Tag: spaceflight

ESA gives its big space rocket company, ArianeGroup, a big subsidy

10:29 am

On November 19, 2024 I noted that in awarding four new rocket startups development contracts worth a total of 44 million euros, the European Space Agency (ESA) had not given any of that grant money to its biggest and most established rocket company, ArianeGroup, which not only owns and builds the Ariane-6 rocket but also has a subsidiary called MaiaSpace that is developing its own smallsat partly reusable rocket, in direct competition with those four small startups.

The exclusion of ArianeGroup in that announcement suggested to me that ESA had decided ArianeGroup’s smalsat rocket subsidary could manage without any additional aid, since its owner is a well-financed big space contractor.

I was wrong. Today the ESA awarded ArianeGroup a much big pile of cash, totaling 230 million Euros, to further finance the development of a reusable demonstration rocket, dubbed Themis, that also uses ArianeGroup’s Prometheus rocket engine. The Themis hopper project has been under development since 2018 initially under the management of Arianespace, has seen many delays in that time, and is now three years behind schedule.

Because of these delays, ESA pulled it from Arianespace in 2022 and gave full control of the project to the builder, ArianeGroup. This new contract award appears to be cementing this new arrangement, and is in addition to previous awards for this project exceeding 224 million euros.

The award also apparently includes funds for ArianeGroup’s MaiaSpace smallsat rocket startup, though the exact amount has not been specified.

The bottom line is that ESA is still dumping lots of cash to its older big space companies. Despite its clear shift to promoting independent rocket startups instead of a single government-controlled commercial entity (Arianespace), it is still favoring the big space contractors like ArianeGroup it has used for decades under that old Soviet-style system.

It will be interesting to see how this unbalanced system plays out in the coming years. Europe might get a competitive rocket industry of many companies, but then it might not, considering its space agency is putting its thumb on the scale to favor the already-established players.

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Musk: Starship will likely attempt a chopstick landing on the eighth test launch

9:57 am

UPDATE: The original post below is incorrect. I misread Musk’s tweet, not realizing he was refering exclusively to Starship when he wrote “ship.” He and his company now routinely use “ship” to refer to Starship and “booster” for Superheavy.

The real story behind this tweet is that SpaceX is working to attempt a chopstick catch of both Superheavy and Starship on the eighth test flight, after the as-yet unscheduled seventh flight. This means the eighth flight of Starship will be a full orbital flight, will use its Raptor engines to do a de-orbit burn to bring it back to Boca Chica, and that the company expects to have two launchpad towers ready to make the two catches.

Won’t that be an exciting event?

Original incorrect post:
———————————–
According to a tweet by Elon Musk on November 19, 2024, SpaceX will not attempt a chopstick landing of Superheavy on the seventh test orbital launch of Starship/Superheavy.

We will do one more ocean landing of the ship. If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.

According to an update on the SpaceX website, the decision to abort the chopstick landing during this week’s sixth test flight was made because of issues at the launch tower:

Following a nominal ascent and stage separation, the booster successfully transitioned to its boostback burn to begin the return to launch site. During this phase, automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt. The booster then executed a pre-planned divert maneuver, performing a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

At this moment SpaceX has not provided any additional information on what those issues at the tower were, and might never do so since this is proprietary information. Nonetheless, it could be that more work is necessary to make sure the tower is healthy after launch, which is why they won’t attempt a chopstick landing next time.

As for when that seventh test flight will occur, we as yet have no word. The timing is going to depend on many factors, including the need for upgrades, the final flight plan decision, any changes then required to SpaceX’s FAA launch license, and finally the impact the new Trump administration will have on that red tape.

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Space Perspective wants to launch its balloon from the Middle East

9:49 am

Space Perspective's Neptune Capsule
Space Perspective’s Neptune balloon capsule

The high altitude balloon company Space Perspective is presently in discussions with a number of Middle Eastern nations to find a location from which tourists can take tourist flights on its Neptune balloon capsule.

The Florida-based company is spending time in the Gulf to evaluate opportunities and expects to select a location in the first quarter of 2025, Michael Savage, its chief executive, told The National on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Skift Global Forum East in Dubai.

