Tag: spaceflight

NASA buys 18 new space shuttle engines for SLS for $1.79 billion

8:09 am

NASA has awarded Aerojet Rocketdyne a $1.79 billion contract to build 18 new space shuttle R-25 engines for its still unlaunched SLS rocket.

In plain math, that equals $100 million per engine. Since SLS uses four of these engines per launch, and since that rocket is entirely expendable and will thus throw these engines away after each launch, that guarantees each SLS launch must cost no less than $400 million, about four times the price of a Falcon Heavy launch.

But wait, there’s more! Eric Berger at Ars Technica notes

NASA has previously given more than $1 billion to Aerojet to “restart” production of the space shuttle era engines and a contract for six new ones. So, according to the space agency, NASA has spent $3.5 billion for a total of 24 rocket engines. That comes to $146 million per engine. (Or 780,000 bars of Gold-Pressed Latinum, as this is a deal only the Ferengi could love.)

That means each SLS launch must cost a minimum of just under $600 million, and that’s just the price for the four engines. It doesn’t include the rocket itself, the ground systems, its upper stages, or any other component.

But wait, there’s more! Berger also reminds us that SpaceX estimates the cost to build each its Starship Raptor engines to be about $1 million, and each will be used multiple times. He also points out that the Raptor is actually more powerful than the R-25 engine.

That’s okay though. This is the federal government, run by Washington, whose goal for the few decades has been to let no project succeed, and to waste as much money as possible in the process. And if they can squelch the dreams and aspirations of everyone else as they do it, so much the better!

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Sierra Nevada names its first Dream Chaser spacecraft “Tenacity”

7:52 am

Capitalism in space: Sierra Nevada yesterday announced that it is giving the name “Tenacity” to its first Dream Chaser spacecraft.

Though the press release does not say so, this decision essentially confirms the company intention to build more Dream Chaser spacecraft, once this one proves itself in flight. And I would expect those later craft will be aimed at manned flight.

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SpaceShipTwo Unity makes first New Mexico glide flight

7:42 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic’s Unity suborbital spaceship successfully completed its first glide test flight from its New Mexico launch site yesterday.

They still have not set a date for their first commercial flights, so the company still claims those first flights will occur this year. I will believe it when I see it.

There does appear to be one apparent positive development for Virgin Galactic. It increasingly appears as if Blue Origin is slowly abandoning its effort to compete for suborbital tourism with its New Shepard spacecraft. Blue Origin has not said so, but the extreme slow down in test flights the last two strongly implies it. Moreover, that company’s success in garnering big government contracts, a billion from the military for its orbital New Glenn rocket and about a half billion from NASA for its proposed Blue Moon manned lunar lander, reinforces the sense that the company is shifting its focus away from suborbital space.

If so, that will clear the market for Virgin Galactic, assuming a viable market still exists with the coming of private commercial orbital spaceships like Dragon and Starliner.

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NASA delays 1st SLS launch again

9:55 pm

NASA has now made official what had been expected for months, announcing a new delay of the first unmanned test flight of its SLS rocket from March 2021 to November 2021.

The article tries to put a lot of the blame for this new delay on the shut down over the Wuhan panic, but that shut down will only stop work for at most two months. The new delay however adds eight months to the schedule, showing that they probably were never going to meet that March 2021 deadline, and are using COVID-19 as a cover for the program’s continuing problems, delays, and cost overruns.

Should this unmanned flight take place in November 2021, it will have taken NASA about seventeen years and about $60 billion to get to that first flight. They say the first manned mission is scheduled in late 2022 or early 2023. If true would mean it took NASA about two decades to achieve a single manned flight since Bush Jr. proposed it.

Of course, that is making the very unlikely assumption that there will be no further delays before that first manned flight. I personally am very confident there will be.

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Funding breakdown for three lunar landing contracts

3:47 pm

Capitalism in space: The contracts awarded by NASA yesterday to build manned lunar landers totaled almost a billion dollars, distributed as follows:

  • Blue Origin: $579 million
  • Dynetics: $253 million
  • SpaceX: $135 million

That Blue Origin got the biggest amount might have to do with the bid’s subcontractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. This gives these traditional big space partners, who normally rely on these kinds of government contracts and have little ability to make money outside them, some financing. This will also please their political backers in Congress.

For SpaceX, this is the first time they have taken any government money in connection with Starship. It also appears that NASA is going to stay back and generally let SpaceX develop it without undue interference.

