Tag: politics

UK distributes cash to space sector to keep them in the UK

12:23 pm

The United Kingdom government today announced five different grants totalling $14 million to various institutions and companies in an effort to promote aerospace operations within the UK.

The biggest grant, $6.45 million, went to the German rocket startup Hyimpulse to help pay the cost of a vertical launch of its SR75 test suborbital rocket from the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands.

Hyimpulse, which had originally planned to do its test launches from Saxavord, had been forced to do its first launch from the Southern Launch spaceport in Australia because of regulatory delays in the UK. Because of that red tape the company also signed a further agreement with that Australian spaceport for future test flights. It appears this grant is the UK government effort to get Hyimpulse launches back.

Nor is this the first such grant to Hyimpulse, or to a German rocket startup. Previously Hyimpulse had won two grants totaling almost $5 million. In addition, the UK has also awarded the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg just under $5 million.

Of the other four grants in this most recent award, the second biggest ($4.57 million) went to a Glasgow company, Spire Global, to develop better weather satellite forecasting technologies. The other three grants were all about a million dollars each, and went a variety of space sector institutions/companies in Scotland.

It is apparent that the red tape problems at Saxavord that has been driving rocket startups away from the UK has forced the UK government to reach into its wallet to try to keep them from leaving. For these companies, taking the money is a two-edge sword. The cash is nice, but if they can’t launch as planned it does them little good. I expect these deals require Hyimpulse and Rocket Factory to launch from Saxavord, but do not require them to do so first. This gives these companies the freedom to go elsewhere if necessary to meet their schedules.

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NASA suspends all U.S. spacewalks on ISS due to water leak

9:03 am

Because of a water leak that occurred in an umblical cord at the beginning of a spacewalk on June 24, 2024, NASA has now suspended all U.S. spacewalks on ISS as it investigates the cause.

Tracy Dyson, a NASA astronaut, had a brief spacesuit leak a month ago while still in the hatch of the International Space Station (ISS). She and Mike Barrett had just opened the door for a 6.5-hour spacewalk for maintenance activities, when showers of ice particles erupted from a spacesuit connection to the ISS. The spacewalk was suspended, but the astronauts were never in any danger, NASA has emphasized.

“That spacewalk ended early because of a water leak in the suit’s service and cooling umbilical; that’s the site that’s connected to ISS,” station program manager Dana Weigel, of NASA, told reporters in a teleconference Wednesday (July 17). (Astronaut spacesuits stay connected to ISS life support systems via that umbilical until just before they exit the hatch.) “We’re still taking a look at the cause of the water leak, and what we want to do to recover,” Weigel added. “We’ll go look for the next opportunity for where we want to do the spacewalk. It’s not time-critical or urgent, and so we’ll find the best, logical place to put it.”

At this moment NASA has still not identified the cause of the leak, though astronauts on ISS have been inspecting the umblical cord as well as the entire suit, disassembling components where possible.

What really needs to happen is the delivery of newly designed suits, something NASA has wanted done for about fifteen years. The agency spent most of that time making powerpoint presentations and spending a billion dollars, with no new suits produced. It is now hoping its spacesuit contract with Axiom will get it new spacesuits.

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The Trump assassination attempt provides another illustration of our bankrupt press/media

3:11 pm

We can learn a lot about the press by watching how they react to breaking news stories, with the aftermath and questions about the Secret Service’s actions during the attempt on Donald Trump’s life on July 13, 2024 being a perfect example.

My goal is not to analyze the failures of the Secret Service that day. Others will do that far better than I. My goal here is to analyze the press itself, to illustrate who is really interested in finding out what really happened, to report the news, and who is not.

First we have Fox anchor Jesse Watters’ opening statement on July 15, 2024 at the start of the Republican National Convention, outlining great detail all the many many MANY questions that remain unanswered about the truly horrible job the Secret Service did in protecting Trump during that July 13th rally. His opening sentence illustrates his focus quite bluntly:

There is one burning question on all of our minds. Did Biden’s Secret Service almost get Trump killed? All evidence points to yes.

