Tag: freedom

Researchers develop liquid nitrogen spray that removes lunar dust

9:18 am

In a significant breakthrough that might solve a problem that has been on on-going threat to future lunar exploration, researchers at Washington State University have developed a liquid nitrogen spray that appears able to remove the Moon dust that sticks to spacesuits and equipment.

The sprayer removed more than 98% of moon dust simulant in a vacuum environment with minimal damage to spacesuits, performing better than any techniques that have been investigated previously.

You can read their paper here.

During the Apollo lunar landings the astronauts found Moon dust to be a serious problem. It is not only abrasive and attaches itself to everything, it caused in some astronauts what they called “lunar hay fever”, suggesting that on longer Moon missions the dust could cause serious health issues.

The process is not yet perfected. For example, it has not yet been tested in lunar gravity. Moreover, techniques for applying this spray practically during actual lunar operations do not yet exist. Nonetheless, this appears to be the first technique found that might work.

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No resolution in sight for Blue Origin’s investigation into New Shepard flight abort

9:00 am

According to one Blue Origin official, the company’s investigation into the New Shepard flight abort continues without resolution, nearly six months after the incident occurred shortly after launch on a flight in September 2022.

Speaking at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference here Feb. 28, Gary Lai, chief architect for New Shepard at Blue Origin, said the company was continuing to investigate the Sept. 12 uncrewed mission, designated NS-23. On that flight, the crew capsule, which had experiments but no people on board, fired its launch escape motor about a minute after liftoff from the company’s West Texas test site.

The company has provided few updates about the status of the investigation since the incident and has not estimated either when the investigation would be complete or when New Shepard flights would resume. “We are investigating that anomaly now, the cause of it,” he said after a talk about New Shepard at the conference. “We will get to the bottom of it. I can’t talk about specific timelines or plans for when we will resolve that situation other than to say that we fully intend to be back in business as soon as we are ready.”

The pace of this investigation fits the generally slow manner in which Blue Origin appears to do everything. Six months later and it appears as if its engineers are still unclear about the cause of the abort. Nor is the company able to say when it will resume launches. This slow response matches the very leisurely pace the company set to fix its BE-4 orbital rocket engines, a pace so slow it caused a three year delay in the launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, and an even longer delay (with no end in sight) for Blue Origin’s own New Glenn rocket.

Considering that it has customers waiting to fly, this slow pace will not recommend it to future or even present customers. It would not surprise me if several — for both the suborbital and orbital spacecraft — quietly jump ship and arrange launch services elsewhere.

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ESA invites private companies to build lunar satellites for communications and navigation

9:47 am

Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) has now invited European and Canadian companies to build the lunar communications and navigation satellites that will be needed to serve the many future manned and unmanned missions presently being planned by the U.S. and Europe.

Under its Moonlight programme, ESA is inviting space companies to create these lunar services.

By acting as an anchor customer, ESA is enabling space companies involved in Moonlight to create a telecommunication and navigation service for the agency, while being free to sell lunar services and solutions to other agencies and commercial ventures.

Once Moonlight is in place, companies could create new applications in areas such as education, media and entertainment – as well as inspiring young people to study science, technology, engineering and maths, which creates a highly qualified future workforce.

According to the press release, almost 100 companies have already expressed interest.

It is however unclear how much freedom the companies will have in designing and creating these satellites, based on ESA’s own descriptions of the project. It appears that ESA wants to design them, and is simply looking for private companies to build them. Under this arrangement, ownership will not belong to the companies, even if they are given the freedom to make money selling the capability to others. In fact, past history suggests that in the end, ESA will eventually retract this part of the deal, because of its desire to fully control the satellites it designed.

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Ispace provides update on its Hakuto-R1 lunar lander on the way to the Moon

9:09 am

Lunar map showing Hakuto-R1's landing spot
Hakuto-R1’s planned landing site is in Atlas Crater.

The CEO of the Japanese company Ispace yesterday gave a media briefing on the status of its Hakuto-R1 lunar lander, essentially stating that the spacecraft is doing fine and is on target to land on the Moon at the end of April as planned.

Ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said during a media briefing Monday that the flight has provided operational data that will inform subsequent missions. “We have acquired tons of data and know-how” on the lander and its subsystems, he said. “They are very viable assets for ispace.”

