Tag: spaceflight

NASA pushing for an SLS launch before the end of the year

9:40 am

According to a statement by NASA administrator Bill Nelson earlier this week, the agency is working hard in its stacking of the SLS rocket in Florida, with the goal of launching before the end of the year.

That statement was revealed in the last sentence of this article describing the work on getting SLS ready, work that appears to be moving along briskly with few surprises.

The present official targeted launch date is set for November. The agency had said it would take between six to ten months to get the rocket ready after the core stage arrived at Kennedy in May. This pointed to a launch sometime between November and March. Right now it appears that NASA is trying very hard to meet that earlier date.

This aggressive effort to launch on schedule is behavior quite out of character for the NASA of the past three decades. In the past, the agency would have moved leisurely along, so that those four months of margin would have almost certainly been used and the launch would have been delayed until March.

I suspect this push now to launch on time is partly generated by a fear that SpaceX’s Starship will reach orbit before SLS. If that happens it will be a major embarrassment to NASA, considering that the agency has spent about three times longer and ten times more money on its rocket than SpaceX.

Isn’t competition wonderful? It even makes government work more efficiently.

Stay tuned. There is still a lot of time between now and November. This race between comparable rockets being built by the government and a private company appears to be neck and neck as we head down the stretch.

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Thales Alenia to build first two modules of Axiom’s commercial space station

9:24 am

Capitalism in space: The Italian company Thales Alenia today announced it has finalized the contract to build the first two modules of Axiom’s private commercial space station, set to be docked to ISS initially but eventually to fly independent once ISS is decommissioned.

Total price for the contract is 110 million euros. According to the press release, they are targeting 2024 and 2025 for launching these modules, which will be able to house as many as eight residents.

Based on its past successful experience in building modules for the International Space Station, Thales Alenia Space is responsible for the design, development, assembly and test of the primary structure and the Micrometeoroid & Debris Protection System for the two Axiom modules.

The welding activities of the primary structure of the first module will start in September 2021, with the assembly process concluding in 2022. The first module will arrive at Axiom facilities in Houston in July 2023, where Axiom will integrate and outfit the core systems and certify it for flight prior to shipping to the launch facility.

With the launch of this station, human spaceflight in the United States will become completely independent of the federal government. Private companies will own the rockets, spacecraft, and stations, and the government will no longer have a major say on what goes on in space. The NASA bureaucracy that makes getting an experiment onto ISS cumbersome, difficult, and discouraging will be out of a job. (An example: In the 2000s American scientists studying plant growth in weightlessness ended up launching their experiments with the Russians because getting NASA approval turned out to be too difficult.)

This doesn’t mean that it will be easy to get a payload or experiment onto Axiom’s station. The demand will be quite high. It just means that the decision will no longer reside with the government, but with the private companies and citizens of the United States.

As it always should have been.

Furthermore, that the demand is going to exceed the supply will mean that additional stations will be built, and quickly, because the lure of profit will be there. For example, many of the commercial medical experiments that were on the verge of paying off but were shut down after the Challenger accident in 1986 could very well be brought back to life.

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Engineers report Hubble fix appears successfully

8:50 am

Engineers this morning announced that their attempt to switch to backup computer hardware on the Hubble Space Telescope was successful.

The switch included bringing online the backup Power Control Unit (PCU) and the backup Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF) on the other side of the Science Instrument and Command & Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit. The PCU distributes power to the SI C&DH components, and the CU/SDF sends and formats commands and data. In addition, other pieces of hardware onboard Hubble were switched to their alternate interfaces to connect to this backup side of the SI C&DH. Once these steps were completed, the backup payload computer on this same unit was turned on and loaded with flight software and brought up to normal operations mode.

They are now doing tests to make sure everything is working as expected, and preparing the telescope to bring it out of safe mode and resume science operations.

This is great news, but to bring everyone down to Earth, we must remember that Hubble no longer has any redundancy in this area. Should there be another similar computer failure, the telescope will then be dead in the water, with the only way to bring it back a manned or robotic mission — something we presently do not have the capacity to do — to replace these units.

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New images from Zhurong on Mars

10:37 pm

Zhurong's view north
Click for full image.

China today released three new images from its Zhurong Mars rover, showing that since their last release in late June the rover has traveled about 1,000 feet to the south to reach the parachute and backshell (or entry capsule), both released just before landing.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is the color panorama from that release, looking north. According to a translation of the Chinese press release, provided at this Space.com report, the image shows:

“The complete back cover structure after aerodynamic ablation, the attitude control engine diversion hole on the back cover is clearly identifiable,”

Below is an annotated orbital picture of this location taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in mid-June.
» Read more

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Winner of Blue Origin auction for suborbital flight will not fly on July 20th

11:13 am

Capitalism in space: Blue Origin today announced that the $28 million winner of the auction to buy a seat on the first commercial flight of its suborbital spacecraft New Shepard on July 20th will not be on board, and will instead be replaced by an 18-year-old.

