Tag: spaceflight

Hubble and Webb confirm decade-long conflict in universe’s expansion rate

8:58 am

The uncertainty of science: New data from both the Hubble and Webb space telescopes has confirmed Hubble’s previous measurement of the rate of the Hubble constant, the rate in which the universe is expanding. The problem is that these numbers still differ significantly from the expansion rate determined by the observations of the cosmic microwave background by the Planck space telescope.

Hubble and Webb come up with a rate of expansion 73 km/s/Mpc, while Planck found an expansion rate of 67 km/s/Mpc. Though this difference appears small, the scientists in both groups claim their margin of error is much smaller than that difference, which means both can’t be right.

You can read the paper for these new results here.

The bottom line mystery remains: The data is clearly telling us one of two things: 1) the many assumptions that go into these numbers might be incorrect, explaining the difference, or 2) there is something fundamentally wrong about the Big Bang theory that cosmologists have been promoting for more than a half century as the only explanation for the formation of the universe.

The solution could also be a combination of both. Our data and our theories are wrong.

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Two SpaceX launches yesterday evening, on opposite coasts and only five hours apart

8:39 am

SpaceX yesterday completed two different Starlink launches, placing 46 satellites total into orbit from opposite coasts and only five hours apart.

First, at 7:05 pm (Eastern) a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying 23 Starlink satellites, with its the first stage successfully completing its seventeenth flight.

Next, just over five hours later, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg, carrying its own cargo of 23 Starlink satellites, with its first stage also completing its seventeenth flight.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

24 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world in successful launches 27 to 19. SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including other American companies, 24 to 22.

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Stratolaunch completes first flight of its Talon-A hypersonic test vehicle

8:50 pm

Stratolaunch yesterday successfully completed the first flight of its Talon-A hypersonic test vehicle, released from its giant Roc airplane.

Primary objectives for the flight test included accomplishing safe air-launch release of the TA-1 vehicle, engine ignition, acceleration, sustained climb in altitude, and a controlled water landing.

“While I can’t share the specific altitude and speed TA-1 reached due to proprietary agreements with our customers, we are pleased to share that in addition to meeting all primary and customer objectives of the flight, we reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers,” said [Dr. Zachary Krevor President and CEO of Stratolaunch]. “Our goal with this flight was to continue our risk reduction approach for TA-2’s first reusable flight and be steadfast on our commitment of delivering maximum value to our customers. We are excited to review the data from today’s test and use it as we plan our next steps toward TA-2’s first flight later this year.”

Stratolaunch’s main customer is the Air Force, which wishes to use this testbed to test hypersonic flight in a number of ways, both for missiles and possibly aircraft. Those military goals explain the required secrecy.

Stratolaunch is under competitive pressure from Rocket Lab, which has already demonstrated that the first stage of its Electron rocket can provide a similar testbed. Stratolaunch is reusable, however, which potentially makes it cheaper with a faster turnaround. Rocket Lab in turn is already capable of test flights. This Stratolaunch success will likely spur Rocket Lab to complete its program to recover and reuse those first stages, while Rocket Lab’s succes is likely spurring Stratolaunch to accelerate its own program.

Ain’t competition wonderful?

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Japanese rocket startup scrubs first launch attempt

9:11 am

The first Japanese rocket commercial rocket company, Space One, today scrubbed the first launch attempt of its Kairos rocket, scheduled to take off from its own launchpad in the south of Japan.

“We informed the public in advance that we wanted to make the area free of people, but even 10 minutes before the launch, a vessel remained in the area, so we decided to cancel the launch because it would have been impossible for them to leave promptly,” Space One executive Kozo Abe told a news conference in the afternoon.

Abe said there were no technical problems with the launch and that the next attempt could come as soon as Wednesday, with the company likely to give a more detailed schedule at least two days before the new date.

The rocket has four-stages, the first three solid-fueled and the last liquid-fueled. Its capacity is comparable to Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket, and the company hopes to eventually ramp up to as many as twenty launches per year.

