Tag: spaceflight

Elon Musk’s employee update released January 12th

10:19 am

I have embedded below an employee update of the status of all of SpaceX’s projects, given by Elon Musk and released publicly on January 12, 2023. The video has been edited only to remove the many enthusiastic applauses by Musk’s audience of co-workers in order to shorten it.

Though Musk provided a lot of general information about the company’s long term goals with Starlink, Starship, Mars, the Moon, and other topics, these are the most important take-aways relating to its ongoing efforts now:

  • Falcon 9: The company is now upgrading its first stage so that it will be able to fly reused forty times, not twenty. Musk also noted that they have now reused the rocket’s fairings more than 300 times.
  • They are now aiming for about 150 launches in 2024. (It appears now that the biggest obstacle to this goal will be weather, as seen by the weather delays that have stalled Falcon 9 launches this very week.)
  • The Dragon fleet has now spent more days at and flights to ISS than the NASA’s entire shuttle fleet.
  • Starlink: It is a supplement to present phone and internet service, not a replacement, serving remote areas. Its biggest obstacle now however to providing that service is government approvals. The company is blocked by regulators in many places where the service is operational.

On Starship/Superheavy, he revealed these facts:

  • They are planning to double its payload capacity to 200 tons to orbit, twice the Saturn-5.
  • Starship would have made orbit on the second orbital test if it had had a payload. To simulate the weight of payload it had carried extraoxidizer, and when it vented these as it approached orbit it caused problems that activated the self-destruct system.
  • The third orbital test flight will thus almost certainly reach orbit, and will then test engine burns, some refueling technology, payload deployment, and de-orbit procedures.

Musk emphasized that they must be able to fly these tests frequently to get Starship/Superheavy functioning, not just for SpaceX but for NASA’s Artemis program. As he said, “Time is the one true currency.” With each launch they refine the system to make it more reliable and operational. Without those launches they can’t.

He did not mention why launches might not happen frequently, probably because the last thing he needs to do is antagonize the regulators who are slowing him down. I (and other journalists) however are not under that restriction. The biggest obstacle to SpaceX’s success is the red-tape being wound around it by the Biden administration and its love of strict regulation, possibly instigated by its political hostility to Elon Musk as a person.

This government action to stymie freedom must end, and the sooner the better.
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Peregrine still operational but expected to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere

9:23 am

Peregrine flight path as of January 13, 2024
Click for original image.

According to an update yesterday from Astrobotic’s engineering team, the damaged lunar lander is likely to enter the atmosphere burn up when its orbit brings it back to Earth in about a week.

In an update the day before, the company released a graph of the spacecraft’s position in relation to the Earth and Moon, shown to the right. From that update:

Peregrine remains operational at about 238,000 miles from Earth, which means that we have reached lunar distance! As we posted in Update #10, the Moon is not where the spacecraft is now (see graphic). Our original trajectory had us arriving at the Moon on day 15 post launch. Our propellant estimates currently have us running out of fuel before this 15-day mark

The plan had apparently been to circle the Earth twice in this elongated orbit, with the second orbit (after some mid-course corrections) bringing Peregrine close enough to the Moon (after it had moved further in its orbit) to be captured by its sphere of influence. With the loss of fuel due to the leak, the spacecraft doesn’t have the fuel to do any of the required engine burns, including one that would avoid the Earth’s atmosphere upon return.

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Momentus delays next orbital tug mission due to lack of funds

3:24 pm

The orbital tug startup Momentus has now delayed its next orbital tug mission, scheduled to launch in March on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, due to shortage of cash in the bank.

In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Jan. 12, Momentus announced it did not plan to fly its next tug, Vigoride-7, on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 rideshare launch in March. The company said it called off the flight because of its “inability to support continuing operations for the expected launch date as a result of the Company’s limited liquidity and cash balance.”

The company said in November that it has signed up seven customers who planned to deploy satellites on Vigoride-7 and two other customers who would operate hosted payloads on the vehicle, but did not identify then. Momentus also intended to fly a rendezvous and proximity operations demonstration on the vehicle as part of its long-term plans for reusable tugs.

Momentus also announced the layoff of 20% of its full-time workforce, on top of the 30% layoffs which occurred in the third quarter in 2023. It appears from the SEC filing that these layoffs are a result of not winning the military contract to build its Tranche-2 constellation, won by Rocket Lab earlier this week.

The company is presently seeking new investment capital.

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Another look at the increasing regulatory burden impacting commerical space

1:10 pm

Link here. The author does a nice job summarizing the problems now becoming evident as the administration state strives to expand its power and control. Though he gives space to both sides, allowing the defenders of that administrative state to explain why strong regulations are good, he doesn’t bow to those defenders, as do too many modern journalists.

