China today used its Long March-6 rocket to place sixteen satellites into orbit, all of which appear to be for military and civilian Earth observations.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
35 SpaceX
30 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 50 to 30 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 50 to 48.
Click for original photo.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX engineers yesterday performed static fire tests of both its Superheavy prototype #7 and its Starship prototype #24.
The Superheavy prototype fired one engine, and did so only a few weeks after that prototype experienced an explosive event the launchpad during earlier fueling/engine tests. Yesterday’s engine test was the first time any Superheavy prototype had fired its engines on the launchpad.
The Starship prototype meanwhile fired two engines on a nearby vertical test stand.
SpaceX’s plan is to stack #24 on top of #7 and attempt an orbital launch test that will have the Superheavy prototype land in the Gulf of Mexico while the Starship prototype reaches orbit and then returns to Earth in the Pacific northeast of Hawaii. Based on the company’s normal pace of operations, that flight is probably only weeks away. However, before that flight engineers will have to do a full static fire test of all 33 of #7 engines, and then like do it again with Starship #24 stacked on top.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch another 52 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The first stage completed its third flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The fairings also completed their third flight.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
35 SpaceX
29 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 50 to 29 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 50 to 37.
Capitalism in space: As noted during a speech yesterday by CEO Peter Beck, Rocket Lab is considering further interplanetary targets for its still functioning Photon upper stage, that helped launch NASA’s CAPSTONE mission toward the Moon.
Rocket Lab is continuing to operate Lunar Photon more than a month after it deployed CAPSTONE. The spacecraft is currently about 1.3 million kilometers from Earth, he said, and will swing back to Earth later in the month.
The spacecraft still has 10-15% of its propellant remaining. “As it scoots past Earth,” Beck said, “we’ll have a crack at doing something cool with it and see how far into the solar system we can get with it.”
Rocket Lab hopes to use a future Photon stage to send a probe to Venus, and is using the Photon in space now for engineering tests. It is also selling this technology as a viable cheaper alternative to the typically expensive interplanetary probes.
According to an official of a company that helps track space junk, the scattered debris from the satellite destroyed by Russia in an anti-satellite test in 2021 has had numerous near collisions with multiple Starlink satellites.
In the Aug. 6 event, Oltrogge said there were more than 6,000 close approaches, defined as being within 10 kilometers, involving 841 Starlink satellites, about 30% of the constellation. It’s unclear how many, if any, of the satellites had to maneuver to avoid collisions.
This conjunction squall was exacerbated by a new group of Starlink satellites. SpaceX launched the first set of “Group 3” Starlink satellites July 10 from Vandenberg Space Force Base into polar orbit, followed by a second set July 22. A third batch of Group 3 satellites is scheduled to launch Aug. 12.
The problem is only going to get worse, as this junk will be in orbit for quite some time.
Capitalism in space: Because the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, Northrop Grumman yesterday announced that it has signed a deal with the rocket startup Firefly to replace the Russian engines and Ukrainian-built first stages on its Antares rocket.
Firefly’s propulsion technology utilizes the same propellants as the current Antares rocket, which minimizes launch site upgrades. The Antares 330 will utilize seven of Firefly’s Miranda engines and leverage its composites technology for the first stage structures and tanks, while Northrop Grumman provides its proven avionics and software, upper-stage structures and Castor 30XL motor, as well as proven vehicle integration and launch pad operations. This new stage will also significantly increase Antares mass to orbit capability.
The press release made no mention of launch dates. However, according to Reuters Northrop Grumman has purchased three SpaceX Falcon 9 launches in ’23 and ’24 to get its Cygnus cargo freighter into orbit in the interim and thus fulfill its ISS resupply contract with NASA.
After an earlier Antares failure the company (then Orbital ATK) had hired ULA’s Atlas-5 to launch Cygnus. ULA however is retiring the Atlas-5 after it completes its present full manifest, so this rocket was no longer available. ULA is replacing it with the Vulcan rocket, but that rocket is not yet operational due to delays in the delivery of its Blue Origin first stage engines. Thus, SpaceX was Northrop Grumman’s only viable option.
There is also a certain irony in the hiring of Firefly to replace the Ukrainian first stage. Firefly was saved from bankruptcy by a Ukrainian billionaire, Max Polykov. Though he has been forced to sell off his ownership in the company by the State Department, Firefly would not now exist to take this business from a Ukrainian company had Polykov not provided his financial help.
Both Russia and a pseudo-commercial Chinese company today completed launches.
Russia used its Soyuz-2 rocket to launch a military reconnaissance satellite for Iran, along with 16 Russian smallsats. The rocket was originally going to launch a South Korean satellite, but that launch was cancelled due to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.
In China, the pseudo-company Galactic Energy used its four-stage Ceres-1 rocket to place three Earth observations satellites into orbit. Because three of the rocket’s four stages use solid rocket motors, they were likely reworked from military applications. Thus, Galactic Energy does nothing without the full approval and supervision of the Chinese government. It might have been funded privately, and focused on making profits, but it really owns nothing it builds.
Nonetheless, this was its third successful orbital launch, making it the most successful of these Chinese pseudo-companies. It is also developing a Falcon 9 clone rocket dubbed Pallas-1, which it hopes to launch next year.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
34 SpaceX
29 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 49 to 29 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 49 to 47. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch later today should strengthen this lead again.
The leade
The new Sri Lankan government, at the request of India, has rescinded the permission granted by the previous government that would have allowed a Chinese satellite tracking ship to dock at one of its ports.
