Tag: engineering

SpaceX launches commercial satellite with first used Block 5 first stage

8:34 am

Capitalism in space: Last night SpaceX successfully placed a commercial communications satellite into orbit using a previously flown Block 5 first stage.

The turnaround for this first stage was only a little over two months. It successfully landed on the drone ship in the Atlantic, and they plan to fly it a third time later this year. You can watch the launch here.

The leaders in the 2018 launch race:

22 China
15 SpaceX
8 Russia
5 ULA
4 Japan
4 Europe

China still leads the U.S. 22 to 21 in the national rankings.

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Want to earn a college degree in mining in space? You can!

2:12 pm

Capitalism in space: Link here.

Classes begin Aug. 20 for the first 35 students enrolled in the program. With courses held online, students around the world can earn a post-baccalaureate certificate, master’s degree, or doctorate focused on finding and pulling resources from space.

Many asteroids and nearby planets contain rare platinum-group metals and industrial metals like iron and nickel that are needed for building exploration infrastructure. Right now, though, the most sought-after resource in space is one that is actually quite abundant on the Blue Planet. “If you think about it, water in space would be the oil of space, because that is going to power and transport, give us energy, enable the whole space economy and allow us to keep going further and further,” Abbud-Madrid said. “Such an elemental product as water would be the first one we go after.”

It can be argued that this is premature. It can also be argued that the time is coming, and knowing more about the resources in space can be an advantage in the competitive free market.

Hat tip Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas.

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How to build a scaled-down version of Curiosity, all by yourself!

9:50 am

JPL has released open-source plans for building a scaled down version of the rover Curiosity at a total cost of only $2,500.

This project is a successor to an earlier educational rover model called “ROV-E,” which received positive responses in schools and museums, NASA said. The Open Source Rover offers a more affordable, less complicated model, and according to agency officials, people can assemble the new model with off-the-shelf parts for about $2,500.

“While the OSR [Open Source Rover] instructions are quite detailed, they still allow the builder the option of making their own design choices,” JPL officials said. “For example, builders can decide what controllers to use, weigh the trade-offs of adding USB cameras or solar panels and even attach science payloads. The baseline design of OSR … will allow users to choose how they want to customize and add to their rover, touching on multiple hardware and software principles along the way.”

I wonder how heavy a home-built rover would be, and whether it could be launched on a Falcon Heavy to Mars.

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Next Rocket Lab launch set for November

9:40 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has now announced its next launch will take place in November, with plans for a second launch one month later.

Rocket Lab stood down from an earlier launch window for It’s Business Time in June 2018, after unusual behavior was identified in a motor controller during pre-launch operations. Initially, it was thought the recycle would be a matter of days, before the decision was made to rollback the vehicle and change out the controller.

…Now Rocket Lab has noted that, following analysis, the motor controllers have been modified and – as such – required new qualification testing ahead of the next launch which won’t take place until November

In a sense this delay and their response to it speaks well of the company. Rather than proceed with another controller, they dug deeper, located a more fundamental problem, and have moved to fix it. And it appears they have done this relatively quickly.

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Chandrayaan-2 delayed again, until January 2019

9:13 am

The new colonial movement: ISRO, India’s space agency, has revealed that the launch of its lunar rover/lander Chandrayaan-2 has been delayed from October to Janaury 2019.

Dr M Annadurai, Director of U R Rao Satellite Centre confirmed to NDTV that the launch date for Chandryaan-2 “is slipping to 2019” from the initially planned launch in October this year.

Dr Annadurai said that India’s moon mission now aims to land in February and the rocket launch will take place in January next year.

Moreover, since the weight of the Chandrayaan-2 satellite has increased, Dr Annadurai said that now instead of GSLV MK-II, GSLV MK-III will be used. Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle MK-III (GSLV MK-III), also called the ‘The Bahubali’, is India’s heaviest rocket that weighs nearly 640 tons and will be used to hoist the Chandrayaan-2 satellite from India’s rocket port at Sriharikota.

It appears that in building the spacecraft they have not been able to keep its weight low enough, and have been forced to switch launch vehicles, with this switch causing the delay.

The article also provides a tidbit of information about the GLSV MK-III rocket, that they have an real name for it, Bahubali. If so, they should use it. It sells much better than GLSV MK-III.