That he quotes me extensively (and has has told me personally that he is a regular reader of Behind the Black), might have something to do with this. He isn’t parroting my positions, however, in this essay, but giving his own perspective.

Definitely worth reading.

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A cluster of strange terrain in Martian glacier country

12:53 pm

Overview map

A cluster of strange terrain on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 21, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “patterned ground.” I see instead a whole range of inexplicable Martian geological features that, while each has been documented previously, each remains puzzling as to its formation process.

First there is the stucco-like peaks of all sizes on the upper left. This surface really looks like it had been wet plaster covered with Saran Wrap that had its peaks pulled up when that wrap was pulled off quickly.

Then there is brain terrain on the right. Always associated with glacier features on Mars, these convolutions are unique to Mars and as yet not entirely understood.

Next there is the circular arc on the middle left. It appears to be the remains of an impact crater now filled partly, but if so why has its northern rim disappeared so completely?

If you look close at the image above as well as the full image, you will find other mysterious features as well.

The location is the white dot on the overview map above. The rectangle in the inset shows the area covered by this picture, part of the floor of an unnamed eighteen-mile-wide and one-mile deep crater. The glacial material that appears to fill its interior as well as the splash apron that surrounds it all suggest the ground here is impregnated with water ice. Located as it is on the western end of the 2,000-mile-long north mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country — where practically every image shows glacial features — this conclusion is not surprising.

In fact, this photo illustrates well the alieness of Mars. We understand glaciers and ice, but on Mars, with its very cold temperatures, one-third Earth gravity, and thin atmosphere, those glaciers and ice are able to do things that we don’t yet understand. Untangling these geological processes will take decades of work, and likely will not be completed until people can walk the Martian surface and study it up close.

And won’t that be fun?

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A new plan to send a probe to interstellar object Oumuamua

9:55 am

Project Lyra about to rendezvous with Oumuamua
Click to watch the animation.

Scientists have proposed a project to send an unmanned probe to Oumuamua, using the Earth, Jupiter, and then the Sun to slingshot onto a path that would catch up with the interstellar object on its journey leaving the solar system in the mid-2050s.

The project, dubbed Lyra, was first proposed in 2023. The scientists have now revised the plan to account for the greater speeds needed to catch up with Oumuamua as it continues to move away from us. It is still within the solar system, but it is moving away very fast.

The graphic to the right, a screen capture of an animation at the link, shows the spacecraft as it finally approaches the interstellar object in 2055. To get there it would launch in the early 2030s, slingshot past the Earth to reach Jupiter, which would then slow it down so that it would fall back to the Sun, passing it by less than 450,000 miles, which would slingshot it out to Oumuamua (with the help of an additional engine burn). To survive the close solar approach it would use the same technology used by the Parker Solar Probe, which has already successfully flown that close to the Sun.

It seems this is an entirely worthwhile project, since Oumuamua continues to baffle scientists as to its nature. While most belief it is a natural but very unusual interstellar asteroid, none can dismiss the possibility that it instead an alien spacecraft. The data precludes nothing. Getting close to it seems worthwhile, no matter what.

For me, that rendezvous will happen when I would be 102 years old. I don’t think I’ll be here to see it.

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Japan’s H2A rocket launches military surveillance satellite

9:24 am

Japan’s H2A rocket today successfully launched a new military surveillance satellite designed to observe North Korean’s missile launch sites.

The live stream of the launch is here, cued to T-10 seconds.

New reports had previously reported the last launch of the H2A occurred in September 2023, launching Japan’s SLIM lunar lander and XRISM X-ray telescope. This was obviously incorrect. Today’s launch appears to close out the H2A manifest, leaving Japan rocketless until it can get both its new H3 and grounded Epsilon rockets operational.

The 2024 launch race:

4 China
3 SpaceX
1 India
1 ULA
1 Japan

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Boeing completes Starliner parachute drop test

9:13 am

Boeing on January 9, 2023 successfully completed a parachute drop test of its Starliner capsule, testing whether the redesigned connection between the chutes and the capsule was now meeting proper safety specifications.

The drop test, which used a Starliner parachute system attached to a dart-shaped sled the same weight as a Starliner, was performed to confirm the functioning of a redesigned and strengthened soft link joint that is part of the network of lines connecting the parachutes to the spacecraft. The test also validated a change to strengthen one textile joint in the parachute, increasing overall parachute robustness. As with other capsules, Starliner relies on parachutes to land safely when it returns to Earth.