Watters then unreservedly without fear outlines all the known facts and the many failures, never flinching from the very ugly conclusions those fact suggest. As he concludes, “The minute we stop asking questions, they win.” Watch:
» Read more

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ESA’s Juice probe to Jupiter prepares for first Earth+Moon slingshot fly-by

10:35 am

Graphic showing Juice's upcoming duel fly-by
Graphic showing Juice’s upcoming duel fly-by.
Click for original image.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) first mission to Jupiter, dubbed Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) is about to do the first ever back-to-back fly-bys of the Moon and then the Earth immediately afterward in order to slingshot it forward on its long journey to the gas giant.

The graphic to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the plan. Juice will first fly past the Moon, shifting its path slightly, and then zip past the Earth one day later, its trajectory then under-going a much larger change.

The lunar-Earth flyby will see Juice pass just 700 km [435 miles] from the Moon’s surface at 23:16 CEST on 19 August and 6807 km [4230 miles] from Earth’s surface almost exactly 24 hours later at 23:57 CEST on 20 August.

Using the gravity of the Moon to slightly bend Juice’s trajectory first will improve the effectiveness of the much larger gravity assist at Earth. However, the dual flyby requires extraordinarily precise navigation and timing, as even minor deviations could send Juice in the wrong direction.

The engineering teams have already been doing simulations to make sure they get this complex maneuver right. If all goes right, the spacecraft will then do flybys of Venus in August 2025, Earth in September 2026, and Earth again in January 2029, arriving in Jupiter orbit in July 2031.

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China launches earth observation satellite

9:50 am

China today successfully launched an earth observation satellite, its Long March 4B rocket lifting off from Taiyuan spaceport in the north of China. Video clips of the launch can be seen here.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

71 SpaceX
31 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the world combined in successful launches, 83 to 47, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 71 to 59.

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NASA and Boeing complete ground static fire tests of Starliner

11:20 pm

According to a press announcement tonight from NASA, the agency and Boeing have now completed the static fire tests using a Starliner ground capsule to duplicate the engine burns required to bring the in-space capsule back to Earth, carrying its two astronauts.

Teams completed ground hot fire testing at White Sands and are working to evaluate the test data and inspect the test engine. The ongoing ground analysis is expected to continue throughout the week. Working with a reaction control system thruster built for a future Starliner spacecraft, ground teams fired the engine through similar inflight conditions the spacecraft experienced on the way to the space station. The ground tests also included stress-case firings, and replicated conditions Starliner’s thrusters will experience from undocking to deorbit burn, where the thrusters will fire to slow Starliner’s speed to bring it out of orbit for landing in the southwestern United States.

Engineers now need to complete a review of those tests, followed by a full review leading to a decision as to when the astronauts will return on Starliner. No dates have yet been set, but expect these reviews to be completed within two weeks, and that Starliner will likely be scheduled for return in early August, prior to the scheduled launch of the next Dragon manned mission in mid-August.

All this assumes the FAA will clear SpaceX to resume launches before then. SpaceX is apparently ready to resume this week, but we have no indication the FAA will go along.

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Scientists: Biden has infused DEI and racial quotas throughout the entire federal science bureaucracy

1:39 pm

Joe Biden, allied with Hamas
Joe Biden, like the KKK in love with racist quotas

A new research paper just completed by a international group of scientists details at length how the policies of critical race theory and its “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” philosophy has been infused deeply into all levels of the entire federal science bureaucracy, influencing grant awards and hiring at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in ways that warp science and research and make good research impossible..

You can read the paper here [pdf]. From the press release:

The paper exposes how DEI has spread much further and more deeply into core scientific disciplines than most people, including many scientists, realize. This has happened, in large part, by presidential executive order (specifically, EO 13985 and EO 14091), implemented through the budget approval process.