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Another failed drilling attempt by Curiosity

9:38 am

The second attempt by Curiosity to drill into Vera Rubin Ridge was a failure, the rock once again being too hard using the rover’s new improvised drilling technique.

They are now in search of “softer rock.” The scientists very much want to get at least one drill hole in the hematite unit on Vera Rubin Ridge. However, it does appear that the new drill technique, that uses the robot arm to push the drill bit down as its drills, does not provide enough force for some hard geological features.

The failure to drill is in itself not a complete scientific washout. Knowing the hardness of a rock can tell a geologist a great deal about it. Nonetheless, the Curiosity science team seems determined to find something they can drill into on Vera Rubin Ridge.

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Mars dust storm blocks Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images

9:29 am

In my normal routine to check out the periodic posting of new high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the August 1 update brought what at first was a disturbing surprise. If you go to the link you will see that a large majority of the images show nothing by a series of vertical lines, as if the high resolution camera on MRO has failed.

Yet, scattered among the images were perfectly sharp images. I started to look at these images to try to figure out the differences, and quickly found that the sharp images were always of features in high latitudes, while the blurred images were closer to the equator.

The August 1 image release covered the June/July time period, when the on-going Martian dust storm was at its height. The images illustrate also where the storm was most opaque, closer to the equator.

The next few updates, which occur every three weeks or so, should show increasing clarity as the storm subsides. And the storm is subsiding, according to the latest Opportunity update. The scientists have still not re-established contact with the rover, and do not expect to for at least a month or more, but they are finding that the atmospheric opacity at Endeavour Crater seems to be dropping.

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More close-up images of Ceres

9:19 am

Dome and fractures in Occator Crater

Strange image time! The Dawn science team today released a set of new images taken by the spacecraft in its new very close orbit of Ceres. The image on the right is a cropped section of one of those images, and shows some fractures and a dome in Occator Crater. The image was taken from 28 miles altitude, and if you click on it you can see the entire photograph.

What immediately stands out in this image is the strange bright flow on top of the dome. At first glance it looks like someone put a seashell there. In reality I think it is showing us a landslide of bright material flowing downward, towards the top of the image. The flow was significant enough that it piled up as it went down, which is why it created a cliff edge and shadow line at its base.

Everything we see here is influenced by Ceres’s tiny gravity. It is not unusual to see fractures in the floor of a crater, the nature of these fractures and domes is different, and will require a lot of work by scientists to interpret, because of the different environment.

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No water as yet detected on Ryugu

9:05 am

The Hayabusa-2 science team today said that their first preliminary survey of Ryugu has yet to detect evidence of water.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said Aug. 2 that data collected from the space probe showed no water on the boulders scattered on the surface of Ryugu.

Ryugu is a C-type asteroid, which is rich in carbon. Many C-type asteroids are known to contain moisture in their surface boulders, and experts hoped that Ryugu would be one of them.

Hayabusa-2’s visit has just begun. I still expect surprises.

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NASA announces crews for first commercial manned launches

9:00 am

NASA has announced the crews for the first commercial manned launches.

Boeing’s crew flight test aboard its Starliner spacecraft, which is targeted to launch in mid-2019, will have Eric Boe, Chris Ferguson and Nicole Mann on board. Boeing’s first post-certification mission will have Josh Cassada and Suni Williams aboard.

SpaceX’s demo mission 2 aboard its Crew Dragon spacecraft, which is targeted to launch in April 2019, will have Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley aboard. The first post-certification mission will be crewed by Victor Glover and Mike Hopkins.

These crews cover the first two manned missions for each spacecraft.

Hat tip Kirk Hilliard.

More information here.

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New launch dates for commercial crew posted by NASA

2:26 pm

NASA has now released an updated schedule for the first test flights of Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX’s Dragon manned capsules:

In chronological order:

SpaceX Demo-1 (uncrewed): November 2018
Boeing Orbital Flight Test (uncrewed): late 2018 / early 2019
SpaceX Demo-2 (crewed): April 2019
Boeing Crew Flight Test (crewed): mid-2019

Note once again that this schedule bears no resemblance to the pessimistic schedule put forth by the GAO. That schedule indicated that significant delays could be expected because of NASA’s heavy paperwork requirements.

