Tag: spaceflight

Ingenuity completes 16th Mars flight

9:38 am

According to a tweet by the Ingenuity team, the Mars helicopter successfully completed its 16th flight on Mars on November 21st.

“#MarsHelicopter continues to thrive!” mission personnel wrote in a tweet posted Monday (Nov. 22). “The mighty rotorcraft completed its 16th flight on the Red Planet last weekend, traveling 116 meters northeast for 109 seconds. It captured color images during the short hop, but those will come down in a later downlink.”

No images have as yet been downloaded from the flight.

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Rocket Lab to attempt 1st stage recovery by helicopter, beginning early next year

9:30 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab announced today that based on the data obtained during its previous launch in November, the company will attempt a helicopter recovery in the air of its Electron rocket’s first stage, starting with its first launches in 2022.

With the success of this latest mission, Rocket Lab will now move to aerial capture attempts with a helicopter for future recovery missions in the first half of 2022. Rocket Lab’s recovery helicopter will include auxiliary fuel tanks for extended flight time during the capture attempt. While Rocket Lab’s engineers and recovery vessel will also be stationed at sea, Rocket Lab’s primary objective will be to return Electron’s booster to the mainland while attached to the helicopter. Improvements to the launch vehicle for this next recovery attempt will include a thermal protection system applied to the entire stage and its nine Rutherford engines to help it endure heat of up to 2,400 degrees Celsius during re-entry, and modifications to the parachute system including an engagement line for the recovery helicopter to capture and secure the booster.

The company has a launch scheduled for the end of November, but apparently it is not going to attempt a first stage recovery by helicopter during that mission.

If successful, Rocket Lab will have become the second company able to reuse its first stage, and thus cut the price it charges for launches significantly.

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Russia successfully launches Progress with new docking hub for ISS

9:15 am

Russia today successfully launched a new Progress freighter carrying Prichal, a new docking hub for the Russian half of ISS.

If all goes as planned, Prichal will dock to Nauka in two days.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

43 China
26 SpaceX
19 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China still leads the U.S. 43 to 41 in the national rankings. This launch was the 111th successful launch in 2021, which tied the number from 2018 that had been the highest since the 1990s.

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SpaceX successfully launches NASA asteroid mission

8:58 am

Last night SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched NASA’s DART asteroid mission.

The first stage landed successfully, completing its third flight. This was SpaceX’s 26th launch in 2021, setting a new record for the company and in fact for any private company ever.

DART’s mission is to test one method for changing an asteroid’s orbit.

After launch tonight, DART will take aim on an asteroid called Dimorphos. The spacecraft will strike Dimorphos at nearly 15,000 mph (about 6.6 kilometers per second).

The primary science goal of the mission is to measure how the high-speed collision next September, which will destroy the DART spacecraft, disrupts the orbit of Dimorphos around nearby Didymos. The data could help plan a future mission to deflect an asteroid on a course to hit Earth.

Dimorphos and its larger companion Didymos pose no near-term threat to Earth, but the asteroids will be close enough to our planet next year for astronomers to observe DART’s impact using ground-based telescopes. The asteroids orbit the sun in an elongated path that occasionally bring them into Earth’s neighborhood. That makes them potentially hazardous asteroids, although scientists say there is no near-term threat from the pair.

No space mission has ever explored Didymos and Dimorphos, but scientists who have observed them through telescopes say the asteroids are about a half-mile (780 meters) and 525 feet (160 meters) in diameter, respectively.

An Italian cubesat is also on board, and will separate from DART about ten days before impact so that it can observe the impact with two camera.

The leaders in 2021 launch race:

43 China
26 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 43 to 41 in the national rankings. For the U.S. SpaceX’s launch last night topped the U.S. total from last year, which was this country’s highest launch total since the 1960s.

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Second camera on Hubble returned to science operations

10:35 am

Engineers working to reactivate the instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope have successfully brought a second camera out of safe mode.

