Tag: politics

Ranking the four private space stations under construction

10:18 am

the proposed Starlab space station
the proposed Starlab space station

Yesterday NASA posted an update on the development of Starlab, one of the four private space stations under development or construction, with three getting some development money from NASA. According to that report, the station had successfully completed “four key developmental milestones, marking substantial progress in the station’s design and operational readiness.”

As is usual for NASA press releases, the goal of this announcement was to tout the wonderful progress the Starlab consortium — led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman — is making in building the station.

“These milestone achievements are great indicators to reflect Starlab’s commitment to the continued efforts and advancements of their commercial destination,” said Angela Hart, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program. “As we look forward to the future of low Earth orbit, every successful milestone is one step closer to creating a dynamic and robust commercialized low Earth orbit.”

I read this release and came to a completely opposite conclusion. » Read more

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Thailand signs the Artemis Accords

8:26 am

Thailand yesterday became the 51st nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining the American alliance in space.

The full list of nations now part of this American space alliance: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

Trump created the accords with the goal to create an alliance with enough clout to overcome the Outer Space Treaty’s restrictions on private property. Biden rewrote the goal to accomplish the exact opposite, as NASA states in all recent press releases about new nations joining:

The Artemis Accords are grounded in the Outer Space Treaty and other agreements including the Registration Convention, the Rescue and Return Agreement, as well as best practices and norms of responsible behavior that NASA and its partners have supported, including the public release of scientific data.

I expect there to be a shift back to the original goals in the second Trump administration.

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Ispace awarded $5.83 million loan from Japanese government

10:01 am

Ispace landing map

The planetary lander startup Ispace today announced that it has been awarded a $5.83 million loan from the Japan Finance Corporation, a government corporation designed to issue loans to encourage Japanese businesses.

The money will be issued this month, and Ispace will have ten years to pay it back. Depending on whether the company is profitable or not, the interest rate will be either 0.5% or 4.15%.

Ispace’s one lunar landing attempt so far, Hakuto-R1, was a failure when its software thought it was close to the ground at three miles altitude and shut off its engines. The company however is going to try again, with the launch of its second lander, dubbed Resilience, scheduled for a January 2025 launch. It will also carry the company’s own Tenacious micro-rover, and will hopefully land as shown in the map to the right, in the north of the Moon’s near side.

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China launches first set of satellites for planned internet megaconstellations

9:42 am

China today successfully launched an unknown number of satellites in the first launch of one of its planned internet megaconstellations designed to compete with Starlink, its Long March 5B rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

Not revealing the number of satellites launched is probably a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, which requires each signatory to inform others of its launches and at a minimum the number of objects placed in orbit. This constellation, dubbed Guowang, is hoping to launch as many as 13,000 satellites, and that will require some coordination to prevent it from interfering with the constellations launched by others. Not revealing the size of this satellite group makes such coordination impossible.

In a bit of good news, it appears China has solved the problem of its Long March 5B rocket, which in the past had used its core stage to place objects in orbit. After payload deployment that core stage would be in an unstable an orbit that would quickly decay, allowing the stage to crash uncontrolled, thus threatening habitable areas worldwide. The rocket’s new upper stage now takes the payloads into orbit, so the core stage can drop off sooner and fall into the ocean harmlessly.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

129 SpaceX
61 China
16 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 148 to 93, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 129 to 112.

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FAA eliminates a stupid licensing requirement imposed when it “streamlined” its launch licensing regulations

9:18 am

We’re from the government and we’re here to help! The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced last week that it will stop demanding rocket companies redo a flight safety analysis that have already been done by the rocket’s spaceports, a new bit of red tape that was apparently added when the agency introduced its Part 450 “streamlined” licensing regulations in 2021.

The FAA announced Dec. 13 that it will accept flight safety analyses performed by federal launch ranges in California, Florida and Virginia in applications for launch licenses under regulations known as Part 450. That decision means that companies will no longer have to perform similar analyses specifically for the FAA as part of the licensing process. Launch companies had complained of the duplication of work needed to carry out FAA analyses in addition to those required by the ranges they were launching from.

