Tag: spaceflight

Starlink now has four million subscribers

9:00 am

According to SpaceX’s CEO, Gwynne Shotwell, during testimony in a hearing before the Texas state legislative committee and confirmed by a SpaceX tweet on X, Starlink now has a total of four million subscribers.

The milestone would mean that SpaceX has gained a million new customers since the end of May alone. This outpaces the company’s already impressive rate of growth: Starlink started providing beta service of its product in October 2020; it hit 1 million subscribers in December 2022, 2 million subscribers in September 2023, and 3 million in May. The constellation now comprises nearly 6,000 satellites, with service available in nearly 100 countries to individual users as well as large enterprise customers like major airlines and cruise lines.

The service is on track to generate $6.6 billion in revenue this year — an increase from roughly $1.4 billion just two years prior, according to industry research and consulting firm Quilty Space. [emphasis mine]

With $6.6 billion in yearly revenue, in two years SpaceX will get as much from its customers as it has raised in investment capital. It essentially does not need to look for more funding, as it is now earning enough to pay for both Starlink as well as the development of Starship/Superheavy. Furthermore, at this point the company no longer needs NASA’s government funds to do anything it wants to do.

Nor are these numbers the end. Yesterday it was also reported that Air France had signed up Starlink for its airplane fleet, coming after both United and Hawaiian airlines announced they were switching to Starlink as well.

No wonder the left as well as the federal bureaucracy — dominated by top-down authoritarians who love governemnt rule — are hostile to SpaceX. It no longer needs them, and that independence threatens their power.

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Orbital tug startup D-Orbit raises another 150 million euros

8:44 am

The orbital tug company D-Orbit announced today that it was able to extend its more recent round of fund-raising by 50 million euros, and raise a total of 150 million in private investment capital instead.

Japan’s Marubeni Corp. led the Series C round. Marubeni has exclusive rights to distribute D-Orbit’s services in Japan in Southeast Asia, according to the news release.

New and existing investors participating in the round include: Avantgarde, CDP Venture Capital, Iberis Capital, Indaco Venture Partners, the European Innovation Council, Neva, Phaistos Investment Fund, Primo Ventures and Seraphim Space Investment Trust. Also joining the round was a consortium led by United Ventures that included the European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund.

I call the company a “startup” in the headline, but that probably is now incorrect. It already has flown fourteen orbital tug missions, with seven more scheduled in 2025. At this point it is well established, and could extend this most recent funding round.

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Musk and Shotwell once again blast red tape against the company

12:54 pm

The EPA to SpaceX
The EPA to SpaceX “Nice company you got here.
Sure would be a shame if something happened to it.”

In a follow-up to SpaceX’s blunt critical response to the attacks against it by the head of the FAA, Mike Whitaker during House testimony on September 24, 2024, Elon Musk in a tweet yesterday called for Whitaker to resign.

That blast however was only the start. During a different hearing on September 24th before the Texas state house appropriations committee, Gywnne Shotwell, the CEO of SpaceX, called the actions of the EPA to regulate the launch deluge system for Starship/Superheavy “nonsense.”

“We work very closely with organizations such as the (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality),” she said. “You may have read a little bit of nonsense in the papers recently about that, but we’re working quite well with them.”

…On Tuesday, Shotwell maintained that the the system — which she said resembles “an upside down shower head” — was “licensed and permitted by TCEQ [Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] … EPA came in afterwards and didn’t like the license or the permit that we had for that and wanted to turn it into a federal permit, which we are working on right now.”

…The state agency has said the company received a stormwater permit — a type that’s usually quickly approved — but did not have the permit required for discharge of industrial wastewater produced by launches. That type of permit requires significant technical review and usually takes almost a year to approve. [emphasis mine]

The problem with this demand by both EPA and TCEQ is that SpaceX is not dumping “industrial wastewater produced by launches.” The deluge system uses potable water, essentially equivalent to rain water, and thus does zero harm to the environment. In fact, a single rainstorm would dump far more water on the tidal islands of Boca Chica that any of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy launches.

