Tag: freedom

SpaceX launches 20 Starlink satellites

8:27 am

SpaceX early this morning launched another 20 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

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

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

70 SpaceX
29 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 81 to 44, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 70 to 55.

To get a sense of how incredible SpaceX’s launch pace this year has been, those 70 launches, completed in only days more than first half of the 2024, matches the American record for launches in a entire year, that was set in 1966 and remained the record until 2022.

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Florida approves expansion of spaceport territories

9:32 am

Map of potential Florida spaceports

The Florida legislature has now approved two new locations in Florida where rocket launches can take place.

Governor Ron DeSantis signed off on a bill that, as of Monday, will add South Florida’s Homestead Air Reserve Base and the panhandle’s Tyndall Air Force Base to Florida’s growing spaceport territories.

The map to the right shows the spaceport locations within Florida. While the state government might now allow launches from these locations, it is unclear if either military facility is entertaining the idea.

Regardless, the Florida government is clearly intent on encouraging and attracting this new industry to its state.

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Blue Origin expands deal to fly citizens free on New Shepard

9:16 am

Blue Origin, in partnership with a non-profit, has expanded its program to fly citizens free on suborbital flights of New Shepard, adding India and what it calls “the small island developing states (SIDS)” to the recently announced deal to fly a Nigerian.

The non-profit, dubbed Space Exploration and Research Agency (SERA), has purchased one seat on each of the next half dozen flights, and will only charge passengers $2.50 for the ticket.

In an unprecedented move, SERA will allow people around the world to vote on which citizens will take the approximately 11-minute journey. Anyone living in one of the program’s partner nations can apply to secure a seat. Applicants must be proficient in English, at least 18 years of age, and meet Blue Origin’s parameters for height, weight, physical fitness, and citizenship.

Five of the seats will be allocated to specific nations, and candidates will be voted on by citizens of those nations. The sixth will be open to anyone within a SERA-partnered country and chosen through a global vote. Remaining seat assignments will be announced later this year.

Overall, this continues the PR stunt nature of Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard, which apparently does not have enough business to fill its passenger manifest, and thus is arranging these give-aways. While the gesture is nice, it would be far better if the company got its orbital rocket off the ground and actually began flying real cargos and passengers into space.

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PLD pushes for first orbital launch from French Guiana in 2025

10:40 am

The Spanish rocket startup PLD announced last week that it has invested more than $10 million in developing its own launchpad and assembly facility at France’s French Guiana spaceport, and is targeting 2025 for the first orbital launch of its Miura-5 rocket.

The launcher company PLD Space has announced today an investment of 10 million euros in MIURA 5 Launch Complex at Guiana Space Center (CSG), Europe’s spaceport in Kourou (French Guiana), owned by the French Space Agency (CNES) and the European Space Agency (ESA). With the first launch of its rocket at the end of 2025, PLD Space will become the first non-institutional launch operator that will go to orbit from this historical base.

The company is reconfiguring the launchpad used by France to launch its Diamant rocket back in the 1960s and 1970s. It will include “its own launch zone and a preparation area, comprising an integration hangar, a clean room, a control center, and both commercial and work offices.”

Right now it appears that PLD along with several other European rocket startups are going to bypass a number of American rocket startups that had had a significant headstart, but also appear to be stalled in the last year or so because of a new regulatory framework at the FAA.

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New Polish suborbital rocket to be test flown from Andoya spaceport in Norway

10:26 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

A new Polish suborbital rocket, dubbed “ILR-33 Amber 2K,” and being developed by the Łukasiewicz Institute of Aviation, will do its next test flight from the Andoya spaceport in Norway.

After four consecutive test missions completed successfully in Poland, the next stage of preparations of the ILR-33 AMBER 2K to reach the edge of space will take place this year in July. Polish technology will be tested in Norway where one of the key European space centers for launching space vehicles is located.

According to this report, this rocket has a core stage with a hybrid-fueled engine plus two strap-on solid-fueled boosters, a configuration rare for suborbital rockets. After this test flight it will then begin operational suborbital flights, run by a Polish company Thorium from 2025 to 2027.

This deal is another competitive blow to the Saxaford and Sutherland spaceports in the United Kingdom. Both started commercial operations years ahead of either Andoya or Esrange, but because of red tape nothing has been yet allowed to launch from either. This Polish deal one of several for both the Andoya and Esrange spaceports that might have gone to the UK otherwise.

