Tag: policy

Space Force wants to pay commercial space to remove space junk

9:30 am

Capitalism in space: In a video released today, the Space Force announced a new program, dubbed Orbital Prime, that asks commercial companies to bid on a new test program for removing space junk.

More info here.

The initial solicitation, due by February 17th, asks for proposals capable of achieving the ability to rendezvous, dock and service a piece of space junk, either by “repairing, repositioning, refueling, deorbiting, reusing or recycling” it. The solicitation is aiming for orbital test flights in no more than two to four years.

This approach by the military is excellent news, and continues the transition by the space-related agencies of federal government from trying to design and build everything itself to acting merely as a customer and buying what it needs from the private sector.

There are a number of companies who have already launched robots capable of doing exactly this, including Northrop Grumman and Astroscale. By taking this customer approach, the military will likely not only get a junk removal capability sooner, it will do so for far less cost.

It would also seem that the Russian anti-satellite test that produced thousands of pieces of orbital junk that now threatens ISS and a number of military satellites also helped prompt this announcement. The military has clearly recognized that it needs the capability to remove space junk now. It cannot afford to follow its past behavior of taking forever to accomplish such tasks.

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Engineers replace engine controller on SLS core; launch to be delayed

9:12 am

Engineers have successfully replaced the failed engine controller on the core stage of NASA’s SLS rocket.

Last week engineers and technicians successfully removed and replaced an engine controller from one of four RS-25 engines after the team identified an issue during a power-up test of the rocket’s core stage. Engineers are now performing standard engine controller diagnostic tests and check-outs, including controller power-up and flight software load. Subsequently, the team will work to complete all remaining SLS pre-flight diagnostic tests and hardware closeouts in advance of a mid-February rollout for a wet dress rehearsal in late February. NASA will set a target launch date after a successful wet dress rehearsal test.

The official schedule still lists the launch for February, but NASA has already admitted this is now impossible. Once they complete the wet dress rehearsal on the launchpad they will have to roll the rocket back into the Vehicle Assembly Building to do further tests. While it remains possible for NASA to meet an April launch window, more likely the agency will push back to windows during the summer.

Thus, the race between SLS and Starship for completing the first orbital flight remains neck-and-neck. Starship could launch this spring, but it faces an uncertain schedule determined not by SpaceX but by the bureaucracy in the federal government, which is reviewing the FAA’s environment reassessment for the Boca Chica launch site and really has no requirement to meet any schedule at all. The FAA says it plans to approve the reassessment by the end of February, but that is simply made up deadline. It could revise it at will at any time.

NASA meanwhile is still pushing to launch SLS in April, but this launch date is entirely unrealistic. Expect NASA to announce a new target date sometime in the summer in the coming weeks.

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NASA finally makes available to the aerospace industry its new flight termination software

2:59 pm

After what appears to be about a year and a half delay, NASA finally today made available its new flight termination software so that the aerospace industry can now test it.

“This is a major milestone that enables Rocket Lab and other U.S. launch companies to integrate the software now with their launch vehicle’s hardware and run performance simulations,” said David L. Pierce, Wallops Flight Facility director. “This is a key achievement toward enabling Rocket Lab launches from Wallops, in parallel with the NASA teams’ final safety certification steps, which are currently underway. Rocket Lab’s use of the NASA software will enable a high degree of confidence moving forward toward launch.”

Rocket Lab had hoped to launch from Wallops more than a year ago, but was blocked by NASA because the agency was apparently behind schedule in preparing this software. Now that it is finally available for testing, expect Rocket Lab to move swiftly, with a likely Wallops launch within months.

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Today’s blacklisted American: A short list of just a few of the academics fired for having opinions

2:39 pm

Lysenko with Stalin
Trofim Lysenko, the person American academia now most admires,
preaching to Stalin as he destroyed Soviet plant research,
persecuted anyone who disagreed with him, and caused famines
that killed millions.

Today at the Daily Signal one of their writers, Douglas Blair, compiled a list of eight college professors whose lives were destroyed by the intolerant left and its effort to silence all opposition, by any means necessary. That list is as follows:

Five of those eight individuals had previously been a subject of my daily column, “Today’s Blacklisted American,” proving that the number of such cases of oppression and blacklisting by the academic left has grown so large that a daily column can’t possibly cover every story.