Thus, this demand by the EPA clearly proves the political nature of this regulatory harassment. The unelected apparatchiks in the federal bureaucracy are hunting for ways to stymie and shut down SpaceX, and they will use any regulation they can find to do so — even if that use makes no sense. And they are doing this because they support the Democratic Party wholesale, and thus are abusing their power to hurt someone (Elon Musk) who now opposes that party.

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The jet 3,000 light years long that causes nearby stars to explode

10:48 am

The jet from M87
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the left, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the giant eliptical galaxy M87, known for more than a century by astronomers for the jet of gas that points outward from its center. Astronomers now know that this jet is produced by a supermassive black hole in the center of M87, weighing 6.5 billion times the mass of our Sun.

The blowtorch-like jet seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. These novae are not caught inside the jet, but are apparently in a dangerous neighbourhood nearby. During a recent 9-month survey, astronomers using Hubble found twice as many of these novae going off near the jet as elsewhere in the galaxy. The galaxy is the home of several trillion stars and thousands of star-like globular star clusters.

M87 is considered an old galaxy, but its entire formation process remains uncertain.

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Lockheed Martin drops out of commercial manned lunar rover consortium

9:29 am

Lunar Outpost, one of the three companies/partnerships that have won NASA contracts to develop manned lunar rovers for the Artemis program, has replaced Lockheed Martin as one of its partners.

This fact was only made evident now, three months after Lockheed parted ways, with a statement that a new much smaller company, Leidos, has joined the consortium.

That statement listed the other members of the Lunar Dawn team: General Motors, Goodyear and MDA Space. Notably absent was Lockheed Martin, which Lunar Outpost had described as its “principal partner” on the rover when it won the NASA contract in April. The website for Lunar Dawn also did not list Lockheed Martin as a partner.

In a Sept. 25 interview, Justin Cyrus, chief executive of Lunar Outpost, confirmed that Lockheed Martin was no longer involved in the rover project. “We just weren’t able to reach an agreement as we were negotiating the terms and conditions of the statement of work for this contract,” he said.

Both Lunar Outpost and Lockheed Martin provided no specific reasons for the break-up, other than typical PR statements such as “it wasn’t a good fit for us or them.”

The rover being built is dubbed Lunar Dawn. The present NASA contract only covers the design phase. Once completed NASA will choose one consortium to build the rover itself, picking from either the Lunar Outpost design or the designs submitted by Intuitive Machines and Venturi Astrolab.

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Monitoring gullies on Mars for changes

12:25 pm

Overview map

Monitoring gullies on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on June 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists label the picture simply as “gully monitoring,” with an apparent goal of looking to see if this gully has changed since MRO took the first high resolution image two years previously. In the interim this terrain went from Martian spring, through summer and winter, and has now returned to spring.

As far as I can tell, no changes are visible, but then I am not using the highest resolution data available. Small changes might be detectable in the highest resolution using good detection software. Overall, the gully drops about 3,000 feet.

The white dot in the overview map above marks the location, on the southwest interior rim of an unnamed 30-mile wide crater. This region in the Martian cratered highlands was featured in a four part cool image series I did back 2023 (here, here, here, and here), with this as my conclusion:

Overall, our short survey of the southern cratered highlands suggests that the glacial material and ice found in the southern mid-latitudes affects the Martian surface differently than in the northern lowland plains. In the north the craters and the surrounding terrain often appear blobby, as if the ice is close to the surface and also a dominant component of the ground. Impacts therefore cause significant soft melt features, with craters often heavily distorted. Similarly, there is evidence of the existence of past mud volcanoes that once spewed water and mud from below ground.

In the south however the surface is at a higher elevation, and it appears the ice layer is deeper underground. Thus, it appears the ground is more firm, and the only obvious evidence of an underground layer of ice is revealed when sublimation and the subsequent erosion produce these large pits inside craters.