“We have interest from the UAE and entities from Abu Dhabi have come to visit mission control more than once. And we have interest from Qatar and from Saudi Arabia,” he said. “Our customer base likes to vacation in and visit this region, this has become a global hub for high-net worth vacationing … and because this is a luxury experience, it’s ideal for us to be as close as possible to that demographic.”

This the same approach that another American balloon company, World View, proposed in 2022. Since then however that company has not announced any updates of the tourist version of its high altitude balloons, which it has mostly been using to provide reconnaissance data for the Pentagon.

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A U.S. startup building a returnable capsule raised $44 million in investment capital

9:37 am

The new American company Inversion Space — which is developing an orbiting cargo capsule called Arc — has now raised $44 million in private investment capital.

The Los Angeles-based company announced Nov. 20 that it raised a Series A round led by Spark Capital and Adjacent, with participation from Lockheed Martin Ventures, Kindred Ventures and Y Combinator. The company has raised $54 million to date, with a $10 million seed round in 2021. It also won in September a Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) agreement with the Space Force’s SpaceWERX valued at $71 million, a combination of government and private funding to support work on reentry vehicles tailored for military customers.

Inversion will use the funds to further development of Arc, a reentry vehicle designed to provide what it called “precision delivery on-demand” from space to the Earth. The company is currently working on the design of Arc with a first flight planned for 2026.

The number of companies developing orbiting cargo capsules, either to provide supplies to the new space stations or to do manufacturing in orbit for return and sale on Earth, appears to be growing by leaps and bounds. First there was SpaceX’s Dragon, though the company has not yet flown any in-space manufacturing missions. Varda followed next, and has already flown and returned one capsule successfully. Sierra Nevada will follow next year with the first launch of its reusable Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle. Inversion will be the fourth.

In Europe there is The Exploration Company in France with its Nyx capsule, the German startup Atmos with its Phoenix capsule, and the Spanish startup PLD with its Lince capsule. There may be more.

All of these orbiting and returnable capsules have multiple profit opportunities, which explains why there has been a willingness of investors to provide them funds. They can either supply cargo to the four private stations presently under construction, or fly independent orbital missions where the capsule carries equipment to produce products of value that can only be manufactured in weightlessness.

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The space agencies of India and Australia agree to cooperate in recovering Gaganyaan

9:23 am

India’s space agency ISRO yesterday announced that it has signed an agreement with the Australian Space Agency (ASA) to work together in doing ocean recovery of India’s Gagayaan manned capsule.

The IA [Implementation Agreement] enables the Australian authorities to work with Indian authorities to ensure support for search and rescue of crew and recovery of crew module as part of contingency planning for ascent phase aborts near Australian waters.

Apparently ISRO anticipates the possible need for capsule ocean recovery near Australia should there be a launch abort shortly after liftoff.

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Russia and SpaceX complete launches

9:16 am

Both Russia and the American company SpaceX successfully completed launches this morning. First, Russia sent a new Progress freighter on its way to ISS, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan. The cargo ship is planned to dock with ISS in two days.

Next SpaceX put another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

119 SpaceX
53 China
14 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 137 to 80, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 119 to 98.

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French rocket startup wins multi-launch contract

9:03 am

Capitalism in space: The French rocket startup Latitude yesterday announced that it has gotten a multi-launch contract from the German startup Atmos Space Cargo, which is developing its own returnable cargo capsule.

In a deal announced at Space Tech Expo Europe here Nov. 19, Atmos will buy a minimum of five launches a year of Latitude’s Zephyr rocket between 2028 and 2032. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Each launch will place a Phoenix spacecraft into very low Earth orbit, or VLEO. The spacecraft are designed to accommodate payloads for microgravity research in fields like pharmaceuticals and manufacturing, returning them to Earth.

Both companies have raised private investment capital, with Latitude raising $30 million and Atmos $1.4 million. Both are part of the sudden burst of new independent space companies that have emerged in Europe in only the last three years, even as many new American space startups have fallen by the wayside due to technical problems and government red tape.

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FAA approves revised launch rate for Boca Chica; schedules public meetings

10:42 am

The FAA today announced that it has issued a revised draft environmental assessment [pdf] of SpaceX’s operations at Boca Chica in which the agency approves the company’s request to increase its Starship/Superheavy launch rate from 5 to 25 launches per year.