In a written request, the Sri Lanka Foreign Ministry told the Chinese Embassy in Colombo not to go ahead with the visit, said an official involved in the process. “The Ministry wishes to request that the arrival date of the vessel Yuan Wang 5 in Hambantota to be deferred until further consultations are made on this matter,” the request says.
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe assured political leaders on Friday that the visit will not go ahead as planned.
The previous government, recently overthrown by a citizen revolt because of its green policies that produced starvation and bankruptcy throughout the nation, had agreed to the docking, changing years of cooperation with India. Apparently the new government has decided to renew that Indian alliance.
India in turn wishes to limit China’s ability to spy on its own satellites and operations in space.
Click for full figure.
By analyzing 600 scattered pieces recovered from a 20-foot wide asteroid that broke-up and landed in the Sudan in 2008, scientists have discovered that some surface pieces were able to reach the ground unscathed because they were on the asteroid’s protected aft as it plowed through the atmosphere.
This asteroid was one of the first ever discovered shortly before impact and then tracked as it hit the atmosphere and broke up, the pieces falling as meteorites. The image to the right, figure 4 of the paper, shows the computer simulation of the asteroid’s break-up, based on the data obtained by mapping the location of its pieces on the ground. From the press release:
“Because of the high speed coming in, we found that the asteroid punched a near vacuum wake in the atmosphere,” says Robertson. “The first fragments came from the sides of the asteroid and tended to move into that wake, where they mixed and fell to the ground with low relative speeds.”
While falling to the ground, the smallest meteorites were soon stopped by friction with the atmosphere, falling close to the breakup point, while larger meteorites were harder to stop and fell further downrange. As a result, most recovered meteorites were found along a narrow 1-km wide strip in the asteroid’s path. “The asteroid melted more and more at the front until the surviving part at the back and bottom-back of the asteroid reached a point where it suddenly collapsed and broke into many pieces,” said Robertson. “The bottom-back surviving as long as it did was because of the shape of the asteroid.”
No longer trapped by the shock from the asteroid itself, the shocks from the individual pieces now repulsed them, sending these final fragments flying outwards with much higher relative speed. “The largest meteorites from 2008 TC3 were spread wider than the small ones, which means that they originated from this final collapse,” said Jenniskens. “Based on where they were found, we concluded that these pieces stayed relatively large all the way to the ground.”
The location of the large meteorites on the ground still reflects their location in the back and bottom-back part of the original asteroid.
While there is a certain randomness in how any asteroid breaks up, this data will help scientists better understand the make-up of future meteorites they find. The bigger more widely scattered pieces likely came from the asteroid’s rear surface.
For the original images, click here for the top photo and here and here
for the bottom photo.
The photo comparison to the right, created from high resolution images taken by Curiosity on Mars two months apart, provides us a new update on the state of the rover’s damaged wheels. It shows damage on the same wheel that I have been tracking for several years.
The numbers indicate the same treads, or grousers as termed by the science team. The “+” sign indicates spots where new damage has occurred since the previous photo.
The top photo was taken on June 3, 2022, and was the first to show new damage in more than five years. The bottom photo was taken on August 6, 2022, and shows that another small piece on the same grouser has broken off during the past two months.
Other than this change, however, the rest of the grousers appear unchanged. Moreover, a comparison with an earlier image of this same wheel taken in the summer of 2021 shows that grouser #6 as well as the unnumbered one just below appear also unchanged.
The damage in grouser #5 however is still concerning, and reflects the increasing roughness of the terrain as Curiosity climbs higher and higher on Mount Sharp. Though the science team has been very careful since the rover’s first few years on Mars to travel around obstacles that could damage the wheels, it apparently is becoming harder to do so.
However, even if this wheel eventually loses all the metal between the zig-zag grouser treads, the science team has said it has “proven through ground testing that we can safely drive on the wheel rims if necessary.” The team as also said they do not think that is likely, at least not for a long time, and based on the rate of damage documented by these pictures, this appears very true.
Delayed years because of India’s panic over the Wuhan flu, the first launch of that country’s new Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) failed today when the rocket’s fourth stage apparently did not fire its engines properly.
The problem appeared to be the SSLV’s terminal stage, called the velocity trimming module (VTM). According to the launch profile, the VTM was supposed to have burnt for 20 seconds at 653 seconds after launch. However, it burnt for only 0.1 seconds, denying the rocket of the requisite altitude boost. Two satellites onboard the rocket – the primary EOS-2 Earth-observing satellite and the secondary AzaadiSAT student satellite – separated from the vehicle after the VTM burnt.
As a result, the two satellites were put in an orbit that was too low, which quickly decayed, destroying both.
Since this launch failed, I do not count it in the launch totals for 2022.
Considering that this was SSLV’s first launch, it was in that sense a test, and a failure therefore is not unexpected. India’s real problem is that the launch was delayed so long because of the Wuhan panic, thus allowing other competitors to catch up and pass India. While it is certain ISRO will try again, and eventually succeed, it will not get the market share it would have had, had it launched in 2020 as originally planned.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX in July raised $250 million in investment capital from five unnamed investors, bringing the total raised in 2022 to $2 billion.
Added to the amount brought in before this year, SpaceX has raised about $9 billion in private capital, most of which is focused on financing the development of Starship/Superheavy. When you add the $2.9 billion contract it won from NASA to develop Starship as a manned lunar lander, the company has raised about $12 billion to build this heavy lift rocket.
The numbers demonstrate several things. First, Wall Street is apparently very confident SpaceX will succeed in building the rocket, and then make a lot of money from it. Second, the numbers prove it shouldn’t cost $60 billion and two decades to design and build a heavy lift rocket, as NASA has done with its SLS rocket. SpaceX is doing it for less than a fifth of the cost, in a third of the time.