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Scientists better constrain time frame of Mars’ active dynamo

12:33 pm

Using data from the MAVEN orbiter, scientists have now constrained the time frame when Mars’ dynamo was active and producing a global magnetic field, between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago.

Magnetism in certain rocks on Mars’ surface indicate that the Martian dynamo was active between 4.3 and 4.2 billion years ago, but the absence of magnetism over three large basins – Hellas, Argyre, and Isidis – that formed 3.9 billion years ago has led most scientists to believe the dynamo was inactive by that time.

Mittelholz’s team analyzed new data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter and found clear evidence of a magnetic field coming from the Lucus Planum lava flow that formed about 3.7 billion years ago – much later than at other areas studied.

There is of course a lot of uncertainty here.

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Europa’s mysterious stained grooves

11:18 am

Europa's jumbled icepack
Click for full image.

From 1995 to 2003 the Galileo orbiter circled Jupiter 34 times. During those orbits the spacecraft made numerous close fly-bys of Jupiter’s moons, including eleven past the tantalizingly mysterious moon Europa.

The image to the right was taken during the eighth fly-by of Europa. It is one of three Galileo images of Europa that scientists have pulled from the Galileo archive and subjected to modern computer processing in order to improve what can be seen. The other two can be found here and here. From the release for the image to the right:

All three images were captured along the same longitude of Europa as Galileo flew by on Sept. 26, 1998, in the spacecraft’s 17th orbit of Jupiter (orbit E17). It was the eighth of Galileo’s 11 targeted flybys of Europa. High-resolution images were taken through a clear filter in grayscale (black and white). Using lower-resolution, color images of the same region from a different flyby (orbit E14), technicians recently mapped color onto the higher-resolution images.

In other words, they laid the colors from a lower resolution color image on top of the high resolution black & white image so that we could see these three images in color. The blue and white areas are made of up water ice, while the reddish areas are made up of “more non-ice materials.”

The vagueness for describing the non-ice materials is intentional, as scientists still do not know what they made of. They do believe that this material came from the planet’s interior, as the red material is always found aligned with the cracks, fissures, and grooves, as illustrated clear by this image.

What has always struck me about this surface of Europa since I first saw similar Galileo images back in 1998 and wrote about them for the magazine The Sciences is how much it resembles the Arctic ice pack as seen by early explorers during their attempts to reach the North Pole, jumbled jigsaw pieces of ice packed together but moving slowly so that the cracks between them shift and change over time.

The resemblance adds weight to the theory that there is a liquid ocean below Europa’s icepack, and the red material hints at some intriguing chemistry coming from that ocean.

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Starlink satellites, not aliens, are those strings of lights in the night sky

1:12 pm

Apparently many people have been seeing the reflected strings of SpaceX’s new Starlink satellites in the night sky, and are calling news organizations asking about them.

Some viewers have noticed the “lights” in the sky will go dark, one by one. This is due to the reflection of light from the moon and Earth and how the position of the satellites change.

Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, detailed a plan this week to “mitigate the impact of their Starlink satellite constellation on night sky observation,” according to an article on Tech Crunch.

In that Tech Crunch article, Musk describes how they are installing sun visors on the satellites to prevent the reflections and make them hopefully invisible to the Earthbound observers.

This will make the astronomy crowd happy, which wants its new big ground-based telescopes to be useful. I think they should instead be focusing their effort in building more space-based telescopes.

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NASA contract award for manned lunar landers rejects SLS

12:12 pm

Capitalism in space: NASA today announced the award of contracts to three different private companies to develop manned lunar landers for the 2024 Artemis Moon mission, all of which will not use the SLS rocket to get to the Moon.

The press release described the awards as follows:

  • Blue Origin of Kent, Washington, is developing the Integrated Lander Vehicle (ILV) – a three-stage lander to be launched on its own New Glenn Rocket System and ULA Vulcan launch system.
  • Dynetics (a Leidos company) of Huntsville, Alabama, is developing the Dynetics Human Landing System (DHLS) – a single structure providing the ascent and descent capabilities that will launch on the ULA Vulcan launch system.
  • SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, is developing the Starship – a fully integrated lander that will use the SpaceX Super Heavy rocket.

All, including NASA and the Trump administration, are aiming to get these landers built and launched by the Trump administration’s 2024 deadline.

