Tag: engineering

Stripped screws preventing access to Bennu samples

9:07 am

According to the scientists working to extract the samples from the asteroid Bennu brought back by the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule, the work has been stymied because of two stripped screws.

Last month, researchers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, discovered that two of the 35 screws that fasten the lid of the sample-return canister couldn’t be opened — blocking access to the remainder of the space rock. Curators used tweezers to pull out what they could, but NASA is now making new screwdrivers so it can get into the equipment it flew billions of kilometres across the Solar System to the asteroid Bennu and back.

Because the capsule is kept within a sealed glovebox to prevent the samples from being contaminated by the Earth environment, removing the screws requires NASA to manufacture special screwdrivers that will also not contaminate that environment. This work is what is causing the delay.

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NASA updates status of three private space stations

8:58 am

NASA today posted a short update of the development status for the three private space stations for which it has signed contracts.

Not surprisingly, Axiom’s station appears to be the most advanced.

Axiom Space, which holds a firm-fixed price, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract with NASA, is on schedule to launch and attach its first module, named Axiom Hab One, to the International Space Station in 2026. A total of four modules are planned for the Axiom Commercial Segment attached to the station. After the space station’s retirement, the Axiom Commercial Segment will separate and become a free-flying commercial destination named Axiom Station.

With the remaining two stations, Starlab and Orbital Reef, the update provided no schedule information. While both Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, and Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin, appear to be making progess, the former appears to be accomplishing more than the latter, though that impression could simply be what NASA decided to report. For example, in describing the work being done on Orbital Reef, NASA chose for some reason to say nothing about the testing Sierra Space has been doing to test the inflatible module planned for the station. By leaving that out it makes it appear as if less has been done in developing that station.

These are not the only private space stations being proposed, only the ones that have contracts with NASA. A fourth station, Vast, is being built using funding from private sources, and is partnering with SpaceX.

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A tour of Blue Origin’s Huntsville Machine Shop & Manufacturing Facility

9:36 pm

Video below, which is heavily focused on machining and machine shop work. The facility, the Machine Shop & Manufacturing Facility in Huntsville, appears to build the BE-3U engine (to be used for the New Glenn upper stage), though I thought some of the engines shown could be BE-4’s. I hope my readers can help clarify this.

While this video actually reveals very little solid information, one important fact was disclosed near the end, when the tour reached the final engine assembly point. There the Blue Origin employee mentioned that they are assembling three engines at this facility. Considering facility’s size and the number of engines that will be needed once New Glenn begins flying, I was not impressed. Does it really take this much space and equipment to only build three rocket engines? Am I wrong?

Hat tip to reader John Harman, who is himself the owner of an aerospace manufacturing company.

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Martian crater or mud caldera?

2:13 pm

Martian crater or volcano?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 18, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists only call this a “feature,” likely because they don’t wish to guess as to its nature without more data. However, the 2.5 mile wide splash apron around the central double crater certainly merits a closer look. That double crater could be from impact, but it also could be a caldera, with the apron the result of material that flowed from the caldera.

That there appear to be fewer craters on the apron than on the surrounding terrain strengthens this last hypothesis. The apron would have erased many earlier impact craters, resulting in this lower count.

The location however suggests that if this feature was volcanic in origin it might not have been spewing out magma.
» Read more

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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.
» Read more

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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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Musk touts SpaceX’s gigantic lead in sending mass to orbit in 2023

9:22 am

The mass sent to orbit in 2023
Click for original image.

In a tweet Elon Musk sent out yesterday, he noted that “SpaceX is tracking to launch over 80% of all Earth payload to orbit this year.”

The graphic to the right was included in Musk’s tweet. Despite the delays in developing its heavy-lift Starship/Superheavy rocket, mostly caused by government red tape since the arrival of Joe Biden in the White House, the company’s smaller Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets have still been able to launch more than fifteen times the mass into orbit that its nearest competitor, the nation of China.

I count launches by company or nation as a indicator of rocketry success. The mass-to-orbit metric is as important, if not more so, though the two are without doubt linked. Both measure the success of those trying to become major players in the launch market.

