Tag: spaceflight

SpaceX’s Saturday launch will two test smallsats for its planned 11K internet constellation

11:27 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX will include two test smallsats for its planned internet constellation of more than 11k satellites when launches a Spanish radar satellite in two days.

The FCC gave SpaceX permission for the test in November, and new documents now show that SpaceX will piggyback Microsat-2a and Microsat-2b onto its launch of a Spanish radar satellite called Paz. The mission is set to lift off from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Saturday at 9:14 a.m. ET aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, according to Spaceflight Now.

Ajit Jai, chairperson of the FCC — the government entity which must ultimately approve SpaceX’s plans — endorsed the effort on Wednesday. “Satellite technology can help reach Americans who live in rural or hard-to-serve places where fiber optic cables and cell towers do not reach,” Pai told Reuters in a statement.

A lot of news sources have made a big deal about Jai’s endorsement, as if that endorsement guarantees FCC approval of SpaceX’s gigantic constellation. It doesn’t, though it certainly helps.

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Vector gets new contract for five launches

11:13 am

Capitalism in space: Vector has signed a contract with nanosat company Open Cosmos, which has reserved five launches from 2019 to 2023.

The most interesting tidbit in this press release was where it says that Vector is planning its first orbital launch of its Vector-R rocket in July. According to the plans their CEO Jim Cantrell had described to me when he gave me a tour of their facility in March 2017, they were going to do five suborbital test launches before doing an orbital flight. So far they have done two of these. Either they plan to do the remaining three in the next six months, or are going to go orbital sooner than originally planned.

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SpaceX cancels Texas subsidy that required Boca Chica operation in 2018

2:59 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX has canceled a small Texas subsidy that required it to begin operations at its Boca Chica spaceport by September 2018.

The company terminated a deal reached with the office of then-Gov. Rick Perry in late 2013 that earmarked $2.3 million from the Texas Enterprise Fund for the future spaceport at Boca Chica beach, which is near Brownsville. The project has experienced delays and SpaceX had received about $400,000 of the money, but it now has paid back all of it.

The deal mandated that, to receive the incentives dollars, the spaceport be operational by Sept. 30 this year and employ 180 people by the end of 2018. It appears SpaceX was unlikely to meet either target.

This does not mean that SpaceX is abandoning the spaceport, only that it can’t meet the schedule required by this subsidy. This also might explain why they requested an additional $5 million from Texas. They knew they were going to lose this $2.3 million subsidy and were lobbying to make up for it with other state funds.

Hat tip Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas.

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Europe suddenly realizes that reusable rockets are possible and economical

8:53 am

The head of the European Space Agency (ESA) has admitted in his blog that the agency’s future rockets, Ariane 6 and Vega C, are not going to be competitive because they will not be reusable.

The promise to secure autonomous access to space and reduce the price by a factor of 2 proved sufficiently compelling to secure ESA member states’ agreement to finance the development. At that time, I succeeded in placing environmental concerns and the possible development of reusability among the high-level requirements:

  • Maintain and ensure European launcher competence with a long-term perspective, including possibility of reusability/fly-back.
  • Ensure possibility to deorbit upper stage directly

Due to time and cost pressure, however, these aspects did not make it onto the agenda for Ariane 6 and Vega C. Yet in the meantime, the world has moved on and today’s situation requires that we re-assess the situation and identify the possible consequences. In many discussions on the political level, the strategic goal of securing European autonomous access to space has not changed, however there is a growing sense that pressure from global competition is something that needs to be addressed. With Vega C, Ariane 62 and Ariane 64 approaching completion, it seems logical to complete these launchers in order to at least take that major step towards competitiveness. At the same time, it is essential that we now discuss future solutions, including disruptive ideas. Simply following the kind of approaches seen so far would be expensive and ultimately will fail to convince. Totally new ideas are needed and Europe must now prove it still possesses that traditional strength to surpass itself and break out beyond existing borders. In this sense, the process of discussing and deciding on a launcher system that eschews traditional solutions can send a powerful signal out into other areas as well. I therefore intend to invite innovative, really interested European players to come together to define possible ways forward. [emphasis mine]

Let me translate his bureaucratic wording: “We didn’t think reuseable rockets were practical, economical, or even possible. We took a safe route in designing Ariane 6 and Vega C. We screwed up, and now face a competitive market in which our rockets cannot compete. Thus, we need to move fast to copy the private sector, SpaceX and Blue Origin in particular, or face serious financial consequences.

