Using its Soyux-2 rocket, Russia today launched the last GPS-type satellite in the existing Glonass constellation.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
54 SpaceX
52 China
20 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA
The U.S. still leads China 78 to 52 in the national rankings, while trailing the rest of the world combined 82 to 78.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The image to the right, cropped, rotated, reduced, and enhanced to post here, is without doubt one of my favorite objects that the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed over the decades. This new image combines imagery obtained by earlier Hubble cameras and the newer cameras installed in 2009.
The delicate sheets and intricate filaments are debris from the cataclysmic death of a massive star that once lived in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. DEM L 190 — also known as LMC N49 — is the brightest supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud and lies approximately 160 000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Dorado.
What makes this supernova remnant so visually appealing to my eye is its ghostly resemblance to a woman’s face, her hair blowing freely to the right. The original 2003 Hubble picture, shown below, has been the desktop image of my computer for almost two decades.
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Capitalism in space: An unmanned Dragon freighter successfully docked with ISS yesterday, bring with it 7,700 pounds of cargo, including two new solar arrays for the station.
Two International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or iROSAs, launched aboard SpaceX’s 22nd commercial resupply mission for the agency and were installed in 2021. These solar panels, which roll out using stored kinetic energy, expand the energy-production capabilities of the space station. The second set launching in the Dragon’s trunk once installed, will be a part of the overall plan to provide a 20% to 30% increase in power for space station research and operations.
These arrays, the second of three packages, will complete the upgrade of half the station’s power channels.
The graphic to the right shows the station as of today, with six different spacecraft docked to six different ports. No wonder there is a significant limit to the number of private missions that can fly to ISS. The needs of the station, as dictated by the international partnership of governments that run it, too often fill those ports.
This limitation will begin changing when Axiom launches its first module for ISS in about two years, followed soon thereafter by the launch of a number of other private independent stations by different American companies.
Capitalism in space: The Indian rocket startup Agnikul Cosmos has completed construction on the first privately owned launchpad in India, with the first suborbital launch planned before the end of this year.
Agnikul’s infrastructure comprises a launchpad and a Mission Control center 4 kilometres away, both within ISRO’s facilities on the island located off the coast of Chennai. The space pad was designed by Agnikul, constructed over two months, and is a part of the MoU signed between ISRO and Agnikul (among other space startups) under the new regulatory authority IN-SPACe’s first batch of support projects for private companies from ISRO.
Currently, it is capable of launching Agnikul’s rocket, the Agnibaan. [emphasis mine]
The first test launch is apparently not going to be orbital, but a technology test of the launch pad, its fueling facilities, and the 3D-printed engine Agnikul has built for Agnibaan.
The highlighted words once again note the effort by the Indian government to emulate the U.S. policy in the past decade to transition from a government-run space program to a privately-run competing and chaotic space industry. This MoU (memorandum of understanding) probably resembles the first space act agreements NASA issued to SpaceX and Orbital ATK. The agreements gave private companies aid and assistance, but the companies retained full ownership of what they build, and were left free to design things as they saw fit, not as the government dictated.
That two different Indian companies, Agnikul and Skyroot, are on the verge of their first orbital launches signals that this policy is succeeding. Agnikul has tested its engines and built its launchpad. Skyroot has completed its first suborbital launch.
SpaceX today successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch a Dragon freighter to ISS.
The first stage landed successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic, completing its first flight, only the third time this year out of 54 total launches that SpaceX had to use a new first stage. All other launches were with reused boosters.
The Dragon freighter is scheduled to dock with ISS at 7:30 am (Eastern) tomorrow.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
54 SpaceX
52 China
19 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA
The U.S. now leads China 78 to 52 in the national rankings, but trails the rest of the world combined 81 to 78.
The smallsat rocket startup Phantom Space has been awarded a NASA launch contract designed to encourage new companies.
Phantom Space Corp. announced today it has been awarded four new NASA task orders to launch CubeSat satellites into space as part of the new VADR contract. NASA’s VADR missions (for Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare) missions intend to meet the agency’s needs for NASA payloads while also fostering the development of new launch vehicles from both emerging and established launch providers. VADR increases access to space by significantly reducing costs using less NASA oversight to achieve lower launch costs with payloads that can accept a higher risk tolerance.
…The company plans to stage the first space flights in 2024, and the NASA CubeSats will be among the first payloads. Two will be onboard the second Phantom flight, and the other two will be on the fourth flight. The CubeSat launches for NASA will occur at the Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Space Launch Complex 8.
The Tucson-based company’s Daytona rocket will use ten Hadley engines being built by the rocket engine startup Ursa Major.