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First manned Starliner mission slips to May

8:53 am

The first manned mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has now been delayed another few weeks, to early May, due to scheduling conflicts at ISS.

The delay was revealed as an aside in a NASA press release detailing the schedule of press briefings related to the mission. There appears to be no technical reasons for the delay. The quiet way NASA revealed it probably just indicates the agency’s embarrassment at Boeing’s overall problems with this spacecraft that have caused a four year delay in its first manned mission.

The flight will dock with ISS, last two weeks, and carry two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Its goal is to complete the final check out of Starliner prior to the initiation of operational missions. Once done, Boeing will not only begin to fly paid flights to ISS for NASA, it will be free to offer this capsule to others, including commercial tourists. Don’t expect customers to flock to buy seats, considering the many problems both Boeing and Starliner have had. Instead, it will likely take Boeing several years of NASA missions to reassure customers the spacecraft is reliable.

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Update on rocket startup Stoke Space’s effort to make completely reusable rocket

10:07 am

Link here. This Nasaspaceflight.com article provides an excellent update on the status of the development of Stoke’s Nova rocket, which will have a radical new engine design in its upper stage, using a ring of small nozzles rather than one single central one. That design will allow the upper stage to return to Earth for reuse, something that no other rocket now in use at present can do.

Stoke Space recently carried out the first test of the full-size 30-thruster version of the innovative engine that the company is producing for its in-development second stage. This will be an integral part of its future Nova rocket, which aims to be a fully reusable medium lifter.

The engine test took place on Feb. 26 and follows the engine’s first test flight on its prototype vehicle, Hopper 2, in September 2023. Although fitted with only 15 chambers for that flight, Hopper 2 flew for 15 seconds, achieved a maximum altitude of 30 feet, traversed to a landing site, and touched down softly.

The article includes a lot of interesting technical details about this upper stage and what engineers are learning about this radical engine design. Worth reading. At present Stoke is the only company other than SpaceX attempting to make its upper stage fully reusable. If successful it will jump ahead of everyone else.

No launch schedule however for its new rocket was revealed in this report, so it might be awhile, if ever, before any of this bears fruit.

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Budget bill includes very short extension of commercial space “learning period”

9:39 am

The budget bill that Congress has just passed and awaits signature by the president included a very short extension of commercial space “learning period” that supposedly prevents heavy safety regulation by the FAA of the new commercial space industry.

That learning period was first established in 2004, and has been extended several times since. This new bill extends that period until May 11, 2024, only two months, supposedly to allow Congress time to pass a new commercial space act.

The truth is that, at present, the Biden administration has long since abandoned that learning period exemption, and has been applying a much stricter safety regulatory framework from space companies than required by law, as best illustrated by its treatment of SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starship launches. The FAA now expects all launches to function perfectly, even if testing a prototype, and should anything not go perfectly it treats the failure the same as an airplane mishap that requres any investigation to get full government approval before further launches can resume.

Unless there is a change in leadership in Washington, it is very likely we shall see few new American rocket companies from here on out. The existing companies with lots of money and power will survive, but under this heavy regulatory atmosphere it will be hard if not impossible for new companies to get established.

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Astra’s board agrees to deal to take the company private

9:24 am

The board of directors of the rocket startup Astra have finally agreed to a cut-right price offer from the company’s two founders to buy the company and take it private once again, rather than declare bankruptcy.

The company announced Thursday that its board had accepted an offer from its CEO, Chris Kemp, and its CTO, Adam London, to purchase the remaining Astra stock at a price of $0.50 per share. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2024, at which time Astra will cease trading on the Nasdaq.

This offer was significantly less than their first offer in November, when Kemp and London offered to buy the company for $1.50 per share, suggesting the company’s value has declined significantly in the interim as its cash assets declined. This decline suggests that any recovery will be difficult and long, and could easily fail.

Freedom is wonderful in that it allows for the greatest amount of creativity, competition, and achievement, from everyone. It also carries great risk that everyone must face. Astra has now illustrated the risk. Not all creative gambles are going to succeed.