I fully expect that political needs will force that paperwork to be done much faster than the GAO, or NASA, expects, or even wants. And the increased speed will have little to do with reducing safety.

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Landslide on Mars

12:45 pm

Landslide on Mars

Cool image time! The image on the right, cropped and reduced in resolution to post here, was taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on May 30, 2018. It shows the remains of a landslide where it appears a huge chunk of the cliff face broke off and then flowed downward, pushing ahead of it more material to produce a tongue of debris more than four miles long. (If you click on the image you can see the full photograph.)

The picture invokes a spectacular single event. When the cliff broke off, it hit the ground below it like a rock would in wet beach mud. Like wet sand, the ground was pushed away in a muddy gloppy mess.

Is this terrain wet however? The location of this landslide provides some intriguing geological context. Below are two context images, showing this landslide’s location on Mars.
» Read more

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Private rocket failure in Alaska

9:19 am

Capitalism in space: A suborbital test launch of a private company on July 20 likely failed almost immediately after launch.

On July 20, the California-based company Astra Space carried out a suborbital launch of its “Rocket 1” from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island in Alaska. The rocket took off in foggy conditions, so there wasn’t much to see, but the launch could still be heard, according to local reporter Gabe Stutman. But other than the fact that Rocket 1 launched, no one seems to know what happened next.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said, in a statement to SpaceNews, that the rocket “experienced a mishap.” Many have taken this to mean that, at some point after the rocket launched, it failed in some way. But Craig Campbell, president of Alaska Aerospace, which operates the launch site, told SpaceNews that Astra Space is “very pleased” with how the launched turned out.

I must admit that I completely missed this event, when it happened. However, it appears that the company experienced some form of failure, not unlike what happened to the recent launch of Interstellar’s MOMO rocket. Since this is a test launch, even a failure is of value however, as it can tell them what is wrong with their rocket.

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Boeing adjusts Starliner launch schedule after fuel leak during test

8:56 am

Capitalism in space: Yesterday Boeing pushed back its Starliner launch schedule as a result of the fuel leak problem that had occurred during an engine test of the capsule last week.

They now plan the first unmanned test flight around the end of this year, with the first manned flight in the middle of 2019.

As for the fuel leak,

several abort engine valves failed to close properly, causing a leak of toxic fuels. The test article was not damaged and no one was hurt, but the incident required an investigation with support from NASA.

Other reports say that 4 of 8 valves failed to close. There is no explanation about why this happened, but I find it a very strange technical failure. Building valves for spacecraft is not cutting edge design, or I wouldn’t think so.

Tomorrow NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine is going to make an announcement with some official launch dates for both Boeing and SpaceX. We shall see if SpaceX’s schedule gets pushed back as well.

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Close-up of bright spot in Occator Crater

3:35 pm

Vinalia Faculae in Occator Crater

Cool image time! The Dawn science team today released some new images taken by the spacecraft in its final tight orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres. The image on the right is a cropped section of the full image. It shows some interesting details of part of one of the two bright spots in Occator Crater, dubbed Vinalia Facula, and was taken from a distance of 36 miles.

Other images show small bright spots in another small crater, fractures and interesting patterns in the floor of Occator crater, a dome in Occator Crater suggestive of underground processes pushing up, and other close-ups of its crater walls.

While all of these features are reminiscent of geology on Earth, none are really the same. Ceres’ light gravity and harsh environment, plus its history in the asteroid belt, requires alien processes that only hint at similarities to what we see on Earth.

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New York shuts down 7-year-old’s lemonade stand

9:58 am

Fascist New York: Because of complaints by commercial vendors, New York bureaucrats moved to shut down a 7-year-old’s lemonade stand.

Soon-to-be second-grader Brendan Mulvaney ran afoul of government regulators last Friday when vendors at the Saratoga County Fair in upstate Ballston Spa whined to a state health inspector that he had no permit to sell refreshments from his family’s front deck just outside the fairgrounds.

Being just a kid, he was also undercutting their pricey drinks by nearly 90 percent, selling lemonade for just 75 cents — a significant discount from the $7 cups inside the fair. He also peddled $1 snow cones and bottled waters. The vendors griped to a state health inspector doing a routine inspection of the fair, and his next visit was to the Mulvaneys’ home. He promptly ordered the stand shut down, leaving the family shocked.