One of Phantom’s founders, Jim Cantrell, gave me a tour of their facility in May. Cantrell had been head of the rocket startup Vector, and when that failed because its own engines were underpowered, formed Phantom. Phantom however does not build its own engines but gets them from Ursa Major, a company founded by former SpaceX engineeers.
Using its PSLV rocket, India’s space agency ISRO successfully launched one ocean science satellite plus eight smallsats into orbit early on November 26, 2022.
This was India’s fourth successful orbital launch in 2022, tying it with Europe’s Arianespace. The leaders in the 2022 launch race however remain the same:
53 SpaceX
52 China
19 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA
The U.S. still leads China 77 to 52 in the national rankings, but trails the rest of the world combined 81 to 77.
Engineers today successfully completed an engine burn that put Orion into the retrograde lunar orbit in which it will remain for the next week.
Due to the distance of the orbit, it will take Orion nearly a week to complete half an orbit around the Moon, where it will exit the orbit for the return journey home. About four days later, the spacecraft will harness the Moon’s gravitational force once again, combined with a precisely timed lunar flyby burn to slingshot Orion onto its return course to Earth ahead of splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, Dec. 11.
As of now all systems seem to be working as intended.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
China also announced its Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 lunar landers will include “hoppers” aimed at exploring the Moon’s permanently shadowed craters for ice.
This was the sixth asteroid spotted before reaching Earth.
Apparently, a piece of the Japanese rocket, launched in 2012, broke up, and did so about the time it cut across the orbit of Chinese rocket debris, though the two did not hit each other.
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image takes us back to a previous cool image, from December 2020. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on August 22, 2022 as part of a regular monitoring program of these worm-shaped and tiger-striped dunes in 42-mile-wide Kunowsky Crater, located in the northern lowland plains of Mars at the high mid-latitude of 57 degrees north.
The tiger stripes appear to be the northern hemisphere’s version of what are called “spiders” in the south, where each spring the mantle of dry ice that settles on the surface in winter begins to sublimate away, from the bottom up. The trapped gas eventually escapes at the mantle’s weak points where it cracks.
When the gas escapes it spews dust onto the surface, creating the dark patches. In the southern hemisphere, the ground is generally stable, and the gas travels and escapes along the same routes each year, creating relatively permanent spider-like tributary patterns. In the north the ground is less stable, so the dark streaks form more randomly from year to year.
This monitoring campaign, first begun in 2008, is looking to see how these seasonal changes might change these northern dunes. The white rectangle in the image shows an area shown in close-up below, comparing 2020 with 2022 to see what changes might have occurred.
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According to Japan’s space agency JAXA, one of its astronauts, Satoshi Furukawa, falsified and fabricated the research results of a ground-based experiment run from 2015 to 2017.
The experiment asked a total of 42 test subjects to spend 14 days in a mock space station, during which blood and urine samples were collected.
A JAXA probe later found multiple misconduct with the research, including creating data without a supervisory researcher and intentionally rewriting evaluations. The study also lacked sufficient assessment methods and adequate research notes, and the credibility of the data wasn’t assured.
These wrongdoings were discovered after the experiments had been completed, and since the research was subsequently suspended no papers were published.
Furukawa is scheduled to fly to ISS in ’23. Though JAXA says he and his research team will be punished, it is unclear whether that means his flight has been canceled.
Capitalism in space: The governmental officials representing all of the partners in the European Space Agency this week decided to commit $122 million to a program designed to encourage private independent and competing space companies.
This budget represented a 17% increase.
The ScaleUp programme, which has two elements, supports a company along its entire life cycle. First, it assists in the development of the enterprise with business incubation, business acceleration, intellectual property and technology transfer services (ScaleUp Innovate), and then, it facilitates the scaling up of their products on new markets (ScaleUp Invest).
ScaleUp is business-focused and not technology or sector specific and applies within all ESA programmes. This programme targets start-up companies, applied research and innovation centres, and more mature companies such as SMEs, Mid-Caps and large system integrators.
While encouraging news, the language of the press release and the size of the budget indicates that these European governments are being dragged kicking and screaming into this new capitalist aerospace world. It is clear that ESA has been losing out by sticking with its government-run and government-owned Arianespace operation. At the same time, it is also clear that ESA officials and their governments are showing the same reluctance Congress showed in the last decade when NASA wanted to transition from its government-run and -owned system. At that time, Congress consistently resisted budgeting the commercial space line in NASA’s budget, thus delaying the launch of both Dragon and Starliner significantly.
In the end the effectiveness of competition, private property, and freedom however won out in the U.S. I expect it will do the same in Europe, though it might take another decade or so before Europe’s governments realize it.
