The concept has been studied several times by NASA and other government entities, but never tested to a point where it could be used on a mission. According to this report:

For the vacuum chamber test at Portal’s Bothell lab, engineers used an electrical induction system to simulate the sun’s heating power. The apparatus reached temperatures in the range of 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,700 degrees Fahrenheit), and the performance of the thruster validated Portal’s propulsion architecture for integration with future flight hardware.

The concept is similar to an ion engine, but appears to produce more thrust, allowing it to move satellites more quickly to different orbits. Portal hopes to do an in orbitat test by next year. The company has raised $17.5 million in private funding, and $45 million from an Air Force grant.

To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.

To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.

The IAU claims that the first goal of this new office will be to study the effects of these satellites on ground-based astronomy accompanied by an effort to work with industry to mitigate those effects.

That is a lie. This is the office’s real purpose:

Another role for the center will be to create national and international laws and norms for what regulators allow in orbit. “We need to codify these good intentions, to have some backup,” says Richard Green of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. “We’ll take a two-pronged approach: Cooperate and develop legislation to apply if necessary.” IAU and other bodies are working to convince the United Nations’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the need for legislation. “We are confident that we will have guidelines that will have to be followed by companies in the near future,” Benvenuti says. Cosmologist Aparna Venkatesan of the University of San Francisco says it would be good if there were laws in the United States and elsewhere that echoed the influential U.S. Clean Air Act: “Many of us dream of a Clean Skies Act.”

Rather than realize that things are changing and Earth-based astronomy is becoming obsolete, the astronomers wish to use the force of law to block progress by others so that they can continue to live in the past.

The time to have moved all cutting edge astronomical research off the planet arrived more than three decades ago. The astronomers refused to recognize this, focusing instead on building giant telescopes on the ground that had less capability than the Hubble Space Telescope and were dogged by political and engineering challenges that hindered their success.

Had astronomers instead focused on building many small orbiting optical telescopes, the threat of satellite constellations now would be minimal. Instead, astronomers would be poised to build the bigger space-based telescopes they need. Instead, they are grounded, with the needed future space-based telescopes possibly decades away.

To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.

As I suspected in my previous InSight update, the lander’s life is still coming to an end.

The mission, though, has been grappling with a gradual decline in the spacecraft’s power because of dust accumulating on its solar arrays. Unlike the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, whose arrays were regularly cleaned by atmospheric activity, dust has continued to accumulate on InSight’s arrays. At a meeting of MEPAG in June 2021, Banerdt projected that power levels would drop below that needed to keep the spacecraft alive in the spring of 2022.

That date has been pushed out slightly, but he said the long-term outlook for the lander still does not look promising. “Our current projections indicate that the energy will drop below that required to operate the payload in the May/June time frame and probably below survivability some time near the end of the year,” he said.

They might still squeeze a month or two more from the lander, but unless they are very lucky and a dust devil blows across it, the end is coming.

The 2022 launch race:

6 SpaceX
2 China
1 Virgin Orbit
1 ULA
1 Russia

This report is a day late because I was out in the back country, hunting javelinas.

The team is currently testing the settings for operating the spacecraft using the five operational reaction wheels. After the tests for these settings have been completed, they plan to upload them to the spacecraft next week.

Swift can fully carry out its science mission with five wheels. After careful analysis, the team has determined that the five-wheel configuration will minimally impact the movements necessary for Swift to make science observations. The team expects the change will slightly delay the spacecraft’s initial response time when responding to onboard gamma-ray burst triggers, but this will not impact Swift’s ability to make these observations and meet its original operational requirements.

Only after getting Gehrels-Swift operating again will the engineers then consider trying to recover the failed reaction wheel.

Gehrels-Swift was one of the key space telescopes that made it possible for astronomers to solve the mystery of gamma ray bursts. It is also used today to help identify the source of mysteries like fast radio bursts and other supernovae events. It was designed to quickly begin observing in multiple wavelengths any spot in the sky where a mystery burst or new supernova has occurred, thus getting astronomers the earliest new data possible.

Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created from three photos downloaded today from Curiosity’s right navigation camera. It looks to the northeast of the rover, out across Gale Crater. The crater floor is about 1,750 feet lower.

This is dust season on Mars, which explains the thick haze in the crater. About 25 miles away the crater rim can be faintly seen through the dust haze as a mountain chain. If you look at the full resolution panorama you can see several buttes on the crater floor barely visible through that haze.

The map to the right gives the context. Curiosity’s present location is indicated by the yellow dot, with the yellow lines indicating the area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line indicates the rover’s future planned route.