Note that the stand is on the family’s porch, on private property. The boy has has also been operating it for three years, with no problems.

Essentially, the local vendors used the government as a hammer to smash the competition, even if it was something as innocuous as a child’s lemonade stand. And New York, being a fascist state run by fascist Democrats, immediately moved to do the bidding of those vendors.

The government, embarrassed by this, is now trying to fix it, but they still claim that a permit is required for the stand. How nice of them! In modern New York, no one is allowed to start a business without government permission!

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NASA safety panel reviews commercial crew, tries to justify its paperwork demands

9:35 am

Link here. The article describes the results from the quarterly meeting of NASA’s safety panel, which occurred last week, including its concerns about the recent test problems during a launch abort test of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. It also describes the panel’s general satisfaction at the status of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

The article however ends with a long screed by one panel member, explaining that the heavy paperwork requirements they are imposing on the two companies is not really paperwork.

“It needs to be noted by everyone, and we’re especially interested in making sure that all of the external stakeholders realize this, that while the concluding process of certification has sometimes been described as a paper process, that is really just a shorthand clarification and in reality it could not be further from the truth,” noted Dr. McErlean.

In reality, the process is as follows. “In a certified design, the design agent – the contractor or partner in this case – performs the design and in the certification plan, the design agent and the certification agency (NASA) agree on the submittal of certification evidence.

“This could be measurements, it can be test data, it can be analysis, but it almost always involves the submittal of detailed technical data, not simply paper descriptions or forms. Sometimes it involves witness testing and sometimes it involves physical inspection. But it almost always wraps around important technical submittals.

Can I translate? The safety panel requires a lot of testing so that a lot of paperwork can be filled out. And while much of this testing is likely to help make the capsule’s safer, most of it seems to me to be make-work, and designed to justify the existence of NASA and its safety panel.

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Russian company that builds Proton rocket faces bankruptcy and reorganization

9:25 am

The Russian company that builds Russia’s Proton rocket now faces bankruptcy and reorganization.

By the middle of 2018, due to the dramatically slowed down rate of Proton launches, its manufacturers fell deeper into the red and needed federal funding to stay afloat. According to the official numbers, GKNPTs Khrunichev lost 23 billion rubles in 2017 and asked for a 30-billion infusion of cash from the government.

At the end of June, the Head of Roskosmos Dmitry Rogozin acknowledged an ongoing effort to fix the financial situation at Khrunichev and announced plans to accelerate the switch of the Russian launch operations from the Proton to the Angara family. Ironically, Roskosmos exacerbated the company’s debt with its penalties for missed production deadlines, even though Russian payloads slated to ride those delayed rockets were themselves years behind schedule and GKNPTs Khrunichev had no room to store large rocket components.

In an effort to raise capital, Khrunichev planned to sell a big part of its campus, located in the hyper-valuable real estate area of Moscow, to private developers. In the process, the company would also dramatically reduce its production capacity and cut its personnel in the Russian capital, shifting key manufacturing operations to Omsk, in Western Siberia. In another cost-saving measure, around 200 people were reported to be marked for layoffs at Proton’s launch facilities in Baikonur beginning in the fall of 2018.

The Russian government, rather than allow for competition, is working to prop the company up. So, rather than having new companies appear with new and better ideas, Russia will be saddled with an old company not good at innovating.

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NASA rubberstamps Russian engines in Atlas 5 for manned flights

9:18 am

Surprise surprise! NASA has certified the Russian engines used in the Atlas 5 as safe for manned flights.

NASA had been claiming that, because it cannot observe every detail in how Russia builds the engines, it cannot certify them as safe for manned flight. This is, and has been, crap. The Atlas 5, with this engine, has been one of the most reliable rockets ever built.

In truth, what NASA’s bureaucracy was really doing was using these Russian engines as a wedge to slow down Boeing’s first manned flight, mainly because the commercial crew program is threatening NASA past monopoly on U.S. manned flight. Once privately built rockets and manned spacecraft fly, people are suddenly going to realize we don’t really need NASA.