This does not mean that SpaceX can now launch that many times in 2025. The draft still has to go through more red tape, including public meetings and a comment period, then reviewed again by the FAA. In this announcement the FAA rescheduled those public meetings, as follows:

  • Tuesday, January 7, 2025; 1:00 PM–3:00 PM & 5:30 PM–7:30 PM CDT at the Texas Southmost College, Jacob Brown Auditorium, 600 International Boulevard, Brownsville, TX 78520
  • Thursday, January 9, 2025; 1:00 PM–3:00 PM & 5:30 PM–7:30 PM CDT at the Port Isabel Event & Cultural Center, Queen Isabella Room, 309 E Railroad Avenue, Port Isabel, TX 78578
  • Virtually on Monday, January 13, 2025; 5:30 PM–7:30 PM CDT. Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6f5su5mtTne_vBr8MqJOLA
    Dial-in phone number: 888-788-0099 (Toll Free),
    Webinar ID: 879 9253 6128, Passcode: 900729

I strongly suggest that local businesses and citizens in the Brownsville area organize to show up en masse at these meetings to express their approval of SpaceX, because I can guarantee that the fringe anti-Musk activists groups SaveRGV, Sierra Club, the Friends of Wildlife Corridor, and the fake Indian Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas (which never existed in Texas) are organizing to be there to demand SpaceX be shut down.

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NASA to award SpaceX and Blue Origin contracts to deliver cargo to the Moon

9:14 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that is planning to award both SpaceX and Blue Origin contracts to use their manned lunar landers as cargo freighters to deliver supplies to its planned lunar base.

NASA expects to assign demonstration missions to current human landing system providers, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to mature designs of their large cargo landers following successful design certification reviews. The assignment of these missions builds on the 2023 request by NASA for the two companies to develop cargo versions of their crewed human landing systems, now in development for Artemis III, Artemis IV, and Artemis V.

…NASA plans for at least two delivery missions with large cargo. The agency intends for SpaceX’s Starship cargo lander to deliver a pressurized rover, currently in development by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), to the lunar surface no earlier than fiscal year 2032 in support of Artemis VII and later missions. The agency expects Blue Origin to deliver a lunar surface habitat no earlier than fiscal year 2033.

The contracts however have not been issued. This is merely an announcement of NASA’s intent to do so, which suggests to me that NASA management has already recognized that the entire Artemis program is facing a major restructuring and wants to indicate it will support such a change. That does not mean these contracts won’t be issued — both rely on the privately owned rockets of both companies — but that NASA now realizes that its manned program — which now relies on SLS/Orion — will likely to be changed significantly, likely by the elimination of SLS/Orion and its replacement by private rockets and private manned spacecraft.

Because of this looming restructuring, NASA management probably intended this press announcement — which really announces little that is new — as a signal of its support for such a change, because the announcement focuses on these private companies rather than NASA’s government-built rocket.

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Flights into Brownsville sold out prior to SpaceX’s sixth test flight of Starship/Superheavy

8:57 am

If anyone thinks the anti-Musk activists groups that have been using lawfare to try to shut down SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility have any local support, this story should put a quash on that. According to the airport director for the Brownsville-South Padre Island Airport, all flights sold out leading up to the sixth test flight of Starship/Superheavy.

Airport director Angel Ramos told Channel 5 News he’s noticed traffic increases whenever SpaceX does a flight test. “People are excited,” Ramos said. “They’re wearing SpaceX hats and SpaceX shirts [when they come] in to the airport.”

Ramos said flights were sold out between Sunday and Tuesday, and 700 people have been arriving daily at the airport since Sunday. “There is no launch that happens that we don’t see lots of people coming in and out of the airport, and now that they continue to be more frequent and more successful, people are paying more interest and actually coming days before,” Ramos said.

The story was reported by the local ABC television affiliate, and reflects the very positive impact SpaceX is having on the local community that is recognized quite clearly by everyone who lives there. The Brownsville area had been economically depressed for decades. Now the economy is booming, all because of SpaceX.

The public wants SpaceX there. The nay-sayers represent practically no one. That many local news organizations not only don’t report these facts when they cover the lawfare of these activists but instead often frame their stories as if the opposition is general throughout the region is shameful and an indication of the bankrupt nature of these press outlets.