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SpaceX studying changes to de-orbit procedures for Dragon service module

10:09 am

Because it appears the trunk section of the service module of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules actually survives re-entry, the company is now studying changes to its de-orbit procedures so that it can guarantee that trunk will not crash on land, as has happened now three times in the past two years.

The solution [a NASA official] said NASA and SpaceX are looking at involves changing deorbiting procedures. Currently, the trunk is released before the capsule performs its orbit burn. That means the trunk can remain in orbit for months before making an uncontrolled reentry.

Instead, [that NASA official] said engineers are examining doing the deorbit burn and then releasing the trunk. That would provide more control of where the trunk reenters, ensuring that any debris that survives reentry lands in unpopulated regions.

To make this new procedure work they need to recalculate the fuel requirements for doing the de-orbit burn. It also requires them to figure out when to detach the trunk after the burn. I expect SpaceX to successfully implement these changes before the next Dragon launch, whether manned or unmanned.

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Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander completes thermal vacuum testing

10:01 am

The Japanese startup Ispace announced late last week that its second lunar lander, formerly names Hakuto-R2 and now dubbed Resilience, has successfully completed thermal vacuum testing and is on schedule for a launch before the end of this year.

The testing was completed at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tsukuba Space Center in Tsukuba, Japan, where the agency operates a large testing facility. The flight model was assembled at the facility and all payloads or testing models were integrated into the lunar lander before testing began. All test success criteria were met; ispace engineers are now reviewing the detailed data that RESILIENCE collected during the ten-day testing regime. The results will allow engineers to optimize the spacecraft thermally for spaceflight as well as improve flight operation procedures.

Thermal vacuum testing is conducted in a large chamber that allows the lunar lander to experience conditions similar to what it will face during its journey through outer space including extreme temperatures in a vacuum environment. Initial test results indicated successful operation of power systems, guidance, navigation and control (GNC) equipment, radio communications, and thermal control of the lander while simulating an actual spaceflight. During testing in the chamber, ispace operators utillized the lander’s onboard radio to assess connections, send commands to, and receive telemetry from the lander, further simulating actual flight operations.

This lander will also carry a mini-rover, and will be launched by a Falcon 9 rocket. The company’s press materials don’t name a location for the lunar landing spot, though one must have been chosen. I suspect, as this mission is a precursor to Ispace’s first NASA lunar landing mission set for 2026, it will be sent to the same location as Ispace’s first Hakuto-R1 test mission, which got to within three miles but then crashed because sensors thought it was just above the surface and shut off the engines prematurely.

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France awards contract to French startup to launch two robotic satellite servicing missions

10:03 am

Capitalism in space: France has awarded the French startup Infinite Orbits a contract to launch two robotic satellite servicing missions, one to attach itself to a still-unnamed satellite to extend its life, and a second to test rendezvous and proximity maneuvers near a defunct and thought-to-be tumbling weather satellite.

The key tidbit however is that the contract award is part of a French government program to encourage commercial space:

The France 2030 initiative is a €54 billion investment programme that aims to transform sectors of the French economy with technological innovation.

I was unaware of this French government program. It appears it signals a shift in financial support from the European Space Agency’s commercial entity Arianespace to new competitive French companies. If so, this is a very good sign for its aerospace industry.

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SpaceX and China complete launches

9:44 am

Both SpaceX and China completed launches in the past 12 hours. First, SpaceX last night launched a package of National Reconnaissance Office reconnaissance satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its eighth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. The two fairings completed their seventh and thirteenth flights respectively.

Then, early today China launched a new communications satellite, its new Long March 7A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport. Video of the liftoff can be seen here.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

69 SpaceX
29 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 80 to 43, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 69 to 54.

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Sixteen Nobel economists once again prove that our “expert” class is expert at nothing

1:57 pm

Our modern intellectual class
Our modern intellectual class

Earlier this week a group of sixteen Nobel laureate economists issued a public letter endorsing Joe Biden’s economic agenda and claiming that a return of Donald Trump to the White House would lead to economic ruin.

“We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world, and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy,” the economists write in the letter. “Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast. There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets.”