Blue Origin announced Thursday that instead of a $28 million auction winner launching with founder Jeff Bezos on Tuesday, Dutch runner-up Oliver Daemen will be on board. The company said he’ll be the first paying customer, but did not disclose the price of his ticket. …According to Blue Origin, Daemen took a year off after graduating from high school last year to obtain his private pilot’s license. He’ll attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in September. His father is Joes Daemen, founder and CEO of Somerset Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Oisterwijk, Netherlands. Both father and son are already in the U.S. preparing for the launch, according to a company representative.

…Blue Origin said the yet-to-be-identified winner of the charity auction is stepping aside because of a scheduling conflict and will catch a future flight. Daemen was going to be on the second launch for paying customers.

The company has yet to open ticket sales or disclose its prices to the public. That’s expected following Bezos’ flight.

There are some puzzles here. Did Daemen bid during the auction? Was his bid second? If not, why has he been pushed to the head of the line, even before Blue Origin has opened ticket sales or announced its prices?

Moreover, much of this does seem to be hype and pr, rather than real achievement. More important would be an announcement saying that the BE-4 engine is finally ready, making possible orbital flights on New Glenn and ULA’s Vulcan rocket.

Nonetheless, it is nice that Bezos is taking this teenager into space, as is his decision to also give a seat to 82-year-old Wally Funk, one of the women who applied to fly during the Mercury program in the 1960s but was rejected.

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Thailand’s government approves new space law

10:00 am

The new colonial movement: The cabinet of Thailand has approved a new space law that will establish a space agency and establish a regulatory framework for both its private and public space industry.

The core principles included the planning of a policy to support both state and public sector participation in a “new space economy”, the creation of a national space policy committee to draw up space policy. The bill also sets up a national space administration agency to perform secretarial tasks for the national space policy committee, with a director that will have the power to appoint officials.

As the language of the bill is not available, it is unclear exactly what the bill does, other than establish a government framework for Thailand’s space industry. Its passage however illustrates the growing international passion for joining the new commercial effort in space. Thailand apparently does not wish to be left behind.

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India successfully completes static fire testing of rocket engine for human flights

9:55 am

The new colonial movement: India has successfully completed the third long duration static fire tests of its Vikas rocket engine, to be used on its planned manned space mission dubbed Gaganyaan.

[T]he Vikas engine is the workhorse liquid rocket engine powering the second stage of India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), second stage and the four strap-on stages of the Geosynchronous Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and the twin-engine core liquid stage (L110) of GSLV Mk-III.

Experts point out that the successful testing is necessary as the testing is part of the human rating of a rocket that was not originally designed to launch humans into space. Every space agency follows its own standards of human rating of a launch vehicle and there are no global standards. “This test is one of the critical items which need to be checked in human rating GSLV Mk-III. Semi-Cryogenic engine SE-200 which will replace Vikas is still under development and its developmental times will not match the ambitious Gaganyaan timelines. Vikas is one of the most reliable engines in the world and has proved its mettle.

If you look at PSLV, GSLV Mk-II and GSLV Mk-III missions where Vikas has been used, the burn profile or duration is approximately around 150-160s only on a typical flight. Testing its performance above its designed operational limit is essential to ensure engine reliability against any event of a mishap.

In other words, for the manned mission Vikas will have to burn for a much longer time than its normal profile. They have now successfully shown that it can handle that long burn time.

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Bezos donates $200 million to Air & Space Museum

9:48 am

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin and about to fly on the first commercial suborbital flight of his New Shepard spacecraft, today announced the donation of $200 million to the Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

The Smithsonian said $70 million of the money would support museum renovations. The other $130 million would go toward building a new education center at the museum called the Bezos Learning Center to inspire students to promote innovation and explore careers in science, math and engineering.

While this is a very gracious and generous act, in the long run it might actually have been better for Bezos to have used this money to get his rocket company off the ground. Success in that manner would be far more effective in inspiring students. Once Blue Origin is actually launching humans into orbit to explore the heavens such a donation might have made better sense. Those student would not only be inspired by the achievement, Bezos would then be providing them a way to join in.

Still, the gift will do much to help maintain the nation’s capabilities in space. Good for Bezos.

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FAA threatens shutdown of SpaceX’s Starship program at Boca Chica

9:33 am

Banned by the FAA?
Starship banned by the FAA?

They’re coming for you next: An FAA official revealed yesterday that the agency has not approved the launch tower that SpaceX is building for its Starship/Superheavy rocket in Boca Chica, Texas, and threatened that if disapproved the government would force the company to tear it down.