What struck me about this list however was the petty, ugly, and absurd reasons given for destroying or silencing these individuals. » Read more

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Debris from Russian anti-satellite test threatens more than ISS

10:26 am

According to an analysis by a commercial space tracking firm, the debris from the satellite destroyed during a Russian anti-satellite test in November threatens not just ISS but many military weather and spy satellites.

Hugh Lewis, head of the Astronautics Research Group at the UK’s University of Southampton, on Monday tweeted an analysis of predicted conjunctions, or close approaches, between satellites and the Cosmos 1408 debris for the first week of January. That analysis showed 8,917 likely conjunctions where a sat and a debris fragment would pass within five kilometers of each other — scarily close in terms of collision risk.

The COMSPOC analysis also shows that Russian government claims that the debris would not harm the International Space Station are blatantly not true. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case.

At the time of ASAT test, COMSPOC listed the ISS as 20th on the list of most imperiled spacecraft. But the analysis shows that risks of a catastrophic collision with the ISS will continue to grow as the debris pieces spiral downward from the impact point into the Earth’s atmosphere, Oltrogge said.

More and more it seems this Russian anti-sat test was a deliberate act of sabotage by the Putin government, aimed at harming U.S. assets.

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China takes the global lead in fusion research

9:47 am

In setting new records of temperature and running time in its own tokamak fusion experiment, China now leads the U.S. in the field of developing the technology for generating practical fusion energy.

[The U.S.] ITER’s target temperature is 150 million °C (270 million °F). China’s EAST facility, which is a key contributor to the ITER project, has hit this mark already, reaching 160 million °C (288 million °F) for 20 seconds, and holding 120 million °C (216 million °F) for 101 seconds in separate experiments announced last May.

The latest experiment tested the Chinese tokamak’s capability to endure extreme temperatures over longer periods, sustaining a temperature 2.6 times hotter than the Sun’s core for some 1,056 seconds, or 17 minutes and 36 seconds. Nobody’s ever sustained a high-temperature plasma for 1,000 seconds before, so this is an important milestone.

The development of this capability continues China’s effort to lead the world in all areas of research, led I think by the many high government officials in positions of great power after cutting their teeth as managers for China’s space effort. These individuals understand how to build big technology projects at the cutting edge of science, and are likely pushing for more such research in all fields, such as the experiments in fusion energy above.

As big government projects, however, the long term future of such work is very risky. Government projects like this might start out great, which describes China’s status today, but they always end up corrupt and hidebound, as seen in the Soviet Union and at NASA in the U.S.

Nonetheless, this success highlights China’s aggressive effort to lead the world in all things. We would be foolish to ignore this.

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Starlink temporarily backs out of India due to regulatory snafu

9:38 am

Capitalism in space: Starlink in India has stopped taking new preorders and is refunding all previous preorders of its internet service because it had failed to get the proper regulatory permits for selling its service.

India’s Ministry of Communications issued a Nov. 26 statement instructing SpaceX to “refrain from booking/rendering” Starlink services “with immediate effect” because the company did not have a license to operate in the country.

In the days that followed, SpaceX appeared to be still accepting $99 preorder deposits via Starlink’s website for addresses in India.

But the website now tells prospective subscribers: “Starlink is not yet available in your area due to pending regulatory approval. As we receive approvals our coverage area will continue to expand, so please check back for future availability in your area.”

The head of Starlink India also announced his resignation today. It appears he not only did not get the proper permissions, he ignored that November 26 order from the government.

SpaceX apparently is now reviewing the legal situation, which is very unclear and might even block the company from selling its services in India entirely. No timeline is presently known for restarting its operations there.

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Webb: Sun shield deployment completed

3:32 pm

Engineers today successfully completed the full deployment of the sun shield of the James Webb Space Telescope.

The unfolding and tensioning of the sunshield involved 139 of Webb’s 178 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, roughly 400 pulleys, and 90 individual cables totaling roughly one quarter of a mile in length. The team also paused deployment operations for a day to work on optimizing Webb’s power systems and tensioning motors, to ensure Webb was in prime condition before beginning the major work of sunshield tensioning.

The process took eight days, and was by far the most complex such remote deployment ever attempted by an unmanned spacecraft. The shield is now in place to shade Webb from sunlight and heat and thus allow it to observe very faint infrared objects billions of light years away.

Next comes the deployment of Webb’s secondary mirror, followed by the unfolding of its main mirror.

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ArianeGroup ships the 1st Ariane-6 core and upper stages to French Guiana

10:08 am

Capitalism in space: ArianeGroup today announced that the first completed stages for its new Ariane-6 rocket have been shipped to French Guiana for testing.