You can read their letter here. It was signed by the following (the date of their Nobel award in parenthesis):

George A. Akerlof (2001), Sir Angus Deaton (2015), Claudia Goldin (2023), Sir Oliver Hart (2016), Eric S. Maskin (2007), Daniel L. McFadden (2000), Paul R. Milgrom (2020), Roger B. Myerson (2007), Edmund S. Phelps (2006), Paul M. Romer (2018), Alvin E. Roth (2012), William F. Sharpe (1990), Robert J. Shiller (2013), Christopher A. Sims (2011), Joseph Stiglitz (2001), and Robert B. Wilson (2020).

What is hilarious about their letter is how it exposes these so-called economic giants as partisan hacks. A dive into their campaign contributions finds that eleven are donors to Joe Biden or the Democrats, while the remaining five have all previously endorsed Biden publicly. Before the 2020 election two of these sixteen economists signed a similar letter, calling for Joe Biden’s election, claiming he would “…build an economy that works for all Americans.” In 2021 thirteen of these same economists then followed up with another letter, endorsing all of Biden’s spending proposals then before Congress (costing an expected $1.9 trillion).

A comparison between the claims in all three letters and what actually happened also reveals how little these economists know about economics. As noted at this City Journal article by James Piereson:
» Read more

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New update on SpaceX’s preparations for future Starship/Superheavy test launches

10:06 am

Link here. Lots of progress described, all suggesting SpaceX continues to target late July for the next test orbital flight. Very much worth reading.

The article repeatedly suggests the work to prepare the launch tower at Boca Chica to catch a returning Superheavy means the next launch will attempt such a catch, but in truth there is no evidence such a thing is planned, other than a single tweet by Elon Musk. As the article finally admits in its next-to-last paragraph,

Starship can now fly missions that have very similar profiles to Flight 4 with the existing FAA license, but a license modification is needed for any catch attempt. If Flight 5 does indeed proceed with a catch attempt at the tower for Booster 12, additional paperwork will need to be filed for this license modification.

I continue to expect SpaceX to propose such a catch on a later flight. The tower work at Boca Chica could be the company doing the necessary work to prove to the FAA that a amended launch license process should be issued, but not for the next flight.

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Indonesia government offering proposed launch site to SpaceX and others

9:57 am

Indonesia proposed spaceport on Baik

As part of its effort to promote a long term space industry development plan, Indonesian officials have repeatedly been offering a proposed launch site to SpaceX and others on government land on the island of Biak off the coast of New Guinea.

The map to the right shows the location. First SpaceX and China were offered use of Baik. Neither has accepted. Then,

As recently as 2023, BRIN officials promoted their spaceport plans at the G20 Space Economy Leaders’ Meeting and Asia-Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum. China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and India were invited as potential partners, but none signed on.

Meanwhile, the article says Indonesia hopes to launch 19 satellites in 2025, using a variety of commercial launchers.

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European weather satellite company cancels launch contract with Ariane-6, switches to SpaceX

9:37 am

We now know the reason why an Arianespace official on June 26th demanded new legislation requiring all European payloads to launch on European rockets. Today it was revealed that the European weather satellite company Eumetsat has canceled a launch contract on an Ariane-6 rocket and instead switched to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Late yesterday, French news outlet Le Monde reported that the executive committee of Eumetsat, the European meteorological satellite agency, had asked the agency’s board of directors to cancel a contract it signed with Arianespace four years ago to launch its Meteosat MTG-S1 satellite. The mission would have been flown aboard the third Ariane 6 flight, which is expected to be launched in early 2025. The satellite will now be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Not surprisingly, another French official today — Philippe Baptiste, the head of France’s CNES space agency — once again demanded action to require European companies to use European rockets. In his whining however he revealed an amazing inability to understand why this decision was made.

“How far will we, Europeans, go in our naivety. … I am impatiently waiting to understand what reasons could have led Eumetsat to such a decision at a time [when] all major European space countries as well as the European Commission are calling for launching European satellites on European launchers.”

The reasons why are quite obvious, and if this guy can’t recognize them then there is little hope the European Ciommision will ever figure out how to compete. Not only is the cost for a Falcon 9 launch likely one third that of an Ariane-6, it is a proven launcher. Ariane-6, four years behind schedule, won’t make its first launch until July 9, 2024, assuming all goes as planned. Eumetsat officials probably decided they couldn’t afford the extra cost and risk.