The first thing that stands out like a beacon is the exclusion of SLS as the rocket to launch any of these landers. Instead, the aim is to use the cheaper privately built rockets of either SpaceX, ULA, or Blue Origin.

The second thing that stands out is the commitment by SpaceX to use its Super Heavy/Starship rocket, not its Falcon Heavy. This means they are directly telling the world that they expect this rocket to be in operation much sooner than most expect. It also suggests that they hope this rocket will supplant SLS as the main rocket to get to the Moon. The award also means that NASA is agreeable to this.

The third thing that stands out is the exclusion of Boeing, which submitted a bid but did not win. Not only does this exclusion reinforce the sense gotten from an earlier report that NASA was very dissatisfied with Boeing and was thus going to rank it very low in future bidding considerations, it also indicates once again that NASA is seriously looking at other options to SLS. Boeing’s rejected bid was apparently the only one linked to SLS, and was rejected.

In fact, that SLS was not mentioned as the rocket for any of these landers strongly indicates that NASA and the Trump administration is finally abandoning SLS as the rocket to get Americans to the Moon.

Which immediately raises the question: Why the hell are we spending any money building it? It no longer has any purpose at all.

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New technical problems for SLS?

10:49 am

A new GAO report [pdf] issued yesterday has revealed that SLS engineers are concerned that the rocket’s core stage will develop leaks during its first full test, hopefully scheduled for this year.

[T]he new “Assessments of Major NASA Projects” report released on Wednesday contains what seems to be an entirely new bit of information about the Space Launch System rocket NASA is developing for deep space exploration. The report asserts that engineers at NASA and the SLS rocket’s core-stage contractor, Boeing, are concerned about fuel leaks.

Earlier this year, NASA moved the big rocket’s core stage to a test site at Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi. Before the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily halted work, NASA and Boeing teams were working toward a critical summer exercise. During this “green run” test, the clamped-down rocket will ignite its engines and burn for about eight minutes to simulate an ascent into orbit.

“Program officials indicated that one of the top remaining technical risks to the green run test is that the core stage may develop leaks when it is filled with fuel,” the report states on page 82. “According to these officials, they have conducted extensive scaled testing of the gaskets and seals used in the core stage; however, it is difficult to precisely predict how this large volume of liquid hydrogen will affect the stage.”

My god, for them to think that the core stage might leak when it is filled with fuel for the first time illustrates the entire bankrupt nature of this entire project. This is why you do tank tests early in the process (as SpaceX has been doing with Starship), so that you don’t get surprised late in the game.

The report also notes further issues with the Orion capsule.

The Orion program plans to reduce the 7-month-long pre-launch processing period by 1.5 months. The program plans to use a mass simulator—instead of the Orion spacecraft—to conduct some prelaunch tests that would otherwise be done after integrating Orion with SLS—providing the program with extra time to complete work before delivering Orion for integration and further testing according to officials. With this shortened process, the program has only 1 week of schedule reserve remaining to the November 2020 launch date, and program officials have said this date will likely be delayed

I must remind everyone that Lockheed Martin got the contract to build Orion in 2005. They have had fifteen years to build this one capsule, and will still deliver it late.

Personally, I hope SLS leaks. If it does, it will force a very long new delay to the program, and very well might finally force Congress and the Trump administration to face reality and cancel it.

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Air Force study rubber-stamps Air Force desire to limit launch companies

10:33 am

Garbage in, garbage out: An Air Force commissioned RAND study released yesterday has confirmed the Air Force’s desire to restrict the award of launch contracts for the next decade to only two companies.

“We asked RAND to independently double check the assumptions we used to build our acquisition strategy,” said Col. Robert Bongiovi of the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in California. “What we found was that our acquisition strategy encompasses RAND’s recommendations as we are already making prudent preparations for a market that will only sustain two providers with our phase two contract structure.”

…Part of the RAND report also recommended that the military closely watch companies over the coming years to see which are the most stable. “The U.S. Space Force should make prudent preparations for a future with only two U.S. providers of NSS-certified heavy lift launch, at least one of which may have little support from the commercial marketplace,” RAND Corporation said of its first main recommendation.

Though the report does suggest that the military continue its development program to help three companies through 2023, it reiterates the military’s belief that there simply isn’t enough business to support more than two companies.