The Federal Aviation Administration warned Elon Musk’s SpaceX in a letter two months ago that the company’s work on a launch tower for future Starship rocket launches is yet unapproved, and will be included in the agency’s ongoing environmental review of the facility in Boca Chica, Texas. “The company is building the tower at its own risk,” an FAA spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday, noting that the environmental review could recommend taking down the launch tower.

The FAA last year began an environmental review of SpaceX’s Starship development facility, as Musk’s company said it planned to apply for licenses to launch the next-generation rocket prototypes from Boca Chica. While the FAA completed an environmental assessment of the area in 2014, that review was specific to SpaceX’s much-smaller Falcon series of rockets.

This revelation from FAA officials is most interestingly timed, coming on the same day as this garbage article about the terrible environmental damages some activists imagine SpaceX’s launch facility might someday cause. As is usual for a mainstream news source, the article makes no reference to the wildlife preserve that surrounds the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where we have empirical proof for more than a half century that a spaceport does no harm to the environment and actually acts to protect it from development.

Nor was this the only such attack article in the past two days. Here is just a sampling:
» Read more

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Blue Origin distributes $19 million of the $28 million earned for its July 20th suborbital flight

1:23 pm

Blue Origin today announced the nineteen non-profits that will receive $1 million each, taken from the $28 million that a single as-yet unnamed person is paying to fly with Jeff Bezos on the first commercial suborbital manned flight of New Shepard on July 20, 2021.

All of the organizations are advocates for space exploration. A majority foster education for the young. Two are pro-women, pushing gender politics in space.

The remaining $9 million will be used by Blue Origin’s non-profit to encourage space-focused curriculum and its project to encourage people to send postcards into suborbital space on its New Shepard spacecraft.

All in all the list of recipients surprised me. I had expected this money to go to many of the very leftist environmental groups that Jeff Bezos loves. Instead, the list is entirely space-focused, though it does tend to favor organizations that mostly aim to maintain the status quo of a big government space program or push for gender or racial politics. That there is a large variety of organizations that push many different approaches to encouraging space exploration however is refreshing.

Nonetheless, except for a few that actually educate children, most are advocacy groups. Compare that to the charity being produced by SpaceX’s first manned commercial flight in September, dubbed Inspiration4. That flight is pumping big bucks directly into St. Jude’s Research Hospital to help it cure children from cancer.

Which do you think is doing more for the world?

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Hubble update: Engineers pinpoint issue, prepare to fix it

12:38 pm

In an update today on the status for bringing the Hubble Space Telescope back into science operations, the engineers say they think they have pinpointed the failed unit, and are ready to do the switch to a backup.

A series of multi-day tests, which included attempts to restart and reconfigure the computer and the backup computer, were not successful, but the information gathered from those activities has led the Hubble team to determine that the possible cause of the problem is in the Power Control Unit (PCU).

The PCU also resides on the SI C&DH unit. It ensures a steady voltage supply to the payload computer’s hardware. The PCU contains a power regulator that provides a constant five volts of electricity to the payload computer and its memory. A secondary protection circuit senses the voltage levels leaving the power regulator. If the voltage falls below or exceeds allowable levels, this secondary circuit tells the payload computer that it should cease operations. The team’s analysis suggests that either the voltage level from the regulator is outside of acceptable levels (thereby tripping the secondary protection circuit), or the secondary protection circuit has degraded over time and is stuck in this inhibit state.

Because no ground commands were able to reset the PCU, the Hubble team will be switching over to the backup side of the SI C&DH unit that contains the backup PCU. All testing of procedures for the switch and associated reviews have been completed, and NASA management has given approval to proceed. The switch will begin Thursday, July 15, and, if successful, it will take several days to completely return the observatory to normal science operations.

Engineers did a similar switch in 2008, so they are very confident it will work this time also. However, once done, the telescope will no longer have backups for any of these computer modules. The next failure in any of them will shut the telescope down, for good.

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Craters on Ganymede’s striped surface

11:27 am

Craters on Ganymede
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, is a color enhanced section taken from of one of the images taken by Juno when it did a close fly-by of the Jupiter moon Ganymede back on June 7, 2021.

The enhancement was done by citizen scientist Navaneeth Krishnan, using a wider Juno image of Ganymeded enhanced by citizen scientist Kevin Gill. That wider image is below, and marks the area covered by this first image with a white box.

