Tag: spaceflight

SpaceX successfully completes two launches today

11:40 am

SpaceX successfully completed two launches today, one from each coast.

First in the early morning the company sent 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. Of the 20 satellites, 13 were configured for direct-to-cell service.

Next, SpaceX launched GSAT-20, a geosynchronous communications satellite for India’s space agency ISRO, which hired SpaceX because the satellite was too heavy for its own rockets. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, with the first stage completing its 19th flight, successfully landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. Of the two fairings, one completed its fifth flight while the second completed its first flight.

If we include the afternoon launch yesterday by SpaceX from Kennedy, the company did three launches from three locations in less than 24 hours. And it hopes to launch again tomorrow, this time flying Starship/Superheavy on its sixth test orbital flight, launching from the company’s launchpad in Boca Chica. I have embedded the live steam here.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

117 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 135 to 79, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 117 to 97.

With these two launches today, the all-time global record for successful orbital launches in a year, set only last year at 213, has been broken, and there are still about five weeks left in 2024.

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A new geologic map of one of the Moon’s largest impact basins

10:00 am

Orientale Basin on the Moon
Click for original image.

Using data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scientists have now produced a high resolution geological map of Orientale Basin, one of the largest impact basins on the Moon — at about 600 miles across — and located just on the edge of the Moon’s visible near side.

That map is to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here. You can read the paper here [pdf]. From the press release:

Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist Kirby Runyon is a lead author on a paper published in the Planetary Science Journal containing a new high-resolution geologic map of Orientale basin that attempts to identify original basin impact melt. The hope is that future researchers use this map to target sample return missions and pin down impact dates for this and other impact basins.

“We chose to map Oriental basin because it’s simultaneously old and young,” Runyon said. “We think it’s about 3.8 billion years old, which is young enough to still have its impact melt freshly exposed at the surface, yet old enough to have accumulated large impact craters on top of it as well, complicating the picture. We chose to map Orientale to test melt-identification strategies for older, more degraded impact basins whose ages we’d like to know.”

The map’s prime purpose is to pin down locations where material from the actual impact exist and can be returned to Earth for precise dating, thus helping to create a more accurate timeline of the Moon’s formation as well as the entire solar system’s accretion rate.

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A spiral galaxy as seen from the side

9:36 am

A spiral galaxy seen from the side
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of what is believed to be a spiral galaxy seen edge-on. The galaxy itself is estimated to be 150 million light years away, and this view highlights two major features, the dust lanes that run along the galaxy’s length and its distinct central nucleus, bulging out from the galaxy’s flat plain.

The way this image was produced however is intriguing on its own:

Like most of the full-colour Hubble images released by ESA/Hubble, this image is a composite, made up of several individual snapshots taken by Hubble at different times and capturing different wavelengths of light. … A notable aspect of this image is that the two sets of Hubble data used were collected 23 years apart, in 2000 and 2023! Hubble’s longevity doesn’t just afford us the ability to produce new and better images of old targets; it also provides a long-term archive of data which only becomes more and more useful to astronomers.

All told, four Hubble data sets were used to produce the picture.

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Oh no! Starship/Superheavy is loud!

9:21 am

Superheavy after its flight safely captured at Boca Chica
Superheavy after its October flight, safely captured at Boca Chica

Time for another Chicken Little report: A new study of the sound levels produced by SpaceX’s Superheavy booster during its fifth launch and landing at Boca Chica in October 2024 suggests that it produces more noise than predicted.

Overall … Gee et al. note that one of the most important conclusions from their data is the differences between Starship’s launch noise levels and those of SLS and Falcon 9. The team found that Starship produces significantly more noise at liftoff than both SLS and Falcon 9 in both A-weighted and Z-weighted (unweighted) noise metrics.

When compared to Falcon 9, the noise produced by a single Starship launch is equivalent to, at a minimum, 10 Falcon 9 launches. Despite SLS producing more than half of Starship’s overall thrust at liftoff, Starship is substantially louder than SLS. More specifically, one Starship launch is equivalent to that of four to six SLS launches regarding noise production. As has been hypothesized by numerous other studies into the noise produced by rockets, this significant difference in noise levels may be due to the configuration of first-stage engines on the rockets. For example, although the Saturn V produced less overall thrust than SLS, it produced two decibels more noise than SLS, which may be due to the clustered engine configuration on Saturn V’s first stage.

We’re all gonna die! Despite the doom-mongering of this study (which you can read here), the only issue noted by the paper from this noise was car alarms going off. And even here, the spread of the noise was asymmetrical, occurring in only one direction.