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Freedom wins again: SpaceX completes the 6th orbital test flight of Starship/Superheavy

3:50 pm

Starship/Superheavy at T+6 seconds

SpaceX today successfully completed the sixth orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy heavy lift rocket, only forty days after its previous test flight, the shortest turn-around so far, mainly because the FAA imposed no red tape to hold SpaceX back.

Before describing details of the flight, it is essential to note that this giant rocket, bigger than the Saturn-5 that sent Apollo astronauts to the Moon and intended to be completely reusable and being designed to be able to relaunch in mere hours, has been conceived, designed, built, and tested entirely by a private company and free American citizens, funded almost entirely by private investment capital hoping to make a profit from the rocket. The government and NASA has played almost no part, except possibly using its regulatory power improperly to slow development down by a year or two.

Even more important its development has cost a tiny amount compared to similar government programs, and has been accomplished in less than a third of the time.

Thus this rocket is a perfect example of freedom in action. Get the government out of the way and allow humans the freedom to follow their dreams, and they will do astonishing things.

As for the flight, Superheavy worked perfectly in getting Starship off the launchpad and on its way into orbit. However, engineers canceled a second tower catch attempt and instead diverted Superheavy to complete a soft splashdown just off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico. The booster touched down on the water quite softly, and then fell over into the water. Expect SpaceX to quickly do salvage operations to recover it.

Starship reached its orbit as planned, carrying for the first time a payload, a single plastic banana suspended by cords in the center of the Pez deployment payload bay where SpaceX hopes to soon begin deploying Starlink satellites. Though somewhat silly, the banana is being used by SpaceX and the FAA to certify future payload operations.

About 38 minutes into the flight engineers did the first re-light of one Raptor-2 engine while in orbit, the burn lasting about three-four seconds. This burn demonstrated that Starship is capable of doing a de-orbit burn so that in a future flight it can be launched into a full orbit and use the engines to bring it back to a precise location on Earth, including possibly a return to the launch tower for its own chopstick catch.

Starship splashing down vertically
Starship splashing down vertically

During re-entry the flight plan called for pushing Starship beyond its technical margins in order to learn exactly what those limits were. Even so, it appeared that — unlike the previous flights — there was very little evidence of damage to the flaps from the heat of re-entry. One flap appeared to have damage at one pointed end, and even that burn-through appeared far less than the previous flights.

During final descent and moving slower than the speed of sound they pointed the ship nose down in order to stress the flaps the most. Even so, the ship performed as planned, and splashed down softly and vertically in the Indian Ocean.

Though the flight plan for this Starship flight as well as the previous flights was purposely designed to bring it back to Earth before it completes an orbit, this was still essentially a successful orbital launch, and thus I am including it in my launch totals. The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

118 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 136 to 79, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 118 to 97.

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Judge rules that Ligado’s $39 billion lawsuit against federal government can proceed

9:32 am

A federal judge has now ruled that the $39 billion lawsuit by the satellite company Ligado against the federal government can move forward.

In October 2023, Ligado sued the government for $39 billion over claims that officials at the Departments of Defense and Commerce took “unlawful actions” to, in effect, improperly seize without compensation the firm’s L-band spectrum. In January, the government had asked a judge to dismiss the suit. Today Judge Edward J. Damich of the US Federal Claims Court ruled in part in favor of Ligado and in part for the government over aspects of the case, but ultimately said the case “may proceed.”

Essentially, after the FCC had awarded this spectrum to Ligado, the feds stepped in to take it away for its own use. The company argued that once it was given that spectrum to use for its satellites it was essentially its property, and that the seizure without due compensation was an illegal taking under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. This court decision allows this lawsuit to proceed.

The reason these federal agencies seized the spectrum this that they believe Ligado’s satellite constellation would interfere with GPS, something the FCC disputed in awarding the spectrum. Whether the company will win in court remains unclear.

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ESA awards four European rocket startups contact extensions worth €44.2 million total

9:19 am

Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) this week awarded four European rocket startups — HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Orbex — new contact extensions worth €44.2 million total to continue the development of their commercial rockets.

According to ESA, the €44.2 million in funding awarded through the Boost! contract extensions is aimed at alleviating the pressure in the months before an inaugural flight when costs are high and the potential to generate revenue is limited.

…While the ESA press release did not disclose the specific amounts awarded to each company, announcements from the companies have revealed that Orbex will receive €5.6 million, Isar Aerospace €15 million, and both Rocket Factory Augsburg and HyImpulse €11.8 million each.