In the case of this crater, a small impact on its interior southwest slope apparently caused that underground layer of ice to melt temporarily and flow downhill, leaving behind the gully and flow features we see today. Based on the two MRO pictures taken a full Martian year apart, it appears the feature is generally stable and thus likely old, left over from that impact. If things are changing seasonally they are doing so in small amounts and slowly.

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Amateur gets new image of China’s X-37B copy in orbit

9:42 am

An amateur astronomer, Felix Schöfbänker, has released a new picture he took of China’s X-37B-type reusuable mini-shuttle while it was in orbit and prior to its landing on September 6, 2024.

The picture is low resolution and not very pretty, but it does appear to show that the mini-shuttle has a delta wing design.

While the recent space plane flight was underway, space watcher veteran Felix Schöfbänker in Upper Austria took imagery of the craft. In a recent posting, Schöfbänker reported he has imagery taken Aug. 10 of the Chinese space plane which shows a delta-wing design, captured when the craft turned 180 degrees since an earlier observation he made on July 30.

Schöfbänker also theorizes that the dark area between the wings could be the mini-shuttle’s cargo bay.

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A puzzling striped rock on Mars

9:32 am

A striped rock on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 13, 2024 by one of the high resolution cameras on the Mars rover Perseverance. The rock’s striped nature makes it unique, unlike any feature spotted by any rover previously. From an update today:

The science team thinks that this rock has a texture unlike any seen in Jezero Crater before, and perhaps all of Mars. Our knowledge of its chemical composition is limited, but early interpretations are that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes. Since Freya Castle [the name the science team gave the rock] is a loose stone that is clearly different from the underlying bedrock, it has likely arrived here from someplace else, perhaps having rolled downhill from a source higher up. This possibility has us excited, and we hope that as we continue to drive uphill, Perseverance will encounter an outcrop of this new rock type so that more detailed measurements can be acquired.

Without doubt the rock’s rounded surface suggests it was ground smooth by either water or ice. That surface certainly resembles glacial cobble seen across the northeast of the U.S. where ice glaciers once covered the entire landscape. The rock also resembles river cobble, smoothed by flowing water.

The stripes however suggest that prior to its being smoothed, this rock underwent a much more complex geological process, whereby two different materials were intermixed and squeezed together.

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China launches five satellites

9:02 am

China today successfully launched five satellites, its Kinetica-1 rocket (Lijian-1 in Chinese) lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

China’s state-run press generally attempts to describe this rocket as commercial and built by one of its pseudo-companies, but in this case that is even more dishonest. CAS Space was created from a government space division as a separate subsidiary, and thus is wholly controlled, funded, and owned by that agency. Unlike China’s other pseudo-companies, it didn’t even bother to go through the dance of raising investment capital or winning contracts.

Nonetheless, company officials now boast — after this fourth launch of this rocket — they are about to begin launching monthly. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

Meanwhile, China also today publicly announced a successful ICBM test launch into the Pacific, the first time it has made such an test or public announcement in four decades. It released almost no details, however, including where the missile was launched or where it splashed down.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

94 SpaceX
43 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 110 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 94 to 81.

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SpaceX launches 21 more Starlink satellites

9:09 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 21 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

94 SpaceX
42 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 110 to 64, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 94 to 80.

The United States has now tied its record for launches in a single year, 110, set only last year. It has done so however in less than three-quarters of a year, suggesting that the new record will be significantly higher. This new record mostly reflects the pace that SpaceX and Rocket Lab are setting, with most of the heavy lifting by SpaceX.

If things go as expected, expect 2025 to smash this record as well, because all signs suggest that both ULA and Blue Origin will begin launching regularly in order to meet their various contracts, joining SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and several other rocket startups.

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FAA administrator claims SpaceX wasn’t following regulations; SpaceX says that’s false

4:08 pm

FAA administrator Mike Whitaker today said this to SpaceX:
FAA administrator Mike Whitaker today to SpaceX:
“Nice company you have there. Shame if something
happened to it.”

In a hearing today before the House transportation committee, the FAA administrator Mike Whitaker claimed repeatedly that the red tape his agency has imposed on SpaceX, as well as the fines it recently imposed on the company, were due to safety concerns as well as SpaceX not following the regulations and even launching without a license.