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Amazon delays offering Kuiper broadband service to ’25

9:06 am

Though Amazon still has plans to begin launching satellites of its internet Kuiper constellation late this year, it revealed yesterday that it will now delay operational availability of the service to the public until 2025.

Amazon had earlier aimed to start deploying more than 3,200 satellites in the first half of 2024 to begin beta trials with potential customers, including Verizon in the United States. However, the company now expects to ship the first production satellites this summer to Florida for the launch with United Launch Alliance from its recently opened factory in Kirkland, Washington.

In order to offer the product to the public Amazon needs to have a certain number of satellites in orbit. Moreover, the company’s FCC license required it to launch half of this constellation by 2026, so meeting that deadline is getting increasingly difficult. Amazon has contracts to launch satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9.

By the time Amazon begins selling Kuiper, Starlink will have been available for about four years. For Amazon to grab market share will be thus difficult, unless it offers its product for significantly less.

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Supreme Court to SEC: Use of in-house administrative law judges unconstitutional

1:43 pm

SEC: no longer above the law
SEC: no longer above the law

The Supreme Court today ruled 6-3 that the SEC has violated the Constitution with its use of in-house administrative law judges to rule on its various securities fraud cases.

The agency, like other regulators, brings some enforcement actions in internal tribunals rather than in federal courts. The S.E.C.’s practice, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a six-justice majority in a decision divided along ideological lines, violated the right to a jury trial. “A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator,” the chief justice wrote.

This ruling against the use of administrative law judges has a direct bearing on SpaceX’s own lawsuit [pdf] against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In January the NLRB filed a complaint against SpaceX, accusing it of firing eight employees illegally for writing a public letter criticizing the company in 2022. Rather than fight that complaint directly, SpaceX’s response was to file a lawsuit challenging the very legal structure of the NLRB itself, including its use of administrative law judges.
» Read more

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SpaceX now valued at $210 billion

10:46 am

As part of another sale of insider shares to raise more private investment capital, SpaceX has now been valued at $210 billion.

SpaceX will sell shares at $112 each in the tender offer, the Bloomberg report said, with the newer sales valuing the company much higher than a $180 billion valuation seen during a tender offer in December.

The report does not say how many shares SpaceX hopes to sell, or how much total new capital it hopes to obtain. Previous such sales have raised a total of $12 billion, money the company is using to develop both its Starlink constellation and its Starship/Superheavy rocket.

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Collins officially backs out of contracts to build spacesuits for NASA

10:20 am

According to an announcement today from NASA, Collins Aerospace has now officially backed out of its NASA contracts to build a new spacesuit for both space station and lunar operations in the agency’s Artemis program.

In 2022 and 2023, NASA awarded Collins Aerospace two task orders under the agency’s xEVAS (Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services) contract. The first task order was to deliver a next generation spacesuit and spacewalking system for potential use on the International Space Station with a base value of $97.2 million. The second task order was to advance additional spacesuit capabilities with a base value of $5 million.

After a thorough evaluation, NASA and Collins Aerospace have mutually agreed to descope the existing task orders on the Collins Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services contract. This descope includes ending the International Space Station suit demonstration, which was targeted for 2026. No further work will be performed on the task orders. This action was agreed upon after Collins recognized its development timeline would not support the space station’s schedule and NASA’s mission objectives.

NASA still has a second and similar spacesuit deal with Axiom, which appears to be moving forward as planned. Whether the agency will consider new offers from other companies to replace Collins is not known at this time. It is instead possible NASA will reserve this $102.2 million to use to help Axiom if it runs into problems.

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NASA awards SpaceX $843 million contract to de-orbit ISS

10:14 am

NASA today announced that it has awarded SpaceX a $843 million contract to build a de-orbit spacecraft that can dock to ISS and fire its thrusters so that the station will be safely de-orbited when it is retired in 2030, burning up over the ocean.

While the company will develop the deorbit spacecraft, NASA will take ownership after development and operate it throughout its mission. Along with the space station, it is expected to destructively breakup as part of the re-entry process.

The announcement provided no other details. It is not clear whether the thrusters on a Dragon capsule would be sufficient for this task. Most likely not, which means SpaceX will have to develop something else to do the job. Maybe its bid proposed using a Starship for the task.