Unless he forces some major cultural changes in ESA, however, I expect that by the time this government-run operation manages to duplicate the achievements of those two private companies, those companies will have marched on to even more innovative successes.

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Massive flow on Mars

9:59 am

Massive flow on Mars

Cool image time! The image on the right, cropped to post here, comes from a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image that shows a massive relatively recent and dark slope streak that emanates out from a single point on the surface. (Note that the release at this link rotates the image so that north points down. I have rotated back so that north points up.)

Streaks form on slopes when dust cascades downhill. The dark streak is an area of less dust compared to the brighter and reddish surroundings. What triggers these avalanches is not known, but might be related to sudden warming of the surface.

These streaks are often diverted by the terrain they flow down. This one has split into many smaller streaks where it encountered minor obstacles. These streaks fade away over decades as more dust slowly settles out of the Martian sky.

Point of origin for flow

Location of flow, west of Olympus Mons

The MRO release focuses on the fingerlike breakup of the flow as it descends into sand-dune filled plain. What is more interesting to me is the terrain where this flow originated. A close-up of that area from the full image, shown on the right, reveals a feature that could be a wash running in line with the flow’s origin, and leading uphill to a dark feature that is a likely a cliff face. (The light in this image is coming from the southeast.)

This location, at 15.2N latitude, 214.9E longitude and shown by the small cross in the image on the right and captured from this page, is west of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars. This suggests to me that the originating feature might be an outlet from a lava tube, from which water suddenly seeped out to produce this massive slope streak. A look at the mesa from which this flow came, cropped from the full image and posted below the fold, shows numerous similar slope streaks of varying ages flowing out of this mesa, with some very faint because they occurred farther in the past. Some are even within the bowl at the top of the mesa.

Whether these come from lava tubes is definitely unclear, and I suspect I will be told by geologists not likely. The seeps however do suggest strongly that this mesa might be a very good location for future colonists to look for underground water ice. Since clouds form on the western slopes of Arsia Mons, the southernmost of the three giant volcanoes to the east of Olympus Mons, and that past glacial activity has been documented there, I wonder if some of these same conditions might also exist here, on the nearby terrain west of Olympus Mons.
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Trump to propose transitioning ISS to private hands post 2024

8:57 am

It appears that the Trump administration will propose in its 2019 budget, to be released today, to cease funding ISS in 2024 but to aim at a full transition to private control so that the station is not de-orbited when federal funding ceases.

The approach the administration has chosen is one that would end NASA funding of the ISS in 2025, while offering support for the development of commercial successors. “In support of enabling a timely development and transition of commercial capabilities in LEO where NASA could be one of many customers in the mid-2020s, the Administration is proposing to end direct Federal support for the ISS in 2025 under the current NASA-directed operating model,” the document states.

The 2019 budget proposal will offer $150 million “to enable the development and maturation of commercial entities and capabilities which will ensure that commercial successors to the ISS – potentially including elements of the ISS – are operational when they are needed.” The document says “increasing investments” above that $150 million will be included in future years’ budget requests.

The end of federal funding for the ISS would not necessarily mean the end of the station, or at least some parts of it, according to the document. “[I]t is possible that industry could continue to operate certain elements or capabilities of the ISS as part of a future commercial platform,” it states.

Not surprisingly, there are already hints that there will be massive opposition to such a plan, as it will shift power (and responsibility) from the government to private contractors. Some in Washington will not want the government to lose that power. And some private contractors are simply unwilling to shoulder the responsibility for figuring out how to make money from the station, something that is certainly possible since the development costs will have been fully paid for by the taxpayer.

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A good health check for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

10:32 am

Link here. The article outlines in good detail the spacecraft’s present condition, which is excellent despite being in space since 2005, as well as outlining the measures being taken to keep it operational into the 2020s.

This item is probably the biggest cause for concern:

For example, some HiRISE images taken in 2017 and early 2018 show slight blurring not seen earlier in the mission. The cause is under investigation. The percentage of full-resolution images with blurring peaked at 70 percent last October, at about the time when Mars was at the point in its orbit farthest from the Sun. The percentage has since declined to less than 20 percent. Even before the first blurred images were seen, observations with HiRISE commonly used a technique that covers more ground area at half the resolution. This still provides higher resolution than any other camera orbiting Mars — about 2 feet (60 centimeters) per pixel — and little blurring has appeared in the resulting images.