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Sierra Space confirms its Tenacity spacecraft successfully completed vibration testing

9:16 am

Sierra Space yesterday confirmed that its first Dream Chaser reusable mini-shuttle Tenacity, being readied for a hoped-for April launch, successfully completed vibration testing last month.

Key accomplishments in this first critical phase of pre-flight testing included: the completion of Sine Vibration Testing (in all three axes or directions), a Separation Shock Test that simulates the separation of the Dream Chaser from Shooting Star and a test that involved deploying the spaceplane’s wings. These tests evaluated Dream Chaser’s performance under the stresses of launch, operation in orbit and ability to communicate with the International Space Station (ISS).

What I find revealing about the press release at the link is that it really adds nothing from a NASA press release from a month ago. Then NASA said that Tenacity was about to move to a vacuum chamber for environmental testing. According to this new press release, that move has still not occurred and the environmental test still must begin.

That engineers didn’t move Tenacity to environmental testing while they were reviewing the vibration test data suggests there was something in that test data that prevented it. It appears that unstated issue is resolved, but it caused a pause in testing.

As a result, it appears that an April launch is unlikely delayed by a month or more, assuming my attempt to read between the lines is correct.

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The really really strange landscape of Cydonia on Mars

12:21 pm

Some really strange terrain on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 3, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the camera team describes merely as “landforms.”

In truth, these features, as well as almost everything in the surrounding terrain beyond the edge of this picture, are possibly the weirdest geological features on Mars. The two mounds, no more than fifteen feet high at the most, resemble pimples. The rough ground to the north actually appears to be some flow that worked its way around the mounds, as indicated by the arrows. The crack to the southeast of the two mounds appears to be an extension of a fault line that cuts through the center of the larger mound, suggesting the mound is some form of eruption belching out of that fissure.

That the latitude is 42 degrees north, these weird features all suggest some form of ice-based volcanic activity, because the ground here is probably impregnated with ice.

As for the bridge connecting the two mounds, who knows what caused it?
» Read more

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Another woman sues SpaceX for sexual discrimination and retaliation

10:10 am

On March 5, 2024 Michelle Dopak filed a lawsuit against SpaceX for sexual discrimination and retaliation, claiming the company paid her less than male workers, refused to promote her, and ignored her complaints about sexual abuse by her married manager that eventually led to a pregnancy.

Dopak said in the suit that in 2020, her manager offered her $100,000 to have an abortion, which she declined. She is suing the company for an unspecified amount of damages. Reuters was first to report the existence of the lawsuit. Dopak accused SpaceX of colluding with her former manager by allowing him to transfer $3.7 million in SpaceX stock out of his name to evade child support payments, according to the lawsuit obtained by Business Insider.

This suit is one now of several discrimination suits against the company. Unlike the others, however, if Dopak’s accusations prove true it would be the most damaging of all, since she claims the company itself took action against her to protect this manager. The other suits appear more frivolous on their face, issued by individuals claiming to have been fired by SpaceX for their opinions, when the facts strongly suggest they were more interested in causing trouble at the company then doing their job, and thus deserved to be fired.

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NJ man arrested for trafficking 675 Starlink terminals illegally

10:00 am

A New Jersey man was arrested on December 4, 2023 while driving a vehicle carrying more than two hundred Starlink terminals, and later charged with trafficking 675 Starlink terminals that he obtained illegally using “stolen credit card accounts or hacked Starlink billing accounts.”

The man, 35-year-old Kelvin Rodriguez-Moya, was stopped by police Dec. 4 while driving 223 Starlink terminals in a pickup truck and trailer after leaving a residence in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, a criminal complaint said. The terminals had shipping labels addressed to multiple different names at the same address.

Lawrence Township police had been tipped off about a suspiciously large number of Starlink terminals being shipped to that home, the complaint said. Detectives then witnessed Rodriguez-Moya loading a FedEx shipment of terminals onto the truck and trailer.