Mike Whitaker, the administrator of the FAA, told lawmakers on the House Transportation Committee that his decision to delay SpaceX’s launch for a few months is grounded in safety, and defended the $633,000 fine his agency has proposed against SpaceX as the “only tool” the FAA has to ensure that Musk’s company follows the rules.

… [Kevin Kiley (R-California)] argued those reviews don’t have anything to do with safety, prompting Whitaker to shoot back: “I think the sonic boom analysis [related to returning Superheavy back to Boca Chica] is a safety related incident. I think the two month delay is necessary to comply with the launch requirements, and I think that’s an important part of safety culture.”

When Kiley asked what can be done to move the launch up, Whitaker said, “complying with regulations would be the best path.”

SpaceX immediately responded with a detailed letter, published on X, stating in summary as follows:

FAA Administrator Whitaker made several incorrect statements today regarding SpaceX. In fact, every statement he made was incorrect.

The letter then detailed very carefully the falseness of each of Whitaker’s claims. You can read images of the letter here and here. The company noted:

It is deeply concerning that the administrator does not appear to have accurate information immediately available to him with respect to SpaceX licensing matters.

Based on SpaceX’s detailed response, it appears its lawyers are extremely confident it has a very good legal position, and will win in court. Moreover, the politics strongly argue in favor of fighting now. Though such a fight might delay further Superheavy/Starship test launches in the near term, in the long run a victory has a good chance of cleaning up the red tape for good, so that future work will proceed without this harassment.

Whitaker’s testimony also suggests strongly that he — a political appointee by the Biden administration –is likely the source of many of the recent delays and increased red tape that SpaceX has been forced to endure. He clearly thinks he knows better than SpaceX on these technical areas, even though his education and work history has never had anything to do with building rockets.

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Layered mesas in Martian chaos

12:27 pm

Layered mesas in Martian chaos
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 19, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a 2,500 to 3,000-foot-high mesa with what the scientists call “bedrock layers”, most obvious as the lower terraces on the mesa’s western slopes.

What makes this mesa especially interesting is its overall shape. It appears as if something has taken a bite out of it, resulting in that bowl-like hollow on the mesa’s southern half.

Was this caused by an impact? Or has some other long term Martian processes caused it?

This mesa is just one of many mesas in a region of chaos terrain dubbed Hydraotes Chaos. Such chaos terrain is thought to form when erosion processes, possibly glacial in nature, that carve out canyons along faultlines, leaving behind mesas with randomly oriented canyons cutting in many directions.
» Read more

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Observations of solar flares do not match the standard model used to explain their origin

9:47 am

The uncertainty of science: When scientists carefully compared new and much more precise observations of the Sun’s solar flares with the standard model they have used for decades to explain their origin, they found unexpected differences, suggesting the model is wrong or imcomplete.

In sum, none of the processes simulated in accordance with the model proved capable of explaining the observational data. The conclusion drawn by the researchers was obvious to some extent: the standard model of solar flares needs to be reformulated, as required by the scientific method.

The scientists found that the two sources of each flare brightened at slightly different times. The model said these sources should brighten almost simulatanously, and no version of the model could explain the contradiction.

All this means is that the researchers simply don’t have enough data or understanding of the Sun to formulate a model that can fully explain the process. This study simply demonstrates this, but also provides a guide for soliving the problem.

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Bioengineered heart samples on ISS confirm that weightlessness weakens and ages the heart

9:33 am

Using 48 bioengineered heart samples that spent 30 days on ISS in 2020, scientists have confirmed other research that showed weightlessness not only weakens the heart, it ages it as well.

In addition to losing strength, the heart muscle tissues in space developed irregular beating (arrhythmias)—disruptions that can cause a human heart to fail. Normally, the time between one beat of cardiac tissue and the next is about a second. This measure, in the tissues aboard the space station, grew to be nearly five times longer than those on Earth, although the time between beats returned nearly to normal when the tissues returned to Earth.