For this reason, the Air Force space division, now the Space Force, had wanted to restrict bidding in the 2020s on its future satellite launches to only two companies out of the four (ULA, SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin) that hope to compete for this business. This report is their attempt to justify that decision.

However, the decision has been repeatedly delayed, partly because of a protest of the plan by Blue Origin and partly because a lot of political pressure in the background from those four companies, none of which want to be excluded from future bidding. It was originally going to be made last year, and is now delayed to later this year.

With the release of the report, the military also suggested that if Congress gives it more money, it might be able to open up bidding to more companies. How typical. Instead of trying to trim costs by allowing competition, the Space Force is now maneuvering elected officials to pump up its budget so that these companies all get more cash while picking the pockets of the taxpayer.

This is the same thinking that caused Boeing and Lockheed Martin to merge their launch operations into ULA and for the Air Force to give that new company a monopoly on launches in 2005. The Air Force assumed then that there wasn’t enough launch business for both companies. Rather than compete to lower costs so that both the Air Force and the private sector could afford more launches, the two companies agreed with this Air Force conclusion and teamed up with the Air Force to form a cartel to control the bulk of the U.S. launch market, while charging the Air Force $200-$500 million per launch.

Then SpaceX comes along and proves them completely wrong. It not only gets more than enough business to make a lot of money (in the billions), it charges only $60 million per launch. When the Air Force tried to deny it the right to bid against ULA for military launches, SpaceX sued, and won.

Now the Space Force wants to do the same thing in the 2020s, limiting to two the number of companies that can bid on contracts. All this will do is raise launch costs, and limit competition.

In the end, I doubt seriously if the Space Force effort here will work. All four companies are developing rockets, and all four should have the right to bid on all future launches. If the military tries to exclude any, they will sue, as SpaceX did, and win. Moreover, the military’s assumption that all four companies cannot survive because it doesn’t have enough business for all four is patently false. SpaceX proved them wrong. All these companies have to do is what SpaceX did, keep their launch costs low enough so that other private customers can buy their services.

There will then be more than enough business to go around, for all.

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Rocket Lab completes new launchpad at Wallops

9:43 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has signaled the completion of new launchpad at Wallops Island in the U.S. by the first roll out of an Electron rocket.

The actual launch of a Space Force test satellite is set for sometime in the summer.

Meanwhile, the company is ready to resume launches in New Zealand, but is stymied by the Wuhan panic.

Beck tells the Herald that his company’s Mission Control centre in Auckland is now fully operational with NZ’s move to level 3.

However, its “Don’t Stop Me Now” mission from Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula – originally planned for March 24 – is still on hold, with no estimated launch date. “We’re now ready to launch, but currently border restrictions are preventing specialists from entering the country, which is having a negative impact. Our team is on standby to launch as soon as those restrictions are eased,” Beck says.

I hope the company has the resources to weather these government-imposed delays.

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Arianespace to resume launches in June

9:34 am

Capitalism in space: Arianespace now plans to resume launches from French Guiana in mid-June with the first Vega launch since that rocket’s first failure in July 2019.

That launch will place 40+ cubesats in orbit. Arianespace hopes to follow with an Ariane 5 launch near the end of July. Of that mission’s three payloads is MEV-2, Northrop Grumman’s second Mission Extension Vehicle to launch, planned to dock with another defunct geosynchronous communications satellite and reactive it for five years.

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Perseverance’s helicopter named Ingenuity

9:15 am

After sifting through the 28,000 name suggestions submitted by K through 12 American students for naming the Mars rover Perseverance, NASA has chosen to use a suggestion from an Alabama high school student to name the rover’s prototype test helicopter Ingenuity.

As a technology demonstration, Ingenuity is a high-risk, high-reward experiment. The helicopter will ride to Mars attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover, which is preparing for launch in July or August. For several months following the rover’s landing, Ingenuity will remain encapsulated in a protective cover to shield it from debris during entry, descent and landing. When the timing in the rover mission is right, Ingenuity will be deployed to stand and operate on its own on the surface of the Red Planet. If the 4-pound (2-kilogram), solar-powered craft – a combination of specially designed components and off-the-shelf parts – survives the cold Martian nights during its pre-flight checkout, the team will proceed with testing.

If successful during its 30-Martian-day (31-Earth-day) experimental flight test window, the small craft will prove that powered flight can be achieved at Mars, enabling future Mars missions to better utilize second-generation helicopters to add an aerial dimension to their explorations.