And in both metrics, SpaceX is wiping the floor with its competition.

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SpaceX initiates new round to obtain from $500 to $750 million in additional private investment capital

8:45 am

SpaceX has opened another tender round to obtain from $500 to $750 million in additional private investment capital, with the company now valued at $175 billion, up from the previous valuation of $150 billion.

With this new capital, the company will have raised at a minimum around $12 billion from private sources, not including the undisclosed investment in October from Italy’s biggest bank.

Why are private investors willing to do commit so much cash to this company? This quote from the article says it all:

SpaceX is on track to book revenues of about $9 billion this year across its rocket launch and Starlink businesses, Bloomberg News reported last month, with sales projected to rise to around $15 billion in 2024. The company is also discussing an initial public offering for Starlink as soon as late 2024 — a bid to capitalize on robust demand for communications via space.

In other words, SpaceX is already earning enough to pay for the development of Starlink/Starship/Superheavy, with even bigger profits expected because it has such a lead on its competitors in the satellite broadband business.

These investors realize that SpaceX has captured the majority of this market share, and because of this it will be difficult for late arrivals like Amazon to enter the market. Amazon could charge less to gain market share, but SpaceX could then do the same. And SpaceX will already be in the black when it does so, while Amazon will instead be increasing its red ink.

This situation underlines the wisdom of Musk’s decision in 2018 to shake-up the management in SpaceX’s Starlink division because the management then was setting too slow a pace. As I wrote then:

Musk’s desire for speed here actually makes very good economic sense. There are other companies developing similar internet satellite constellations, and if SpaceX’s launches late they will likely lose a significant market share.

His concern about the slow pace seems to me also justified. This technology, while cutting edge, shouldn’t require as much testing and prototype work as it appears the fired managers wanted. Better to get something working and launched and making money, introducing upgrades as you go, as SpaceX has done so successfully with its Falcon 9 rocket.

Time has now proven Musk right.

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SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites

11:53 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

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

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

90 SpaceX
56 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches, 102 to 56, and the entire world combined 102 to 90. SpaceX by itself is once again tied with the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 90 to 90. The fast pace in launches continues, however, with five launches scheduled in the next five days.

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December 6, 2023 Quick space links

3:26 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

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Big Martian gullies partly filled with glacial material

1:15 pm

Overview map

Big Martian gullies partly filled with glacial material

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 18, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists dub as “large gullies with infilled alcoves.”

Gullies on Mars were one of the first discoveries by orbiters of small-scalle potential water-caused features on the Red Planet. The favorite explanation for their formation today involves the seasonal freeze-thaw cycle, combined with the deposition of ice and dry ice frost in the winter. When that ice and dry ice sublimates away in the spring it causes collapse and erosion, widening the gullies.

These gullies also exhibit evidence that underground and glacial ice might contribute as well. The material in the largest gullies looks like a mixture of glacial material and dust and debris. It could also be that there is ice impregnated in the ground, which can cause large collapses when it sublimates away.

The white rectangle on the overview map and inset above marks the location of this picture, on the western rim of a 13-mile-wide unnamed crater inside the western portion of the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip on Mars I dub glacier country, since every image from orbit shows evidence of glaciers.

This picture is no different, as the horizontal cracks at the base of the crater rim suggests the glacier that fills the crater floor is being pulled apart by gravity at its edges. The elevation drop from the top of the rim to the floor is about 3,200 feet, so any ice on that slope will definitely be stressed by gravity. Such cracks are therefore not surprising.

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Psyche takes its first pictures

9:49 am

The spacecraft Psyche — going to the metal asteroid Psyche — has successfully taken its first pictures, proving its camera and pointing system work as planned.

The pictures, taken on December 4, 2023 from about 16 million miles from Earth, are actually quite boring, merely showing a field of stars. However,

The imager instrument, which consists of a pair of identical cameras, captured a total of 68 images, all within a star field in the constellation Pisces. The imager team is using the data to verify proper commanding, telemetry analysis, and calibration of the images. …The imager takes pictures through multiple color filters, all of which were tested in these initial observations.