The scientists also found, in the tissues that went to space, that sarcomeres—the protein bundles in muscle cells that help them contract—became shorter and more disordered, a hallmark of human heart disease. In addition, energy-producing mitochondria in the space-bound cells grew larger, rounder and lost the characteristic folds that help the cells use and produce energy.

Finally …[t]he tissues at the space station showed increased gene production involved in inflammation and oxidative damage, also hallmarks of heart disease.

None of this is ground-breaking, as it confirms numerous other past studies. What it does do however is confirm that long-term weightlessness is not good for a person’s heart. Many studies have shown that these issues mostly go away once astronauts return to Earth, but for any journey to Mars, involving two years in weightlessness, this data suggests the health risks will be far higher.

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Blue Origin completes first static fire test of New Glenn upper stage

9:23 am

Blue Origin yesterday successfully conducted a 15 second static fire test of the upper stage of its orbital New Glenn rocket.

The hotfire lasted 15 seconds and marked the first time we operated the vehicle as an integrated system. The purpose of the hotfire test was to validate interactions between the subsystems on the second stage, its two BE-3U engines, and the ground control systems.

Additionally, we demonstrated its three key systems, including: the tank pressurization control system, which uses helium to pressurize the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks during flight; the thrust vector control system, which gimbals the engines and steers the rocket during flight; and validated the start-up and shut-down sequences for the BE-3U systems, which can be restarted up to three times during a mission.

In addition to testing our flight hardware, this hotfire test was also an opportunity for the launch operations team to practice launch day procedures on console and verify timing for a number of critical operations.

An actual launch date has not been announced. Previously New Glenn was to carry two Mars orbiters for NASA and launch by October 21, 2024 at the latest. Because of doubts the company could meet that data, NASA pulled the satellites from the rocket.

Prior to launch the company still has to do a full static fire test of the rocket’s first stage. Though company officials have said this would happen “very soon,” no date has been announced for the test.

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China launches eight satellites from offshore barge

9:16 am

China's spaceports

China today successfully launched eight satellites, its Smart Dragon-3 rocket lifting off from an offshore barge off the northeast coast of China.

The reports from China’s state-run press provided no information on the satellites themselves. The rocket has four stages that are all solid-fueled. This was its fourth launch from the off-shore barge. It was also thirteenth total offshore launch for China, involving four different rockets.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

93 SpaceX
42 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 109 to 64, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 93 to 80.

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September 23, 2024 Quick space links

4:23 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

  • ULA is prepping Vulcan for its second launch

    • Target launch date is October 4, 2024. The launch will put a dummy payload into orbit, but it will, if successful, also certify Vulcan for operationals paying launches for the U.S. military.

 

 

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More deterioration to Curiosity’s worst wheel

12:13 pm

Comparison of changing damage from Feb to Sept 2024
For original images go here, here, and here.

The science team for the Curiosity Mars rover on September 22, 2024 did another survey of its damaged wheels using the close-up camera on the end of the rover’s arm, and though most of the pictures appear to show the situation remains stable, the one wheel that has consistently shown the worst damage now shows some additional deterioration since February 2024.

To the right are comparison pictures, with the February 2024 picture on top and two new September 22, 2024 images showing the same damaged area, though from a different angle, on the bottom. (The technical captions for the bottom images can be found here and here.) I have labeled the treads, dubbed growsers, to make it easier to understand how the pictures all line up.

Previous images have looked down at the large damaged area from growsers 1 to 4, and since it was first spotted in 2022 showed it to be growing, but very slowly. The new pictures show that same damaged area from the side, which reveals that the zig-zag divider between growser #3 and growser #4 has now collapsed, so that this whole damaged area is now a major depression, as indicated by the two arrows.

Overall, the rover’s wheels appear to surviving the rough terrain of the foothills of Mount Sharp, though it is clear that care must continue to be taken to extend their life for as long as possible. That the rover has six wheels gives it a lot of redundancy, so that even if this one wheel eventually fails the rover will likely be able to continue to rove, but with some limitations. This wheel is the left middle wheel, which is helpful, as it is less necessary than the four corner wheels. [Update: According to a rover update today, this wheel is the right middle wheel, which contradicts an earlier report which described this as the left middle wheel. I note this contradiction for accuracy.]