The concern about sonic booms has always been the annoyance they cause to residents near airports. In the case of Superheavy, it is very unlikely it will ever fly at a frequency to make its noise intolerable. More important, the nature of a spaceport versus an airport reduces the concern considerably, since a spaceport requires a much larger buffer area, and at both of SpaceX’s Starship launchsites in Florida and Texas almost everyone living close by works for the company or in the space business. They are not going to complain.

And while studying these noise issues is useful, we must not be naive about the real purpose of such studies. Underneath its high-minded science goals is a much more insidious one: finding a weapon for shutting down SpaceX. This concern of mine might be overstated, but remember, almost our entire academic community is rabidly leftist and made up of partisan Democrats. They hate Musk for his politics, and have been aggressively looking for ways to hurt him. This sound study is just another tool in that war.

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European cargo capsule startup raises $160 million in private investment capital

8:56 am

The Exploration Company's proposed Nyx cargo capsule
Artist rendition of the proposed Nyx cargo capsule,
taken from The Exploration Company’s website

The French cargo capsule startup The Exploration Company (TEC} announced today that it has raised an additional $160 million in private investment capital, bringing the total raised by the company to $230 million.

Venture capital firms Balderton Capital and Plural were the lead investors in the round which also included French government-backed investment vehicle French Tech Souveraineté and German government-backed fund DeepTech & Climate Fonds.

TEC’s core product is Nyx, a capsule that can be launched from rockets into space carrying passengers and cargo. Nyx is reusable so once it has dropped its payload, it can re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and be used for the next mission.

The company hopes to do its initial test flight of Nyx in 2028. It flew a demonstrator prototype on the first Ariane-6 launch in July 2024, but was unable to test that prototype’s re-entry capabilities (its prime mission) because of a failure in Ariane-6’s upper stage. It hopes to fly a second demonstrator in 2025 on a Falcon 9.

At the moment company officials say they already signed $800 million in cargo contracts, 90% of which are with the commercial space station companies Axiom Space, Vast, and Starlab. The rest are government contracts.

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SpaceX launches Australian geosynchronous communications satellite

3:37 pm

SpaceX today successfully placed an Australian geosynchronous communications satellite into orbit, its Falcon 9 lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The rocket’s two fairings completed their 10th and 20th flights respectively. The first stage completed its 16th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. At posting the satellite had not yet been deployed.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

115 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 133 to 79, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 115 to 97.

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NASA’s annual audit is not only not as great as NASA claims, it illustrates how the poison of DEI permeates the agency

3:43 pm

Not all is well at NASA
Not everything is as great as NASA claims

Yesterday NASA issued a press release proudly announcing that its annual independent audit of NASA’s finances concluded “for the 14th consecutive year … an unmodified, or ‘clean,’ opinion [of] its fiscal year 2024 financial statements.”

The rating is the best possible audit opinion, certifying that NASA’s financial statements conform with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for federal agencies and accurately present the agency’s financial position. The audit opinion reaffirms the agency’s commitment to transparency in the use of American taxpayers’ dollars.

In reading the actual financial statements and auditor’s report (available here [pdf]), I found however that all is not “clean”, as NASA claims. Two issues of concern — one financial and the other political — are well buried in the report and should be quickly dealt with by the upcoming Trump administration.

Sloppy bookkeeping

First, the independent auditor, Ernst & Young, found that NASA’s internal control system designed to track spending was not quite up to par. From pages 90-91 of the report:
» Read more

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SpaceX delays 6th Starship/Superheavy launch one day to November 19, 2024

2:42 pm

In a tweet yesterday SpaceX announced that it is now targeting November 19, 2024 for the sixth orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket. The thirty minute launch window opens at 4 pm (Central). Though SpaceX will provide a live stream on X, X does not provide a standby service, so I am embedding below the feed of SpaceX’s live stream provided by Space Affairs.

From SpaceX’s webpage for this mission:

The next Starship flight test aims to expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities and get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online. Objectives include the booster once again returning to the launch site for catch, reigniting a ship Raptor engine while in space, and testing a suite of heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for ship reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean.

Starship’s landing will be in daylight this time in order to allow for better observation.
» Read more

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Orbital tug startup Impulse Space buys three SpaceX Falcon 9 launches

12:53 pm

The orbital tug startup Impulse Space announced yesterday that it has signed a contract with SpaceX for three Falcon 9 launches in order to fly its Helios orbital tug as well as its smaller Mira tug on several commercial missions.

The first launch, planned for mid-2026, will be the first flight of Helios. The transfer vehicle will transport the company’s smaller Mira vehicle, carrying a commercial optical payload, from low Earth orbit to geostationary transfer orbit on the Victus Surgo mission for the Space Force and Defense Innovation Unit. Impulse Space received a $34.5 million contract for Victus Surgo and another mission, Victus Salo, Oct. 3. Impulse Space said the schedule and payloads for the other two Helios launches will be determined later.

