Tag: engineering

Rocket Lab successfully launches commercial radar satellite

1:49 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today successfully used its Electron rocket to place a commercial radar Earth observation satellite into orbit.

This was the company’s 30th successful launch. As of this writing, the satellite itself has not yet deployed.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

41 SpaceX
37 China
11 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise now leads China 57 to 37 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 57 to 56. The 57 successful American launches so for this year ties for third place with 1964 and 1967 for launches in a year. The record number of U.S. launches in a single year was 70, in 1966. That record should almost certainly be topped this year.

SpaceX will once again attempt to launch 54 Starlink satellites later tonight, having cancelled several times this week due to weather.

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Billionaire wants to build spinning space station for testing artificial gravity

9:40 am

Capitalism in space: Billionaire Jed McCaleb, who earned billions in software and cryptocurrency, has started a company dubbed Vast to develop and build a spinning space station for testing the pros and cons of artificial gravity.

McCaleb is self-financing at the moment, though he hopes to turn his station eventually into a money-making proposition. His company is also right now very small, but he clearly is going for the best in who he is hiring:

Currently, the company has about 20 employees, including Kyle Dedmon, former SpaceX vice president for construction and facilities; Tom Hayford, a systems engineer who has worked for Relativity Space and SpaceX; Molly McCormick, a former SpaceX human factors engineer and Honeybee Robotics program manager; and Colin Smith, a former SpaceX propulsion engineer. In addition, former SpaceX vice president Hans Koenigsmann is advising the company.

This new private space station joins by my count the four other American private space stations now proposed, including Axiom’s station, a partnership led by Sierra Space building Orbital Reef, Nanorack’s Starlab station, and Northrop Grumman’s upgrade station based on its Cygnus freighter.

That’s five private space stations under development in the United States. And there could be others that I have missed.

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Overlapping galaxies

9:22 am

Overlapping galaxies, as seen by Hubble
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, and captures two galaxies that happen to overlap in their line of sight to Earth.

The two galaxies, which have the uninspiring names SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, lie more than a billion light-years from Earth. Despite appearing to collide in this image, the alignment of the two galaxies is likely just by chance — the two are not actually interacting.

This image was taken as part of the citizen-scientist project dubbed Galaxy Zoo, whereby volunteers review lower resolution images of strange-looking galaxies and propose the best for Hubble higher resolution imaging.

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Astronomers propose method for predicting the stars that will go supernovae

9:12 am

The uncertainty of science: Using a computer model based on the most recent data that suggests red supergiant stars like Betelgeuse are the kind of stars that produce certain kinds of supernovae, astronomers now think they have a method for predicting which of those stars are about to go supernovae.

You can read the science paper here. From the link above:

In a few examples, astronomers have looked back at old catalogs and found images of the stars before they exploded, and they all seem to be red supergiants like Betelgeuse. That’s a clear indication that those kinds of stars are supernova candidates, ready to go off at a moment’s notice.

The stars that result in these kinds of supernovas are thought to have dense shrouds of material surrounding them before they explode. These shrouds are orders of magnitude denser than what’s measured around Betelgeuse.

More importantly, the data suggests that once this shroud of material forms, the supernova will follow, in just a few years. As the scientists conclude in their paper:

The final overarching conclusion we can make from this work is that, shortly before core-collapse, [red supergiants] must undergo some prodigious mass-losing event which radically alters the appearance of the star. Therefore, the signature of an imminent explosion should be a dramatic change in the progenitor stars’ optical – near-IR photometry on timescales of less than a month. Such a signature should be detectable in the coming era of wide-field short cadence photometry. [emphasis mine]

Near-IR (infrared) photometry is exactly in the wavelengths in which the James Webb Space Telescope operates. Thus, if it is lucky and sees this kind of star in an image, and a supernova follows shortly thereafter, this theory will have been proven correct.

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Company providing satellite engines for smallsats raises $28 million

8:58 am

Capitalism in space: Morpheus, a German company focused on providing small satellites engines for maneuver and de-orbit, has successfully raised $28 million in private investment capital.

Morpheus, a company originally focused on producing miniature electric thrusters, has broadened the scope of its business to offer propulsion systems and software to help satellites maneuver in orbit and deorbit at the conclusion of their missions.

Last year, Morpheus unveiled a suite of products designed to reduce the cost and complexity of operating satellite constellations. The Sphere Ecosystem includes thrusters with nontoxic propellant, plug-and-play autopilot, space mission software and a web application.

This is not the only German company moving into the new space market. Three startup rocket companies have all successfully raised capital. Morpheus’s success, along with those rocket companies, suggests that Germany is quickly transitioning from a government-run space industry to a privately-run one.

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Update on SpaceX’s Starship and Superheavy

8:50 am

Link here. The article not only outlines the test program leading to the first launch of prototypes Starship #24 and Superheavy #7, it describes the status of later prototypes, as well as the construction of SpaceX’s Starship launch site in Florida. Key quote:

Booster 7’s gradual approach to static fire testing will allow the teams to fix issues as they test and fully mature procedures and software ahead of the long-awaited orbital flight of Starship. Should this gradual testing go without a hitch, it could culminate in one or perhaps even two 33-engine static fire tests of Booster 7 on the OLM [orbital launch mount].

Once this testing is completed and any issues found fixed, it’ll be cleared to proceed into another phase of testing: Ship 24 will then be stacked on top of Booster 7 for combined tests. This could include launch countdown simulations, an eventual full-up countdown, and a 33-engine static fire test.

SpaceX hopes to complete this by mid-next month and clear both vehicles for launch shortly after. However, as we’ve seen in the past few weeks, any issues encountered during this intense test campaign could well mean a slip to later into the year and, perhaps, into next year.