NASA continues bringing the Hubble Space Telescope back to normal science operations, most recently recovering the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument Sunday, Nov. 21. This camera will be the second of Hubble’s instruments, after the Advanced Camera for Surveys, to resume science after suspending the spacecraft’s observations Oct. 25. The Wide Field Camera 3’s first science observation since the anomaly will be Nov. 23.

The team chose to restore the most heavily used Hubble instrument, the Wide Field Camera 3, which represents more than a third of the spacecraft’s observing time. Engineers also began preparing changes to the instrument parameters, while testing the changes on ground simulators. These changes would allow the instruments to handle several missed synchronization messages while continuing to operate normally if they occur in the future. These changes will first be applied to another instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, to further protect its sensitive far-ultraviolet detector. It will take the team several weeks to complete the testing and upload the changes to the spacecraft.

The telescope’s other instruments remain in safe mode as the engineers continue to investigate the problem that caused the shut down on October 25th.

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China launches another Earth observation satellite

10:21 am

China’s high pace of launches in 2021 continued yesterday with another launch, this time placing an Earth observation satellite into orbit using its Long March 4C rocket.

This was China’s 43rd successful launch in ’21, three more than it had predicted it would achieve at the start of the year and the most any single nation has accomplished since the Russians completed 49 in 1994.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

43 China
25 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 43 to 40 in the national rankings.

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Webb launch delayed four days because of “incident” during stacking

2:18 pm

NASA management has decided to delay the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope for four days while engineers investigate whether an “incident” that occurred during the telescope’s stacking on top of an Ariane 5 rocket could have long term consequences.

Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter, which is used to integrate the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket. A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band – which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter – caused a vibration throughout the observatory.

A NASA-led anomaly review board was immediately convened to investigate and instituted additional testing to determine with certainty the incident did not damage any components. NASA and its mission partners will provide an update when the testing is completed at the end of this week.

The launch had been scheduled for December 18th. They have now pushed it back to December 22nd.

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History Unplugged – The Age of Discovery 2.0: Episode 6

8:48 am

Episode six of the six part series, The Age of Discovery 2.0, from the podcast, History Unplugged, is now available here.

On this episode Scott Rank interviews Ram Jakhu, an associate professor at McGill University and a researcher on international space law. From the show summary:

The British East India Company is perhaps the most powerful corporation in history. It was larger than several nations and acted as emperor of the Indian subcontinent, commanding a private army of 260,000 soldiers (twice the size of the British Army at the time). The East India Company controlled trade between Britain and India, China, and Persia, reaping enormous profits, flooding Europe with tea, cotton, and spices. Investors earned returns of 30 percent or more.

With SpaceX building reusable rockets and drawing up plans to colonize Mars, could we be seeing a new British East India Company for the 21st century? The idea isn’t that far-fetched. In the terms of service for its Starlink satellite internet, one clause reads the following: “For Services provided on Mars, or in transit to Mars via Starship or other colonization spacecraft, the parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities. Accordingly, Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.”

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Senate Democrats trying to sneak $10 billion payoff to Bezos’s Blue Origin in military budget

10:15 pm

Senator Majority leader Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) have inserted a $10 billion subsidy to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company in a $250 billion budget bill they are pushing that they claim will address things like the semiconductor chip shortage and the supply chain issues.

The bill, called the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, or USICA (pdf available here), is of course mostly filled with payoffs to the friends of Democrats, and will likely achieve nothing that is promised. It is also like all the budget bills being pushed by the Democratic Party in that it treats money as if it grows on trees. They can spend as much as they want, with no consequences at all.

Worse, Schumer and his cronies are trying to hide this pork bill by making it part of the annual military budget bill, dubbed NDAA.