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Isar begins static fire tests of its Spectrum rocket

9:44 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

Isar Aerospace, one of three German rocket startups vying to the be first to complete an orbital launch, has now revealed that it has begun static fire tests of its Spectrum rocket at its launch facility at the Andoya spaceport in Norway.

In response to questioning from European Spaceflight, Isar confirmed that all components of the Spectrum rocket that will be utilized for its inaugural flight had arrived in Andøya and that testing of the first and second stages had begun.

“All components of our launch vehicle Spectrum have arrived in Andøya and the final preparations for the first test flight of Spectrum are in full swing,” an Isar Aerospace spokesperson said. “We are currently performing hot fire tests of the first and second stages. These tests will determine whether the systems meet all the necessary requirements for the first test flight.”

The company has a 20-year lease at Andoya, and though it has not announced a launch date, these ground tests suggest that launch could occur quite soon. If so, Isar will have beaten Rocket Factory Augsburg and Hyimpulse to space. Rocket Factory had apparently been in the lead until a fire during a full static fire test of its RFA-1 rocket’s first stage in August destroyed the rocket.

This race is also between the spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea. Rocket Factory is launching from Saxavord in the Shetland Islands, a spaceport that has been under development the longest, since before 2020, and has been plagued with the red tape problems that appear systemic in the United Kingdom. Andoya however is a latecomer in this race. Though it has been used for suborbital tests for decades, it only started its effort to become a commercial spaceport for orbital flights in November 2023, less than eleven months ago.

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SpaceX conducting salvage operations to recover a Superheavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico

9:19 am

SpaceX has apparently conducted salvage operations in the Gulf of Mexico to recover the Superheavy booster that had successfully completed a soft vertical splashdown during the fourth Starship/Superheavy test flight on June 6, 2024.

Confirmation of the recovery project came from a group of young, independent filmmakers who caught wind of the operation and chartered a boat for the 15-mile trip to the Ridgewind to see for themselves what was going on.

…After a two-and-a-half-hour cruise they were about a half mile from the Ridgewind when a drone buzzed toward them. It hovered for a moment before a voice announced through a loudspeaker: “There is a one mile exclusion zone in this area, please depart one mile away from vessel.”

The filmmakers retreated as requested, but then remained there for awhile, observing operations from a distance. They later contacted SpaceX.

The Interstellar Gateway crew reached out to SpaceX, which Leal said quickly confirmed it had contracted with Hornbeck to recover the giant booster. It asked the filmmakers to refrain from announcing the find until after the Ridgewind completed its work and began steaming to port. That happened Sunday.

The filmmakers are one of the number of independent live stream groups that record launches, and made it clear it announcing the salvage work that they respected SpaceX’s request because they knew it was entirely reasonable — to avoid safety problems that could be caused by others boating over — and that they had no desire to hinder SpaceX’s effort.

The article, from a mainstream Democratic Party propaganda source, however tried to slam SpaceX for its “secretive nature,” something that is so untrue only a Democrat shill could write it with a straight face. It also spent a lot of time criticizing the company for creating that one-mile safety exclusion zone around its salvage operations, questioning SpaceX’s “authority” to do so.

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Chinese pseudo-company almost succeeds in vertically landing test rocket

9:00 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Deep Blue Aerospace this weekend almost succeeded in vertically landing a grasshopper-type test rocket, its engines cutting off just before landing so that when the rocket hit the ground the impact was too much for its landing legs.

I have embedded video of the flight and crash landing below. The footage has a AI feel to it, for several reasons. First the camera is a fisheye lens, creating distortion. Second, this test grasshopper-type rocket is quite small, much smaller than the company wants you to realize, thus allowing the drone to fly around during its flight it in a somewhat spectacular manner.