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Watch SpaceX retract one leg from used Block 5 booster

12:42 am

For geeks only! The video below the fold shows the new equipment that SpaceX has developed to retract the open legs of a used Block 5 booster. This video shows them attaching the booster in a secure vertical position, then attaching cables to the base of the first leg which are then used to retract it back into its launch position against the side of the booster. The design is quite clever.

The design also shows how primitive the art of reusable rockets remains. Though SpaceX has clearly succeeded in simplifying and automating this process, it remains slow and complex. In time this will get easier, but right now, this remains state of the art.

Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
» Read more

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First Block 5 1st stage reflight

12:47 am

Capitalism in space: It appears that SpaceX is planning to do its first reflight of a used Block 5 booster on August 4.

This will be SpaceX’s third Falcon 9 Block 5 launch in less than two weeks if the schedule holds. More important than the schedule, perhaps, is the fact that it would appear that SpaceX intends to reuse the first Block 5 booster (B1046) for this particular launch. To lay out the foundation of this claim, it’s known that SpaceX’s CCAFS Pad 40 integration facilities are only capable of fitting one booster and the strongback (transporter/erector/launcher, TEL) at a time, evidenced both by sourced comments and views inside the hangar.

Meanwhile, an unmistakeable Block 5 booster – with black interstage and octaweb coverings – was spotted being transported through Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) earlier this week, just after Falcon 9 B1047 launched (July 21 EDT) and freed up space for another booster inside the horizontal integration facility (HIF) at Pad 40. Given that only one Block 5 booster has been recovered on the East Coast and that B1047 was still out at sea earlier this week, the sooty booster traveling through CCAFS thus has to have been B1046, and it was making a beeline for LC-40.

SpaceX is once again demonstrating why they have taken over the global launch industry. They are proving that they will be able to routinely reuse a relatively small number of first stage boosters, frequently, and cheaply.

CORRECTION: I initially wrote this post under the mistaken impression that the booster being reflown was going to do so after only fourteen days. This was wrong. The booster was flown two months ago, in May.

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A vegetable grater on Mars

1:44 pm

A vegetable grater on Mars

Cool image time! I honestly can’t think of any better term but “vegetable grater” to describe the strange surface in the image on the right, cropped from the full sized image that was released with the July 11, 2018 monthly release of new images from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

If you click on the image you can see the whole image, which merely shows more of the same terrain over a wider area. When I cropped it, I literally picked a random 450×450 pixel-sized area, since other than slight variations the entire terrain in the full image is as equally rough. The resolution captures objects as big as five feet across.

Looking at the full image there does seem to be flow patterns moving across the middle of the image, but if so these flow patterns had no effect on the surface roughness, other than indicating a very slight difference in the size of the knobs and pits. Overall, very strange.

The location of this place on Mars is in the cratered southern highlands, to the southwest of Hellas Basin, as indicated by the black cross in the image below.
» Read more

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Two roundworms return to life after being frozen for almost 42,000 years

10:25 am

Russian scientists have successfully brought two roundworms back to life after being frozen for almost 42,000 years.

Russian scientists said the two prehistoric worms, out of a group of about 300, are moving and eating after they came back to life in a lab at the Institute of Physico-Chemical and Biological Problems of Soil Science in Moscow, the Siberian Times reported. “After being defrosted, the nematodes showed signs of life,” a report from the Russian scientists said, according to the Siberian Times.

One of the worms was found near the Alazeya River in 2015 and is believed to be about 41,700 years old, according to the study published in the Doklady Biological Sciences. They were found about 11.5 feet underground.

The other worm was found in 2002 in a fossil rodent burrow near the Kolyma River. These samples were taken from about 100 feet underground.

If confirmed, this result is not only astonishing, it has significant implications, as it suggests that the science fiction idea of freezing people for long interstellar flights might actually be possible, eventually.

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Virgin Galactic’s Unity successfully completes powered test flight

3:05 pm

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic’s Unity spacecraft today successfully completed its third powered test flight, reaching an altitude of 170,800 feet, or about 32 miles.

Though this is a record flight for any of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwos, this elevation is still about half that reached by Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital capsule, and is considerably below the presently accepted international definition for space, which is 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles. It is getting close to the line accepted by the U.S. Air Force, 50 miles, and now being pushed by some as a better line for the beginnings of space.