To prove that this is nothing more than corrupt payoffs we need only look at the $10 billion subsidy to Blue Origin. This is a company being directly financed, in the billions, by Bezos himself. It has no shortage of cash. It not only doesn’t need government subsidies, it has never even looked for private investment capital. Bezos has provided it billions from his own pocket, far more cash than SpaceX has ever had on hand.

Yet Bezos is lobbying Democrats for this subsidy, aimed at financing his failed manned lunar lander project that NASA simply doesn’t have the cash to build and also doesn’t want to build because it was a generally weak proposal. From the bill:

This section would require the NASA Administrator to maintain competitiveness within the human landing system by funding design, development, testing, and evaluation for at least two entities. It would also authorize, in addition to amounts otherwise appropriated for the Artemis program, for fiscal years 2021 through 2026, $10.032 billion to NASA to carry out the human landing system program.

In other words, force NASA to award that second manned lunar lander, with Blue Origin almost certainly the winner.

Whether Schumer’s games here will pay off for Bezos remains unknown. I expect most senate Republicans will oppose it (other than the typical RINO fools like Romney). Already Democrats like Bernie Sanders have expressed opposition, as well as at least one children’s lobbying group that appears more aligned with the left than the right.

And even if it passes in the Senate, the House will have to approve, and we can expect ample opposition there from both parties.

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Nanoracks signs deal to be first customer for Canadian spaceport

7:35 am

Capitalism in space: Nanoracks announced yesterday that it has signed a deal with Maritime Launch Services, the Canadian company managing a proposed spaceport in Nova Scotia as well as the launch services of a Ukrainian-built rocket, the Cyclone-4M.

The company and spaceport are targeting 2023 for launch.

Spaceport Nova Scotia is being operated a little differently than most of the new commercial spaceports. Instead of offering its facilities to all rocket companies, its manager, Maritime, has partnered with the two Ukrainian companies, Yuzhnoye and Yuzhmash, that build the Cyclone-4M. They then offer the spaceport and rocket, as a unit, directly to satellite companies like Nanoracks.

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China’s Long March 4B rocket launches Earth observation satellite

7:24 am

China early today successfully placed an Earth observation satellite in orbit, using its Long March 4B rocket.

This was China’s 42nd successful launch in 2021, which is two launches more than it had projected it would fly at the start of the years.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

42 China
25 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 42 to 40 in the national rankings.

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Astra successfully completes first orbital launch

11:31 pm

Screen capture 12 seconds after liftoff
Screen capture 12 seconds after liftoff.

Capitalism in space: Astra tonight successfully launched a dummy payload into low Earth orbit. This was their first success after four tries.

The company now joins Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit as the three operational smallsat rocket launch providers.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

41 China
25 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China’s lead over the U.S. in the national rankings has now narrowed to 41 to 40. For the U.S. the 40 launches so far this year ties the entire total from all of last year. With about six weeks left in the year, the U.S. is likely to add a good number of launches to this total. If the total tops 50, it will be first time since the mid-1960s that the U.S. has done that.

The total number of successful launches this year is presently 107. There is an excellent chance the total will exceed 120, a number last seen routinely during the 1970s and 1980s. The highest total ever was 132 in 1975. There is a slim chance that can be beat this year, but if not, I would expect it will be easily eclipsed next year.

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Watching Astra’s launch attempt tonight

1:05 pm

Capitalism in space: Astra has made its live stream available for its orbital launch attempt tonight, scrubbed last night about ten minutes before liftoff.

This will be the company’s fourth attempt to launch a payload into orbit. The first three attempts failed in some manner.

I have embedded the company’s live stream, provided by NASASpaceflight LLC and Astra Space Inc., below the fold.
» Read more

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Video of Ingenuity’s 13th flight

11:47 am

Using the high resolution camera on Perseverance, the science team has now released two videos taken of Ingenuity’s 13th flight on Mars, on September 4, 2021.

One is a very wide view, which makes it hard to see the helicopter. The closer view can be seen here.