The student, Vaneeza Rupani, had proposed the name for the rover. She instead is honored for the helicopter.

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Long March 5B moved to launchpad

8:32 am

The new colonial movement: China’s first Long March 5B rocket has been rolled to its launchpad in advance of its first launch, now expected around May 5th.

The launch was originally scheduled for mid-April, but it appears two recent Chinese launch failures, plus the Wuhan flu, caused the two-three week delay.

The payload is a test prototype of China’s still unnamed next generation manned capsule, which according to the article, will come in two variants:

The spacecraft has two variants of around 14 and 20 metric tons respectively. The mission will test the latter, which is designed for deep space. The mission will be uncrewed and will not include life support systems.

The spacecraft will be able to carry up to six astronauts, or three astronauts and 500 kilograms of cargo to LEO. The three-module Shenzhou can carry three astronauts to LEO and has been used for all six of the country’s crewed missions. The new spacecraft also features improved heat shielding than that used by the Shenzhou. The advanced shielding is required to survive the higher-energy reentries involved deep space missions.

Once in low Earth orbit, the two-module, 8.8-meter-long, 21.6-ton uncrewed spacecraft will use its own propulsion to raise its orbit to an apogee of around 8,000 kilometers. It will then attempt a high-speed reentry to test new heat shielding. The mission also will test avionics, performance in orbit, parachute deployment, a cushioned airbag landing, and recovery. Planned partial reusability — by replacing the heat shielding — will also be tested.

China’s entire manned and planetary program depends on the success of this launch. Should it fail, as did the early launches of the Long March 5, the program will likely experience a one to two year delay.

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Hubble photographs break-up of Comet ATLAS

10:53 am

The break-up of Comet ATLAS
For the full images go to April 20 and April 23.

Cool image time! Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have captured the break-up of Comet ATLAS over a period of several days. The two images to the right, cropped and annotated to post here, were taken on April 20th and April 23rd respectively.

Hubble identified about 30 fragments on April 20, and 25 pieces on April 23. They are all enveloped in a sunlight-swept tail of cometary dust. “Their appearance changes substantially between the two days, so much so that it’s quite difficult to connect the dots,” said David Jewitt, professor of planetary science and astronomy at UCLA, Los Angeles, California, leader of one of two teams who photographed the doomed comet with Hubble. “I don’t know whether this is because the individual pieces are flashing on and off as they reflect sunlight, acting like twinkling lights on a Christmas tree, or because different fragments appear on different days.”

That there are fewer pieces in the later image could also be because the smaller fragments had crumbled even more during the three days between photos, and thus were simply too small to see any longer.

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Europe turns to private enterprise for future space transportation

8:42 am

Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced a permanently open call for private companies to develop “space transportation to space, in space, returning from space, or any combination of these.”

To be eligible, the economic operator should demonstrate that its space transportation service is a ‘complete offering’. This means that customers should not need to procure any additional essential service elements such as access to facilities, transport or logistics, to obtain the full service.

The economic operator should take full responsibility for the service project, including finding the funding and resources necessary to develop and deploy the service.

The new space transportation services should justify commercial viability, oriented toward private sector customers, without relying on a guaranteed European institutional demand during the operational phase and with a long-term vision of service provision. Preference will be given to such service projects that are conceived, developed and commercialised in the Participating States.

Though the announcement is filled with the typical hard-to-translate bureaucratic language typical of ESA’s projects, the intent here seems clear. The ESA no longer wishes to do any designing and developing of its rockets, as they have done from the beginning of the space age. This also means they are facing the reality that the Ariane 6 rocket, developed for them by the joint partnership of Airbus and Safran dubbed ArianeGroup, is going to be a financial failure, unable to compete against the lower cost SpaceX and Russian rockets now on the market.

Instead, they are now following what appears to be NASA’s path — the path I outlined in Capitalism in Space — to have ESA act merely as a customer, buying these services from competing private companies (not just ArianeGroup) who will develop the rockets themselves and (most important) own the rockets themselves.

If this is so, it is very good new for the future of space travel. It ups the competition, and it will allow for the development of European rockets able to provide this service at low cost.

The one wrench in the process is that this announcement also includes a bidding process for allowing these new private companies to get development money and technical assistance from ESA. That process appears to have some strings attached that might in the end prevent competing private companies to grow, independent of this governmental body. For example, the submission process allows “ESA to check compliance with Programme objectives and general eligibility. After a positive assessment, ESA will invite the economic operator to submit a full service proposal.” In other words, if you want ESA’s help, you will have to have ESA’s stamp of approval.

