Tag: spaceflight

Northrop Grumman cancelling its NASA space station project?

9:22 am

According to anonymous sources, Northrop Grumman — one of four company partnerships chosen by NASA to build private commercial space stations to replace ISS — is considering cancelling its project for NASA.

At the International Astronautical Congress meeting this week in Azerbaijan, sources report that there is widespread speculation that one of these four companies, Northrop Grumman, is dropping out of the competition. Northrop’s plan had been to leverage its successful Cygnus spacecraft design to build a free-flying space station.

However, Northrop no longer plans to do so. Rather, it will join the venture backed by Voyager Space, which is partnering with Europe-based Airbus to develop a commercial space station. It’s likely that Northrop would provide cargo transportation services, with Cygnus as part of the team. Officials from Voyager and Northrop Grumman declined to comment on the change in strategy, which could be announced soon.

The original four were Axiom, Voyager Space (then called Nanoracks), Northrop Grumman, and Blue Origin. By teaming up with Voyager Space the number would drop to three, with Northrop simply providing freighter service to Voyager’s station.

Nor is this the only rumored change to these station projects. Last week sources suggested that the partnership between Blue Origin and Sierra Space was breaking up. If so, it remains unclear how that would effect its project for NASA.

These changes to the four proposed NASA stations would leave only Axiom’s space station unchanged and on its original course. Meanwhile, another company, Vast, is developing its own independent station, and SpaceX is considering developing a space station version of Starship.

All these shifts and changes are not to be unexpected, nor are they really bad news. They simply indicate the uncertain nature of any new product, even if that product is as unconventional as a private space station.

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SLIM leaves Earth orbit and is on its way to the Moon

8:51 am

SLIM's planned route to the Moon

The Japanese lunar lander SLIM fired its engines on September 30, 2023 to begin its journey to the Moon. The map to the right indicates the planned route after this trans-lunar injection burn, first flying past the Moon to put it on a trajectory that will bring it back to the Moon at the proper speed and direction for its landing several months hence.

The main goal of this mission is engineering, to test the ability of an autonomous unmanned spacecraft to land precisely within a small target zone about 300 feet across. If proven, this ability will make it possible to send unmanned landers to many places that are presently impossible due to their rough topography.

The route that SLIM is taking to the Moon is also unusual, and is probably also an engineering test of its own. Flybys of planets to change a spacecraft’s path is not a new technique, but in the past it has been used to slingshot the probe to another object, not send it back to that planet.

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ESA completes investigation of Vega-C rocket failure

5:10 pm

The European Space Agency (ESA) today released its completed investigation of December 2022 launch failure of its Vega-C rocket’s second stage.

One of the recommendations was to implement a (delta-)qualification of the nozzle with a new Carbon-Carbon throat insert material different from that previously used on the Zefiro40, the solid rocket booster of the Vega-C second stage. On 28 June 2023, a static firing test of the modified Zefiro40 engine took place at the test bench in Salto di Quirra in Italy. During the test the engine nozzle suffered significant damages.

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher has set up an Independent Enquiry Commission chaired by the ESA Inspector General, Giovanni Colangelo, and composed of experts from CNES, ASI, ESA, Arianespace and academia to understand the cause of the test anomaly and propose recommendations.

The Independent Enquiry Commission concluded that in the current design of the nozzle, the combination of the geometry of the Carbon-Carbon throat insert and the different thermo-mechanical properties of the new material caused progressive damage of other adjacent nozzle parts and a progressive degradation eventually leading to the nozzle’s failure.

In other words, the changes implemented based on the initial investigation that was completed in March did not work. The nozzle needs to redesigned, and will also require at least two more static fire engine tests to be certified.

At the moment ESA officials are predicting that Vega-C will resume launches in the fourth quarter of next year, but do not put any money on that prediction.

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Layered ice sheets on Mars?

11:15 am

Overview map

Layered ices sheets on Mars?

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The white spot near the center of the overview map above marks its location, deep inside the 2,000-mile-long region in the northern mid-latitudes I call glacier country, as everything there seems covered with glacial features of some kind. All the features in this picture are smaller than 50 feet high, based on the resolution of the topographical data obtained by Mars Global Surveyor in the 1990s.

What makes this picture interesting are the layers, made most obvious in the terraced mesa in the upper left. Surrounding this mesa for dozens of miles in all directions are similar layered features, all suggesting that the glacial ice sheets that appear to coat this region have either have been sublimating away over time, or when growing grew less with each subsequent growth cycle.