At the beginning of the video, Ingenuity is near the lower left of frame, at a distance of about 980 feet (300 meters) from the rover. It climbs to an altitude of to 26 feet (8 meters) before beginning its sideways translation. The helicopter leaves the camera’s field of view on the right. Soon after, the helicopter returns into the field of view (the majority of frames that did not capture helicopter after it exited the camera’s field of view were purposely not downlinked from Mars by the team) and lands at a location near its takeoff point.

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Scientists: NASA needs to catch up to SpaceX for using its Starship for future manned and unmanned missions

10:21 am

In a white paper [pdf] submitted to the committee presently writing the next decadal survey for NASA’s planetary science program, a large group of well-recognized planetary scientists essentially pleads with NASA to recognize the gigantic possibilities created by SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft for future manned and unmanned exploration, and rethink its management style.

The capabilities of the Starship vehicle to transport unprecedented quantities of cargo and crew to the lunar and Martian surface will require a new support structure within NASA to enable the NASA planetary science community to participate and provide payloads for these flights. SpaceX envisions an accelerated schedule for flights, but NASA’s traditional schedule for selecting and flying planetary payloads is not necessarily consistent with this timeline.

For example, SpaceX is aggressively developing Starship for initial orbital flights, after which they intend to fly uncrewed flights to the Moon and conduct initial test flights to Mars at the earliest Mars mission opportunity, potentially as soon as 2022, or failing that in the 2024 window. Since the launch window is significantly less restricted for the Moon, it is likely that the first Starship landings will be on the lunar surface. (Even in the case of a first Starship launch to Mars, during its six-month trip to the Red Planet it would be feasible to send a Starship to land on the lunar surface prior to the Mars landing).

In order to take advantage of these opportunities, a new funding program within NASA is needed to provide the opportunity for members of the community (within and outside of NASA) to fly robotic payloads on these flights. … In order to be successful given the flight schedule for SpaceX missions, this funding program must be nimble enough to select proposals for funding and make grants within just a few months after proposal submission.

In other words, NASA’s way of doing things when it comes to planetary exploration is simply too slow and cumbersome to take full advantage of Starship’s capabilities.

I found this white paper through this article at Teslarati, which focuses more on what SpaceX plans to do in its manned planetary exploration using Starship. The paper however is less about what SpaceX will do and more about the need for NASA and the planetary community that has depended on the agency for decades to undergo a paradigm shift. With Starship, missions to the Moon and Mars will no longer be very constrained in terms of weight. Nor will launch schedules be slow and far between. Rather than plan a few billion dollar NASA unmanned missions taking a decade to plan and launch, using Starship NASA could have many planetary missions launching fast and for relatively little cost, with far greater capabilities.

The scientists recognize this, and wrote their paper in an effort to make NASA’s hide-bound management recognize it as well.

What I suspect is going to happen is that the scientists will eventually bypass NASA entirely. Because of the lowered cost provided by Starship, they will find other funding sources, many private, to finance planetary missions. Those other sources will also be much more capable than NASA for reacting quickly to Starship’s fast timetable and gigantic capabilities.

Things are going to get really really exciting in the next few years.

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Court: Blue Origin bid for NASA’s lunar lander contract a failure on all counts

9:40 am

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims today released its detailed report on why it dismissed Blue Origin’s lawsuit against NASA’s contract award to SpaceX’s Starship for its manned lunar lander, essentially saying that the lawsuit was a joke. From the report itself [pdf]:

The Court finds that Blue Origin does not have standing because it did not have a substantial chance of award but for the alleged evaluation errors. Its proposal was priced well above NASA’s available funding and was itself noncompliant. Blue Origin argues that it would have submitted an alternative proposal, but the Court finds its hypothetical proposal to be speculative and unsupported by the record. The Court also finds that several of Blue Origin’s objections are waived.