At this moment all looks good for Psyche’s eventual arrival at Psyche in 2029.

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Iran and China complete orbital launches

9:35 am

Iran's launch December 6, 2023
Iran’s Salman rocket lifting off today.
The launch site itself was not disclosed.

According to the official state-run press of each country, both Iran and China yesterday completed successfully launches, both of which appeared to test new capabilities of some note.

First Iran announced that it had used its Salman rocket to put a 500-kilogram capsule that it said was carrying biological samples, and was also “has the ability to carry a human,” though the mass of this capsule makes that highly unlikely. Little other information was provided. Nor has this orbital launch as yet been confirmed by the orbital monitoring services of the U.S. military. The image to the right is a screen capture from the launch video at the link, and appears to show that this rocket has only one stage, thus making an orbital launch impossible.

Assuming this orbital launch is confirmed, it was Iran’s second orbital launch in 2023 and will therefore not show up on the launch race leader board below. If further information is obtained I will update this post appropriately.

China in turn announced the successful launch today of a test satellite, using its new Smart Dragon-3 solid-fueled rocket lifting off from a barge in the South China Sea 1,300 nautical miles off the coast of Guangdong province, where Hong Kong is located. To arrive at this ocean launch location took five days. The launch thus tested the use of this mobile floating platform from remote ocean locations.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

89 SpaceX
56 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches, 101 to 56, and the entire world combined 101 to 90. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 89 to 90, though it has another launch planned for tonight, with the live stream here.

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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter takes another look at the non-face on Mars

12:51 pm

The non-face on Mars
Click for original image

In 2007, shortly after it began science operations in Mars orbit, the science team for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) pointed its high resolution camera at the so-called “Face on Mars”, taking a picture that confirmed (as had Mars Global Surveyor several years earlier) that this “face” was a non-face, simply a mesa whose features made it appear roughly facelike in low resolution imagery.

Now, more than sixteen years later, scientists have used MRO to take a new picture of the non-face mesa. That picture is to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. Compared to the 2007 photo the new photo has far better lighting conditions, revealing many details on the mesa’s eastern half that were mostly obscured by shadows previously.

In fact, these new details strongly suggest that the depression on the mesa’s eastern slopes harbors a decaying glacier. At least, that is what the features there resemble.
» Read more

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Ingenuity completes its 67th flight on Mars

9:58 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Almost immediately after communications were re-established with Mars after the monthlong solar conjunction — where the Sun stood between the Earth and Mars — the Ingenuity engineering team uploaded instructions for Ingenuity’s 67th flight, and on December 2, 2023, the helicopter successfully completed that flight, traveling 1,289 feet to the west at a height of 39 feet for 136 seconds, almost exactly what the flight planned dictated.

The overview map above shows with the green dot the helicopter’s new position after that flight. It has moved ahead of Perseverance into Neretva Vallis, the gap out of Jezero Crater through which the rover will eventually travel. At the moment however Perseverance sits much farther east, as indicated by the blue dot, where it has been studying the surface geology of the delta that once flowed through that gap into the crater.

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Stratolaunch completes first test captive carry flight with powered Talon hypersonic vehicle

9:34 am

Test engineering vehicle attached below Roc
Test engineering vehicle attached to Roc during
a flight in October 2022

Stratolaunch has successfully completed the first test captive carry flight with its prototype Talon hypersonic vehicle fueled and powered, carried by its giant Roc airplane.

The flight was the twelfth for the company’s launch platform Roc and the first in which the aircraft carried a Talon vehicle with live propellant as part of a buildup approach for Talon-A’s first powered flight.

The flight lasted a total of three hours and 22 minutes and represented a significant step forward in the company’s near-term goal of completing a powered flight with the Talon-A vehicle, TA-1. A primary objective was to evaluate Talon-A’s propulsion system and the Talon environments while carrying live propellant. A second objective was to verify Roc and TA-1’s telemetry systems, which provides the situational awareness to ensure all systems are ready for powered flight during the release sequence.

