Tag: spaceflight

China launches four weather satellites

12:08 am

China late today used its Kuaizhou-1A solid-fueled rocket to place four weather satellites into orbit, lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed within China. This launch is the first of four Chinese launches known to be scheduled in the next few days, part of China’s typical rush of launches that seems to happen at the end of every year.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

94 SpaceX
62 China
18 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 108 to 62, and the entire world combined 108 to 98. SpaceX in turn trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 94 to 98.

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Repost: The real meaning of the Apollo 8 Earthrise image

11:19 am

I wrote this essay in 2018, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. I think it worth reposting again, especially because stories about Apollo 8 still refuse to show the Earthrise image as Bill Anders took it.
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Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer
Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the moment when the three astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed their first Earthrise while in orbit around the Moon, and Bill Anders snapped the picture of that Earthrise that has been been called “the most influential environmental picture ever taken.”

The last few days have seen numerous articles celebrating this iconic image. While all have captured in varying degrees the significance and influence of that picture on human society on Earth, all have failed to depict this image as Bill Anders, the photographer, took it. He did not frame the shot, in his mind, with the horizon on the bottom of the frame, as it has been depicted repeatedly in practically every article about this image, since the day it was published back in 1968.

Instead, Anders saw himself as an spaceman in a capsule orbiting the waist of the Moon. He also saw the Earth as merely another space object, now appearing from behind the waist of that Moon. As a result, he framed the shot with the horizon to the right, with the Earth moving from right to left as it moved out from behind the Moon, as shown on the right.

His perspective was that of a spacefarer, an explorer of the universe that sees the planets around him as objects within that universe in which he floats.

When we here are on Earth frame the image with the horizon on the bottom, we immediately reveal our limited planet-bound perspective. We automatically see ourselves on a planet’s surface, watching another planet rise above the distant horizon line.

This difference in perspective is to me the real meaning of this picture. On one hand we see the perspective of the past. On the other we see the perspective the future, for as long humanity can remain alive.

I prefer the future perspective, which is why I framed this image on the cover of Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 the way Bill Anders took it. I prefer to align myself with that space-faring future.

And it was that space-faring future that spoke when they read from Genesis that evening. They had made the first human leap to another world, and they wished to describe and capture the majesty of that leap to the world. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Yet, they were also still mostly Earth-bound in mind, which is why Frank Borman’s concluding words during that Christmas eve telecast were so heartfelt. He was a spaceman in a delicate vehicle talking to his home of Earth, 240,000 miles away. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” They longed deeply to return, a wish that at that moment, in that vehicle, was quite reasonable.

Someday that desire to return to Earth will be gone. People will live and work and grow up in space, and see the Earth as Bill Anders saw it in his photograph fifty years ago.

And it is for that time that I long. It will be a future of majesty we can only imagine.

Merry Christmas to all, all of us still pinned down here on “the good Earth.”

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SpaceX launches two German military radar satellites

10:39 am

SpaceX today successfully launched two German military radar surveillance satellites, completing a planned three-satellite constellation, with its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its eighth flight, landing back at Vandenberg.

This launch almost certainly in the past would have launched on a Arianespace rocket, but Arianespace presently has no operational rocket, its Ariane-5 rocket retired and its Ariane-6 rocket not yet operational. Furthermore, its Vega and Vega-C rockets are grounded due to launch failures, and its partnership with Russia ended with Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. Thus, SpaceX gets the business, being less expensive than ULA (which also has no rockets available right now to handle this launch) and there being no other company capable of launching such a payload.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

94 SpaceX
61 China
18 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 108 to 61, and the entire world combined 108 to 97. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 94 to 97.

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SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites

8:54 pm

Early on December 23, 2023 SpaceX successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its 19th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. This reuse was new record. In fact, the reuse numbers of SpaceX’s fleet Falcon 9 first stages are beginning to resemble the reuse numbers of NASA’s shuttle fleet, and are doing so in a significantly shorter period of time and for a lot less money.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race remain the same:

93 SpaceX
61 China
18 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 107 to 61, and the entire world combined 107 to 97. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 93 to 97.

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Curiosity takes a close-up of distant cliffs

11:27 am

Panorama on December 20, 2023
Panorama on December 20, 2023. Click for full image.

Close-up of a distant cliff
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 21, 2023 by the chemistry camera (ChemCam) on the rover Curiosity. Originally designed to take close-ups of rocks very nearby the rover, the science team over time discovered that they could also use this camera to get close-ups of very distant objects, providing them another way to study the geology in Gale Crater and on Mount Sharp.