The company stated that the test completed 10 of 11 engineering goals. It will have to rebuild a new test lander however to achieve that last and most important goal, landing without damage to allow immediate reflight. Regardless, this test means that China is finally getting close to achieving rocket reusablity, something it promised in 2018 it would achieve by 2020.

Note also that though this pseudo-company will likely not release its data to the other Chinese pseudo-companies, if China’s government wants to expropriate it for its own government rockets it will do so, and in fact likely has.
» Read more

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China and Rocket Lab complete launches

3:11 pm

Yesterday there were two more launches. First China’s Long March 2D rocket in the very early morning hours lifted off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northern China, placing six satellites in orbit.

The satellites are part of a constellation for doing high resolution Earth observations. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuel, crashed inside China.

Next Rocket Lab successfully launched five satellites for the French satellite company Kinéis. This was the second of five planned launches by Rocket Lab to put the entire 25 satellite internet-of-things constellation into orbit. It was also the second attempt to launch, with the first experiencing a launch abort at T-0 seconds due to a ground-system issue.

The launch pace is beginning to heat up. There were four launches yesterday, two from China, one from SpaceX and one from Rocket Lab. The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

93 SpaceX
41 China
11 Russia
11 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 109 to 63, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 93 to 79.

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Boeing replaces the head of its defense/space/security division

4:24 pm

Ted Colbert
Ted Colbert

Boeing today announced that the head of its defense/space/security division, Ted Colbert, has been removed, effective immediately.

New Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg in his first significant move since taking over in August, said Ted Colbert would be leaving and Steve Parker, the unit’s chief operating officer, would assume Colbert’s responsibilities until a replacement is named at a later date.

One project that Colbert was in charge of was Starliner, a program that has cost the company at least $1.6 billion in overruns because of numerous faulty engineering problems.

Colbert might not be to blame for the endless problems at Starliner, but the fish stinks from the head. He also might be very qualified, but sadly, as his picture shows, he is a minority, and since Boeing went all in on DEI racist hiring quotas a few years ago, which makes the skin color and gender of an applicant a major qualification in hiring, one can’t help wondering if he was a DEI (Didn’t Earn It) hire. At Boeing that policy created a goal to increase black staffing by 20%. Its full report [pdf] makes it very clear it no longer made talent, experience, or skill the primary qualification for getting hired, but skin color and sex took precedence.

As I said, one cannot help wondering if Colbert was hired not because of his great management and engineering knowledge, but because he happened to born with a dark skin color. If so, that might help explain the failures in this paricular division.

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China’s solid-fueled Kuaizhou-1A rocket launches four satellites

4:05 pm

China this afternoon launched four satellites using its solid-fueled Kuaizhou-1A rocket, lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China.

It is unclear what the satellites purpose are, though there are hints they are part of a constellation providing communications for the internet of things. No word was also released where the rocket’s lower stages crashed in China.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

93 SpaceX
40 China
11 Russia
10 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 108 to 62, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 93 to 77.

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Land of cracks

1:26 pm

Land of cracks

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on June 28, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature. When the camera team needs to do this, they try to pick something interesting, but don’t always have that option.

In this case, the landscape available included the channel shown to the right. About a half mile wide and only about fifty feet deep, the floor of this canyon appears to have a lot of trapped dust, forming ripple dunes, along with a lot of knobby protrusions, likely small mesas. The canyon walls appear layered, with the erosion processes producing different features on opposite sides. On the southeast the layers appear to produce distinct terraces, while on the northwest the cliff is very steep at the top and then forms a long gently descending slope that appears formed of alluvial fill (from that cliff) and formed from erosion and landslides.
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A review of Firefly’s new launch facilities in both the U.S. and Sweden

10:19 am

Link here. The company already has leases for launchpads at both Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, though only the Vandenberg pad is presently operational. It now building new pads in Viriginia at Wallops Island and in Sweden at the commercial Esrange spaceport.

Regarding the purpose of offering a launch site in Europe, Firefly stated to NSF, “The launch cadence will largely be driven by customer demand. With the inaugural Alpha launch from Esrange as early as 2026, the new complex can support commercial customers in the broader European market and enable tactically responsive space missions to further advance national security for NATO countries.”