In this one picture we can see many of the geological mysteries that have puzzled scientists since the Galileo orbiter first took close-up images back in the 1990s. We can see patches of grooved terrain with the grooves in the different patches often oriented differently. We can also see bright and dark patches that while they overlay the grooved terrain they bear no correspondence to those grooved patches. And on top of it all are these small craters, impacts that obviously occurred after the formation of the grooves.
» Read more

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NASA awards three contracts to develop nuclear propulsion concepts

10:13 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded three different contracts to three different corporation partnerships to develop new nuclear propulsion concepts for use in space.

The contracts, to be awarded through the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL), are each valued at approximately $5 million. They fund the development of various design strategies for the specified performance requirements that could aid in deep space exploration.

Nuclear propulsion provides greater propellant efficiency as compared with chemical rockets. It’s a potential technology for crew and cargo missions to Mars and science missions to the outer solar system, enabling faster and more robust missions in many cases.

The contracts went to these partnerships:

  • Lockheed Martin and BWX Technologies
  • Aerojet Rocketdyne, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems, and X-energy
  • Blue Origin, Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies, Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, General Electric Hitachi Nuclear Energy, General Electric Research, Framatome, and Materion

Once the concepts are put forth at the end of the 12-month contracts, the DOE’s laboratory will review them and make recommendations to NASA for further work.

This contract, along with other NASA contracts to develop nuclear power for use on planetary surfaces, strongly suggests that the fear of using nuclear power in space is receding. If so, the capabilities in space will increase significantly in the coming years.

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Facebook gets out of satellite business; “sells” its employees to Amazon

10:02 am

Capitalism in space: Facebook has now apparently abandoned a project to launch its own communications satellites and instead has made a deal with Amazon whereby it sold its satellite division to the Bezos-founded company, where they joined Amazon’s Kuiper communications satellite project.

Over the past year, Amazon has revealed details about Project Kuiper’s antenna design, selected United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket for the initial satellite launches, and acquired still more office space for Kuiper employees in Redmond.

According to The Information, the employees who came to Kuiper from Facebook in April are based in the Los Angeles area. They are said to include physicists as well as optical, prototyping, mechanical and software engineers who have worked on aeronautical systems and wireless networks. One of the employees, Jin Bains, was formerly Facebook’s head of Southern California connectivity and is now described on his LinkedIn page as a director on the Project Kuiper team.

The Information reported that Amazon paid Facebook as part of the deal for the employee switchover, but did not provide further details. “It’s not unheard of for big companies to buy groups of employees from one another, just as they often buy small startups to beef up staff in various parts of their business,” The Information’s Sarah Krouse and Sylvia Varnham O’Regan explained. [emphasis mine]

This deal reveals a number of immediate facts, as well as one long term troubling one. First, it indicates as mentioned Facebook’s abandonment of its space ambitions.

Second, it suggests that Amazon might finally be recognizing that the people running its Kuiper satellite project are taking far too long to get it off the ground. Though proposed approximately the same time as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, Kuiper remains unlaunched with no launches even scheduled, while SpaceX has more than 1,500 satellites in orbit, has been providing test service to customers in selected areas, and is about to become operational globally. This difference is achievement might be explained by this fact: The person Amazon hired to run its Kuiper project was someone Elon Musk fired in 2018 from his Starlink project because that person was taking too long to get it built and launched.

The new hires suggest that Amazon might have finally recognized this issue.

Finally, the long term troubling fact.
» Read more

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Clashing layers in Mars’ largest canyon

1:20 pm

Clashing layers on a mountain slope on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on May 27, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows the clash of different layers on the western slope of a mountain within Mars’ largest canyon, Valles Marineris.

The scientist have labeled this a “possible angular unconformity.” In geology an unconformity generally refers to a gap in a series of layers, a period when instead of the layers being deposited they are being eroded away, leaving no record for that time period. An angular unconformity adds tilting to the older layers, which after erosion are then covered by new layers that are oriented somewhat differently.

Based on these definitions, what the scientists suspect is that the brighter layers to the left and lower down the mountain are older. After a period of erosion new layers were deposited on top at a different angle, forming the stripe of layers going from center left up to center right.

The swirly nature of the material on the top of the ridge suggests to me that these layers might be volcanic in nature, but that’s a pure uneducated guess. What some scientists do believe (but have not yet conclusively proven) is that the lower older layers are sediments laid down by an ancient lake that once filled the canyon here.

The overview map below provides a wider view and some context.
» Read more

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SpaceX unveils third drone ship for landing Falcon 9 boosters

9:34 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk yesterday unveiled the completion of its third drone ship for landing Falcon 9 boosters in the ocean and returning them to port.

The new ship will be put in place in Florida to support Atlantic launches of Falcon Heavy and the flagship rocket of SpaceX, the Falcon 9, that regularly sends Starlink broadband satellites to orbit and NASA astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, among other customer requests.