The two executive orders listed were issued by President Biden in 2021 and 2023 respectively, with the first issued on his very first day in office. If you have the patience, it worth reading both, since they outline in great detail the goals of this administration to favor the hiring and promotion of “underserved communities,” which the first order lists as follows:
» Read more

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Columbia University donors fleeing because of its apparent willingness to tolerate bigotry and pro-Hamas mobs

1:03 pm

Columbia University's seal
The motto means “In Your Light [God],
We Shall See the Light.” Too bad no one
running Columbia now believes in this.

In the past two months Columbia University has discovered that there are real consequences for tolerating and sometimes even supporting the bigotry and anti-Semitism of its Marxist and pro-Hamas students and faculty.

First, in early June a very wealthy Columbia graduate donated $260 million to Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. Though the donor remains anonymous, these details were released by the university:

Not only did the donor make a point to tell onlookers he fought in a conflict entrenched in antisemitism, but he also reiterated how he graduated from Columbia.

It appears the donor wanted to make it very clear that Columbia had once been in the running for this donation, but its wishy-washy response to the riots committed on campus by pro-Hamas students caused him to reject it.

Nor has this been all. Another major donor to Columbia, Mortimer Zuckerman, announced earlier this week that he has cut off payments on a major $200 million donation he had initiated to Columbia in 2012, totaling millions.
» Read more

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Europe’s Gaia space telescope in trouble

9:34 am

Launched in 2013 and now functioning more than six years after the completion of its primary mission to measure precisely the distances to over a billion stars, the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope has experienced several major technical issues this spring related to a micrometeorite hit and a failure of the electronics of one of its CCDs.

The micrometeorite hit occurred in April.

The impact created a little gap that allowed stray sunlight – around one billionth of the intensity of direct sunlight felt on Earth – to occasionally disrupt Gaia’s very sensitive sensors. Gaia’s engineers were in the middle of dealing with this issue when they were faced with another problem.

The spacecraft’s ‘billion-pixel camera’ relies on a series of 106 charge coupled devices (CCDs) – sensors that convert light into electrical signals. In May, the electronics controlling one of these CCDs failed – Gaia’s first CCD issue in more than 10 years in space. Each sensor has a different role, and the affected sensor was vital for Gaia’s ability to confirm the detection of stars. Without this sensor to validate its observations, Gaia began to register thousands of false detections.

The cause of the electronics failure remains unsolved, though it is believed related to the major solar storm that swept by at about the same time.

As a result of these issues, the telescope’s data stream will be significantly reduced. How long it will remain in operation remains unclear. At some point the cost will outweigh the amount of data obtained.

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NASA cancels its VIPER payload on Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander

9:06 am

VIPER's planned route on the Moon
VIPER’s now canceled planned route at the Moon’s south pole

Late yesterday NASA announced it was canceling the VIPER rover that was the primary payload on Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander, scheduled for launch in the fall of 2025.

NASA stated cost increases, delays to the launch date, and the risks of future cost growth as the reasons to stand down on the mission. The rover was originally planned to launch in late 2023, but in 2022, NASA requested a launch delay to late 2024 to provide more time for preflight testing of the Astrobotic lander. Since that time, additional schedule and supply chain delays pushed VIPER’s readiness date to September 2025, and independently its CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) launch aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander also has been delayed to a similar time. Continuation of VIPER would result in an increased cost that threatens cancellation or disruption to other CLPS missions. NASA has notified Congress of the agency’s intent.

Knowing a bit of history is important to understand this decision. In the first half of the 2010s VIPER was called Resource Prospector, and was intended as an entirely NASA-built lunar lander and rover mission with a budget of about billion dollars. In 2018 however the Trump administration cancelled it as part of its decision to shift from missions designed, built, and owned by NASA to making NASA simply a customer buying products from private sector. Rather than spend a billion on one lunar lander/rover mission, NASA would use that money to buy multiple lunar landers from private companies, and put its instruments on those.