Though both have or are likely happening, the latter most likely explains the terraces, as there is a lot of evidence on the surface of Mars showing that each subsequent growth cycle produced smaller glaciers and ice layers.

From the perspective of future colonists, this picture once again shows that water will readily accessible on Mars, as long as you travel north or south of the equator at least 30 degrees of latitude. This location is at 42 degrees north, and is very typical of this whole region.

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Stopgap budget bill includes three-month extension of regulatory “learning-period”

9:00 am

The stopgap 45-day continuing resolution passed by Congress on September 30, 2023 also included a three-month extension of regulatory “learning-period” first established in 2004 and extended several times since then.

Among the provisions in that FAA reauthorization was a three-month extension of the existing restrictions on the FAA’s ability to regulate safety for commercial spaceflight participants. That restriction, often called a “learning period” by the industry, was set to expire Oct. 1 but now runs until Jan. 1.

It must be noted that this so-called limitation on FAA regulation of commercial spaceflight really does not exist any longer, no matter what law Congress passes. The administrative state really runs the show now, and both the FAA and Fish & Wildlife have decided heavy regulations are required, and are imposing such controls over SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starshp test program, while the FAA by itself is imposing strict regulation on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft. The result is a slowdown in launches for both, extending months to a year.

It also appears that this heavy regulation is squelching launches of new rockets. Last year four new rocket startups attempted new launches (Astra, ABL, Firefly, Relativity), some making multiple attempts. This year, such test flights have essentially ceased, with only Firefly completing one launch for the military. Worse, two of those companies (Astra and Relativity) have abandoned their rockets entirely, claiming they are building new bigger versions, but one must now wonder.

The long term historical significance of these facts extends far beyond the space industry. Increasingly the unelected bureaucracy in Washington is taking on powers it is not supposed to have, while Congress (which is delegated those powers) increasingly is irrelevant. The shift in power signals a major reshaping of American governance, in a direction that is not good for freedom or the fundamental concepts that established the country and made it a success.

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SpaceX puts another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit

1:57 pm

SpaceX last night successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

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

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

69 SpaceX
44 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 79 to 44, and the entire world combined 79 to 71. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies), 69 to 71.

Note that this was the 151th successful launch in 2023, all done in the first three quarters, and strongly suggesting the world will complete more than 200 launches this year. This number will top the record of 179 set last year by more than ten percent, and be more than double the number of launches achieved almost every year since Sputnik in 1957.

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Updated map of Yutu-2’s travels on far side of the Moon

3:01 pm

Map showing Yutu-2 full route on Moon
Click for original image.

The Chinese agency operating the Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon today released an updated map showing the rover’s full route since landing, the first update since January 2023. That map is to the right, reduced to post here. The landing site is in the lower right, with the rover presently in the upper left.

Since January the rover has apparently traveled only about 300 feet, even though it has had about eight lunar days to travel. Note too that the last update was also the first in three months. It appears the Chinese are either having issues with the rover (not surprising as it has been operating on the Moon for almost five years, since January 2019), or they have decided they don’t need to tell anyone what they are doing.

Since the rover was not expected to last more than a few lunar days (several Earth months), the former is more likely.

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Is this the source of the sand for the giant dune sea that surrounds the Martian North Pole?

12:49 pm

Overview map

Circling the north pole of Mars is a gigantic dune field dubbed Olympia Undae, with its densest regions (marked in red on the overview map to the right) estimated to be 700 miles long and covering 120 degrees of longitude.

Where does all the sand come from that created this dune ocean? We now have a rough idea. The arrows on the map to the right indicate the direction of the prevailing winds, as recently determined by scientists studying the orientation of dunes. From this it appears that much of the dust comes from the north polar icecap itself, from its lower layers where dust and ice are cemented together. The prevailing winds, especially in the canyons that cut into the icecap, drive that dust out from the lower layers, where it over eons has piled up in that circular ocean of sand.

The white cross marks the location of today’s cool image, an attempt by scientists to photograph at high resolution one of the sources of this sand, on the edge of the icecap.
» Read more

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Hubble data shows expansion of supernova remnant

9:57 am

Cygnus loop filament

Astronomers have created a four-second long movie using Hubble images collected over twenty years that shows the expansion of one filament in the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, the explosion of which is thought to have occurred 20,000 years ago.