Regardless, this success is good news for Virgin Galactic, as it indicates they might finally be getting close to commercial flights, after fourteen years of development.

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House committee approves new space weather bill

9:25 am

The House Science Committee yesterday approved new space weather bill that would shift responsibility for coordinating the government’s space weather observation capabilities to the National Space Council, while also creating a pilot commercial program for launch weather satellites.

It appears there was some heavy political maneuvering involved with this bill, as there was a late switch of language that changed its focus.

The new text has a strong focus on the private sector. In the policy section, for example, it explicitly states that “space weather observation and forecasting are not exclusive functions of the Federal Government” and the government “should, as practicable, obtain space weather data and services through contracts with the commercial sector, when the data and services are available, cost-effective, and add value.” The bill requires the Secretary of Commerce to establish a pilot program for obtaining space weather data from the private sector that appears analogous to NOAA’s commercial weather data pilot program.

The Senate will still have to review and approve this new bill.

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NASA wants to delay WFIRST to pay for Webb overruns

9:07 am

In testimony to Congress yesterday NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said that the agency wants to delay the Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope to pay for the new cost overruns of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Bridenstine said during the hearing that no decisions had been made on how to cover those additional JWST costs. “By the 2020 timeframe is when we’re going to need to have additional funds. So between now and then we’re going to have to make determinations,” he said. “Right now that process is underway.”

He said those decisions would consider the guidance from decadal surveys and a desire to maintain a balanced portfolio of programs. He specifically assured one member, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), that the extra funding would not come out of human spaceflight programs, particularly the Space Launch System. “This is relevant to the Science Mission Directorate exclusively, and that’s where, at this point, we’ve had discussions about what are the options going forward,” Bridenstine said.

Committee members used the two-and-a-half-hour hearing to express their frustrations with this latest delay, noting that the original concept for the mission [Webb] called for it to cost $500 million and launch in 2007, versus a current lifecycle cost of $9.6 billion and launch in 2021. “This is 19 times the original cost and a delay of 14 years,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the committee. “It doesn’t get much worse than that.” [emphasis mine]

Only yesterday I speculated that the cuts to WFIRST were related to Webb. It turns out I was right.

I have highlighted above one detail revealed at the hearing. I have always thought Webb’s initial budget was $1 billion with a launch date of 2011. It appears it was less, by half, and it was supposed to launch four years sooner. Makes this boondoggle even more of an embarrassment for NASA and the astrophysics community. And for the astrophysics community it is also a disaster, because Webb’s overruns for the past two decades essentially wiped out what had been a very vibrant space astronomy program at NASA.

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Changes to big August 3 commercial crew announcement do not bode well

8:58 am

On August 3 NASA is planning on making a big announcement concerning its commercial crew program. Yesterday the agency revealed that the NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, will reveal the names of the crew for the first commercial crew flight.

The changes in how that announcement will be made however suggest that they had hoped to make a bigger announcement and have been forced to back off. Initially, vice president Mike Pence was to have made the announcement. He has now canceled his participation. Also, there had previously been rumors that the announcement would have included the launch dates for both SpaceX’s and Boeing’s first flights. That the new press release makes no mention of dates suggests the dates have been delayed.

I hope I am wrong.

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Ryugu as seen by Hayabusa-2 from less than 4 miles

8:41 am

Ryugu from less than 4 miles distance

The image on the right as a cropped section of an image taken by Hayabusa-2 from only 3.7 miles distance from the asteroid Ryugu. If you click on the link you can see the full image. I picked this section to crop out because it shows the asteroid’s limb, an interesting boulder field, and part of a the asteroid’s largest crater, on the lower right. As noted by the Hayabusa-2 science team in describing details in the full image:

The resolution in Figure 1 is about 3.4 times higher than the images taken from the Home Position [20 kilometers distance] so far. 1 pixel in Figure 1 corresponds to about 60cm. The largest crater on the surface of Ryugu is situated near the center of the image and you can see that it has a shape like a “mortar”. You can also see that the surface of Ryugu is covered with a large number of boulders. This picture will provide important information as we choose the landing site.

The smallest objects visible are thus about two feet across.

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