The company has two contracts to do hypersonic test flights using flightworthy Talon vehicles, one with the Air Force and the second with the Navy. It is not clear however when those flights will occur.

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China launches two satellites

9:22 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy today successfully launched two satellites, its Ceres-1 rocket lifting off from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

China’s own state-run press illustrates how pseudo this company is by not even mentioning its name in its reporting. It mentions the launch was “commercial,” but that’s as far as it goes. China’s press knows the government runs and owns this company, and only allows it the superficial appearance of a private company to enhance competition within its space industry.

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

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

89 SpaceX
55 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches, 101 to 55, and the entire world combined 101 to 88. SpaceX by itself still maintains its lead over the entire world (excluding other American companies) 89 to 88.

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Italian subcontractor for Arianespace misplaces two rocket tanks

8:58 am

This story is hard to believe but true: The Italian company Avio, one of the subcontractors for Arianespace that builds its smaller rockets Vega and Vega-C, apparently misplaced two rocket tanks that were to be used on the Vega rocket’s last launch, thus preventing that launch entirely.

The two propellant tanks that went missing were housed in an Avio production department in Colleferro that had undergone renovation work. At some point following the completion of the renovations, the two tanks were found to be missing.

According to the initial source, the tanks had not been entered into a company-wide asset management system that tracked the location of all vital Avio components. This ensured that the teams tasked with investigating the disappearance had very little to go on when beginning their search for the missing tanks.

Despite the futility of the search, the tanks were eventually found. This was, however, not the good news Avio had hoped for. The tanks are, unfortunately, not in a usable state. They had been crushed and were found alongside metal scraps in a landfill.

The tanks power Vega’s fourth stage that deploys satellites in orbit. They were to be used on the final flight of Vega, which has been delayed repeatedly for unexplained reasons. We now know the reason.

Because this was the final flight, however, the tanks cannot be replaced because the Vega production line has been shut down. The company is considering using two of the four qualification tanks first built more than a decade ago when Vega was first being tested, but those were test tanks and have been sitting unused for as long. It will be difficult to determine their reliability.

Europe’s government-run rocket program thus at present has no rocket capable of launching. Its Ariane-5 is retired. Its Vega cannot launch. Its Vega-C, which replaces the Vega, remains grounded due to a launch failure in December 2022, with the next launch expected no earlier than late in 2024. And its new Ariane-6 rocket won’t do its first launch until the summer of 2024, at the earliest.

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South Korea successfully test launches a new solid-fueled rocket

8:43 am

South Korea today successfully launched a new solid-fueled rocket on its third test launch and first orbital flight.

The space launch vehicle was launched from a barge floating in waters about 4 kilometers south of Jeju Island at 2 p.m. and placed a small Earth observation satellite into orbit at an altitude of about 650 km, the ministry said.

The 100-kilogram synthetic aperture radar satellite, made by Hanwha Systems, succeeded in sending signals to a ground station at 3:45 p.m., which means it is operating normally, the company said. The rocket is designed to put a small satellite into a low Earth orbit for surveillance operations.

This four-stage rocket uses solid fuel for its first three stages and liquid fuel for the final stage. That it launched from a barge is as significant, as having this ability gives South Korea an added launch flexibility.

This was South Korea’s second launch in 2023, so the leader board for the 2023 launch race remains unchanged:

89 SpaceX
54 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches, 101 to 54, and the entire world combined 101 to 87. SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world (excluding other American companies) 89 to 87.

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China launches Egyptian Earth observation satellite

12:03 am

China successfully launched an Egyptian Earth observation satellite on December 4, 2023, its Long March 2C rocket lifting off from its Jiquan spaceport in northwestern China.

The satellite was built in Egypt with Chinese assistence, and is designed to study water and land resources for Egypt.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, which use toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed within China.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

89 SpaceX
54 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches, 101 to 54, and the entire world combined 101 to 86. SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world (excluding other American companies) 89 to 86.

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