Even if Blue Origin had standing and its objections were not waived, the Court finds that it would lose on the merits. Blue Origin has not shown that NASA’s evaluation or its conduct during the procurement was arbitrary and capricious or otherwise contrary to law. NASA provided a thorough, reasoned evaluation of the proposals, and NASA’s conduct throughout the procurement process was not contrary to law.

The court’s analysis makes Blue Origin’s effort here look embarrassing. The company submitted a weak, overpriced bid, and when it lost on the merits, it then cried foul and said it would have done something different had it known. Neither the court, the GAO, or NASA considered this approach a good recommendation for Jeff Bezos’ company.

The time for lawsuits is over. If Blue Origin wants to compete in the new commercial space industry, it had better start doing it. Right now it acts like it is entitled to success, instead of working hard to achieve it.

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Sierra Space raises $1.4 billion in investment capital

9:28 am

Capitalism in space: Sierra Space, the space subsidiary of Sierra Nevada, has raised $1.4 billion in investment capital in a recent round of fund-raising.

The company will use the funds to support development of Dream Chaser, the lifting-body vehicle it is building for to transport cargo for the International Space Station starting in late 2022. The company originally developed Dream Chaser to carry people as a competitor in NASA’s commercial crew program, and company executives have frequently stated they still plan to develop a crewed version at a later date.

The funds will also support development of its Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) inflatable module. Both LIFE and Dream Chaser are part of Orbital Reef, the commercial space station concept announced Oct. 25 by a team that includes Sierra Space along with Blue Origin, Boeing and Redwire.

It appears that the investment community likes the Orbital Reef commercial space station concept, and especially likes Sierra Space’s part in it. This influx of cash also suggests that the investors got a good look at the status of Dream Chaser, and were satisfied its development was proceeding as planned.

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Lucy update: Instruments all working, no action yet on solar array

9:22 am

According to an update from the Lucy science team today, they have completed the checkout of the asteroid probe’s instruments, and found them all operating properly. However, no action has yet been taken to try to correct the partially deployed solar panel.

The team has used an engineering model of the solar array motor and lanyard to replicate what was observed during the initial solar array deployment. The test data and findings suggest the lanyard may not have wound on the spool as intended. Testing continues to determine what caused this outcome, and a range of scenarios are possible. The team isn’t planning to attempt to move or further characterize the current state of the solar array deployment before Wednesday, Dec. 1, at the earliest.

It appears the spacecraft is still on its planned course.

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Hubble’s 2021 survey of the outer solar system

2:18 pm

Jupiter in 2021 by Hubble
Click for full Jupiter image.

Saturn in 2021 by Hubble
Click for full Saturn image.

Uranus in 2021 by Hubble
Click for full Uranus image.

Neptune in 2021 by Hubble
Click for full Neptune image.

NASA today released the annual survey of images taken each year by the Hubble Space Telescope of the large planets that comprise the outer solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

These Hubble images are part of yearly maps of each planet taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy program, or OPAL. The program provides annual, global views of the outer planets to look for changes in their storms, winds, and clouds. Hubble’s longevity, and unique vantage point, has given astronomers a unique chance to check in on the outer planets on a yearly basis. Knowledge from the OPAL program can also be extended far beyond our own solar system in the study of atmospheres of planets that orbit stars other than our Sun.

The four photos, all either cropped or reduced slightly to post here, are to the right. Each shows some changes in these planets since the previous survey images the year before.

On Jupiter for example the equatorial region shows several new storms, with that band remaining a deep orange color longer than expected.

On Saturn the various bands have continued to show the frequent and extreme color changes that the telescope has detected since it began these survey images back in the 1990s.

The photo of Uranus meanwhile looks at the gas giant’s northern polar regions, where it is presently spring. The increased sunlight and ultraviolet radiation has thus caused the upper atmosphere at the pole to brighten. The photo also confirms that the size of this bright “polar hood” continues to remain the same, never extending beyond the 43 degree latitude where scientists suspect a jet streams acts to constrain it.