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September 14, 2022 Quick space links

3:20 pm

Links courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who does the trolling on Twitter so I don’t have to. Commentary however is mostly by yours truly.

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The new in-space repair and refueling industries that are about to revolutionize space exploration

2:57 pm

Robot repair, as imagined in 1979
Robots doing work in orbit, as imagined in 1979

When Orbital ATK announced in 2016 that its robotic Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) — designed to dock with and extend the life of defunct commercial communications satellites — had won its first contract with Intelsat, that contract award only came after several years of persistent campaigning.

In fact, Orbital ATK had had great difficulties getting any satellite communications company interested. At the time, all communication satellites were in geosynchronous orbit, were expensive to build, but lasted routinely from 10 to 15 years. The satellite companies didn’t see a need to fix them when they ran out of fuel. It seems better to launch a new replacement.

Even after winning that contract with Intelsat, it was still four years before that MEV docked with Intelsat’s satellite, bringing it back to life. In the interim Northrop Grumman (which had purchased Orbital ATK in a merger) had managed just one other contract, even as it had announced upgrades to the MEV to allow it to service many satellites, not just one.

The satellite industry seemed in those days to be largely resistant to the concept of repairing and refueling its older satellites.

No more. We are on the cusp of a major revolution in satellite operations, driven first by innovations like the MEV, but accelerated greatly by the new satellite companies launching low orbit constellations. These new companies are willing to take risks, and thus have also shown an eager desire to link their satellites to a variety of in-space services that they themselves did not wish to provide, from satellite repair and refueling to tug services to space junk removal to quick and controlled de-orbit technologies.

The variety and innovation of this new industry is somewhat astonishing, especially considering how young an industry it is.
» Read more

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The shattered cliffs of Mount Sharp

11:04 am

A broken cliff on Mars

Cool image time! The picture above was taken on August 11, 2022 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It shows a great example of the strange manner in which the bedrock in the layered cliffs on Mount Sharp appear to break apart.

I am not certain exactly where this feature is, or its exact scale, but based on the date and where Curiosity was located when the photo was taken, it likely is a small section from one of two hills, Deepdale and Bolivar, that Curiosity passed between in mid-August. It is likely somewhere in the panorama included in my August 11th post, but I have not yet been able to locate it.

Nonetheless, the breakage here is typical of these cliff faces. The structural strength of these layered hills is not very high, so at some point one section can break away from another as the hill sags downward to the left. What makes the cracks here more intriguing is that something caused the higher sections surrounding the main block to widen. On Earth we would assume that this widening was caused by rainwater pouring in from the top. On Mars, that explanation doesn’t hold water.

Wind? Seasonal thermal changes? Neither explains the change in the width of the cracks along their length. Maybe the wider cracks indicate an increased sagging of the hill to the left. The layers below this broken block have simply not slid to the left as much.

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Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine experiences more delays

9:27 am

Capitalism in space: Though Blue Origin appears only a few weeks from delivering its first flightworthy BE-4 rocket engine to ULA for use in that company’s new not-yet-launched Vulcan rocket, the second flightworthy engine is further delayed due to technical problems discovered when static fire testing began.

Sources told Ars that the first engine was put onto the test stand in Texas early in August, but almost as soon as work began to hot-fire the powerful engine, an issue was discovered with the engine build. This necessitated a shipment back to Blue Origin’s factory in mid-August, as the company’s test stands in Texas do not allow for more than minor work.

As a result of this technical issue, ULA now appears likely to get one flight engine this month, but it probably will not receive the other one for installation onto the Vulcan rocket before mid-October, assuming a clean battery of tests in Texas.

This issue almost certainly means that Vulcan will not attempt its first launch this year. The rocket is thus more than three years behind schedule.

The problems outlined here however are far greater than simply the technical issues with this one engine. First, Blue Origin’s pace of operations continues to be far too leisurely. Nothing the company has done since 2017 has proceeded with any sense of urgency, and thus neither ULA nor Blue Origin have been able to launch their rockets.

Second, and far more important, Blue Origin is supposed to be manufacturing the BE-4 for two rockets, both Vulcan and its own New Glenn. Neither rocket will be reusable to begin with, which means the number of needed engines required at first will be high. For example, ULA has contracts to launch Vulcan twice almost immediately, with the need to follow these with several military launches. Each launch will require two BE-4 engines, so Blue Origin at a minimum needs to manufacture four engines, probably more, just to fulfill its obligations to ULA. To supply its own New Glenn rocket, it needs seven BE-4 engines for each launch, with the company having four launches on its manifest for 2023.

All told, Blue Origin thus has to deliver, at a minimum, 32 engines in 2023 alone, to meet its contractual obligations. And since the rockets and engines will be untested, expect at least one or two launch failures that will further increase the need for more engines.

Yet, there is no sign that Blue Origin has figured out how to manufacture these engines on an assembly line basis. Even if it gets these two engines delivered soon, it is unclear it can produce a lot of flightworthy engines fast enough to meet this launch schedule. Expect therefore that both rockets will continue to experience launch delays that could stretch out years.

Meanwhile, a plethora of new rocket companies have been appearing, all aiming eventually to compete with Blue Origin and ULA. If Blue Origin doesn’t get a move on, these new companies will soon be in a position to replace both it and ULA, entirely.

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Astrobotic acquires bankrupt Masten

9:05 am

Capitalism in space: Astrobotic announced this week that it has successfully purchased Masten, a bankrupt company that for almost two decades specialized in developing suborbital vertical rocket landing technology.

This acquisition will combine the workforce of the two companies, and give Astrobotic control over Masten’s test sites at Mojave. Since Astrobotic is one of the many companies with a NASA contract to build lunar landers, the experience of Masten’s workers — experienced experts in vertical rocket landings — will be immeasurable.

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