The FAA’s own bureaucracy had recognized the stupidity of this requirement (as well as many others) in July 2023 report [pdf], but the agency’s management did nothing. Apparently the political appointees who ran the agency during the Biden administration either liked this red tape — slowing American business — or were too dense to take action.

Trump’s election victory has now obviously forced some action. Not only has the agency suddenly recognized this particular problem, one week after Trump’s victory it announced the formation of an independent committee of industry and academia to review, once again, its Part 450 regulations.

It seems this committee is largely a Potemkin Village to make the Trump leadership think the agency is doing something. Instead, the FAA should do what it did last week, and adopt the many recommendations of the July 2023 report, now. The committee can then move forward cleaning up Part 450 in other areas instead of simply repeating that past work.

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SpaceX requests special election to make Starbase at Boca Chica a city

9:41 am

In a letter [pdf] sent yesterday to a local judge, SpaceX requested that a special election be held in Cameron County on whether its Starbase facilities in Boca Chica should be incorporated as a city.

To continue growing the workforce necessary to rapidly develop and manufacture Starship, we need the ability to grow Starbase as a community. That is why we are requesting that Cameron County call an election to enable the incorporation of Starbase as the newest city in the Rio Grande Valley.

Incorporating Starbase will streamline the processes required to build the amenities necessary to make the area a world class place to live—for the hundreds already calling it home, as well as for prospective workers eager to help build humanity’s future in space. As you know, through agreements with the County, SpaceX currently performs several civil functions around Starbase due to its remote location, including management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents. Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body.

The letter went on to list the many other things SpaceX is already doing to benefit the area, including many of the environmental requirements imposed on it by the FAA and Fish & Wildlife.

At this moment there has been no response from the judge or Cameron County. I suspect there will be no objection, and this vote will take place in the near future. I also expect it will pass, because SpaceX employees now make up almost the entire population of Boca Chica.

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Head of FAA resigns

1:32 pm

You could leave now for all I care: Mike Whitaker, who has been director of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) under the Biden administration and who has apparently been the main source of that agency’s increased red tape that has almost destroyed the new rocket industry that had been emerging during the first Trump administration, announced today that he is stepping down next month.

Mike Whitaker announced his pending resignation in a message to employees of the FAA, which regulates airlines and aircraft manufacturers and manages the nation’s airspace. He became the agency’s administrator in October 2023.

Since then, the challenges confronting Whitaker have included a surge in close calls between planes, a need for stricter oversight of Boeing. antiquated equipment and a shortage of air traffic controllers at a time of high consumer demand for air travel.

The article at the link is from PBS, so of course it makes this federal bureaucrat appear a hero. Instead, he was a disaster for America’s space industry, forcing unnecessary delays in SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy program, imposing new regulations that claimed to streamline the launch licensing process but did exactly the opposite, and generally forcing FAA regulators to take a fearful attitude to any new technology, so much so that it became almost impossible for that new technology to launch.

As for the aviation industry, Whitaker’s term did little to change things. For example, he did nothing to shut down the DEI programs at major airline and airplane companies that were causing the hiring of unqualified people.

All I can say is good riddance.

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ESA continues to dither about building a heavy lift rocket

10:47 am

In what almost appears to be a clown show, the European Space Agency (ESA) has three times issued and then retracted and then reissued a request for proposals for studying possible designs to possibly build a heavy lift rocket to both replace Ariane-6 as well as compete with SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy.

ESA published an initial call for its European 60T LEO Reusable Launch System Pathfinder Study initiative on 20 November. The call was, however, deleted later that day. On 3 December, a second version of the call was published and then removed, once again, on the same day. On 10 December, ESA published a third iteration of the call, with this one being the first to remain published overnight.

The second version put more emphasis on “time and cost efficiency.” The third version added details noting the limitations of Ariane-6 (its cost, limited payload capacity, and non-re-usability).