The image of Neptune, the farthest and thus hardest planet for Hubble to see, found that the dark spot in the planet’s northern hemisphere appears to have stopped moving south and now appears to be heading north. Also,

In 2021, there are few bright clouds on Neptune, and its distinct blue with a singular large dark spot is very reminiscent of what Voyager 2 saw in 1989.

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Europe’s Solar Orbiter to make last flyby of Earth

8:51 am

Solar Orbiter, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) probe to work in tandem with NASA Parker Solar Probe in studying the inner regions surrounding the Sun, will make last flyby of Earth on November 27, 2021, thus putting it into its planned science orbit.

While the press release gives a good overview of the mission, it focuses on the risk during that fly-by of the spacecraft hitting something during its close approach.

Solar Orbiter’s Earth flyby takes place on 27 November. At 04:30 GMT (05:30 CET) on that day, the spacecraft will be at its closest approach, just 460 km above North Africa and the Canary Islands. This is almost as close as the orbit of the International Space Station.

The manoeuvre is essential to decrease the energy of the spacecraft and line it up for its next close pass of the Sun but it comes with a risk. The spacecraft must pass through two orbital regions, each of which is populated with space debris.

The first is the geostationary ring of satellites at 36 000 km, and the second is the collection of low Earth orbits at around 400 km. As a result, there is a small risk of a collision. Solar Orbiter’s operations team are monitoring the situation very closely and will alter the spacecraft’s trajectory if it appears to be in any danger.

While there is a risk, it seems to me that ESA is taking advantage of the recent news outburst in connection with the Russian anti-sat test and the space junk it created to sell this mission. The risk of impact during this fly-by is very low, especially in the geostationary ring.

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NASA awards Intuitive Machines another contract to deliver science instruments to Moon

8:37 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded Intuitive Machines its third contract to use its Nova-C lander to deliver four science instruments in 2024 to an unusual geological feature on the Moon.

The investigations aboard Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander are destined for Reiner Gamma, one of the most distinctive and enigmatic natural features on the Moon. Known as a lunar swirl, Reiner Gamma is on the western edge of the Moon, as seen from Earth, and is one of the most visible lunar swirls. Scientists continue to learn what lunar swirls are, how they form, and their relationship to the Moon’s magnetic field.

…Intuitive Machines will receive $77.5 million for the contract and is responsible for end-to-end delivery services, including payload integration, delivery from Earth to the surface of the Moon, and payload operations. This is Intuitive Machines’ third task order award, the first of which is a delivery to Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon during the first quarter of 2022. This award is the seventh surface delivery task award issued to a CLPS partner.

Below is the present schedule for these commercial unmanned lunar landers:

  • 2022: Astrobotic to deliver 11 instruments to the crater Lacus Mortis.
  • 2022: Intuitive Machines to deliver 6 payloads to Oceanus Procellarum.
  • 2022: Intuitive Machines to deliver a drill and two instruments to the lunar south pole.
  • 2023: Firefly to deliver 10 instruments to Mare Crisium.
  • 2023: Masten to deliver nine instruments to the lunar south pole region.
  • 2023: Astrobotic to deliver VIPER rover to lunar south pole region.
  • 2024: Intuitive Machines to deliver 4 payloads to Reiner Gamma.

No one should be surprised if some of these landers fail. The goal of this program is to jumpstart a commercial industry of private lunar landers, which is why NASA is awarding so many contracts. Some will fail. Some will succeed. In the end both NASA and the general public will have several competing options for landing payloads on the Moon.

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Axiom sets launch date for first private commercial manned mission to ISS

8:17 am

Capitalism in space: Axiom has set February 21, 2022 as the target launch date for its first private commercial manned mission to ISS, carrying one employee and three passengers for eight days.