Still, this proposal does not require ESA’s help. The agency does appear to be willing to now entertain the use of any rocket system developed by any private operators within the participating ESA’s member nations of Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

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A Martian lava flood plain

1:21 pm

A Martian lava flood plain?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on March 2, 2020, and shows some inexplicable shallow pits and depressions in the middle of a relatively flat and featureless plain.

Make sure you click on the image to see the full photo. Though the plain looks remarkably smooth, a handful of dark splotches are scattered about, almost all of which occur on top of small craters.

What causes these depressions? The MRO team calls this “Landforms near Cerberus Tholi.” Cereberus Tholi is a a collection of several indistinct and relatively small humps that scientists think might be shield volcanoes.

More clues come from the overall context.
» Read more

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More data from interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov as it zipped past Sun in December

10:00 am

Astronomers studying interstellar Comet 2I/Borisov as it zipped past Sun in December have found that while in many ways it resembled solar system comets, the differences were revealing.

During its trip through the solar system, the comet lost nearly 61 million gallons (230 million liters) of water — enough to fill over 92 Olympic-size swimming pools. As it moved away from the Sun, Borisov’s water loss dropped off — and did so more rapidly than any previously observed comet. Xing said this could have been caused by a variety of factors, including surface erosion, rotational change and even fragmentation. In fact, data from Hubble and other observatories show that chunks of the comet broke off in late March.

…Swift’s water production measurements also helped the team calculate that Borisov’s minimum size is just under half a mile (0.74 kilometer) across. The team estimates at least 55% of Borisov’s surface — an area roughly equivalent to half of Central Park — was actively shedding material when it was closest to the Sun. That’s at least 10 times the active area on most observed solar system comets. Borisov also differs from solar system comets in other aspects. For example, astronomers working with Hubble and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a radio telescope in Chile, discovered Borisov produced the highest levels of carbon monoxide ever seen from a comet at that distance from the Sun.

Because more of the comet’s entire surface had water ice than seen in solar system comets, it suggests that the comet has never been close to another star before. That the water release dropped off precipitously however also suggests that that surface layer of ice was not very deep.

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4th Starship prototype passes tank pressure test

8:41 am

Capitlism in space: SpaceX’s fourth Starship prototype has successfully passed a tank pressure test, the first to do so, allowing engine testing to now begin.

In the end, SN4 passed the cryogenic proof test – hitting 4.9 bar. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk admitted in a tweet that this was “kind of a soft ball…” However, “that’s enough to fly,” he added. It is now expected to move on to engine testing within the coming days.

Currently, SpaceX has three flight-ready Raptor engines waiting for the opportunity to participate in the testing. One of these engines will be installed on SN4. A Raptor engine is not installed until after the cryogenic proof test, as that test uses hydraulic pistons to simulate the forces created by Raptors during flight.

After SpaceX performs the Raptor installation on SN4, teams will need to conduct checkouts of the engine on the vehicle. These will include gimbal, ignitor, and fuel pre-burner tests, among others. Only then will SpaceX be ready to attempt a static fire. April 29 was originally the target for a static fire test, but a one day delay with the cryogenic proof test means that the static fire is now likely targeting no earlier than April 30

All in all, the company’s target of doing a hop with this prototype this summer appears increasingly likely.

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Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS

9:18 pm

Russia tonight successfully launched a new Progress freighter to ISS using its Soyuz-2 rocket.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

6 China
6 SpaceX
6 Russia

The U.S. now leads both China and Russia 10 to 6 in the national rankings. This is the first time that Russia has been able to keep up with China in launches in several years. Since China had expected to launch more times than Russia in 2020, this suggests that China’s launch rate has been reduced because of the Wuhan flu. It at least appears that many of their smaller launch rockets have suspended launches.

We have also heard nothing recently about China’s planned mid- to late-April first launch of its Long March 5B. With only six days left in the month, one wonders if this launch too has been delayed.

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Movie of OSIRIS-REx’s 1st landing rehearsal

12:55 pm

Closest NavCam-2 image during rehearsal
Click for full movie.

The OSIRIS-REx science team has released a short movie taken by one of the spacecraft’s navigation camera (NavCam-2) during its first landing rehearsal on April 14. The image to the right, cropped to post here, is the closest image in the sequence, and shows the relatively smooth Nightingale target landing site near the bottom of the image, approximately 50 feet in diameter.

