear fuel systems that have been used routinely for decades on unmanned planetary probes such as the two Voyager spacecraft, New Horizons, and on Curiosity. This new system however provides significantly more power, as much as ten kilowatts compared to the approximate two hundred watts provided by RTGs.

Such a system will be essential for future bases on both Mars and the Moon, where solar power is not the best option. I should also add that such a system might possibly have applications here on Earth. Developed properly, it could provide a practical power source for out-of-the-way locations not on the grid. If made cheap enough, it might also provide electrical customers a cheaper and competitive alternative that will allow them to remove themselves from the grid entirely.

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Japan’s space agency to build reusable rocket

8:43 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA revealed today that it plans to build a reusable rocket capable of launching twice in two days, with the first test launch now scheduled for 2019.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, plans to build a rocket that can carry observation equipment into space, return to Earth, and be ready for launch again the next day. JAXA aims to start test-launching and landing the roughly 7-meter rocket as early as the spring of 2019, and introduce it for regular operations in the 2020s.

JAXA has already confirmed that the rocket’s key components, including its engine, can endure more than 100 launches, significantly reducing costs compared with single-use models.

I hate to be such a spoilsport, but I have little faith they will do this on the schedule claimed. This story reads like the dozens I’ve read over the past three decades from Russia and NASA, where they repeatedly announce the coming development of some new rocket or manned space project, none of which ever happens.

In other words, this story is nothing more than a bit of government propaganda, trying to convince the Japanese public that JAXA is cutting edge, that they too are going to build reusable rockets, and that they can do it quickly. In reality, I doubt we shall see this government-built reusable rocket anytime soon.

The fact that they have issued this claim however is a good sign. Japan’s lumbering and expensive government space agency is now finding itself under pressure to deliver, and the competition that is causing that pressure might very well force them to streamline their operations and actually accomplish something.

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Alien world

9:21 am

Meridiani Planum
So what is it we are looking at in the image above? I have reduced the resolution slightly to fit it here, but you can see the full resolution image by clicking on the picture.

Is it a marble or granite kitchen counter? Nah, the surface is too rough.

Maybe it’s a modern abstract painting that we can find hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Nah, it has too much style and depth. Abstract art is much more shallow and empty of content.

Could it be a close-up of a just-opened container of berry-vanilla ice cream, the different flavors swirling and intertwined to enhance the eating experience? No, somehow it looks too gritty for ice cream.
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Successful test flight of New Shepard

11:06 pm

Capitalism in space: Blue Origin today successful flew its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft on its second test flight.

You can watch the video of the full flight here. Try not to cringe listening to the announcer, who I think sometimes overdoes it.

They were aiming for a maximum altitude of 350,000 feet, which would place the capsule more than 100 kilometers or 66 miles above the Earth, the generally accepted altitude for the start of space. The live stream showed an maximum altitude of about 347,000, but the article says that later recalculations estimated a top altitude of 351,000.

Either way, they have now successfully achieved a safe suborbital spaceflight twice with this spacecraft, and both times carried science payloads. Meanwhile, their direct competitor, Virgin Galactic, has come no where close, even after fourteen years of development.

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