SpaceX is working with the police to determine how Rodriguez-Moya obtained so many terminals. I suspect it was because so much of Starlink operations are automated. The computer programs that issue terminals to new customers aren’t smart enough to notice such things.

This case might also help explain the stories in both Russia and Botswana of unauthorized terminals being sold.

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Blue Origin completes first round of launchpad/New Glenn tanking tests

9:52 am

Link here. In the past week or so Blue Origin has done three tanking tests of its assembled engineering test rocket, simulating fueling of a New Glenn rocket on the launchpad, and now intends to roll that test vehicle back to its rocket assembly building.

From here, it is most likely that the rocket will be prepared for the next round of testing, which will include a static fire of the seven first-stage BE-4 engines. This test will mark the first time that Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines will ignite while integrated with a New Glenn first stage. It will also be the first time that the new launch pad supports an engine firing.

The company continues to aim for a first test launch of New Glenn before the end of the year, and these tests strengthen the likelihood that this schedule is realistic.

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UK government to invest £10 million in Saxavord spaceport

9:45 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

The government of the United Kingdom announced yesterday that it will directly invest £10 million in the Saxavord spaceport being built on one of the Shetland Islands, as shown on the map to the right.

Coming in addition to around £40 million of private investment, the government funding will allow SaxaVord to accelerate its capital works programme to ensure it is ready to support the first orbital launch.

That capital works program was forced to shut down last year when red tape at the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) delayed the licensing of Saxavord. It could be this grant has been issued partly to repay the losses the spaceport company experienced due to those bureaucratic delays. The timing kind of reinforces this speculation, as only yesterday Saxavord got its spaceport license approved, though other approvals remain pending.

All this news suggests strongly that the first test flight at Saxavord by the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg will occur later this year, as promised.

Meanwhile, the other spaceport in Sutherland must be wondering if it can get similar government aid, or if the government is now playing favorites.

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SpaceX: We want to fly next Starship/Superheavy test launch on March 14, 2024

9:07 am

In a tweet yesterday SpaceX announced an update on its Starship webpage, outlining its plans for the third orbital test launch of its heavy-lift Starship/Superheavy rocket, with March 14, 2024 listed as the hoped-for launch date.

The update began with these cautionary words, “pending regulatory approval,” and then went on to describe details of the test flight:

The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This new flight path enables us to attempt new techniques like in-space engine burns while maximizing public safety.

I suspect the change in the splashdown location, from northeast of the main island of Hawaii, was instigated by the FAA for those “public safety reasons”. From SpaceX’s perspective, this is an easy give, as a slightly shorter flight makes little difference for this test, and it allows the company to test that Raptor engine by firing that de-orbit burn.

Will the flight occur on March 14th? The odds are high, partly because this SpaceX announcement is designed to put pressure on the bureaucrats at the FAA to finish their paperwork already. At the same time, bureaucrats sometimes love to stick it to private citizens, just for fun. We shall see.

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Is this really a spiral galaxy?

10:16 am

Is this really a spiral galaxy?

The uncertainty of science: The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on March 4, 2024 by the PR department of the European Space Agency (ESA) as part of its Hubble Picture of the Week program. It shows what the press release claims is a spiral galaxy about 55 million light years away, seen edge on.

In this image NGC 4423 appears to have quite an irregular, tubular form, so it might be surprising to find out that it is in fact a spiral galaxy. Knowing this, we can make out the denser central bulge of the galaxy, and the less crowded surrounding disc (the part that comprises the spiral arms).

If NGC 4423 were viewed face-on it would resemble the shape that we most associate with spiral galaxies: the spectacular curving arms sweeping out from a bright centre, interspersed with dimmer, darker, less populated regions. But when observing the skies we are constrained by the relative alignments between Earth and the objects that we are observing: we cannot simply reposition Earth so that we can get a better face-on view of NGC 4423!