For the last few weeks Curiosity has been working nestled to the base of a small butte the science team has dubbed “The Prow”, studying its numerous thin layers. I featured the Prow in this January 11th post, though at the time I overestimated its size, which is only about ten feet high. The butte is especially fascinating in that its top layers overhang outward in an unbelievable manner.

The rover is now about to move on, though where must still be decided by the science team. Based on their most recent update it appears they are not ready to leave this barren rocky hollow surrounded with many-layered buttes, and will take the rover to another.

With the latest cash infusion announced Feb. 3, Iceye is expanding manufacturing capacity and upping its launch tempo. Iceye plans to loft 11 satellites in 2022, after launching seven in 2021. Iceye also will devote additional resources toward natural catastrophe monitoring. In 2021, Iceye began working with insurance industry partners including Zurich-based Swiss Re and Tokyo-based Tokio Marine.

With the climate changing and natural catastrophes becoming more frequent, Iceye executives see increasing demand for updated information. SAR satellites are particularly useful for observing floods and other disasters because unlike optical sensors, they gather data at night and through clouds.

Essentially, commercial satellites like Iceye’s are replacing the government satellites that NASA and NOAA have been launching, but with far less frequency and far more cost in the last two decades. In fact, the inability of these agencies to get many new Earth observation satellites launched on time and cheaply has fueled this new private industry.

Like NASA’s manned program, the government will soon depend entirely on privately-built satellites for its climate and Earth resource research. And it will get more for its money and get it faster.

The team includes Steve Jurczyk, who spent thirty years at NASA and finished his career there before retiring serving as acting NASA administrator for the first three months of the Biden administration.

Jurczyk is one of the three co-founders of Quantum Space. Another is Ben Reed, former division chief of exploration and in-space services at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and who worked on satellite servicing projects there. He is the chief technology officer of Quantum Space. The third co-founder is Kam Ghaffarian, who also helped start commercial space station company Axiom Space and lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines after selling Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies. They’re joined by Kerry Wisnosky, the co-founder and former principal owner of Millennium Engineering and Integration, who is the chief operating officer of Quantum Space.

Their plan is to launch their platform and robots to the Earth-Moon L1 point, the spot where the gravitational spheres of influence of the Earth and Moon meet, about 40,000 miles from the Moon.

The outpost … would consist of two components. One is a spacecraft bus that serves as a platform for hosting payloads, using modular “plug-and-play” interfaces. The other is a spacecraft that would deliver payloads to the platform and install them using robotic manipulators.

Those payloads could include communications, navigation, remote sensing, space domain awareness and space weather sensors, Jurczyk said. Those payloads would primarily come from customers, but he said the company is looking at developing its own payloads, particularly for imaging of the Earth and moon.

They hope to launch their first satellite by ’25.

Like the insiders who run Axiom, these guys are taking advantage of their experience at NASA to build a private space company that will serve NASA’s needs. They are also recognizing that in the coming years, everything NASA “does” will be done by private companies. This company is their effort to jump on that bandwagon.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on September 22, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an unnamed four-mile-wide crater in the high northern lowland plains of Mars, at 60 degrees north latitude.

At 60 degrees latitude, it is likely that the crater’s interior is filled with buried glacial ice. A close look at the crater’s interior rim shows that whatever material fills the crater does not quite reach the rim. Furthermore, there are areas in the interior where it appears some slight sublimation has occurred. These features suggest the interior material is buried ice, but do not prove it.

What makes this crater intriguing however is the irregular depression at its center. When craters have a feature at the center, it usually is a central peak, caused at impact. The impact makes the ground act like a pond of water when you drop a pebble into it, with circular ripples (the crater rim) spreading outward and an uplift in the center (the central peak). In the case of a crater, the pond quickly freezes, locking those ripples and uplift in place.

Why a central depression then?

Click for full image.

The wider context MRO context camera image of the crater to the right might help explain this. Unlike most MRO photos, this image is an oblique one, looking sideways to the north. The splatter apron around the crater strengthens the hypothesis that there is a lot of near-surface ice at this high latitude, both inside, outside, and under the crater.

So why the central depression? My totally uneducated and very likely incorrect guess is that there is a hot spot spot where that central peak is located but buried under ice. The heat has caused the ice to sublimate away above, causing the depression.

Another possibility is that the depression reflects the topography of the ground below. Small craters like this usually do not have a central peak. Maybe when the impact happened there was further melt in the center, leaving a sinkhole?

All wild guesses. I really have no idea.

Note that the parallel east-west dark streaks in this context camera image are likely dust devil tracks, indicating the prevailing wind direction in this region.