HiRISE is the spacecraft’s primary instrument, and its most valuable. If it goes, we will lose our best tool right now for looking in detail at the Martian surface.

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SSL lawsuit against Orbital ATK to move forward

8:48 am

A judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought by SSL against Orbital ATK, two companies competing for satellite servicing work, can go forward.

The case stems a December 2016 incident where NASA officials notified SSL that there had been unauthorized access to SSL documents related to a NASA “Tipping Point” technology development award on a server at the Langley Research Center. SSL had received that award earlier in the year to work on technologies related to in-space satellite servicing.

That unauthorized access was traced to an Orbital ATK employee, who was subsequently fired by the company. However, SSL said in its suit that as many as six Orbital ATK employees viewed the documents. SSL filed the suit in March 2017 seeking an injunction to prevent Orbital ATK from using any of those documents in its own projects, as well as “other and further relief the Court may deem just and appropriate.”

Both companies have satellite servicing missions planned. What I want is for both to succeed, to provide some competition in the field. Though I suspect this is doubtful, this lawsuit has the possibiliity of killing Orbital ATK’s effort.

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New Horizons takes the most distant pictures from Earth ever taken

8:43 am

Kuiper Belt Object 2012 HE85

The New Horizons science team has released three images taken by the spacecraft from almost 3.8 billion miles from Earth, the most distant images ever taken.

The routine calibration frame of the “Wishing Well” galactic open star cluster, made by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Dec. 5, was taken when New Horizons was 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers, or 40.9 astronomical units) from Earth – making it, for a time, the farthest image ever made from Earth.

…LORRI broke its own record just two hours later with images of Kuiper Belt objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 – further demonstrating how nothing stands still when you’re covering more than 700,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) of space each day.

The images themselves are not spectacular to look at, though the two images of two different Kuiper Belt objects are the best ever taken of such objects, and certainly contain data that scientists will be able to use. The image on the right is one of these objects, 2012 HE85. For example, note how it does not appear to be round.

This exercise is in preparation for the January 1, 2019 fly-by of 2014 MU69, where the images will be sharp and detailed, and provide us a good look at such a distant object.

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NASA approves 2020 launch window for first Dream Chaser flight

8:32 am

Capitalism in space: Sierra Nevada has gotten the okay from NASA to aim for a 2020 launch window for the first flight of its reusable Dream Chaser mini-shuttle.

SNC announced Feb. 7 that it had received “authority to proceed” on that mission using the company’s Dream Chaser vehicle. The mission will launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in late 2020. The mission is the first of six in the company’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contract it won in 2016 to transport cargo to and from the ISS. SNC received a CRS-2 contract along with current CRS providers Orbital ATK and SpaceX.

“While we won the contract a couple of years ago, the contract still needed to be validated by a task order,” said Mark Sirangelo, executive vice president of SNC’s Space Systems business area, in a Feb. 7 speech at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference here. That order, he said, is the “biggest step” to date on the program. That flight will be a “full scale, fully operational mission,” he said, even though it will represent the first orbital flight of the Dream Chaser. Orbital ATK and SpaceX, who developed their Cygnus and Dragon spacecraft, respectively, under earlier NASA Space Act Agreements, flew demonstration missions before starting their operational CRS cargo flights.

Do not be surprised if this flight does not launch on schedule. I fully expect that development will push it back into 2021, a delay that would not be unreasonable.

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Mars rover update: February 8, 2018

2:01 pm

Summary: Curiosity remains on Vera Rubin Ridge, though it has begun moving toward the point where it will move down off the ridge. Opportunity remains in Perseverance Valley, though it has finally taken the north fork down.

Before providing today’s update, I have decided it is time to provide links to all previous updates, in chronological order. This will allow my new readers to catch up and have a better understanding of where each rover is, where each is heading, and what fascinating things they have seen in the past year and a half.

These updates began when I decided to figure out the overall context of Curiosity’s travels, which resulted in my March 2016 post, Pinpointing Curiosity’s location in Gale Crater. Then, when Curiosity started to travel through the fascinating and rough Murray Buttes terrain in the summer of 2016, I stated to post regular updates. To understand the press releases from NASA on the rover’s discoveries it is really necessary to understand the larger picture, which is what these updates provide. Soon, I added Opportunity to the updates, with the larger context of its recent travels along the rim of Endeavour Crater explained in my May 15, 2017 rover update.