That includes information on the lander’s structural performance during launch and deployment, as well as the performance of thermal, communication and power subsystems. “It’s almost impossible to assume everything perfectly before the mission,” Hakamada said. “It is inevitable to face off-nominal events.” Some off-nominal events in the mission so far include thermal temperatures hotter than the company anticipated and a brief, unexpected issues with communications after the lander deployed from the Falcon 9. The thermal issues have not affected operations.

This mission, while carrying commercial payloads such as the UAE’s Rashid lunar rover, is mainly aimed at finding out these engineering details in order to make the next two missions in ’24 and ’25 more likely to succeed. The ’24 mission is also planned as a test mission, but it will carry commercial payloads for both Japanese and Taiwanese customers. On the ’25 mission, the main customer is NASA.

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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches 21 second generation Starlink satellites

4:33 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched 21 second generation Starlink satellites, dubbed V2-minis because they are smaller than the full version that will be launched on Starship.

The Falcon 9 rocket used a first stage flying on its third flight. It successfully landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The fairings were completing their second flight.

The 2023 launch race:

13 SpaceX
7 China
3 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India

American private enterprise now leads China 14 to 7 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 14 to 12. SpaceX alone leads the entire world combined 13 to 12.

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The shift away from government schools, at all levels, accelerates

3:51 pm

Parents are rejecting this in droves
Parents are rejecting this mantra in droves

It has been clear for decades that the public schools in most major urban areas — all of which have been run by Democrats — have been failing badly at their primary task of educating children. Two recent stories underlined this failure.

First, in Baltimore a study found that not one student in twenty-three of the city’s schools was proficient in math.

Through an analysis of 150 Baltimore City Schools, 23 of them, including 10 high schools, eight elementary schools, three high schools and two middle schools, no students met math grade-level expectations, according to a report by Project Baltimore. Approximately 2,000 students took the state administered math exams that tested proficiency levels.

…An additional 20 schools in the district had no more than two students proficient in math, Project Baltimore reported. Another three schools in the district, which are for incarcerated students and students with disabilities, had no students that met grade-level expectations.

Essentially, just under one third of all of Baltimore’s public schools failed to teach any of their students math. Period. For any school system to accept this level of failure is beyond disgusting. Everyone who works for Baltimore’s schools should be canned, now.

Then, just days later, another story revealed that fifty-five of Chicago’s public schools were also totally incompetent at teaching math or reading, and should find other work.
» Read more

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New company aims at providing floating ocean-going spaceports for rocket companies

9:29 am

A new startup, The Spaceport Company, is building a floating ocean-going spaceport for smallsat rocket companies, with the company’s long term goal to provide a range of floating spaceports for rockets of all sizes.

The Spaceport Company is planning to demonstrate a sea-based launch platform in May, conducting four sounding rocket launches from a modified ship in the Gulf of Mexico. “That will help us prove out our logistical, operational and regulatory procedures,” said Tom Marotta, founder and chief executive of the company, during a panel at the SpaceCom conference Feb. 23.

Those tests will be a precursor to developing a full-scale sea-based platform, based on a ship design called a liftboat. That ship can sail to a location and lower legs to anchor itself on the seafloor. The boat can then lift itself out of the water and serve [as] a launch platform.

That first orbital platform would provide launch services for smallsat rockets capable of launching up to one ton, and if the company’s suborbital test launches go well and further investment capital arrives, could be operational by 2025.

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Astroscale raises $76 million in private investment capital from Mitsubishi, space tourist Maezawa, and others

9:20 am

The Japanese startup Astroscale, which is focused on removing orbital space junk and robotic satellite repair, has raised $76 million in private investment capital, bringing the total it has raised from private sources to $376 million.

Astroscale Holdings Inc. (“Astroscale”), the market leader in satellite servicing and long-term sustainability across all orbits, has closed a Series G round with more than U.S. $76 million in funding from new investors Mitsubishi Electric, Yusaku Maezawa, Mitsubishi UFJ Bank, Mitsubishi Corporation, Development Bank of Japan, and FEL Corporation.

The investors are of interest. Billionaire Maezawa, who has already flown to ISS as a tourist and has purchased a lunar mission on SpaceX’s Starship, contributed $23 million of the $76 million. Mitsubishi in turn has contributed at least $25 million. Both suggest Astroscale is now on very solid financial ground.

It also appears that the big players in Japan see Astroscale’s business plan as viable and expected to be profitable.