This picture provides a great example of the amount of assumptions that are often contained in astronomical observations. Though the data strongly suggests this is spiral, we must remember this is merely an educated guess, based on that central bulge and the dust lanes visible along the galaxy’s profile. There is actually no guarantee that this is so. As the press release also notes, astronomers are constrained by our viewpoint, and cannot change that viewpoint to get a better view to confirm this guess. For all we know, a face on veiw of this flat galaxy would reveal it has no spiral arms, but instead is mottled and chaotic, a rare type that does exist.

Astronomers do the best they can, but it is important that they (and we) always recognize the limitations.

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More orbital tugs reach orbit

9:44 am

When SpaceX launches a large number of smallsats and payloads on a Falcon 9 launch, as it did on March 5 from Vandenberg in California, it routinely takes several days or even months for the results from each payload or smallsat to trickle in. Two reports today illustrate the growing cottage industry of orbital tugs.

First, a company named Apex has successfuly demonstrated its first service module for satellites, designed to provide the basic services needed for satellites so that companies can focus on designing their primary mission rather than reinventing a basic satellite each time. The module was launched on March 5th, and has been operating as expected. The company hopes to begin mass producing this service module in a new factory later this year.

Second, a new orbital tug company from France, Exotrail, has successfully deployed a cubesat from its first tug. That tug was launched on a Falcon 9 smallsat launch in November, and has been testing operations since. After releasing that cubesat for Airbus’s defense division, the tug is continuing operations, acting as the service module for a second payload from Belgium that is testing its own gyros and reaction wheels for controling smallsat orientation.

These companies are small, and are focused on very specific technologies needed by smallsats to operate efficiently in space. As such, their achievements are generally more mundane and less exciting that a SpaceX Starship/Superheavy test launch, by many magnitudes. Nonetheless, their success, not only technically but financially, suggests a growing maturity to the in-orbit space industry, which will also lay the groundwork for much more sophisticated operations in the future beyond Earth orbit. The people that build these tugs will move on to build vessels that can go to the planets and do things that are presently impossible or too difficult, and do it at low cost and very quickly.

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Another helicopter mission under development for Mars?

3:17 pm

Another helicopter mission for Mars?
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image to the right, cropped to post here, is probably on its own one of the more boring cool images I have posted over the years, a generally featureless plain with some ripple dunes within a few low hollows.

What makes this picture cool however is the label for the image: “Sample Landing and Traverse Hazards at Possible Helicopter Landing Site.” The picture was taken on January 23, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), with the obvious goal of seeing whether this location can serve as a landing site for a helicopter mission to Mars.

The site is relatively uninteresting because the first goal is to find a safe place to land, but to do so near a location where there is rough geology which only a helicopter can explore. And it appears, from the overview map below, that is exactly what this location is.
» Read more

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Blue Origin is targeting a first unmanned landing of its manned lunar lander in 2025

10:36 am

Blue Origin's Blue Moon manned lunar lander
An early visualization of Blue Moon

According to one Blue Origin official, the company is now targeting its first unmanned landing of its manned lunar lander, Blue Moon, for sometime in 2025, far sooner than previously expected.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is aiming to send an uncrewed lander to the surface of the moon in the next 12 to 16 months, according to the executive in charge of the development program. John Couluris, senior vice president for lunar permanence at Blue Origin, provided an update on the company’s moon lander program on CBS’ “60 Minutes” news program on Sunday. “We’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today,” Couluris said. “I understand I’m saying that publicly, but that’s what our team is aiming towards.”

Blue Moon is shown in the graphic to the right. Though being built to provide NASA a second manned lander in addtion to SpaceX’s Starship, this first mission will simply bring cargo to the surface, as a test of the lander itself.

If Blue Origin can keep even somewhat close to this schedule, we will likely have two manned moon landers doing test flights at almost the same time.

A sidebar: Note the lander’s height, as well as the narrow footprint of its landing legs. New graphics of this lander from Blue Origin show the same high center of gravity with an even narrower footprint for the legs. One wonders why. Wouldn’t it make sense to have those legs deploy outward more?