In making the announcement the company emphasized the science research the passengers — Larry Connor, Mark Pathy, and Eytan Stibbe — will do:

The crew activities of Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) will focus on science, education, and outreach, conducting approximately 25 experiments while onboard the ISS. Critical data from studies in human research, life and physical sciences, technology demonstrations, and Earth observation will expand the applicability of microgravity research to new sectors. The crew has submitted over 100 hours of human-tended research to conduct during their stay on station.

The commander will be former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, who now works for Axiom. This will be his fifth spaceflight.

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Musk lays out Starship testing plan

12:27 am

Capitalism in space: In a meeting in Washington today, Elon Musk laid out SpaceX’s upcoming testing plan for developing its Starship/Superheavy heavy-lift reusable rocket.

“We’ve completed the first orbital booster and first orbital ship, and we’ll be complete with the launch pad and launch tower later this month, and then we’ll do a bunch of tests in December, and hopefully launch in January,” Musk said. “There’s a lot of risk associated with this first launch, so I would not say it is likely to be successful, but I think we’ll make a lot of progress,” musk said. “We’ve also built a factory for making a lot of these vehicles. So this is not a case for just one or two. We’re aiming to make a great many.

“We intend to do hopefully a dozen launches next year, maybe more,” Musk said. “And if we’re successful with it being fully reusable, that means we build up the fleet just as we are with the Falcon 9 booster, which is reused.”

Musk says the cost of a Starship launch will eventually fall below the cost of a Falcon 9 rocket flight, which a SpaceX manager said last year can fall below $30 million with reused parts.

“Basically, we intend to complete the test flight program next year, which means it’s probably ready for valuable payloads that are not for testing, but actual real payloads, in 2023.”

According to this schedule 2022 will be devoted to refining the rocket to make it dependable, and 2023 will be used to fly unmanned cargo flights to prove it out for later manned flights.

SpaceX will also likely develop in parallel the various expected versions of Starship, including the refueling ship, the manned lunar lander, and ships used for point-to-point transportation on Earth.

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Rocket Lab successfully launches two satellites; recovers 1st stage in ocean

8:27 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab tonight successfully launched two Blacksky satellites, a launch that had been delayed for several months because of the New Zealand COVID lockdowns.

The company also recovered the first stage after it splashdowned in the ocean. A helicopter stood by to observe the stage as it came down by parachute, getting data in preparation for a later recovery attempt where the helicopter will snatch the stage in the air by its parachutes and then transport it back to land.

This was Rocket Lab’s fourth launch in 2021, which brings it back into a tie with Northrop Grumman and ULA. All three however do not make the leader board. The leaders in the 2021 launch race remain unchanged:

41 China
25 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)

China now leads the U.S. 41 to 39 in the national rankings.

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Volcanic vent on Mars

2:43 pm

Overview of Arsia Mons pits

To understand today’s cool image we really should start from a distance and zoom in. The overview map to the right focuses in on the two southernmost giant volcanoes in the string of three that sit to the east of Mars’ biggest volcano, Olympus Mons, and to the west of the planet’s biggest canyon, Valles Marineris.

The black dots mark the locations of the many high resolution photos taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that I have featured previously on Behind the Black. Many are isolated openings with no related geological features. Others appear to be skylights into a more extensive lava tube, hinted at by either a continuing surface depression or a series of similar skylights.

The white dot marks the location of today’s cool image, about 350 miles south of Arsia Mons’ caldera.
» Read more

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UAE Al-Amal Mars orbiter finds surprising variations in Mars atmosphere

10:32 am

Oxygen variations in Martian atmosphere
Click for full graphic.

The United Arab Emirates Al-Amal (“hope” in English) Mars orbiter has discovered unexpected variations of oxygen and carbon monoxide in the Martian atmosphere.

The EMM team had expected to observe a relatively uniform emission from oxygen at 130.4 nm across the planet and yet here we are, faced with unpredicted variations of 50% or more in the brightness.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the variations in oxygen on Mars’s dayside. Though the map does not indicate the geography below, the concentration of oxygen in the northern latitudes appears to correspond to the planet’s northern lowland plains. In fact, the variations should not have been a surprise, since the surface of Mars has such a stark dichotomy between its northern and southern hemispheres.