It is also not clear whether any modules on ISS will be salvaged for other uses before de-orbit. The modules that the commercial company Axiom plans to attach to ISS in the next year or so are supposed to undock to form its own independent space station sometime later this decade. Will Russia’s modules do the same? And will any other modules?

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Firefly signs deal to launch its Alpha rocket from Esrange spaceport in Sweden

9:43 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

Firefly has now signed a deal to launch its Alpha rocket in 2026 from the Esrange spaceport in Sweden, becoming that spaceport’s second orbital customer.

Esrange is not really a new spaceport. It was originally built in the 1960s and was used for decades for suborbital test launches, much like Wallops Island in the U.S. In January 2023 it upgraded one launchpad to allow commercial orbital launches, and in May 2024, signed a launch deal with a new rocket startup from South Korea named Perigee.

This new contract with Firefly is a bigger deal, because Firefly has already launched several times, and is more established.

These developments indicate as well the cost of red tape in the United Kingdom. The map to the right shows the spaceports competing for business in Europe. The two UK spaceports (Saxaford and Sutherland) began construction years before Esrange decided to upgrade, but both are now losing business to Sweden because regulatory delays at the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK has delayed all launches there for years.

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ULA replaces Sierra’s mini-shuttle with dummy payload to launch Vulcan in September

9:28 am

Because of continuing delays in preparing Sierra Space’s Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle for launch, ULA has been forced to remove it from the second launch of Vulcan in order to proceed with the launch in September as planned.

ULA needs to launch Vulcan for the second time and as soon as possible in order to get approval from the Pentagon to do military launches. The delays in getting Tenacity ready for launch has already impacted that schedule, as ULA had originally hoped to launch Vulcan on its second flight — with Tenacity as the payload — several months ago. Further delays beyond September would seriously damage not only ULA’s bottom line, but the military’s own needs. It is all for these reasons that ULA has now set up a new review team to force this schedule forward, likely under pressure from the Pentagon.

Sierra Space meanwhile says that Tenacity is still on track to be ready to launch before the end of the year, but it is unclear what rocket will carry it. ULA will likely offer another Vulcan rocket for the purpose, but to do so it will probably have to delay some other payload, and it is certain it will not do that to any upcoming military launches. Based on the announced launch schedule, it does not look like this launch can occur on a ULA rocket in 2024. ULA says it hopes to launch at least 20 times in 2025, so one of those launches will likely carry Tenacity.

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SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites, using a first stage for the 22nd time

9:08 am

SpaceX early this morning launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral and using a first stage on its record-setting 22nd flight.

That stage successfully landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The flight was so routinely boring for the launch crew that the flight director felt no need to even bother having anyone do a T-10 second countdown at launch.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

68 SpaceX
28 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 79 to 42, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 68 to 53.

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Arianespace calls for Europe to require all European space payloads use European rockets

9:57 am

Arianespace, whose many-decade-long European launch monopoly is presently threatened by a wave of new rocket startups and an effort by European governments to created a competitive launch industry of many companies, has now urged Europe to require that all European space payloads use European rockets.

Arianespace head of public affairs Charlotte Lang has advocated for legislation that would require European missions to be launched aboard European rockets. Lang made the comments during the “Ensuring Long Term Autonomous Access to Space for Europe” panel on the first day of The European Space Forum conference. “The EU should enforce the principle of European launcher preference,” said Lang.

In a follow-up statement, Arianespace reiterated “the need for the EU to legislate that European missions are launched from European territory using launchers and technology manufactured in Europe by European providers.” The company identified the European Union’s planned IRIS² constellation as the “perfect opportunity to advance this initiative.”

Arianespace is like Blue Origin. It can’t get its rockets built and flying at a competitive price, so instead it advocates lawfare to limit competition in order to give it a favored position when it bids on future launch contracts.

In the case of Europe, I think this Arianespace effort will generally fall on deaf ears. The trend among numerous European governments (Germany, France, Italy) is to encourage new rocket companies to compete with Arianespace, in order to create options. These governments will of course wish to favor these new European rocket companies with any contract awards, but they will also not want to tie their hands with the kind of legislation Arianespace proposes. They all discovered in the past two years what could happen if they do that, when Arianespace failed to get Ariane-6 launched on time, and Europe ended up with no launch capabilities. During that time period they still had the option to use other non-European options (such as SpaceX). Having that flexibility in the future makes great sense.