This issue applies also to SpaceX’s Starship, which will also have a high center of gravity. When SpaceX’s rockets land on Earth (both Falcon 9 boosters and Starship), most of their fuel is gone so the bulk of the mass is near the bottom where the engines are, even though the boosters stand very high. On the Moon however these vehicles will be landing heavily loaded, with cargo and fuel. This raises a stability question that was illustrated sadly by the tipping over recently of Intuitive Machines Odysseus lander.

I am not an engineer, so I admit that my off the cuff analysis here is very questionable. Nonetheless, one wonders.

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Scientists: Europa produces oxygen on its surface, but less than expected

10:18 am

Graphic of Europa
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using data from a 2022 flyby of the Jupiter moon Europa by the orbiter Juno have determined that the moon produces about 1,000 tons of oxygen every 24 hours on its surface, a large amount but less than most predictions based on previous indirect observations.

The paper’s authors estimate the amount of oxygen produced to be around 26 pounds every second (12 kilograms per second). Previous estimates range from a few pounds to over 2,000 pounds per second (over 1,000 kilograms per second). Scientists believe that some of the oxygen produced in this manner could work its way into the moon’s subsurface ocean as a possible source of metabolic energy.

You can read the paper here. The graphic shows the basic process, as presently theorized. What remains unknown is how or even if that oxygen is transported downward to the theorized underground ocean of liquid water. That the amount created is on the very low end of previous estimates suggests that there will be less free oxygen to support life in that ocean than expected.

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SpaceX almost completes dress rehearsal countdown of Starship/Superheavy

10:02 am

According to a tweet from SpaceX, the company yesterday conduceted a dress rehearsal countdown of Starship/Superheavy, ending the rehearsal at T-10 seconds so that no static fire test of Superheavy’s engines occurred.

Starship completed its rehearsal for launch, loading more than 10 million pounds of propellant on Starship and Super Heavy and taking the flight-like countdown to T-10 seconds.

Prior to all its launches SpaceX routinely does this kind of rehearsal, but always ends them at T-0 and a short engine burst. That it did not do so here suggests either some issue prevented it, or the company was doing tests of its propellant loading procedures. Either way, it is likely another dress rehearsal countdown will be required before the actual test flight can occur.

I also suspect the FAA is involved in this in some way, demanding certain actions by SpaceX before the agency issues the launch license. At the moment there is no word when that license will be issued, though Elon Musk keeps saying on X that it is coming “soon.”

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Australian rocket startup gets government approval for its spaceport

9:55 am

Proposed Australian commercial spaceports

The Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space has now received a spaceport licence from the Australian government, allowing launches to occur from its Bowen spaceport on the northeast coast of Australia, as shown on the map to the right.

The company describes the approval from [Ed Husic Federal Minister for Industry and Science], who is also the minister in charge of the Australian Space Agency, as a vote of confidence in Gilmour’s technical capability, paving the way for the launch of Australia’s first sovereign-made rockets, ‘bridging Country to Sky’. Gilmour Space has also secured approval from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, enabling the operation of the spaceport at Abbot Point.

Not all is unicorns and rainbows however. First, it appears Gilmour began negotiating for this approval two years ago, so the government took a looong time to say yes. The other spaceport on the map has been awaiting for a launch license for about the same length of time, and has still not gotten it.

Gilmour also wants to do its first test launch of its Eris rocket in the next few months, but it is still awaiting its launch license from the Australian Space Agency. We are therefore about to find out whether Australia’s government can issue that permit in the next few months, or will instead emulate Great Britain, and bog things down with endless red tape.

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JPL requests proposals from the private sector for Mars exploration

9:44 am

Capitalism in space: JPL, which is the lead agency running NASA’s very troubled Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, has now issued a request for proposals from the private sector for doing a variety of Mars missions.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a request for proposals Jan. 29 for “commercial service studies” for future robotic Mars mission concepts. The studies, with a value of $200,000 or $300,000, would be carried out over 12 weeks. The studies are intended to examine four specific design reference missions to explore commercial opportunities to support Mars exploration: delivery of small payloads of up to 20 kilograms to Mars orbit, delivery of large payloads of up to 1,250 kilograms to Mars orbit, services to provide high-resolution imaging of the Martian surface and communications relay services between Mars and Earth.