The first three companies are German-based, while Orbex is based in the United Kingdom. All four have received ESA grants under this program previously. None have yet actually attempted an orbital launch, but all four have been getting close, though all also face challenges. For example, Orbex, which had said it was ready to launch its Prime rocket in 2022, has been waiting for a launch license from Great Britain’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) for almost three years, to no avail. Rocket Factory meanwhile had hoped to launch its RFA-1 rocket this year, but could not after it was destroyed during a static fire dress rehearsal countdown in August.

Isar meanwhile has begun static fire tests of its Spectrum rocket at the Andoya spaceport in Norway. No launch date has been set. Hyimpulse in turn has flown a suborbital test flight from the Southern Launch spaceport on the south coast of Australia, but development of an orbital rocket seems farther behind its competitors.

This ESA contract award is also revealing in who did not get contracts. The large big space company ArianeGroup, which owns the Ariane-6 rocket, also has its own smallsat rocket startup, Maiaspace, that is attempting to compete with these other rocket startups, and had previously gotten ESA development contracts. That it got no contract extension under this program suggests ESA has decided it can manage without this aid, considering its owner is a well-financed big space contractor.

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Dawn Aerospace small-scale rocket-powered airplane breaks the sound barrier

8:54 am

The crew and Mk-II Aurora
The crew and Mk-II Aurora

On November 12, 2024, the startup Dawn Aerospace for the first time flew its small-scale rocket-powered Mk-II Aurora unmanned airplane at speeds exceeding the speed of sound, becoming the first commercial airplane since the Concorde to break the sound barrier.

The company, operating as Dawn Hypersonics, achieved the milestone on 12 November 2024, with the Aurora surpassing the speed of sound for the first time, reaching Mach 1.1 and climbing to an altitude of 82,500 feet. This is over twice as high as commercial aircraft and marks the first time a civil aircraft has flown supersonic since Concorde. This achievement signifies a major step toward operational hypersonic travel and daily space access, establishing rocket-powered aircraft as a new class of ultra-high-performance vehicles.

The flight, conducted from New Zealand’s Glentanner Aerodrome near the base of Aoraki Mt Cook, exceeded its test target speeds and altitude of Mach 1.05 and 75,000 feet. The Aurora also set a global record, becoming the fastest aircraft to climb from ground level to 20 km (66,000 feet), completing the ascent in just 118.6 seconds. This beats the previous record, held by a highly modified F-15 ‘Streak Eagle’ in the 1970s, by 4.2 seconds.

It appears the company’s goals have changed and become less ambitious, at least for the moment. According to the company’s press materials now, the goal now is to sell Mk-II (and bigger versions) for suborbital hypersonic research, both for the military and private sector. Back in 2021 however the company described Mk-II as merely a preliminary test vehicle leading to the construction of a larger fullscale two-stage-to-orbit version that would take off and land on a runway and could be used to launch satellites to orbit.

In a sense, nothing might have really changed, other than the company realizing that it should try to make money on the Mk-II now, even as it flies and tests it in preparation for eventually building the larger orbital version. If Dawn begins to win contracts using this prototype, it will then have the resources (as well as the ability to raise more investment capital) to advance to larger more powerful version.

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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:
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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.
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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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Blue Origin links the first and second stages of New Glenn for the first time

9:43 am

New Glenn finally stacked
Click for original image.

After more than a decade of development and five years overdue, Blue Origin earlier this week finally intergrated the two stages of its New Glenn rocket in preparation for its first launch.

The picture to the right shows the rocket stacked horizontally in Blue Origin’s rocket facility in Florida.

The company still has to roll the rocket out to the launchpad, raise it to a vertical position, and conduct at least one dress rehearsal countdown ending in a short static fire test of the first stage’s seven BE-4 engines. At the moment the company is targeting a November launch.

New Glenn is expected to make its maiden flight sometime in November, taking off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to KSC. The flight will carry one of the company’s new Blue Ring spacecraft on a National Security Space Launch certification flight known as DarkSky-1 and sponsored by the Defense Innovation Unit.

The original payload for this launch, two small NASA Mars orbiters, had been pulled because Blue Origin couldn’t get the rocket ready in time for its October launch window. Blue Ring is Blue Origin’s own orbital tug and satellite platform, and this flight is probably intended to get it certified for national security payloads.