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Blue Origin to FAA: Limit future SpaceX Starship launches at Cape Canaveral

9:38 am

Blue Origin has once again decided to use lawfare against SpaceX rather than actually build rockets that are competitive. As part of the process by the FAA to do a new Environmental Impact Statement on SpaceX’s plans for Starship/Superheavy launches at Cape Canaveral, Blue Origin last week submitted its own comment asking the FAA to cap the launches of its competitor, citing environment concerns.

The company recommends the following mitigation method for SpaceX’s Starship launches, prior to the company being issued a Vehicle Operator License:

“Capping the rate of Ss-SH launch, landing, and other operations, including but not limited to test firings, transport operations, and fueling, to a number that has a minimal impact on the local environment, locally operating personnel, and the local community, in consideration of all risks and impacts, including but not limited to anomaly risks, air toxin and hazardous materials dispersion, road closures, and heat and noise generation.”

Along with requesting a max number of Starship launches at the site, Blue Origin argues that the government increase launch infrastructure that opens other launchpads to nearby lessees when roads are forced to be closed for SpaceX launches. The filing also notes that SpaceX has already received environmental testing at its Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas.

You can read Blue Origin’s full comment here [pdf]. Essentially, Blue Origin is attempting to use this new impact statement to have the federal government damage or destroy its competition.

Musk’s response was a two word tweet: “Sue Origin.”

It is very clear that Jeff Bezos’s company is poorly focused. In the last decade it has built almost nothing, while spending a lot of time filing lawsuits against its competition. This action is simply another example.

Worse, Blue Origin’s comment will provide ammunition for the continuing Biden administration lawfare against Musk and SpaceX, making it difficult for the FAA to approve the impact statement as requested by SpaceX. If so, the development and operational use of Starship/Superheavy will be seriously threatened.

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Collins reportedly in the process of canceling its NASA spacesuit contract

9:19 am

As if NASA didn’t have enough spacesuit problems, with a ISS spacewalk this week canceled because one of the NASA-built suits on the station began leaking water again, Collins Aerospace, one of the two companies that won contracts to build new spacesuits, is now in negotiations to end that contract.

But Collins’ role in the program has been bumpy and development has fallen behind schedule, and the company has been in talks with NASA officials on how to wind down its role in the program, the two people said. “After a thorough evaluation, Collins Aerospace and NASA mutually agreed to descope Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) task orders,” a Collins spokeswoman said in a statement, referring to the spacesuit contract.

If this story is confirmed, it means at present only Axiom is building new spacesuits that can either be used on ISS or on future Artemis missions to the Moon and Gateway. Whether NASA will put out the Collins contract for bid again is unknown. In its original cargo capsule contracts early in the 2010s, one company failed to raise sufficient funds to build its capsule, so NASA cancelled it and awarded Orbital Sciences and its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule the deal.

If the contract is put out for new bidding, SpaceX would be in a very strong position to win, as its own internally financed spacewalk spacesuits are about to get their first flight test on Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Dawn mission on the Resilience Dragon capsule later this summer.

The failure of Collins here is disturbing, and might be an indicator of an overall loss in American engineering capabilities. Once a challenge like this would have posed no problem for any American aerospace company. Now such tasks are increasingly difficult and unachievable.

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French rocket startup wins $16 million grant from French government

9:01 am

The French rocket startup Latitude has been awarded a $16 million grant from French government for development work on its proposed two-stage Zephyr orbital rocket, which is targeting 2025 for its first test launch.

Nor is this grant the only money the company has raised.

In January, Latitude announced that it had closed its Series B funding round, raising $30 million. In March, the company was one of four companies selected to receive a share of €400 million [$427 million] in subsidies from the French government. This funding is, however, only fully unlocked when the company completes its inaugural flight of Zephyr.

Though Latitude has obtained some private investment capital, it appears it is mostly relying on government funds. Under these conditions, it is unclear whether the rocket startup will be able to compete not only with the other new European rocket startups but with the rest of the world. Government funding is usually not well tied with profit or cost efficiency, and thus the company will have less incentive to develop a competitive rocket.

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More garbage science about wildfires and global warming from Nature

12:31 pm

Nature: the science journal that no longer does real science
The science journal which no longer
understands how real science is done

The once highly respected science journal Nature continues its descent into propaganda and bad science, all because it bows unskeptically before the altar of global warming and leftist science fantasies.