The company has already completed five launches from Vandenberg, with a sixth upcoming.

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Brazil approves space bill that appears to crush that country’s future in space

10:13 am

The Brazillian legislature has now approved a new space regulatory bill that appears to create a whole range of new agencies and regulatory bodies, all designed to heavily supervise all space activities while giving a great deal of arbitrary power to the government.

The quote below says it all. Note that the term “space operators” refers to any private aerospace operation.

The [government] may economically exploit, directly or indirectly, without bidding, the space infrastructure, including ground equipment and logistical resources, installations and computer systems necessary to carry out space activities.

The regulatory authorities, AEB and the Air Force Command, will have free access to the facilities and equipment of space operators. They may, at any time, cancel or change the licenses granted in the event of non-compliance with obligations or when there is a threat to national security or violation of international commitments. Even if its activities are suspended or canceled, the operator remains responsible for the artifacts that are in operation. [emphasis mine]

There is a lot more, all of it adding more heavy regulation while imposing great responsibilities both legal and financial on the private companies, all to the benefit of the government.

Who is going to invest billions, even millions, under such an arbitrary regime? No one, especially because the Brazillian government has already proven its willingness to unilaterially block or take over private companies with its actions in connection with Starlink and X.

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SpaceX finds a way to extend the launch window for Europa Clipper

10:03 am

The launch window for SpaceX’s launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper to Jupiter has now been extended a full week because the company has revised the launch process and made hardware changes.

The new launch window runs from October 10th to November 6th.

Usually the two side boosters come back to land at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station so they can be reused and sometimes the core booster is recovered at sea, but not this time. All their fuel will be used to get Europa Clipper on its way to Jupiter. Piloto said SpaceX “made some hardware modifications that enable the launch vehicle to utilize all the fuel in the boosters,” but couldn’t go into detail about what they are because the information is proprietary.

[The NASA official] added that SpaceX has gained experience in flying this configuration — it’s the 11th Falcon Heavy launch — and the company has “come up with a strategy to optimize throttling of the launch vehicle to get more performance out of it.”

NASA and SpaceX have also decided to use NASA’s orbiting communications constellation during the launch instead of ground stations, which increases their flexibility and margins.

I wonder if the FAA has approved these changes. Or even if anyone there even understands them.

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SpaceX and Elon Musk blast the FAA’s red tape again

9:54 am

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

Fight! Fight! Fight! Yesterday both SpaceX and Elon Musk renewed their attack on the FAA’s apparent arbitrary harassment of the company, both by slowing down development of Starship/Superheavy as well as imposing fines and delays on the company for petty issues relating to Falcon 9 launches.

First, Elon Musk sent out a tweet on X, highlighting a successful static fire launchpad engine test of the Starship prototype the company plans to fly on the sixth Starship/Superheavy orbital flight. As he noted with apparent disgust, “Flight 5 is built and ready to fly. Flight 6 will be ready to fly before Flight 5 even gets approved by FAA!”

Second, and with more force, the company released a public letter that it has sent to the leading Republican and Democratic representatives of the House and Senate committees that have direct authority over space activities, outlining its issues with the FAA’s behavior. The letter details at length the irrational and inexplicable slowdown in FAA approvals that caused two launches last summer to occur in a confused manner, with SpaceX clearly given the impression by the FAA that it could go ahead which the FAA now denies. In one case the FAA claims SpaceX removed without its permission a poll of mission control during its countdown procedure. SpaceX in its letter noted bluntly that the regulations do not require that poll, and that the company already requires two other polls during the count.

In another case involving SpaceX’s plan to change to a new mission control center, the company submitted its request in June, and after two months the FAA finally approved the control center’s use for one launch, but had still not approved it for a second. The first launch went off, so SpaceX thus rightly assumed it could use the control center for the second. Yet the FAA is now trying to fine SpaceX for that second launch.

The third case of FAA misconduct appears to be the most egregious. » Read more

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