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Where to get legal help if you have been illegally blacklisted

4:39 pm

Today’s blacklist column is a follow-up of an earlier column from August 2022, when I provided a detailed list of the various legal non-profit firms that now take on cases to defend the blacklisted. The number of such firms has grown, and I decided it was time to provide a new more complete list.

These non-profit law firms are all dedicated to fighting the left’s shameless effort to illegally and immorally blacklist, blackball, censor, and destroy its opposition, and have been increasingly successfully in winning their cases. The list, though obviously not all inclusive, describes what appear to be the most active and successful non-profit law firms presently winning first amendment cases nationwide. (Note too that the ACLU is not on the list, as that organization a long time ago abandoned its foundational goal of protecting free speech and has instead become an agent acting to increase the left’s power over ordinary citizens.)

In choosing among these law firms, make sure you review their entire website and the many cases they are handling. Some firms might be less appropriate for your situation, and it is necessary on your part to do the due diligence to figure this out.
» Read more

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Puerto Rico’s Ports Authority is looking for an operator to run the island’s own spaceport

10:09 am

Ceiba spaceport map
The arrow points to the city of Ceiba

Puerto Rico’s Ports Authority has now issued a call for proposals from potential operators of the spaceport the authority wishes built at an airport in the town of Ceiba on the island’s eastern tip.

The developer — which would operate the Spaceport for several years, depending on the negotiation — would design and build the infrastructure needed for horizontal launches at JAT, using private capital, equity and investment.

…“Vertical launches in Puerto Rico are challenging, considering the population density, among others. However, we want to do a feasibility study for vertical launches in Puerto Rico, with an emphasis on the use of barges and launches in high seas,” the agency stated in the RFP.

Note that the first goal would be to make the airport usable for rocket companies that use an airplane for their first stage, such as Virgin Orbit and Northrop Grumman. The next step would be figure out where a vertical launchpad could be safely and practically established.

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ULA now targets May 4th for first Vulcan launch

9:23 am

According to ULA’s CEO, the company has now scheduled the first launch of its Vulcan rocket for May 4, 2023, a delay of about a month from the previous schedule.

The delay to the new date was caused by a variety of factors. First, the launch window for the prime payload, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, is only open certain days of the month. Second, that lander is just finishing final testing, and the extra time was needed to get it to Cape Canaveral and stacked on the rocket. Third, the extra time was needed to complete all the dress rehearsal countdown tests prior to launch. However, the biggest reason for the delay appears to have been one of Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines.

ULA and Blue Origin are finishing the formal qualification of the BE-4 engine, which Bruno described as the “pacing item” for the launch. “It’s taking a little bit longer than anticipated.”

He revealed that, in a qualification test of one of two engines, the liquid oxygen pump had about 5% higher performance than expected or seen on other engines. “When the performance of your hardware has even a small shift that you didn’t expect, sometimes that is telling us that there could be something else going on in the system that is potentially of greater concern.”

ULA and Blue Origin decided to take the engine off the test stand and disassemble it. Engineers concluded that the higher performance was just “unit-to-unit variation” and not a problem with the engine itself, Bruno said.

If Blue Origin was manufacturing and testing these engines as it needs to do, in large numbers, it would have known a long time ago the range of “unit-to-unit variation” in performance. That this is not known at this late time once again tells us that the company is still struggling to build these engines routinely. Yet it will soon need to produce plenty in short order in order to sustain not only ULA’s Vulcan launch schedule but the launch schedule of its own New Glenn rocket.

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What to expect when SpaceX launches Starship on its first orbital flight

10:04 am

Link here. The article does a careful review of the previous dress rehearsal countdowns and static fire tests, especially the last which successfully fired 31 of Superheavy’s 33 Raptor-2 engines for 7 seconds, in order to understand what will happen during the countdown on the day the rocket does its first orbital launch, now expected within weeks.

It appears right now that SpaceX is preparing to replace one or both of those failed engines, and do it with Superheavy prototype #7 still mounted to the launchpad. Starship prototype #24 has not yet been stacked on top, but work is presently being done to it nearby to prepare it for launch. For example, workers recently have removed the attachment points used by cranes before the chopsticks existed and put thermal tiles there instead.

Based on the pace of work, SpaceX should be ready to launch by mid-March. All that will prevent this will be the FAA, which still has not approved the launch license.

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