NASA then decided to repurpose the rover portion of Resource Prospector, turning it into VIPER to launch on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. However, that project still carried with it all the problems that curse all government-designed, government-built, and government-owned projects. It had no fixed price contract but instead had the typical government unlimited checking account, and thus its costs kept rising with repeated delays in construction.

When then-NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine revealed the project at the 2019 International Astronautical Congress, the estimated cost was $250 million. By the time NASA was ready to make a cost commitment to Congress, that grew to $433.5 million with landing in 2023. That landing date slipped to 2024 with a cost of $505.4 million. Now it has slipped again to 2025 and with a cost of $609.6 million, more than 30 percent above the commitment. That triggered an automatic cancellation review, Kearns said, which took place last month.

Some of the cause of the 2023 delay was because Astrobotic’s Griffin lander wasn’t ready either. Now however it appears VIPER still won’t be ready for the 2025 launch, even though the lander will be ready.

NASA has therefore decided to stop throwing good money after bad, and kill the rover. It however has not killed its funding for Astrobotic’s Griffin, and the mission will go forward, with the company offering its now open payload space to others. It also may use this space to fly a demonstration mission of its own proposed LunarGrid solar power system.

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SpaceX to FAA: Allow launches to resume before completion of July 11th launch failure investigation

10:59 am

SpaceX on July 15, 2024 submitted a request to the FAA to quickly determine that the July 11th Falcon-9 launch failure posed no threat to public safety, and thus allow the company to resume Falcon 9 launches before the investigation of that failure is completed.

The FAA has two means of allowing a rocket to return to flight operations following a mishap. The first is that it approves a launch operator-led mishap investigation final report, which would include “the identification of any corrective actions.” Those actions need to be put in place and all related licensing requirement need to be met.

The other option is for a public safety determination to be issued. This would be an option if “the mishap did not involve safety-critical systems or otherwise jeopardize public safety,” according to the FAA.

“The FAA will review the request, and if in agreement, authorize a return to flight operations while the mishap investigation remains open and provided the operator meets all relevant licensing requirements,” the FAA wrote on its website.

SpaceX is apparently expecting the FAA to quickly approve this request, as it has now scheduled its next Falcon 9 launch for July 19, 2024, at the end of this week.

The lower level workers at the FAA probably want to get out of the way, but they have to obey orders from above, and it is my suspicion that the White House is applying pressure to make life hard for SpaceX. As I have noted, the FAA has not required the same level of due diligence from either NASA and its SLS rocket, or Boeing’s Starliner capsule.

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Europe targets 2031 for the first mission of its own lunar lander

10:48 am

The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved a target date of 2031 for the first mission of its own unmanned lunar lander, dubbed Argonaut, and launched on the most powerful version of the Ariane-6.

On 16 July, the agency published a call for Argonaut Mission 1 Phase A/B1 development aimed at demonstrating the technical and programmatic feasibility of the Argonaut mission concept. The call included a proposed launch date of 2031 for the first Argonaut mission to the Moon.

The Argonaut lunar lander will be launched aboard an Ariane 64 rocket. Once operational, ESA envisions it being used for a wide variety of applications, from cargo logistics to acting as an in-situ resource utilization plant. The agency has already completed pre-phase A studies for what it calls the European Charging Station for the Moon. This system would be launched aboard an Argonaut lunar lander and would essentially act as a gas station on the Moon that would be used to support crewed missions on the surface of the Moon.

As I’ve noted previously, ESA routinely sets a glacial pace on all its government-run projects. Do not expect this government lander to fly on this schedule. More likely by 2031 there will be many cheaper and available options from the private sector, and European companies wanting to put payloads down on the Moon will turn to those, especially because Argonaut is apparently being forced to use the expensive expendable Ariane-6 rocket. The cost for going on Argonaut is simply going to be too high.

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