The Ariane 6 core stage and upper stage intended for the combined tests on the launch pad in French Guiana have left the ArianeGroup sites in Les Mureaux and Bremen and begun their journey to Europe’s Spaceport. These stages will be integrated by ArianeGroup in the Launcher Assembly Building (BAL) to create the central core for the Ariane 6 combined tests model.

The press release provided no information on the schedule for the tests or the first launch. An earlier release had targeted the second quarter of ’22 for the inaugural launch, but based on today’s press release I would suspect that scheduled is very tentative.

This press release marks another major change in how Europe will launch rockets. No longer is the government-run Arianespace in charge. Instead, the commercial partnership of Airbus and Safran, dubbed ArianeGroup, is running things. In exchange for building this new rocket this partnership demanded a greater share of the profits and full control, something the European Space Agency (ESA) had denied them under Arianespace. This new arrangement was devised in the hope it would give this private partnership a direct interest in making a profit, thus cutting costs and encouraging innovation.

However, because ESA is still very very closely involved in every step, it is uncertain whether this arrangement will achieve its goals. Moreover, there are indications that ArianeGroup itself is somewhat risk adverse. For example, in designing Ariane-6 both decided to forego re-usability. Their rocket is thus more expensive than SpaceX, and has had trouble garnering launch contracts.

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Webb deployment resumes, with continuing success

9:50 am

After a day delay to assess the telescope’s earlier operation in space, engineers yesterday resumed the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope’s sun shield.

First they began tensioning the shield’s first of five layers, completing that operation in about five and a half hours.

Next the engineers proceeded to tighten layers two and three, completing that task in about three hours.

Today they have begun tightening the last two layers. A live stream of this slow and relatively unexciting process (as long as nothing goes wrong) is available from NASA here.

Based on what has been done so far, it appears that the deployment of the sun shield, considered the most challenging part of Webb’s deployment, is going to complete successfully. While the unfolding and deployment of the mirror still must be done, getting the sun shield deployed eliminates one of the great concerns that has kept both astronomers and engineers awake nights for decades.

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South Korea pinpoints cause of October launch failure

9:39 am

The new colonial movement: South Korea’s space agency KARI has completed its investigation of the launch failure in October of its first entirely home-built Nuri rocket, revealing that the support structures for the rocket’s helium tanks were designed incorrectly, and allowed the tanks to break free during launch.

“The support structures holding helium tanks inside the third-stage oxidizer tank were not properly designed to account for a force referred to as buoyancy,” KARI said in a Dec. 29 statement. Buoyancy, the upward force exerted by a fluid that pushes an object, rises along with a rocket’s altitude, which was not accounted for, according to KARI.

The helium tanks with the faulty anchors were inside the upper stage’s oxidizer tank, which was filled with liquid oxygen needed for the rocket’s ignition. With the helium tanks coming loose, they disrupted pipelines within the oxidizer tank and led the liquid oxygen to leak, resulting in early termination of the ignition, KARI explained.

The helium is used to keep the tank pressurized as it uses up its oxygen so that oxygen will continue to flow to the engine. Thus, they sit inside the oxygen tanks, and when they came loose they damaged its internal pipes.

Though they can fix the problem, it will likely cause a delay in the second Nuri launch attempt, presently scheduled for May.

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Update on Starship/Superheavy development

9:30 am

Link here.

The article first provides a detailed review of the past year’s effort, which leads to laying out the possibilities for 2022. Key quote:

With the FAA citing its plans to issue the Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) for the SpaceX Starship / Super Heavy project no earlier than the end of February, SpaceX can claim the review process is the schedule driver. However, [Superheavy] Booster 4 [intended for Starship’s first orbital flight] has yet to conduct a Static Fire test, likely including an eventual full 29 engine firing. Further evolutions of the Ship and Booster are yet to come online, with a plan to go to nine engines on Ship and 33 engines on the Booster, all moving to the Raptor 2 variant.

In other words, there is a lot of work that needs to be done before SpaceX can actually fly that first orbital flight of Starship/Superheavy, and that even if the FAA rubberstamped the approval of its environmental reassessment of the Boca Chica site today, SpaceX would likely not be able to launch that orbital flight for several months anyway.

The article also suggests that SpaceX has made big progress in rethinking the Raptor manufacturing process, and has aimed those changes for the production of the Raptor-2 engine, which will also be about 20% more powerful than the Raptor engines presently being installed.

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