The picture to the right I think shows the horizon area indicated by the arrow on the panorama above, taken the day before. Note the many many layers, a geological feature that Curiosity has discovered is ubiquitous on Mars. Over eons the entire surface of the red planet has been layered repeatedly by cyclical geological events, producing layers within layers within layers. I guarantee that when Curiosity gets closer to this cliff it will see layers inside the smallest layers ChemCam can see now.

The red dotted line on the panorama above indicates the approximate planned route that Curiosity will eventually take, cutting across in front of that mountain and turning south somewhere near but to the west of where the cliff in this picture is located.
» Read more

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Firefly successfully launches for the second time in 2023

10:41 am

Alpha seven seconds after liftoff
Alpha seven seconds after liftoff

UPDATE #2: According to a Firefly tweet on X, the second stage failed to fire its second burn. The satellite however was deployed, communications established, and mission operations started. Though its orbit will decay prematurely, it appears the customer, the Space Force, will achieve most of its mission objectives. This should be considered a successful launch, albeit not one that Firefly will want to repeat in this manner.

UPDATE: It appears the upper stage might have had a problem in its final engine burn intended to circularize the orbit for deployment. Either the burn failed to occur, or did not fire correctly. See this tweet. (Hat tip Jay.) I have found other reports that indicate the same question.

The question now is whether this is considered a successful launch. One of its main tasks was to demonstrate fast assembly and prelaunch procedures, for the Space Force. This was accomplished. If the satellite cannot function however is isn’t a full success. I will wait for more information before deciding whether to remove it from the launch stats.

Original post:
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Firefly today successfully completed its second launch in 2023, its third launch overall, its Alpha rocket lifting off from its launchpad at Vandenberg in California.

With this launch Firefly also met its launch prediction for 2023, two launches. The mission was its second for the Space Force this year, both designed to test quick launch procedures. As of posting the payload has not been deployed.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race remain the same:

92 SpaceX
61 China
18 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 106 to 61, and the entire world combined 106 to 97. SpaceX still trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 92 to 97.

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Chinese astronauts do spacewalk to repair Tiangong-3 solar panel

9:27 am

Two Chinese astronauts yesterday completed a 7.5 hour spacewalk on that country’s Tiangong-3 space station to test a repair technique to what the state-run press said was minor damage on a solar panel from micrometeorites.

The EVA posed new challenges for the astronauts, according to Dong Nengli, deputy chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program. “For the previous extravehicular activities, the major tasks for astronauts were to install and check. This round of extravehicular activities on Thursday we call experimental servicing,” Dong told CCTV. “This time the astronauts operated on one of the solar wings. It is flexible, to a certain extent, and also very thin, which limits the space of operation to a certain degree,” Dong said.

Dong added that the successful EVA meant the teams had mastered the ability for some extravehicular repairs. Success was thus, “laying a solid foundation for us to guarantee the space station’s safety and reliability in the future.”

It must be noted that no specific details about what was done were provided, nor did the short video released by China showing highlights of the spacewalk show the specific repair work.

Nonetheless, there is an aspect of China’s space station that makes it a far more powerful national symbol than ISS: It is China’s alone, built, launched, occupied, and maintained by China alone. It fuels national pride in a way that ISS never has, because President Bill Clinton decided to use it in the 1990s for foreign policy concerns by giving the Russians an equal partnership. Neither the U.S. nor Russia have obtained the same kind of prestige at home and abroad because neither really built ISS on their own. It was a shared effort, which meant neither could claim it.

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A glacial lake on Mars?

12:40 pm

A glacial lake in a
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 30, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It shows what appears to be a glacial flow of ice, flowing downhill to the southwest and inside a wide canyon about three miles across. The canyon rims to the north and south are about 2,000 to 2,100 feet above the canyon’s lowest point, indicated by the string of “+” signs.

This close-up view immediately suggests a canyon whose glacier flows outward to the southwest into open lowland terrain, though the three craters, because they are undistorted, suggests that this flow is presently not active. That suggestion however would be wrong. It is always necessary to understand Martian geology to not only take close-in views at high resolution, but to zoom back and see the terrain in context.
» Read more

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New Hubble image of Saturn

10:04 am

Saturn and its rings, as seen by Hubble

The annotated image above was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on October 22, 2023, showing Saturn, its glorious rings, and several of its dozens of moons from a distance of about 850 million miles. For the unannotated version, go here. Of all the features, the spokes in the rings are the most intriguing.

Saturn’s spokes are transient features that rotate along with the rings. Their ghostly appearance only persists for two or three rotations around Saturn. During active periods, freshly-formed spokes continuously add to the pattern. In 1981, NASA’s Voyager 2 first photographed the ring spokes. Hubble continues observing Saturn annually as the spokes come and go. This cycle has been captured by Hubble’s Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program that began nearly a decade ago to annually monitor weather changes on all four gas-giant outer planets.