Today’s example is an article this week entitled “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common,” describing a new Nature paper that attempted to use satellite data to prove that the intensity of wildfires has increased in the past two decades.

For the current study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on 24 June, Cunningham and his colleagues scoured global satellite data for fire activity. They used infrared records to measure the energy intensity of nearly 31 million daily fire events over two decades, focusing on the most extreme ones — roughly 2,900 events. The researchers calculated that there was a 2.2-fold increase in the frequency of extreme events globally in 2003–23, and a 2.3-fold boost in the average intensity of the top 20 most intense fires each year.

We’re all gonna die! As is usual for these crap climate-related studies, the entire goal is to drum up some manufactured new crisis that justifies the claim that the climate is warming. This study is no different, as the article eagerly notes:

Although the study doesn’t directly connect the fire trend to global warming, Cunningham [the study’s lead author] says “there’s almost certainly a significant signal of climate change”. Research has shown that rising temperatures are drying out ecosystems — such as coniferous forests — that are naturally prone to fire. This provides fuel that can boost the fires’ size and longevity. The latest study also found that the energy intensity of the fires increased faster during the night-time over the past two decades than during the daytime, which aligns with evidence4 that rising night-time temperatures are contributing to fire risk.

Not surprisingly, the New York Times immediately jumped on the bandwagon with its own article that accepts the conclusions of this research with utter naivety.

What junk. First, Cunningham fails to note this minor fact mentioned in the abstract of his own paper:
» Read more

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Firefly to launch from Wallops instead of Cape Canaveral

9:18 am

The rocket startup Firefly announced yesterday that it has decided to change its east coast launch site for its Alpha rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida to Wallops Island in Virginia, using the same pad there that Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket uses.

The company said that it would use Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island for Alpha launches, starting as soon as 2025. The launch pad, built for the Antares rocket, will continue to be used for the revised Antares 330 Northrop Grumman is developing in collaboration with Firefly as well as the larger Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV) the companies are building.

The company says launching from Wallops, in addition to its existing pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, will allow it to serve more customers. Wallops can support launches to lower inclination orbits than feasible from Vandenberg, which is best suited for sun-synchronous and other high-inclination orbits.

Because the revised Antares rocket will use a first stage built by Firefly (replacing a Ukrainian first stage no longer available due to Russia’s invasion), this change appears to make a great deal of sense. The revised pad will likely use comparable systems between both Antares and Alpha.

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France’s CNES space agency begins work adapting commercial launchpad at French Guiana for specific startup rocket companies

9:15 am

Capitalism in space: France’s CNES space agency, which has taken back ownership of its French Guiana spaceport from Arianespace, has now begun adapting its new commercial launchpad there for a number of specific startup rocket companies.

In early 2021, the French space agency CNES announced plans to open up the Guiana Space Centre to commercial micro and mini-launch operators. The agency explained that it would be developing a multi-user launch pad on the grounds of the old Diamant launch complex. In July 2022, CNES announced that it had pre-selected Avio, HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Latitude to utilize the new launch complex.

During a media briefing following ESA’s 327th council meeting, Tolker-Nielsen explained that “general work” on the complex had already started and that work on “specific adaptations” was about to begin. These specific adaptations will be completed by the companies that will utilize the launch complex to ensure it fulfills the specific needs of their launch systems.

Of the seven rocket startups listed above, Tolker-Nielson said PLD was the ahead of the others in adapting the pad for its use, though no launch date is set. Avio meanwhile will likely not have to use this pad, as it owns the Vega family of rockets, which have already launched from French Guiana using another launchpad.
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SpaceX completes two launches today, from opposite coasts

10:37 pm

The bunny marches on! SpaceX successfully completed two launches today.

First, its Falcon 9 rocket launched 22 Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral in Florida. This was the launch that had been delayed several times by weather, and then by a tecnical launch abort at T-0. After several days of review, it lifted in the morning today with no problems, the first stage completing its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Then, about ten hours later a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off in the evening Vandenberg in California, putting 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, 13 of which are said to be designed for direct cell-to-satellite capabilities. This first stage also completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

This post is a bit late because we had a five hour power outage in my neighborhood tonight, caused apparently when someone drove into a utility pole and knocked it over.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

66 SpaceX
28 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 77 to 42, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 66 to 53.

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