Now to talk about the most recent news from both rovers!
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Update on Falcon Heavy core stage landing failure

8:26 am

Link here. According to Musk, the reason the core stage hit the water so fast is that some engines did not fire as intended.

He said engineers believed only one of three engines fired during a final burn designed to slow the rocket’s descent before touchdown. The stage only missed the boat by about the length of a football field, but the force of its water impact was enough to “take out” two engines on the nearby drone ship and spray it with debris.

This is proper engineering procedure. They flew a test, and learned something. They now need to figure out why it happened, and fix it.

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Falcon Heavy reactions post launch

8:00 am

I could provide links to probably a hundred articles, but most simply say the same things, while generally being awed and excited. The handful below sum things up well, plus provide some additional details:

The first two stories provide a good overview of the excitement caused by the launch. The third story, about California’s tax on rocket launches, is really an op-ed opposing the tax. (I don’t expect that state’s leftist legislature to cancel it.) The third story also outlines what happened, but provides this significant quote from Musk, illustrating starkly how revolutionary this rocket is:

Musk said he personally inspected the landed boosters, adding that SpaceX could even reuse them if it wanted. Even after seeing the results of the launch, Musk said he was having difficulty comprehending the magnitude of the flight, saying it was surreal for him to see such success.

“It can launch things direct to Pluto and beyond. Don’t even need gravity assist or anything,” Musk said. “You can go back to the moon.”

He estimated the total SpaceX investment was over $500 million dollars to develop Falcon Heavy. Musk noted those funds were “all internal,” and not from taxpayers or fundraising.

In other words, the taxpayer now has available, at no development cost, the heavy-lift rocket that NASA has been trying and failing to build for tens of billions since 2004.

Finally, the last story isn’t really about Falcon Heavy, but about how SpaceX is in the driver’s seat in the prices it charges. The company is saving quite a lot by reusing its first stage boosters. For the first initial launches reusing these boosters they offered discounts to get customers to use them. Now they no longer have to, because their normal prices beat everyone else anyway. They can pocket the extra profits.

And all this has happened because of freedom, competition, and the vision of one man. Musk deserves all the accolades he is receiving today.

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Watching the Falcon Heavy launch

8:59 am

This morning there are dozens of stories across the entire media about SpaceX’s first test launch today of its Falcon Heavy rocket, generally pushing out all other space news. Most repeat the same information, about the rocket, the company, the goals, its history, and its consequences, all subjects that I have already covered extensively here at Behind the Black or elsewhere.

One story however is not only fun, and demonstrates the value of freedom and private enterprise. An uber-type car transportation company called Lyft is offering half-price rides from Orlando to watch the Falcon Heavy launch.

The benefits of innovation and competition will be routinely surprising, and come from places unexpected. Lyft is doing this because of the high traffic being generated by SpaceX’s launch. It gives them margin to cut prices while also generating some good PR.

Meanwhile, if you want to watch the launch (launch now delayed to 2:00 pm Eastern), you can either go to SpaceX’s video stream on its website, or on youtube, or you can go to the live feed at Spaceflightnow.

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Russia’s next ISS module, Nauka, delayed again

9:09 am

Russia is apparently going to have to delay the launch of its next ISS module, Nauka, into 2019.

Nauka was initially built in the 1990s as a back-up module for one of Russia’s first ISS first modules, Zarya. It has undergone numerous concept changes, and even more numerous delays, including the most recent and worst, where it was discovered that they had to scrub clean the module’s fueling system because they had become contaminated.

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Falcon Heavy launch tomorrow

8:58 am

Capitalism in space: Several stories today about tomorrow’s long-awaited Falcon Heavy launch, with a launch window opening at 1:30 pm (eastern).

First, the FAA has approved SpaceX’s launch license. This is an example of the absolute irrelevance of government. There was no way this launch license was going to be denied, which means that the FAA’s only purpose here was to simply make work for some bureaucrats.

Second, this story by Bill Harwood provides a nice summary of the context of the launch, including SpaceX’s success at shaking up the launch history in the past decade. The money quote, however, comes when Harwood quotes John Logsdon, founder and now retired director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. For years Logsdon has been the media’s go-to expert on the policy of space, and has consistently expressed unbounded faith and love for NASA projects like SLS. His perspective has always been that of the 1960s, when the space race then established the concept that in order to succeed in space you needed to have a government space program. The idea of a chaotic, competitive effort by private companies has always been inconceivable to him and most liberal policy experts. Thus, when asked about the purpose behind Falcon Heavy as well as Musk’s even bigger proposed rocket, the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), Logsdon was totally baffled.