Hubble’s crisp images show that the frequency of spoke apparitions is seasonally driven, first appearing in OPAL data in 2021 but only on the morning (left) side of the rings. Long-term monitoring shows that both the number and contrast of the spokes vary with Saturn’s seasons. Saturn is tilted on its axis like Earth and has seasons lasting approximately seven years.

This year, these ephemeral structures appear on both sides of the planet simultaneously as they spin around the giant world. Although they look small compared with Saturn, their length and width can stretch longer than Earth’s diameter!

Though the origin of the spokes remains unsolved, the leading theory proposes they are caused by interactions between Saturn’s magnetic field and the seasonal changes in solar radiation.

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Ingenuity’s engineers explain what they have learned flying the helicopter on Mars

9:49 am

Link here. The essay details carefully the problems they have faced, and how they have not only overcome them but used them to refine operations to squeeze far more capabilities out of the helicopter, beyond its initial design.

Saving flight time saves energy, reduces heating, and provides more freedom to use slower speeds to tiptoe around disruptive terrain that might otherwise endanger or significantly degrade the landing accuracy of the helicopter. Higher speeds and higher accelerations reduce the time needed to execute a given flight path. Higher altitudes permit higher speeds, as the wider field of view helps to keep ground features in view of Ingenuity’s navigation camera longer, counteracting the effect of increased speed. Expanding Ingenuity’s flight envelope had the potential to relax flight planning constraints and allow Ingenuity to operate more effectively alongside Perseverance.

As a result, beginning with flight 45 the team has made changes to increase flight speeds and acceleration at every point of every flight, thus allowing the helicopter to fly higher and farther with less strain.

This report however does not provide any information on Ingenuity’s last two flights, especially its 68th, which did not go as planned. The helicopter appears to be in good shape (the team has already planned the 69th flight, which was supposed to happen two days ago), but a more detailed update would be appreciated.

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ULA’s Vulcan rocket fully stacked for the first time

9:39 am

Peregrine landing site
The landing site for Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander

In preparation for its targeted January 8, 2024 launch, ULA’s Vulcan rocket has now been fully stacked for first time in its assembly building at Cape Canaveral.

ULA’s new rocket has rolled between its vertical hangar and the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station several times for countdown rehearsals and fueling tests. But ULA only needed the Vulcan rocket’s first stage and upper stage to complete those tests. The addition of the payload shroud Wednesday marked the first time ULA has fully stacked a Vulcan rocket, standing some 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall, still surrounded by scaffolding and work platforms inside its assembly building.

It will next be rolled to the launchpad for some final checks prior to launch on January 8, 2023. Unlike most first launches, it carries a real payload, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, which hopes to softly place several NASA and commercial payloads near the Gruithuisen Domes in the northwest quadrant of the Moon’s visible hemisphere, as shown on the map above.

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White House issues “policy framework” to lobby for its space regulatory proposal

9:28 am

Faced with stiff opposition from industry and politicians from both parties in Congress to its regulatory proposal issued in mid-November, the White House yesterday released what it called a “policy framework” for implementing that proposal.

You can read this policy framework here [pdf]. It is filled with high-sounding claims about its goal is to encourage private development and reduce red tape, but in the end it only adds more government entities to the entire bureaucracy that regulates commercial space. From the framework itself:

The Secretaries of Commerce and Transportation will co-lead a Private Sector Space Activities Interagency Steering Group in consultation with the Chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), comprising representation from the Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, Interior, and State, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and any other Federal entities with expertise or equities pertaining to private sector novel space activities, including relevant stakeholders from the Executive Office of the President. The Steering Group serves as a coordinating body to ensure that the U.S. Government oversight system is prepared to meet U.S. priorities while taking into consideration the competitiveness of U.S. industry now and into the future.

One of the criticisms of the White House proposal from mid-November was that it would split regulation between Commerce and Transportation, thus increasing the complexity for commerical companies. This steering group is clearly an effort to answer those complaints, but based on this proposal, it simply adds one more bureaucratic layer to the mix, making things even more complicated.

The framework also calls for the expansion of the government’s regulatory footprint on several fronts, such as controlling orbital debris, and achieved through “expanding existing, or establish new, federal advisory committees to account for all expanded space authorities in furtherance of this Framework and related legislative proposals.”

From the viewpoint of freedom, this entire proposal reads like a zombie end-of-the-world horror film, with bureaucratic zombies appearing endlessly from all directions, aimed at consuming any independent private company as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.

The original commercial space act proposal from Congress, that the Biden administration (and most Democrats) oppose but carries the endorsement of the private commercial space industry, was passed by its House committee, but still needs to be voted on by the full House, as well as the Senate. Because it remains in limbo, the White House has issued this framework, in the hope it can give its side the ammunition needed to defeat that bill and replace it with the White House’s.

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