At the time of writing, the satellites themselves have not yet deployed. The first stage, flying its sixth mission, landed successfully. The two fairing halves were flying their sixth and fourth flights.

The 2022 launch race:

6 SpaceX
2 China
1 Virgin Orbit
1 ULA

You can read the report here [pdf]. The key paragraph however is this:

NASA has … signed agreements with three U.S. companies (Blue Origin of Kent, Washington; Nanoracks LLC of Houston, Texas; and Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation of Dulles, Virginia) to develop commercial destinations in space that go directly to orbit, i.e., free-flyers. The awards, along with the Axiom concept [where the private station starts as part of ISS and then later separates], are the first part of a two-phase approach to ensure a seamless transition of activity from the ISS to commercial destinations. During this first phase, private industry, in coordination with NASA, will formulate and design [commercial space stations] capabilities suitable for potential Government and private sector needs. The first phase is expected to continue through 2025.

For the second phase of NASA’s approach to a transition toward [commercial space stations], the Agency intends to certify for NASA crew member use [commercial space stations] from these and potential other entrants, and ultimately, purchase services from destination providers for crew to use when available.

It is NASA’s goal to be one of many customers of commercial LEO destination services, purchasing only the goods and services the Agency needs. [Commercial space stations], along with commercial crew and cargo transportation, will provide the backbone of the human LEO ecosystem after the ISS retires. [emphasis mine]

The report predicts that, by using private stations instead of building its own, the agency will save up to two billion dollars per year, money it can than use of planetary missions. This of course is assuming NASA cancels SLS. If not, I predict that overpriced cumbersome rocket will quickly absorb all this money saved.

The highlighted sentence indicates that NASA continues to accept entirely the recommendations I made in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space [a free pdf download]. In fact, that sentence is almost an exact quote from one of most important recommendations.

The first incident occurred during the landing of the Dragon capsule Resilience carrying the Inspiration4 commercial crew in November. The second occurred on January 24, 2022 during the return of a cargo freighter.

In both cases there was no safety risk, as the capsules can land safely with only three chutes. However, both NASA and SpaceX want to know why this is happening, and work out a solution to prevent it in the future.

The launch date was revealed by a government official, who also said that this launch will be one of eight total by India in 2022. If that number is completed, it would be the most India has ever accomplished in a single year, topping the seven launches that lifted off in 2018. It would also signal that India has finally put aside its fear of COVID that has shut down its aerospace industry for the last two years.

Axiom Space astronauts Michael López-Alegría, Larry Connor, Mark Pathy, and Eytan Stibbe are prime crew members of the Ax-1 mission. López-Alegría, who was born in Spain, raised in California, and a former NASA astronaut, will serve as the mission commander. Connor, of Dayton, Ohio, will serve as pilot. Pathy, from Canada, and Stibbe, from Israel, will be mission specialists. The quartet is scheduled to spend eight days aboard the orbiting laboratory conducting science, education, and commercial activities before their return to Earth.

Because the four will be staying at this government station, they must work with NASA, which appears to be requiring them to do some research while on board. Those experiments are still “under review” though Axiom has already revealed a suite of microgravity experiments the crew will perform.

The press release does not mention a launch date, but it does state that ground tests of Orbex’s Prime rocket, designed to launch smallsats, are about to begin.

The Orbex ‘Prime’ rocket is soon to be tested on the Orbex LP1 launch platform at a facility in Kinloss, close to the Orbex headquarters in Forres, where full ‘dress rehearsals’ of launch procedures will take place.

Actual launches will take place at Space Hub Sutherland in Scotland. A previous announcement in 2020 had suggested the first launch would occur in ’22. Whether that date can still be met is unclear, but without doubt Orbex is moving forward towards launch.

To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.

What made this launch unusual was that it used a new first stage, only the third time SpaceX has done so since the beginning of 2020. Last year, of 31 launches all but two used a used first stage. This new first stage landed successfully at Vandenberg.

5 SpaceX
2 China
1 Virgin Orbit
1 ULA

The article not only describes NASA’s analysis of each winning bid, it also describes the analysis of some of the eight bids that lost. Most interesting were the strengths and weaknesses NASA saw from SpaceX’s bid.

The company won strengths based on its technical maturity linked to HLS proposal (the Starship lunar lander) and a “strong approach” to communications that appeared to be associated with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. However, NASA assessed several weaknesses because of a lack of details about its concept, including how it will accommodate payloads and scale up an environmental control system for long-duration missions. [emphasis mine]

While SpaceX so far has proven itself to be a brilliant rocket and engineering company — achieving things that everyone else said couldn’t be done and doing so so quickly it takes your breath away — the company has so far appeared to have little understanding or knowledge about the complexities of building an interplanetary manned vessel. This NASA analysis, as noted by the highlighted phrases in the quote above, underlines that impression.