“I don’t understand what they’re doing,” Logsdon said. “Elon’s out talking about they’re not going to pursue the Falcon line of rockets, he’s going to put all his efforts into the BFR. So, what is the future of Heavy?”

…Logsdon said he believes it is “good for the country to have two alternative heavy lift vehicles, at least for a little while, to see which one works better.” But he also believes the SLS enjoys enough solid congressional support to “sustain it for some few more years, anyway.”

What Logsdon, being an academic his whole life, has never understood is the concept of profit and efficiency. Unlike the government projects like SLS that Logsdon tends to favor, Falcon Heavy is designed to provide customers a cheap way to get large payloads into orbit. That ability is going to soon provide SpaceX plenty of business, and will make SLS look like a complete waste of money. Furthermore, the BFR is Musk’s declaration that, as the head of a cutting edge private company, he is not going to stand still, but will keep pushing the envelope to provide his customers even better products in the future.

Finally, this CNN article, while typically shallow and not very knowledgeable, does provide one piece of important information, about the launchpad being used.

Because of a special walkway that has been constructed for it, Pad 39A is the only site that can host flights of SpaceX’s new spacecraft, Crew Dragon. That’s the spacecraft the company is developing to help NASA ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Crew Dragon has already faced delays. And destroying the launch pad could mean pushing deadlines back even further, according to U.S. Government Accountability Office Director Cristina Chaplain.

A launch failure on the launchpad would therefore significantly impact the schedule for SpaceX’s private manned capsule. This also explains why Musk has said he would consider this launch a success if the Falcon Heavy simply cleared the launch tower.

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Japan’s newest rocket puts tiny satellite in orbit

10:19 am

Japan today successfully launched a cubesat into orbit using a redesigned suborbital rocket flying its second test flight.

Standing just 31 feet (9.5 meters) tall and spanning around 20 inches (52 centimeters) in diameter, the SS-520-5 rocket was modest by launcher standards. With Saturday’s successful flight, the solid-fueled booster became the smallest rocket to ever put an object in orbit around Earth. A student-built shoebox-sized CubeSat named TRICOM 1R — weighing in at about 10 pounds (3 kilograms) — was mounted on top of the SS-520-5 rocket for liftoff from the Uchinoura Space Center in Japan’s Kagoshima prefecture.

This rocket, built by Japan’s space agency JAXA, is only a test vehicle. There are no plans to offer it as a commercial product, the agency hopes it will serve as a model that private companies can use to build their own. This approach might work, but it reminds me too much of many past and similar NASA projects, which once completed then vanished, with no real world utilization.

The 2018 launch standings:

6 China
2 SpaceX
2 ULA
2 Japan

I have dropped listing the countries that so far only have one launch.

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Update on the recovery of long lost IMAGE spacecraft

11:15 pm

Link here. Not much additional information, other than the engineers have determined that the spacecraft has definitely done a reboot and appears to be operational.

The puzzle is that when the satellite went dark around 2005, it was using its backup equipment, dubbed Side B, because of issues with Side A. Now however it appears to be using its primary equipment, Side A. Engineers at the moment do not understand why.

I should add that I previously thought IMAGE was designed to study the Sun. That was wrong. It was designed to study the Earth’s magnetosphere, and how that interacts with the solar wind and solar magnetic storms.

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Russia considering $100 million tourist spacewalks

9:09 am

Roscosmos is considering offering future space tourists the chance to do their own spacewalk for $100 million price tag.

“We are discussing the possibility of sending tourists on spacewalks,” Vladimir Solntsev, the head of Russian space company Energia, told Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda. “Market analysts have confirmed this: wealthy people are ready to pay money for this,” Solntsev told the paper.

He said the cost of such a trip could be around $100m (€80m), “possibly less for the first tourist”. The tourists will be able to “go out on a spacewalk and make a film, (or) a video clip”.

The article also reiterates Russia’s plan to put tourist accommodations in its next ISS module.