Missions to provide imaging or communications from Mars orbit could quite easily be provided by numerous private companies. Delivering payloads to the Martian service is exactly what SpaceX proposes with Starship, and is also what several lunar lander companies have now been doing.

Up until now, JPL has always built everything in-house, or if it didn’t it designed and managed everything very closely. The result with MSR is a project that is now poorly managed, vastly over budget and behind schedule, and very likely to fail. This proposal suggests JPL is now recognizing that private enterprise might be able to do it better, as NASA has now proven with its shift from being the builder to becoming merely a customer.

If so, this proposal might be indicating the first step at JPL and NASA in imposing a major change in MSR itself, coming as it does just days after the release of an inspector general report about that project’s many problems.

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Texas approves SpaceX land swap

9:31 am

Despite a concerted effort by a small group of activists to stop it, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission yesterday approved a proposed land swap that would give SpaceX 43 acres of state park land in exchange for receiving 477 acres in a nearby wildlife refuge.

The commission said that the land swap “would create a tenfold return,” allowing the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to begin planning for a new state park that would give the public access to fishing, kayaking, hiking and other outdoor activities.

…The 43 acres it would give to SpaceX are “noncontiguous,” with the commission noting that most of the acres “do not connect to each other or to areas offering public access at Boca Chica State Park.”

“These smaller, noncontiguous tracts do not provide beach access and are dotted among private properties or immediately adjacent to SpaceX’s facilities, meaning they aren’t readily available for public use and provide less cohesive wildlife habitat than offered by a connected and consistently managed tract of conservation land,” the announcement reads.

The opposition came from the same activist groups that have been attempting by lawfare in every way to shut SpaceX down. They claim in the article at the link that “SpaceX has a history of being a bad neighbor, wreaking havoc on the communities and habitat nearby,” but there is zero evidence of this. Even Fish & Wildlife was forced in its own environmental report to admit that there was no reason to block Starship/Superheavy launches at Boca Chica. And the general community is enthused about the presence of SpaceX because of the billions of dollars of new investment and tens of thousands of new jobs it has brought to the Brownsville region.

These activist groups are simply another visible expression of the irrational hatred the left now holds for Elon Musk, because he has dared defy the left in a number of ways. Sadly, these groups routinely get strong help from every media source (also part of that left), always getting quoted and always getting treated as if they are a major political force in the region, when only a tiny minority in south Texas is on their side.

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The beat goes on: SpaceX launches twice today

5:36 pm

UPDATE: This post is changed because I missed an earlier launch today from SpaceX, when it launched 53 payloads, including many smallsats using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. It then followed with a successful launch of another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

On the Vandenberg launch, the first stage successfully completed its fifth flight, landing back at its landing zone at Vandenberg. In the Cape Canaveral launch, the first stage completed its thirteenth flight. landing on a droneship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

22 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined 25 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX now leads the rest of the world, excluding American companies 22 to 19.

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In the NASA budget now approved, Congress demonstrates once again its utter bankruptcy

9:44 am

Negotiators for both the House and Senate have now released a federal budget for the 2024 fiscal year that includes NASA’s budget, and in doing so clearly illustrates by that NASA budget how utterly incompetent, irresponsible, and useless this Congress continues to be.

First of all, this budget is for this fiscal year, that actually began six months ago in October 2023. That Congress can’t come up with a budget on time has not only become routine, those budgets continue to arrive later and later, or not at all.

The budget itself was an attempt to fix things, because it actually is a detailed budget made up of six appropriation bills that the House began developing last year, rather than a massive omnibus bill that no one had reviewed or read. The goal with each bill was to reduce actual spending across the board — as much as 28.8% — not simply slow the growth of that spending.