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Ingenuity’s 16th Martian flight is now scheduled for November 18

9:27 am

According to an update today from the Ingenuity science team, Ingenuity’s sixteenth flight on Mars is scheduled for no earlier than November 18th, and will be a relatively short hop of about 100+ meters to the north, compared to previous flights.

It appears the roughness of the terrain on this flight can cause an accumulating error in its flight software. Because the landing area is also rough, they want to bring the helicopter down sooner to make sure it lands close to where it should.

The present plan is to hop north to return to the location of Ingenuity’s first flight, at Wright Brothers Field. Along the way they will also consider installing an update in the flight software to improve the helicopter’s capabilities.

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NASA expected to finally certify Rocket Lab’s Virginia launchpad by end of year

9:15 am

It appears that after more than a year of delays, the NASA bureaucracy might finally approve launches at Rocket Lab’s new spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia by the end of the year.

The article at the link is mostly about Rocket Lab’s planned acquisition of another company that builds satellite deployment systems. However, its real story was in the last paragraph:

[T]he company is still waiting for NASA to complete certification of an autonomous flight termination system the company needs to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia. Delays in NASA’s certification of that system has, in turn, delayed the use of Launch Complex 2 there for Electron missions. “The current expectation is that it could be done as early as the end of the year,” [Adam Spice, Rocket Lab’s chief financial officer] said of that certification, “which would allow us to commence flight operations out of LC-2 and Wallops in the first half of 2022.”

The company got FAA approval for launches more than a year ago, and had hoped to launch shortly thereafter. NASA however has blocked that launch, refusing for more than a year to approve the flight termination system Rocket Lab uses to destroy rockets should something go wrong just after launch.

The delay is baffling. Rocket Lab has successfully proven that its system works in that it has used it several times to safely abort launches in New Zealand. This success apparently has not been good enough for NASA’s bureaucrats, and the result is that Rocket Lab’s ability to launch rockets has been seriously hampered in ’21.

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Europe joins U.S. in condemning Russian anti-satellite test

8:57 am

Europe’s top space policy chief today joined the U.S. in strongly condemning the Russian anti-satellite test that produced a cloud of several thousand pieces of orbiting space junk.

European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton condemned Russia’s anti-satellite missile system test, which led to the destruction of a satellite in low orbit.

“As European Union (EU) Commissioner in charge of EU Space policy and in particular of Galileo & Copernicus, I join the strongest condemnations expressed against the test conducted by Russia on Monday November 15, which led to the destruction of a satellite in low orbit (COSMOS 1408),” Breton wrote on Twitter late on Tuesday.

The Russians continue to insist the debris poses no threat to ISS, but their own state-run press proves them wrong. This TASS report claims the debris is no threat because it orbits 40 to 60 kilometers (25 to 35 miles) above the station.

That the debris is presently orbiting above the station is exactly why it poses a threat. While mission controllers will periodically raise ISS’s orbit to counteract the loss of altitude due to friction from the very thin atmosphere at that elevation, the various orbits of the satellite debris will continue to fall. Eventually that entire cloud will be drop into ISS’s orbit.

It is likely that the debris spread over time will make it easy for controllers to shift ISS to avoid individual pieces, but the need to dodge will certainly increase with time, raising the odds that something will hit the ISS.

The test seems almost so stupid an act by Russia that one wonders if its purpose was to create a long term threat to ISS itself. At least one private U.S. company, Axiom, plans to attach its own modules to ISS and use it as a base for the next few years for commercial operations. Others want to use ISS as a hotel for private tourists.

The Russians meanwhile are planning to launch their own new station. If the Russians put it in an orbit safe from this debris cloud, this test will have thus conveniently damaged their main competitor in commercial space operations.

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