While the original news source for this story, Pravda, is generally not very trustworthy, I tend to believe this. It is definitely doable, and would give the Russians another way to make money, faced with the reality that they will soon be losing NASA as a customer for flying its astronauts to ISS. It also demonstrates that Russia recognizes that it will not be able to charge tourists the $75-$90 million or so per ticket it has been charging NASA. NASA was over a barrel, and thus the Russians could jack up the price. Tourists however will have the option of walking away, and thus the price per ticket will have to come down. For Russia to get the same money, they will need to offer more.

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Air Force issues bid requests for five future launches

4:36 pm

Capitalism in space: The Air Force has issued a new request for bids on five future satellite launches, with SpaceX and ULA to compete for each.

The Air Force on Wednesday released a final request for proposals for Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) launch services for two National Reconnaissance Office payloads, the fifth Space-Based Infrared System geosynchronous Earth orbit satellite, an Air Force Space Command mission dubbed AFSPC-44 and a secret surveillance mission code-named SilentBarker.

Proposals are due April 16 and contracts are expected to be awarded in late 2018.

…The existence of SilentBarker surfaced last year during a House Armed Services Committee strategic forces subcommittee hearing when Gen. John Raymond, commander of Air Force Space Command, explained that the Air Force and the NRO were developing a “space situational awareness architecture” to help improve the protection of satellites from enemy attacks. SilentBarker is the name of the program.

Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that SilentBarker and Zuma have something to do with each other?

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A SpaceX expansion at Boca Chica spaceport?

9:10 am

SpaceX’s request to the Texas government for an additional $5 million commitment might be because the company wants to expand on its original plans for its Boca Chica spaceport, and needs additional infrastructure work from the local authorities.

State Rep. René Oliveira, D-Brownsville, said SpaceX asked legislators to set aside funds to support space-related companies and operations in the state, though the money would not be specifically earmarked for SpaceX or the Boca Chica project. The company also has a rocket development facility in McGregor.

Oliveira, who helped assemble a coalition of key legislators to secure the $5 million in development aid, said some of the money might be used to support rocket operations beyond what SpaceX previously has said it wants to do at Boca Chica. “About a year ago, SpaceX came to me with their concept of a new, larger, expanded plan for Boca Chica Beach,” Oliveira said. “The concept went well beyond conducting launches, and would require new commitments for construction, investment and jobs to support the new operations.”

This could simply be a lobbying technique by Oliveira to get more money. Or it could be because SpaceX has actually decided to expand its plans for Boca Chica, which has the advantage over Florida in that the company would have no scheduling conflicts as the spaceport would be theirs entirely.

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New Zimmerman op-ed: NASA’s safety bureaucracy sabotaging manned space

9:50 pm

The website American Greatness has now published a new op-ed I have written that describes how the bureaucracy at NASA is acting to sabotage commercial space, even as it ignores far more significant safety issues with SLS and Orion.

I was prompted to write the op-ed after reading the reports in the past few weeks by NASA’s safety panel and the GAO, both of which clearly favored NASA’s bloated projects.

What both reports actually demonstrate is that the bureaucrats in Washington have very little interest in safety, but instead are more focused on putting their thumbs on the scale in order specifically to harm these private efforts—especially SpaceX’s. One report in particular, by NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), was especially hostile to these private efforts, even as it remained completely unconcerned about similar but far worse safety issues that exist with NASA’s government-built and competing SLS and Orion programs.

Both reports also illustrated starkly the complete lack of understanding that the Washington community has for the nature of exploration, the very task that NASA was founded to spearhead. The result is a bureaucratic culture that makes the manned exploration of space by the United States practically impossible.

If things do not change, expect this country to be bypassed in the coming decades by the rest of the world as the solar system is colonized and settled.

Check it out.

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SpaceX successfully launches Luxembourg’s first government satellite

2:57 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched Luxembourg’s first government satellite, GovSat 1.

The launch used a previously flown first stage, which was intentionally not recovered on this flight. They did however land it in the ocean, probably to simply practice the entire routine.

The 2018 launch standings:

5 China
2 SpaceX
2 ULA
1 Rocket Lab
1 Europe
1 India
1 Japan

This launch puts the U.S. and China in a tie for the lead. I must also note that the world’s aerospace industry completed 13 launches in the first month of 2018. If this pace is maintained, we shall see about 150 launches in 2018, the most since before 1980, and possible the most in a single year ever. (I need to check the records for the 1970s, as it is possible but very unlikely this number was topped during that time.)

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