When ESA issued the second version, I noted its lack of urgency. “This is ‘call’ for a ‘study’ to ‘explore’ the ‘options’ for development. Hell will freeze over before ESA starts construction.” The new version doesn’t change this in the slightest. It only recognizes more fully the bad decisions that ESA made in 2015 when it approved the expendable design of Ariane-6, making it too expense then to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

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Chinese citizen arrested for flying drone illegally over Vandenberg

10:29 am

Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese citizen in America on a legal immigrant visa, has been arrested for flying a drone illegally over Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Nearly a mile above Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, a hacked drone soared through restricted airspace for roughly an hour. The lightweight drone photographed sensitive areas of the military facility on Nov. 30, including a complex used by SpaceX, according to federal investigators. The drone then descended back to the ground, where the pilot and another man waited at a nearby park.

Before either could leave however, four security officers from Vandenberg showed up. Initially Zhou lied about what he was doing, hiding the drone under his jacket. At one point however the officers spotted the drone, forcing Zhou to admit the truth as well as delete the footage on the drone.

Neither Zhou or the second man, who remains unidentified, were arrested at that time. Zhou was arrested on December 9, 2024 at San Francisco International Airport, just before he was to board a flight back to China. He is charged with flying a drone illegally out of his line of sight and in a no-fly zone, and remains in custody.

It appears this was an intended spying operation by China or one of its pseudo-companies, attempting to steal more information about SpaceX’s technology in order to copy it. Why Zhou and that other man were not arrested immediately is unclear.

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A satellite startup in Oman signs on to China’s lunar base partnership

10:03 am

Middle East, showing Oman's proposed spaceport

Oman Lens, a satellite startup in Oman, has signed an agreement with China to participate in its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) lunar base project.

This follows Oman’s first suborbital launch, which according to Oman’s state-run press lifted off from its Duqm proposed spaceport facility and reached space. None of this however has been confirmed, though government officials said they hope to do three more suborbital test flights in the next year.

The Duqm spaceport hopes to be fully operational for orbital flights by 2026. Besides China, Oman has also been in negotiations with various American rocket startup companies, though no deals have been announced, mostly because of the State Department’s ITAR restrictions protecting American technology from hostile foreign theft. Oman is not necessarily considered a friendly country.

It appears Oman decided to make a deal with China when it couldn’t make one with the U.S.

As for China’s ILRS project — it formed in competition with the U.S. Artemis Accords — it has now signed thirteen countries and about a dozen academic institutions and international companies. It claims it hopes to get fifty countries on board, but that number likely includes such institutions, not nations.

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China launches five satellites to test the design of a planned laser communications constellation

9:41 am

China today successfully placed the first five satellites of a planned satellite constellation called the “High Speed Laser Diamond Constellation,” its Long March 2D rocket lifting from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

The satellites are apparently intended to test the engineering of using lasers for communications. China’s state-run press provided little further information. Nor did it say where the rocket’s lower stages, using toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

128 SpaceX (with a launch scheduled for later today)
60 China
16 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 147 to 92, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 128 to 111.

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Part 2 of 2: De-emphasize a fast Moon landing and build a real American space industry instead

10:41 am

In part one yesterday of this two-part essay, I described the likelihood that Jared Isaacman, Trump’s appointment to be NASA’s next administrator, will push to cancel NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion capsule, deeming them too expensive, too unsafe, and too cumbersome to use for any viable effort to colonize the solar system.

I then described how the Artemis lunar landings could still be done, more or less as planned, by replacing SLS with Starship/Superheavy, and Orion with Starship. Such a change would entail some delay, but it could be done.

This plan however I think is short-sighted. The Artemis lunar landings as proposed are really nothing more than another Apollo-like plant-the-flag-on-the-Moon stunt. As designed they do little to establish a permanent sustainable human presence on the Moon or elsewhere in the solar system.

Isaacman however has another option that can create a permanent sustainable American presence in space, and that option is staring us all in the face.

And now for something entire different

Capitalism in space: I think Isaacman should shift the gears of Artemis entirely, and put a manned Moon landing on the back burner. Let China do its one or two lunar landing stunts, comparable to Apollo but incapable of doing much else.
» Read more

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