This will give the company two drone ships in Florida and one in California, allowing them to do launches at an even faster pace than the one launch every 2 weeks or so since the beginning of the year. The ship also is designed to be more efficient than the older ships, no longer requiring a tug to take it out into the Atlantic.

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House slams military for not reforming contracting for space missions

9:28 am

Government marches on, to nowhere! The House Appropriations Committee has issued a report strongly criticizing the Air Force and the new Space Force for its failure to reform in any way its contract acquisition management, even though that was the prime reason Congress created the Space Force in the first place.

The report dedicates an entire page to detailing the committee’s dissatisfaction with what it sees as foot-dragging on space acquisition reform — which was one of the primary congressional rationales for the creation of the new space service in the first place. Indeed, the [appropriations committee] reiterates: “The Committee believes the Space Force was established to bring greater attention and focus to fixing its acquisition issues because previous attempts to do so did not produce lasting results.”

The [committee’s] concerns include that that Department of the Air Force — which oversees the Space Force much as the Navy oversees the Marine Corp — still has no clear plan for creating a separate management chain for space acquisition. Similar concerns were voiced at a May hearing by both the chair and ranking members of the HAC defense subcommittee, Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., and Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., respectively.

None of this should be a surprise. The reason the Space Force was advocated by some reformers was to get it out from under Air Force control and allow it to decide for itself what it needed. The belief was that this would streamline contracting and project development.

The fear, which I expressed repeatedly, was that the swamp in Washington would instead use this as an opportunity not to streamline operations but to create a whole new bureaucracy. That is standard operating procedure for government bureaucracies. Any time Congress has mandated a new agency designed to reduce bureaucracy it has for more than a century instead led to a larger bureaucracy, with nothing streamlined.

It appears the latter is what is now happening with the Space Force.

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Superheavy passes first tank test

9:17 am

Superheavy after tank test, July 12, 2021
Screen capture from NASASpaceflight.com live stream,
shortly after tank test of Superheavy

Capitalism in space: SpaceX’s first fullscale complete Superheavy prototype, dubbed #3, passed its first tank test yesterday.

Booster 3 was likely filled with a few hundred tons of liquid nitrogen relative to the more than 3000 tons its tanks could easily hold and the fraction of that total capacity SpaceX’s suborbital launch site can actually supply. Teams have been working around the clock for months to outfit Starship’s first orbital launch site with enough propellant storage for at least one or two back to back orbital launches – on the order of 10,000 tons (~22M lb) – but the nascent tank farm is far from even partially operational. That’s left SpaceX with its ground testing and suborbital Starship launch facilities, which appear to be able to store around 1200 tons of propellant.

Assuming the suborbital pad’s main liquid oxygen and methane tanks can also both store and distribute liquid nitrogen, which isn’t guaranteed, SpaceX thus has the ability to fill approximately 30-40% of Super Heavy B3’s usable volume. Frost lines aren’t always a guaranteed sign of fill level but if they’re close, SpaceX likely filled Booster 3’s tanks just 5-10% of the way during the rocket’s first cryoproof.

While the company still says it is aiming for a July orbital launch, that seems highly unlikely. They still have to do a Superheavy tank test with full tanks, plus static fire tests. They also need to get the orbital launchpad finished, with a full tank farm.

Nonetheless, SpaceX is moving fast towards flight of this heavy lift reusable rocket. I still think the odds are 50-50 it will complete its first orbital flight before SLS, even though its development began more than a decade later and has cost a tenth of the money ($6 billion vs $60 billion).

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FAA approves Blue Origin’s license for commercial suborbital passenger flights

8:51 am

Capitalism in space: The FAA has approved the launch license for Blue Origin, allowing it to fly a commercial suborbital passenger flight using its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft later this month.

The company, founded by the former Amazon.com chief, is approved to conduct space flight missions from its Launch Site One facility in West Texas. The license is valid through August. “To gain license approval to carry humans, Blue Origin was required to verify that its launch vehicle’s hardware and software worked safely and as intended during a test flight,” the FAA said in a statement to FOX Business.

Bezos is scheduled to fly into space on July 20 on New Shepard’s 16th flight. Liftoff is targeted for 8 p.m. CDT, the company said. … The launch date marks the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Bezos assigned himself to the flight just a month ago and asked his brother, Mark, to join him. Accompanying them will be a $28 million auction winner and Wally Funk, one of the last surviving members of the Mercury 13 who was chosen as an “honored guest.”

Expect the same kind of hype surrounding this short suborbital flight that accompanied Richard Branson’s flight this past weekend. The real big deal however will begin in September, when regular orbital tourist flights begin, with one almost every month for the rest of the year.

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Virgin Galactic shares crash after Branson flight

8:44 am

Capitalism in space: The price of the stock for Virgin Galactic plummeted 17% shortly after Richard Branson’s flight on July 11th, experiencing its worst day in more than a year.