None of this precludes SpaceX from gaining that knowledge and applying it to the engineering of future Starship designs. This information however shows that the company still lacks this knowledge. It apparently has still not tackled the job of designing the insides of Starship, only its rocketry for getting into orbit.

While sunspot activity dropped slightly in January, the activity still remained well above the prediction made by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists in 2020, with the upward trend towards a solar maximum much steeper than predicted as well.

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community for the previous solar maximum. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007 for the previous maximum, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The blue curve is their revised May 2009 prediction. The red curve is the new prediction, first posted by NOAA in April 2020.

The number of sunspots in January, while dropping slightly from December, was still far greater than the 2020 prediction by NOAA’s panel of scientists. It was also the most sunspots seen in a month since early 2016, almost four years before the Sun hit solar minimum in late 2019. Furthermore, while it took the Sun four years to drop from that activity to minimum, it has only taken it slightly more than two years to return to that activity level. The Sun is ramping up to maximum very fast.

In the past, a fast ramp up like this would be a prelude to a very active maximum, much much higher than the prediction of the 2020 NOAA panel, and more in line with the high 2007 prediction (indicated by the green curve). If so, then the outlier prediction of a handful of solar scientists that this maximum will be a very strong one will turn out to be right, even though that prediction bucked the general consensus of the solar scientist community.

As always, I must note the caveats. First, we don’t yet know how powerful this maximum will be. Despite the fast ramp up and unexpected activity, past performance is no guarantee of future results. We will only know how active the maximum will be once it has happened.

Second, none of these predictions are based on an actual understanding of the processes that create sunspots. Though scientists know the Sun’s dynamo and magnetic field create the spots, and do so in a cycle as the Sun’s magnetic field flips its polarity every eleven years or so, no one understands why the Sun does this, on a fundamental level. All the predictions do is extrapolate from what has been seen in past sunspot cycles to try to guess what the next cycle will be like. With emphasis on the word “guess.”

A very active Sun however will, based on past data, probably act to warm the Earth’s climate, though how it does so remains unclear. One theory, tested with some success by physicists at CERN, suggests that an active Sun reduces the amount of cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere. This in turn reduces the cloud cover, which then lets more sunlight in so that the climate warms.

If the climate does switch from its long pause in warming during the first two decades of the 21st century to a warming period in the 2020s, it is certain that global warming activists will immediately use that warming to claim that human activity is the cause, and we must restrict or end the use of fossil fuels, no matter how impractical or costly.

That claim however will be specious if those activists do not consider solar activity as a factor. While human activity and the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be the cause of that warming, increased sunspot activity by the Sun could also be as if not more important. Good science demands that we look at all the data, not just the data that pleases us.

In December 2020, 2020 XL5 was spotted by astronomers with the Pan-STARRS 1 survey telescope in Hawaii and added to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center database. Amateur astronomer Tony Dunn went on to calculate the object’s trajectory using NASA’s publicly-available JPL-Horizon’s software and found that it orbits L4, the fourth Earth-sun Lagrange point, a gravitationally balanced region around our planet and star. 2010 TK7, the first-confirmed Earth Trojan asteroid, is also at L4.

The confirmation that it is definitely a Trojan was then made using both new observations as well as a review of archival images, allowing the astronomers to not only refine the asteroid’s orbit, but determine that it is a C-type asteroid, dark with lots of carbon. The data also suggests that in about 4,000 years, 2020 XL5 will drift from its Trojan point.

There are certainly more such asteroids, but detecting them is difficult from Earth because they can only be seen in twilight.

The test took place at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio. The company’s video, available at the link, is like all such videos made by all these companies nowadays, filled with dramatic music in order to make it seem like a movie trailer. The jettison itself occurs near the end of the video, and only shows the separation..

This success is encouraging. Moreover, according to Scott Henderson, Blue Origin’s vice president of test and flight operations and Florida site director, they have also completed the launchpad in Florida.

The first launch of New Glenn is presently targeted for late this year, so these successes indicate that launch is getting close. However, everything still hinges on the production of the company’s BE-4 rocket engine, more than two years behind schedule. Until a flightworthy engine is finally available, that first New Glenn launch will remain an ephemeral dream.