According to the release,

NavCam 2 captures images for the spacecraft’s Natural Feature Tracking (NFT) navigation system. The NFT system allows the spacecraft to autonomously guide itself to Bennu’s surface by comparing real-time images with an onboard image catalog. As the spacecraft descends to the surface, the NFT system updates the spacecraft’s predicted point of contact depending on OSIRIS-REx’s position in relation to Bennu’s landmarks. During the sample collection event, scheduled for August, the NavCam 2 camera will continuously image Bennu’s surface so that the NFT system can update the spacecraft’s position and velocity relative to Bennu as it descends towards the targeted touchdown point.

When the image above was taken the spacecraft was at its closest point, about 213 feet above the surface. Based on this movie, it looks like the system was working, and the spacecraft was refining its aim to head towards Nightingale.

Still, the landing site is not in the center of the image, which I would think is a concern, especially because Nightingale is only one-third the size of the kind of smooth target areas they had designed the system for. (When launched they expected to see smooth areas at least 160 feet across, and designed the system for this.)

The second rehearsal is presently scheduled for June 23, and will drop OSIRIS-REx to within 82 feet of the surface.

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NASA’s safety panel rubberstamps May 27 manned Dragon launch

11:03 am

NASA’s safety panel has apparently reluctantly given its “okay” for the launch of the first manned Dragon launch on May 27th.

NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), meeting by teleconference April 23, said it was unable to talk with NASA’s commercial crew program during its quarterly meeting, which was held virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. The panel’s chair, Patricia Sanders, said that scheduling issues prevented a meeting, but that her committee planned to hold a “part 2” of their quarterly meeting in early May to discuss commercial crew and other topics not taken up this week.

Sanders said the panel has been kept up to date by NASA about commercial crew activities, including plans for SpaceX’s Demo-2 crewed test flight scheduled for May 27. “We are aware of a few technical items that remain to be more fully understood,” she said, “but the path forward appears feasible.”

In other words, it appears that NASA’s management might have taken advantage of the Wuhan panic to cut the panel off from the decision-making process, possibly because this panel has acted now for years to slow progress and in fact discourage any American manned launches at all, out of an almost irrational fear of any failure.

Their recommendations have sometimes verged on the ludicrous, such as an insistence that no manned launch be scheduled until a lot of paperwork was filled out.

It could also be that the panel has recognized at last (or maybe NASA management told them in no uncertain words) that we now have to proceed with American manned missions, since with the expiration of our contract with the Russians we have no other options.

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Scientists fine tune the cause of the super-rotation of Venus’ atmosphere

10:39 am

Scientists using data collected from the Japanese Venus orbiter Akatsuki have now refined their theories on the atmospheric processes that cause that atmosphere to rotate sixty times faster than the planet.

This super-rotation increases with altitude, taking only four Earth days to circulate around the entire planet towards the top of the cloud cover. The fast-moving atmosphere transports heat from the planet’s dayside to nightside, reducing the temperature differences between the two hemispheres.

What they found was that at equatorial latitudes the heat transfer is generated by what they call “atmospheric tidal waves”, generated by the dayside solar heat. At high latitudes the transfer is instead caused by atmospheric turbulence.

From what I can gather, they are calling these tidal waves because the Sun’s heat causes the atmosphere to expand upward on the day side, much as the Moon’s gravity pulls the ocean upward on Earth. It then is quickly drawn to the colder night side, driven I think in one direction because of the planet’s slow rotation.

As always, we must recognize the uncertainties. The data here is somewhat limited because there have been so few atmospheric orbiters so far sent to study Venus. While several future missions are under study in the U.S. and Russia, only India appears to have one targeted for launch, though the date has been pushed back from 2020 to 2023.

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China names its 2020 Mars mission

10:19 am

China’s official state-run press today announced that their 2020 Mars mission will be called Tianwen-1, noting that this name will be applied to all further planetary missions.

The link goes to that government state-run press, which provides no further information on Tianwen-1, such as where on Mars its lander/rover will land, its exact launch date, the instruments on board, etc. So far very very few details have been released.