The drop occurred shortly after the company announced it was going to sell an additional $500 million in new shares.

Virgin Galactic, which trades under the ticker SPCE, fell 17.3% after it filed notice of its stock sale offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Trading in Virgin Galactic was briefly halted Monday morning due to volatility.

The drop in price is likely a reflection of several things, none of which reflects negatively on the overall bright picture for commercial space. First, the release of new stock meant the supply was greater than demand, and thus the price dropped. Second, Branson’s flight, while grand, also highlighted its limitations. While there certainly appears to be a market for suborbital tourism, I suspect the arrival of regular and likely increasingly cheaper orbital flights will cut into this market. In comparison, a short five minutes of weightlessness cannot compare with spending a week in orbit.

Third, Virgin Galactic as a company has nowhere to go. The rocket is essentially an engineering dead end. It can do suborbital flights relatively cheaply and quickly, but the demand for such flights is limited, especially with the arrival of relatively cheaper orbital access.

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The bell of freedom rings in space

12:31 pm

The Liberty Bell
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

Not surprisingly the mainstream press today was agog with hundreds of stories about Richard Branson’s suborbital space flight yesterday on Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spaceplane.

The excitement and joy over this success is certainly warranted. Back in 2004 Branson set himself the task of creating a reusable suborbital space plane he dubbed SpaceShipTwo, modeled after the suborbital plane that had won the Ansari X-Prize and intended to sell tickets so that private citizens would have the ability to go into space.

His flight yesterday completed that journey. The company he founded and is slowly selling off so that he is only a minority owner now has a vehicle that for a fee can take anyone up to heights ranging from 50 to 60 miles, well within the U.S. definition of space.

Nonetheless, if you rely on the media frenzy about this particular flight to inform you about the state of commercial space you end up having a very distorted picture of this new blossoming industry. Branson’s achievement, as great as it is, has come far too late. Had he done it a decade ago, as he had promised, he would have achieved something historic, proving what was then considered impossible, that private enterprise, using no government resources, could make space travel easy and common.

Now, however, he merely joins the many other private enterprises that are about to fly into space, with most doing it more frequently and with far greater skill and at a much grander scale than Virgin Galactic. His flight is no longer historic. It is merely one of many that is about to reshape space exploration forever.

Consider the upcoming schedule of already paid for commercial manned flights:
» Read more

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Israeli nonprofit that built Beresheet-1 raises $70 million for Beresheet-2

8:23 am

SpaceIL, the Israeli nonprofit company that built the Beresheet-1 lunar lander/rover that crashed just before landing in 2019 has now raised $70 million of the $100 million it needs to build Beresheet-2.

SpaceIL said the new pledges means that it has raised almost all of the $100 million it estimates is needed for the mission to meet its 2024 launch target. SpaceIL said the funding would come from South African-Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn, who bankrolled much of the first mission, French-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi and South African philanthropist Martin Moshal, co-founder of venture capital firm Entree Capital.

A number of the engineers who helped build the first Beresheet have since moved on, forming their own company as well as getting hired by the American startup rocket company Firefly. Still, there is no reason Beresheet-2 cannot be built and flown, especially if SpaceIL focuses on rebuilding it rather than redesigning something new. They came very close to a success, and probably only need some tweaking to make the next attempt succeed.

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Virgin Galactic finally flies Richard Branson on its reusable suborbital Unity spacecraft

12:05 pm

Capitalism in space: After almost two decades of development and almost as many false promises by Richard Branson, Branson today finally flew on his SpaceShipTwo ship dubbed VSS Unity.

Unity was taken to about 45,000 feet by the carrier airplane WhiteKnightTwo, where it was released and its engines fired.

Once VSS Unity’s rocket engine cut off, the spacecraft’s momentum took it to an altitude of around 90 kilometers. This is above the minimum altitude of 80 kilometers required by the US Air Force, NASA, and the FAA to grant astronaut wings, and is above the discernible atmosphere. This apogee, or maximum altitude, is below the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI) recognized boundary of space at 100 kilometers, which SpaceShipOne crossed twice to claim the X-Prize in 2004.

The craft spent around five minutes in weightlessness, with the crew evaluating the experience and looking at Earth and space from 17 windows on the craft, before they strapped back into their seats for reentry.

I have embedded below the fold the NASASpaceflight.com live feed, cued to just before Unity was dropped from WhiteKnightTwo. The commentary is far less offensive than the blather on the official live feed, but they end up losing the view from their live feed and switched to the Virgin Galactic live feed, rewinding it to pick it up just before the drop. You then see that feed, with good images and with all the blather, but no interior video during the weightless period. I suspect they want to edit that footage before releasing it, just in case anyone had vomited or Branson looked uncomfortable in any way.