NASA has added additional time to complete closeout activities inside the VAB prior to rolling the integrated rocket and spacecraft out for the first time. While the teams are not working any major issues, engineers continue work associated with final closeout tasks and flight termination system testing ahead of the wet dress rehearsal. [emphasis mine]

Engineers and managers are now reviewing the schedule to see if the actual launch can be scheduled for April or May, assuming the dress rehearsal goes well.

Even if all goes well, I predict a June launch at the earliest, with mid-summer more likely. While private companies like SpaceX work incessantly to compress schedules to get things done, government agencies like NASA like to expand schedules — as NASA has done here — so that no one feels they are under too much pressure.

The vote to kill the bill was 9-1, with the only yes vote coming from the Democrat representing Albuquerque.

That the tax was voted down so conclusively suggests there actually might be some brain cells among the elected officials in New Mexico. Hard to believe, considering that the tax was actually proposed at a time when New Mexico’s only customer for space launches, Virgin Galactic, is in trouble and might go bankrupt. Raising its taxes would likely have only guaranteed that company’s failure.

This launch will also be Astra’s first operational launch, and the first to carry actual satellites on its Rocket-3.3 rocket. If successful it will join Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit as the third operating commercial smallsat rocket company.

The ship veered into the exclusion zone along a Falcon 9 rocket’s flightpath just before the 6:11 p.m. EST launch, forcing SpaceX to stand down from the mission and prepare for a 24-hour turnaround. Harmony of the Seas is the world’s third-largest cruise ship at 226,963 gross tons. It has 2,747 staterooms, a passenger capacity of 6,687 and a crew of 2,200.

In a statement issued Monday, U.S. Coast Guard spokesperson David Micallef said: “We can confirm the cruise ship was Harmony of the Seas. The Coast Guard is actively investigating Sunday’s cruise ship incursion and postponement of the SpaceX launch.”

“Our primary concern is the safety of mariners at sea, and we will continue to work with our federal, state and local port partners to ensure safe and navigable waterways,” Micallef added.

I am quite certain such investigations are routine, since ship captains are supposed to know about such launches and avoid the launch range accordingly. We normally never hear about them because the violations are almost always done by small boats or planes, not giant cruise ships.

SpaceX’s expected increased launch pace in ’22, combined with the desperate need of the cruise lines to resume normal operations following the Wuhan panic, will probably make this kind of conflict more possible. It also highlights SpaceX’s request to rethink the size of the exclusion zone, since today’s rockets are much more reliable than the rockets of the 1960s, when the zones were first created.

This was the fifth attempt to launch in five days, with the first three attempts canceled due to weather and fourth canceled because a cruise ship had violated the no-go zone in the Atlantic.

The first stage completed its third flight, landing at Cape Canaveral after sunset. I highlight this last fact because it shows how completely routine these 1st stage landing have become. No one even notices that the first stage has come back to Florida, and did in the dark. Also, this 1st stage had originally been configured for Falcon Heavy as one of its side boosters. This was its first flight after being reconfigured.

As I write this the satellite and upper stage are still linked together, coasting to the orbital point where the upper stage can boost the satellite into a transfer orbit and then deploy it. UPDATE: Satellite has successfully deployed.

The 2022 launch race:

4 SpaceX
2 China
1 Virgin Orbit
1 ULA

In the past four years I have posted hundreds of cool images taken by the orbiters circling Mars. From those images I have been able to slowly gather and pass on to my readers some of the solid knowledge that scientists are gaining now about the Red Planet.

The image to the right illustrates best why one must never make any quick assumptions about the features you see in these photos. Taken on November 28, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a small crater that appears partly filled with material. On its walls can be seen many slope streaks, a still unexplained feature unique to Mars that is not caused by rock or debris avalanches.

As for the material inside the crater, based on the majority of Martian images showing similar craters, the first assumption one might make is that this material is some form of eroding glacial material.

That first assumption however would simply be wrong. Glacial material found in Martian craters is routinely found in the mid-latitude bands between 30 and 60 degrees. This crater is sits almost exactly on the equator of Mars, where scientists have found no evidence of any glacial material or near-surface ice. In the equatorial regions the surface of Mars is essentially dry.

So what is that patch of material? As always, location is all.

The crater sits, as indicated by the white cross, on the edge of the giant volcanic ash deposit dubbed the Medusae Fossae Formation. The deposit in the crater’s floor is thus almost certainly trapped volcanic ash from Medusae.

If you click on the picture to see the full resolution image and zoom in close, you will see that in detail this patch does not really have the soft appearance of sublimating ice. It appears harder, like the slickrock sandstone of the American southwest that was once sand dunes that over time hardened into rock, but is now easily eroded by wind.