What this propaganda press announcement does do is spout a lot of blather about how wonderful China is, and how we should all be thankful the communists have been in charge there. Here are some snippets to lighten your day:

  • …signifying the Chinese nation’s perseverance in pursuing truth and science
  • …a window for the Chinese public and the world to get a better understanding of China’s aerospace progress.
  • Chinese space engineers and scientists have overcome various difficulties and achieved aerospace development through self-reliance and independent innovation.
  • …promoting human welfare on the basis of equality, mutual benefit, peaceful utilization and inclusive development.

While China’s achievements in space are real (though much of the engineering was stolen or borrowed from others), these propaganda claims are junk and lies. Chinese space engineers are “self-reliant” and have “independence”? Don’t make me laugh. Everything done in their space program is dictated and controlled from the top, by the Chinese government and the Communist Party. No one is free to do anything, without their permission.

As for China’s pursuit of “truth and science”, their behavior during the Wuhan flu epidemic, originating from their country and very possibly caused deliberately or incompetently by them, makes this claim ludicrous on its face. They have lied, arrested scientists, blocked research, and distorted the scope and magnitude of the epidemic from day one.

Even a tiny bit of truth from them, from the beginning, might have prevented the panic that has overtaken the world which in turn appears to have triggered the next great economic depression, what I like to now call the Great Wuhan Depression.

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SpaceX rolls out next Starship prototype

9:59 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX has completed construction of its next Starship prototype and has moved it to its test stand in preparation for further tests.

This is the fourth prototype. If the tank pressure tests go well, they hope to add engines and do a twelve mile hop with this prototype, landing vertically. If not, they will try again with later prototypes. Regardless, the goal is to do that hop this year.

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Swarm and Momentus team up to launch and position satellites

9:37 am

Capitalism in space: Swarm, builder of the tiny cubesats dubbed SpaceBees, has teamed up with Momentus to use that company’s Vigoride cubesat upper stage to position its satellites in different orbits after launch.

Under an agreement announced April 22, Momentus will arrange rides for 12 Swarm SpaceBee satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission in December 2020 with additional SpaceBee launches scheduled in 2021 and 2022.

To offer global coverage for customers seeking to relay messages through the internet, Swarm satellites must be stationed in different orbital planes and spread out within those orbital planes like a string of pearls, Sara Spangelo, Swarm co-founder and CEO, told SpaceNews.

For the Falcon 9 launch in December, Momentus will not move Swarm SpaceBees to a new orbital plane. In the future, Momentus’ Vigoride in-space shuttle will offer Swarm the option of moving SpaceBees from the rocket’s drop-off point to different locations, Negar Feher, Momentus vice president of product and business development, said by email.

Both companies have raised significant investment capital.

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Firefly signs deal with satellite broker Spaceflight

9:29 am

Capitalism in space: Firefly Aerospace has signed a deal whereby the satellite broker Spaceflight will provide the payloads for one of Firefly’s Alpha rocket launches, planned for 2021.

The smallsat launch company already has several other launch contracts, even as development of its rocket proceeds.

Firefly is in the final phases of development of Alpha, and hopes to perform its first launch later this year. Markusic said the company is assembling the first flight vehicle, with plans to perform static-fire tests of the second stage in May and the first stage in June. Once those tests are complete, the vehicles will be shipped to Vandenberg, where work is continuing to modify Space Launch Complex 2 West, a former Delta 2 pad.

A lot can happen between now and 2021, but so far Firefly appears a strong candidate to launch and compete with Rocket Lab.

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The first complete geologic map of Moon

9:15 am

Geologic map of Moon

Using data from several recent lunar orbiters, scientists have compiled and now released the first comprehensive geologic map of the Moon.

To create the new digital map, scientists used information from six Apollo-era regional maps along with updated information from recent satellite missions to the moon. The existing historical maps were redrawn to align them with the modern data sets, thus preserving previous observations and interpretations. Along with merging new and old data, USGS researchers also developed a unified description of the stratigraphy, or rock layers, of the moon. This resolved issues from previous maps where rock names, descriptions and ages were sometimes inconsistent.

“This map is a culmination of a decades-long project,” said Corey Fortezzo, USGS geologist and lead author. “It provides vital information for new scientific studies by connecting the exploration of specific sites on the moon with the rest of the lunar surface.”

The image to the right shows the Moon’s near side.

The complete map file is free to download, and I guarantee that scientists and engineers in China are downloading it even as I type, planning to use it to establish their ownership to the Moon’s most valuable real estate that we scouted for them.

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