Overall, Virgin Galactic deserves congratulations for finally accomplishing this flight. That it took so long and occurred just before the start of commercial manned orbital flights unfortunately pops the balloon on this achievement. The flight was so short that it now seems somewhat disappointing compared to the upcoming orbital tourist flights.

The next suborbital flight by Blue Origin on July 20th, and unlike today’s Virgin Galactic flight, will carry the first paying passenger, making it the first wholly financed and built private commercial space flight.
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Northrop Grumman wins contract to build Lunar Gateway’s habitable module

10:03 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that it has awarded Northrop Grumman the construction contract for building HALO, (Habitation and Logistics Outpost), the module where astronauts will live and work on its Lunar Gateway space station.

Combined with earlier development contracts this contract, worth $935 million, brings the total fixed-price cost to about $1.1 billion.

[HALO], one of the first for the Gateway, will serve as a habitat for visiting astronauts and a command post for the lunar orbiting facility. It will have docking ports for Orion spacecraft, cargo vehicles like SpaceX’s Dragon XL and lunar landers, as well as for later modules to be added by international partners. HALO is based on the Cygnus spacecraft that Northrop Grumman uses to transport cargo to the International Space Station, but extensively modified with docking ports, enhanced life support and other new subsystems.

This module is not expected to launch before 2024. Moreover, it is supposed to work in conjunction with what NASA calls its Artemis 3 mission, the third launch of SLS and the first to dock with Gateway. SLS however is so far only funded through its first two flights, and has a schedule that is presently highly uncertain.

There is great irony here. HALO, based on the Cygnus cargo freighter, will be about that size. If the present schedule for SpaceX’s Starship continues as expected, it will be flying to the Moon at about the same time, and will have a cargo bay big enough to store several Cygnus freighters inside. And though no work has yet been done to make that cargo bay habitable, Starship’s cost per launch, about $2 million, is so far below the $1.1 billion cost for HALO that it will certainly cost much less than HALO to make it a habitable station. And it will be gigantic in comparison.

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China launches 5 military reconnaissance satellites

9:37 am

Using its Long March 6 rocket, China today successfully launched five military reconnaissance satellites.

This is China’s fourth successful launch in the past week.

Though this newer rocket’s first stage does not use toxic hypergolic fuels — China’s older rockets — that first stage still crashes in China after its job is done and it falls to Earth. No word on whether it landed near inhabited regions.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

22 China
20 SpaceX
11 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 29 to 22 in the national rankings.

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Ingenuity’s view of Jezero Crater during its 9th flight

11:57 am

Ingenuity looks across Jezero Crater
Click for full image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The photo above, cropped, enhanced, and reduced to post here, was taken on July 5, 2021, about thirty seconds after Ingenuity had taken off on its 9th flight on Mars. I have increased the contrast slightly to bring out the features. This is a raw image, so I do not think the colors are accurate, and I also do not know why the middle of the image is brighter than the edges.

The red lines on the map to the right indicates the general area this image captures. Essentially, once the helicopter reached its flying altitude after liftoff the engineers had it tilt so that it could see the route it was about to take to the southwest. As they noted in their description of this flight,

We began by dipping into what looks like a heavily eroded crater, then continued to descend over sloped and undulating terrain before climbing again to emerge on a flat plain to the southwest.

I think that crater is visible on the left edge of this picture.

So far 180 raw images from Ingenuity have arrived at JPL. There might be a few more, but I think this is the bulk from the flight. Of these, all but nine are black and white and point straight down. The nine color images seem tilted up towards the horizon to various degrees, though the image above is the only one that captures the horizon itself and the distance mountains of Jezero Crater’s rim.

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Watching Virgin Galactic’s suborbital flight on July 11th

10:24 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic has now made available the live stream for its planned suborbital flight on July 11th that will also carry the company’s founder, Richard Branson.

I have embedded the live stream below the fold. Though the company has not announced an actual launch time, according to that stream the broadcast is now scheduled to begin at about 9 am (Eastern). The flight itself should last about ninety minutes total, from takeoff of the carrier airplane to landing of both it and the suborbital spacecraft, VSS Unity.

The weightless portion of the flight will last about four minutes or so. Unity will get to more than 50 miles altitude, which meets the American definition of space but not the international standard of 67 miles. For more details about the flight, see this Space.com article.

Expect the broadcast to be filled with endless hype and blather about how “spectacular” and “amazing” and “wonderful” Virgin Galactic is. And yes, what the company is doing is very cool, a privately financed manned spacecraft capable of reaching space, returning to Earth, and then flying again. Unfortunately, both suborbital companies (Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin) seem to think they have to convince people of this obvious fact on their broadcasts, and scream it at the viewers endlessly. They would be wiser to take SpaceX’s soft-sell approach: State once what they are accomplishing and then simply report on what actually happens, with no breathless commentary.