The picture above is one frame of that movie. The filament is estimated to be two light years in length.

By analyzing the shock’s location, astronomers found that the shock hasn’t slowed down at all in the last 20 years, and is speeding into interstellar space at over half a million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in less than half an hour. While this seems incredibly fast, it’s actually on the slow end for the speed of a supernova shock wave.

Two versions of the movie are at the link, with the longer providing excellent context.

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Parker completes 17th close fly-by of the Sun, setting new records

9:43 am

The Parker Solar Probe on September 27, 2023 completed its seventeenth close fly-by of the Sun, setting new speed and distance records.

Set up by a gravity-assist flyby of Venus on Aug. 21, the close approach (known as perihelion) occurred at 7:28 p.m. EDT, with Parker Solar Probe moving 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour) around the Sun – another record. The milestone also marked the midway point in the mission’s 17th solar encounter, which began Sept. 22 and continues through Oct. 3.

It zipped past the Sun at a distance of only 4.51 million miles, also a record.

Whether it survived this fly-by will not be confirmed until October 1, when it is able to safely send its first data back after moving far enough away from the Sun to reopen communications.

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Orbital Reef partnership between Blue Origin and Sierra Space in trouble

9:36 am

According to anonymous sources, CNBC reports that the partnership between Blue Origin and Sierra Space to build the private commerical Orbital Reef space station is possibly breaking up.

The companies announced Orbital Reef as a co-led project in 2021, but updates about the project dried up in the past year. The pair of private space companies are now navigating a potential end to the Orbital Reef partnership, according to three people who spoke to CNBC about the situation.

Those people, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss nonpublic matters, emphasized that discussions are ongoing and described the situation as fluid. But other development projects with more significant current contracts – such as Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander and Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane – have taken higher priority for both companies, those people said.

To readers of Behind the Black, this possible break-up is not a surprise. In June Sierra’s announcement of its own independent space station based on its LIFE modules suggested it had its own doubts about Orbital Reef. Then in August, when Sierra announced a partnership with Redwire to launch LIFE as an independent station, I wrote this:

What struck me about this deal is the shrinking mention of Blue Origin. Originally that company was listed as one of the major players in building this private space station, dubbed Orbital Reef, in which LIFE is only the first module. In the past year however its participation seems less and less significant in every subsequent press release. It appears to still be part of the project, but it is Sierra Space that is leading the effort, and appears to be making things happen.

But then, the track record of Blue Origin is to not make things happen. It could very well be that events are once again overtaking it. Sierra Space can’t wait for Blue Origin to slowly get its act together. It is finding ways to get things done, even if that means Blue Origin gets left behind.

Today’s CNBC story reinforces this conclusion. So does its timing with the removal of Blue Origin’s CEO, Bob Smith, earlier this week. It could be that the failure of Blue Origin in the Orbital Reef partnership was the final straw for Jeff Bezos.

The problem for NASA in this is that the agency awarded a $130 million contract to the Orbital Reef partnership, with Blue Origin listed as the lead contractor which controls the contract. If that partnership ends, that contract must get renegotiated or cancelled, or gets transferred from Blue Origin to Sierra Space (the most likely outcome).

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Ispace wins $55 million NASA contract for lunar landing mission

9:17 am

The Japanese company Ispace, which is also establishing operations in the U.S., has won a $55 million NASA contract to send a lunar landing plus communications relay satellites to the Moon in 2026.

Ispace’s Hakuto-R1 lander attempted a landing on the Moon in April, but crashed. The company has a second Hakuto-R mission presently targeting launch next year. The NASA contract would the company’s third, which will be built in its new U.S. facility and be called Apex-1.

In today’s briefing, Ispace representatives announced that the primary customer for its upcoming Mission 3 is NASA, which has selected the company as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS). Ispace stated during the briefing that it has signed a $55 million contract with NASA for Mission 3 in order to land near the lunar south pole carrying approximately 210 pounds (95 kg) of scientific payloads.

But that’s not all the mission will do. On its way to the lunar surface, Mission 3 will deliver relay satellites that will remain in orbit around the moon to serve as communication relays.

Though it will not be surprising if these launch dates slip, Ispace is in a strong position to succeed, considering it is presently the only private company to launch a Moon lander, and got very close to putting it down on the lunar surface successfully.

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