The fast development of Blue Ring might give us a hint as to the changes to Blue Origin’s culture since Bezos replaced its previous CEO, Bob Smith, with Dave Limp in September 2023. Blue Ring was announced only one month later, and in just over a year it is now ready for its first launch. Such speedy development has not been the way at Blue Origin for years, if ever. If Limp has been able to instill that urgency across the entire company, then we shall some very exciting achievements from Blue Origin indeed in the next few years.

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AST Spacemobile signs multi-launch agreement with Blue Origin

9:24 am

The direct-to-cell satellite company AST Spacemobile announced yesterday that it has signed a multi-launch agreement with Blue Origin to use its New Glenn orbital rocket to place approximately sixty of its second generation BlueBird satellites into orbit in the 2025-2026 time frame.

The next-generation Block 2 BlueBirds are designed to deliver up to 10 times the bandwidth capacity of the BlueBird satellites in orbit today, accelerating the goal to achieve 24/7 continuous cellular broadband service coverage. The service will target approximately 100% U.S. nationwide coverage from space with over 5,600 coverage cells, with beams designed to support a capacity of up to 40 MHz, enabling peak data transmission speeds up to 120 Mbps, supporting voice, full data and video applications. The Block 2 BlueBirds, featuring up to 2,400 square foot communications arrays, will be the largest ever commercially deployed in low Earth orbit once launched, surpassing the current record held by AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 1-5 and BlueWalker 3, each ~700 square feet in size.

The Block 2 BlueBirds are designed to be compatible with all major launch vehicles. Blue Origin’s launch vehicle, the New Glenn, offers a seven-meter fairing enabling twice the payload volume of five-meter class commercial launch systems, and is well-suited to launching up to 8 of the largest-ever Block 2 BlueBirds.

According to this, the contract is for approximately 7 to 8 New Glenn launches. It also notes the large capacity of New Glenn apparently gives it an advantage over the rockets available from both SpaceX and ULA. If (the operative word) Blue Origin can finally get this rocket off the ground soon, it will then finally provide some real competition to SpaceX.

We shall see. New Glenn is five years behind schedule, and all signs suggest the company continues to move at a relatively slow pace compared to its competitors. It has said it wants to do the first New Glenn launch before the end of the year, but that remains uncertain.

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FAA forming new committee to revise its launch licensing regulations

9:14 am

The timing is interesting: The FAA yesterday announced that it wishes to form a committee of “members of the commercial space industry and academia” to revise its Part 450 launch license regulations that were introduced in 2021 supposedly to streamline the process but have instead served to squelch innovation and new rocket startups significantly.

“The FAA is seeking to update the licensing rule to foster more clarity, flexibility, efficiency, and innovation,” said FAA Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation Kelvin B. Coleman. “Making timely licensing determinations without compromising public safety is a top priority.”

The Part 450 rule was developed to streamline the regulations, reduce the number of times an operator would need to come to the FAA for a license approval and decrease the need for the FAA to process waivers, among other goals.

The committee will consist of members of the commercial space industry and academia and will focus on nine topics, including flight safety analyses, system safety, and means of compliance. It is expected to submit a report with recommended changes to Part 450 rule by late summer 2025. The FAA would then use the recommendations to plan future rulemaking actions. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words are a lie. While established rockets might have benefited — allowing more launches, Part 450 has practically squelched new development because it forces companies to undergo lengthy reviews every time they attempt to introduce any new technology or redesign to their rockets. SpaceX’s experience with Starship/Superheavy is only the tip of the iceberg, because the company is big enough that it has been able to survive these reviews and push on. Almost all of the new rocket startups that were on the verge of launching in 2020, before Part 450 went into effect, have either delayed launches for years or gone bankrupt.

The FAA hopes to conduct the first meeting of this new committee by the first week in December. It apparently realizes that the Trump administration is going to demand a major change in Part 450 (possibly a complete repeal), and the agency wishes to get ahead of this to maybe fix things.

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China launches Tianzhou cargo freighter to its Tiangong-3 space station

8:50 am

China today successfully launched a new Tianzhou cargo freighter to its Tiangong-3 space station, its Long March 7 rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

114 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 132 to 79, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 114 to 97.

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