I don’t expect that to happen however. Thus, I’m not sure I can stomach hours on end of Virgin Galactic PR hype on Sunday, especially considering that this spaceflight by Branson is more than a decade late. His own endless hype for the last fifteen years, promising over and over again that he would be flying in mere months, has soured me from any desire to listen to more. Maybe I’ll go on a hike instead.
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British startup rocket company wants to recover only satellite launched by UK

10:08 am

Capitalism in space: Skyrora, a British startup rocket company which is attempting to build the first rocket using hypersonic technology, has now issued a challenge to the commercial space industry to come up with a plan to snatch from orbit the only satellite ever launched by a rocket built by the United Kingdom and bring it back safely to Earth.

Edinburgh-based rocket company Skyrora is issuing a challenge to find a way to retrieve the Prospero satellite. The object was the first and only UK spacecraft to be launched on a British rocket, from Australia in 1971. It’s defunct now, obviously, but is still circling the globe on an elliptical orbit some 1,000km up.

Skyrora, who will soon start sending up rockets from Scotland, regards the satellite as an important piece of UK space heritage. The company has already recovered part of the Black Arrow vehicle that placed Prospero in orbit. This fell back to Australia in the course of the mission where it languished for decades in the Outback until the firm had it shipped home and put on display.

Now, Skyrora is looking for ideas as to how best to approach and grab hold of the 66kg satellite, whose original mission was to investigate the space environment.

After that single successful launch of Black Arrow, the British government decided to abandon it, and in fact for the next half century refused to invest any money in space, at all. While the decision was probably economically wise for the government, it also did not do anything to encourage a private space industry, and for the next half century there was none in the UK. This is now finally changing, but fortunately not as a government space program like Black Arrow but as a competitive private launch industry aimed at profit.

Recovering Prospero would be a nice public relations stunt that might help further encourage that private industry.

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NASA to scientists: Don’t expect to use SLS for science missions for at least a decade

9:58 am

In a briefing held by the planetary science community to propose its future missions for the next decade, a NASA official explained that there will likely be no available launches on NASA’s SLS rocket for planetary missions until the late 2020s, and more likely not until the next decade.

While NASA has a goal of being able to launch three SLS missions in a 24-month period, and two in 12 months, the supply chain is currently limited to one SLS per year. That will change by the early 2030s, [the official] said, growing to two per year and thus creating opportunities for additional SLS missions beyond the Artemis program. That will be enabled by changes to at the Michoud Assembly Facility to increase core stage production and a “block upgrade” to the RS-25 engine used on that core stage that will be cheaper and faster to produce.

The official also claimed that the cost of buying a launch on SLS is at best going to be $800 million, but that price won’t be available until the ’30s when SLS’s are launching more frequently. Until then, it appears NASA will charge one billion per launch.

All of this is pure fantasy on NASA’s part. Once cheaper and more usable private commercial rockets come on line, such as SpaceX’s Starship, SLS will go the way of the horse buggy. And this is likely to happen much sooner than 2030, more likely in the next three years.

Moreover, for both cost and practical reasons I cannot see any planetary scientist planning a mission on SLS, ever. There are now much cheaper options that are actually flying, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which costs about $100 million per launch. Moreover, SLS’s slow and cumbersome launch pace should scare any planetary scientist away, as such missions must launch on time, and SLS might easily miss their launch windows. In fact, this has already happened. For years Congress mandated that Europa Clipper launch on SLS. When it became clear that SLS would not be available for that mission’s launch window, Congress finally relented and allowed NASA to buy the launch from a commercial company.

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China targets 2024 for next lunar sample return mission

9:42 am

The new colonial movement: China’s next robotic lunar sample return mission, called Chang’e-6 and targeted for a 2024 launch, will also attempt to bring back the first samples from the far side of the Moon.

Hu Hao, chief engineer of the China Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, announced in a statement released on China’s national space day in April this year that the Chang’e 6 probe, consisting of an orbiter, lander, lunar ascent vehicle and reentry capsule, will target the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin.The SPA basin is a colossal, ancient impact crater roughly 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) in diameter that covers almost a quarter of the moon’s far side. The impact basin, considered to be the oldest on the moon, holds vital clues about the history of the moon and the solar system, according to a new report.

The precise spot for landing has not been revealed. Since the basin is so large and covers the Moon’s south pole, the mission could land in that region where ice is thought to possibly exist in the permanently shadowed floors of some craters. Whether they would attempt a landing in one of those craters is presently unknown, though unlikely because of the technical challenge.

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