However, that effort this year has been a failure. The use of continuing resolutions to keep the government running at previously high levels for the first six months of this fiscal year has largely defeated that effort. Do not expect the budget to shrink in 2024 in any major manner at all.

The budget for NASA also gives us a good window into Congress’s bankruptcy.
» Read more

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SpaceX successfully launches four NASA astronauts to ISS

9:17 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched four NASA astronauts to ISS, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral on the company’s eighth operational manned mission for NASA, and the thirteenth overall manned mission launched by SpaceX since May 2020.

The Dragon capsule, Endeavour, is flying its fifth manned flight. The first stage completed its first flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The crew is expected to dock with ISS on March 5, 2024. The crew is scheduled to fly a standard six month mission.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

20 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined 23 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX now leads the rest of the world, excluding American companies 20 to 19.

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Watch video from Varda’s return capsule as its comes back to Earth

9:42 am

I have embedded below video taken from inside the capsule of the commercial startup Varda from its release from the Rocket Lab service module throughout its descent back to Earth.

The capsule had been launched in June 2023, carrying equipment to manufacture HIV drugs in space and then return them to Earth for sale. Even though the company had begun negotiations with the FAA and the Air Force two years prior for landing that capsule in the Air Force’s test range in Utah, those agencies blocked its planned return in the September of 2023, and was only able to do it last month. This mission is demo flight, with three others now scheduled.

For the video, Varda included a window looking up outside the capsule, and a camera to film everything that occurred outside that window during descent, release of parachutes, and impact on the ground. It is quite fascinating, as you can see that the capsule initially tumbles, then as the atmosphere thickens its aerodynamic shape causes it to stablize with its heat shield at its bottom.
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German rocket startup ships suborbital test rocket to Australia for launch

9:28 am

The German rocket startup Hyimpulse has now packed its SR75 test rocket for shipment to Australia for a suborbital test flight taking off from Koonibba Test Range on that nation’s southern coast.

The launch at Koonibba will also assist HyImpulse as they continue development of their SL1 Orbital Launcher. The SL1 Orbital Launcher will use ten of the SR75 rocket motors to lift payloads of up to 600kg to low earth orbit and could be launched from the Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex [part of Koonibba] in the future.

The launch campaign is scheduled to begin from mid-April with both companies targeting a launch at the end of April through to early May subject to regulatory approval. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrase immediately raises concerns, as Australia is part of the British Commonwealth, with laws based on Great Britain’s. In Great Britain the red tape from those laws has acted to stymie all launches, destroying one company (Virgin Orbit) and threatening the viability of two spaceports. In Australia there have been indications that such red tape is doing the same to new spaceports on the northern coast. We shall see if that April launch happens. If it is delayed because of “pending regulatory approvals” it will confirm that the Australian government is as much a problem as Great Britain’s.

Hyimpulse is one of three German rocket startups, with Rocket Factory Augburg and Isar Aerospace the other two. It however has been very quiet in the past few years, with the other two companies garnering the most publicity as they prepare for their own first test launches. This story suggests however it might actually be the first to fly, despite the lack of news reports about it.

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Lockheed Martin offers to buy startup satellite maker Terran Orbital

9:38 pm

Lockheed Martin now has submitted an offer to buy the startup satellite maker Terran Orbital for $293 million.

Lockheed Martin has submitted a nonbinding offer to buy satellite maker Terran Orbital’s 223 million outstanding shares for $1 each and pay $70 million for its outstanding warrants.

Lockheed Martin also offered to cover about $313 million of the company’s outstanding debt.

Lockheed already owns 28.3% of Terran Orbital, and uses the satellite maker to produce its military satellites, so this deal seems a good fit. It also fits the overall long term strategy of Lockheed, which has been investing in a number of other startups (such as rocket startups Rocket Lab and ABL). The company has clearly seen the future. Rather than continue working like an old-style bloated big space company, it has been using these new companies as models for its future work.

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