This development signals a major shift in the nascent orbital tug industry. Up until now the varous tug companies would buy launch space on rockets as secondary payloads. This I think is the first time a tug company has purchased the rocket itself as the primary payload, giving it the ability to control the rocket in order to make its tug operations more precise for all of its customers.

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Rocket startup ABL abandons its effort to build a rocket

12:42 pm

The rocket startup ABL, which had one failed launch attempt and a second failure during a static fire test, announced yesterday in a long tweet on X that it is abandoning its effort to build a rocket and will instead use its assets to provide products to the military.

[W]e have made the decision to focus our efforts on national defense, and specifically on missile defense technologies. We’ll have more to share soon on our roadmap and traction in this area. For now, suffice to say we see considerable opportunity to leverage RS1, GS0, the E2 engine, and the rest of the technology we’ve developed to date to enable a new type of research effort around missile defense technologies.

In other words, they are repurposing their RS1 rocket for missile technology.

The company’s announcement claims this decision is partly because the competition from established companies diminished its opportunity to gain market share, but I think its real problem was twofold. First, failure breeds failure. ABL’s rocket failures, combined with its very slow response after each failure, probably caused a shrinkage in investment capital. For example, one of its biggest investors had been Lockheed Martin, which had signed ABL up for a big launch contract. ABL’s failure to get its rocket off the ground however had Lockheed switch rocket companies, signing a new launch deal with Firefly in 2024. ABL had thus lost its biggest customer.

Second, as a new company with a rocket under development, it probably faced heavy regulatory burdens getting new launch licenses. The FAA under its “steamlined” Part 450 regulations probably required new license applications every time the company realized it needed to redesign something, and that red tape made it difficult to move forward.

In any new industry one must expect a shake-out to occur whereby many of the startups fail or get absorbed by others. This is natural. It is unfortunate however that government regulation has become an unnecessary and unnatural factor in this shake-out.

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New thermal protection system developed by Sierra Space

10:27 am

Sierra Space yesterday announced that it has developed in partnership with Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee a new thermal protection system (TPS] that it expects will give its Dream Chaser mini-shuttles a heat shield that can be reused frequently and fast.

The TPS tiles are made of a proprietary composite material that’s as strong as carbon fiber but with the added high-temperature stability of ceramic materials. The composite tiles have low-density thermal protection properties that are vital for insulative protection and stable flight dynamics. Atmospheric re-entry exposes spacecraft to speeds of more than Mach 17 (About 13,000 mph or 21,000 kph) with temperatures reaching higher than 3,100 degrees Fahrenheit (1,704 degrees Celsius).

These new tiles are based on the shuttle tiles, but apparently use carbon fibers to strengthen them so they are more robust and require less replacement. The shuttle tiles were much too fragile, requiring significant replacement after each launch. That fragility also caused the destruction of Columbia on its return to Earth in 2003, because the tiles were damaged badly when hit by foam coming off the shuttle during launch.

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SpaceX scraps its land swap offer to Texas

10:11 am

SpaceX has decided to scrap its land swap offer to Texas, whereby the company would have given the state 477 acres of wildlife land it owns elsewhere in exchange for ownership of 43 acres of state park land adjacent to its Boca Chica facility.

In a Sept. 26 letter seen by Bloomberg News, SpaceX Vice President Sheila McCorkle told the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department that the company “is no longer interested in pursuing the specific arrangement.”

In exchange for SpaceX getting the 43 acres, the company would have given the state some 477 acres of its land near Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, around 10 miles away. The land could have given Texans access for hiking, camping and other recreational purposes, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission said. In March, the commission approved the deal.

Environmental activists worry their fight’s not over with SpaceX and Musk, who has achieved newfound political power through his close ties to President-elect Donald Trump. “We’re concerned that he has something bigger and more disruptive to the beach and to the wildlife in mind,” Bekah Hinojosa, a representative from the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, an advocacy group, said in an interview. [emphasis mine]

The blind opposition of these leftist activists to Musk and anything he does has merely caused them to cut off their nose to spite their face. SpaceX’s proposal would have given the public a much larger wildlife area that was also far enough away from Boca Chica to allow its use all the time. Now the state is stuck with 43 acres of state park land that is going to be useless whenever Starship/Superheavy launches.

The lawsuits against this swap claimed it violated the Texas constitution. My guess is that SpaceX decided it wasn’t worth fighting this battle. Or maybe it is now playing hardball in negotiations. These activists do not have the support of the local community, which wants SpaceX’s operations to be successful. By scrapping the plan now SpaceX might be acting to force the Texas legislature to change the law to make the land swap legally acceptable.

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