Engineers are still analyzing the results, though the parachutes worked as planned. The first manned mission of Boeing’s commercial capsule is now scheduled for April 2024, only four years late as well as four years after SpaceX accomplished the same thing. It still remains staggering that the company did not find out about that soft link joint when it was designing the capsule, instead of only months before the first manned mission last year. It is not as if the use of parachutes to land capsules is cutting edge technology.

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Double-ringed crater near the Starship landing zone on Mars

2:41 pm

Double-ringed crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 10, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label simply as a “double-rim crater.”

If you look close you might not be unreasonable to call this instead a triple-rim crater, as there appear to be two rings on each side of the highest crater rim.

Multple rings in craters are not rare. We see many on the Moon. Most however are associated with very large impacts, and are an expression of the ripples formed at impact, not unlike the ripples seen when you drop a pebble in water. Unlike water ripples, the ripples formed in rock are impact melt that quickly refreezes, thus capturing those ripples as concentric rings.

In this case, these rings likely signal not freezing rock but freezing ice.
» Read more

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Webb infrared data detects unexpected structure inside debris disk of Beta Pictoris

10:36 am

Beta Pictoris debris disk
Click for original image.

A new false color infrared image from the Webb Space Telescope has revealed an unexpected structure extending out from the two debris disks that surround the near-by star Beta Pictoris, with computer modeling suggesting might this structure have been the result of a large collision as recently as only 100 years ago.

That false-colr image is the right, with this newly discovered structure, described by the scientists as resembling “a cat’s tail”, on the right side. The infrared light of the star has been blocked in the center in order to see the details of the disk.

Webb’s mid-infrared data also revealed differences in temperature between Beta Pic’s two disks, which likely is due to differences in composition. “We didn’t expect Webb to reveal that there are two different types of material around Beta Pic, but MIRI clearly showed us that the material of the secondary disk and cat’s tail is hotter than the main disk,” said Christopher Stark, a co-author of the study at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The dust that forms that disk and tail must be very dark, so we don’t easily see it at visible wavelengths — but in the mid-infrared, it’s glowing.”

To explain the hotter temperature, the team deduced that the dust may be highly porous “organic refractory material,” similar to the matter found on the surfaces of comets and asteroids in our solar system. For example, a preliminary analysis of material sampled from asteroid Bennu by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission found it to be very dark and carbon-rich, much like what MIRI detected at Beta Pic.

In an attempt to explain the cat’s tail, the scientists used computer models, which suggested it might have been caused by an event that produced a lot of dust, such as a collision between two large objects in the debris disk, and that event could have happened as recently as a hundred years ago.

This hypothesis remains unconfirmed, with much more data required before a final explanation can be accepted.

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Astronomers discover Earth-sized exoplanet roasted by a Sunlike star

10:18 am

Using data from the TESS space telescope, astronomers have discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet in a 4.2 day orbit around a G-type star like our Sun about 70 light years away.

The tidally locked planet is very close to Earth size (it is approximately 1.1 times the diameter of our own planet) and it’s orbiting a star that’s similar to the size of our Sun (the star is about 0.91 the size and 0.99 the mass of the Sun).

The star in this system is a G-type star, the same type as our Sun. But HD 63433 d orbits much closer to its star than we do, with a minuscule 4.2 day long “year” and extremely high temperatures on its dayside.

To read the research paper, go here. At an estimated age of only 400 million years, this exoplanet and its solar system of at least two other planets is much younger than the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth. Though the press release and paper note the possibility that it is similar in many ways to Io, a volcanic planet covered with lava, we don’t know this. All we know is that it is roasted by its star by orbiting so close to it.

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Blue Origin moves first stage of its New Glenn rocket from factory to launchpad hanger

10:08 am

In what might be the first step in assemblying Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket for the first time (followed by a launch), the company yesterday transported the rocket’s first stage from its factory to its launchpad hanger.

Transported by a series of multiwheeled carriages and an arching structure, the 189-foot-tall first stage for what will be a 320-foot-tall rocket when fully assembled traveled horizontally on a 22-mile trip from the New Glenn factory in Merritt Island through Kennedy Space Center over to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station where Blue Origin has a hangar and launch pad at Launch Complex 36.

Jeff Bezos has said the company plans that first launch before the end of this year, though the company has been making this same promise now for the last three years, and is years behind schedule. What makes this promise different however is that this time we are seeing actual hardware moving towards the launchpad.

The article also gives a rough update on the company’s effort to manufacture the many BE-4 rocket engines needed for New Glenn (7) and ULA’s Vulcan rocket (2). The two engines for the next Vulcan launch in April are presently undergoing final testing at Blue Origin’s test facility in Texas, and the company says it is about to ramp up production. It thus appears that getting enough engines built is still the main obstacle to launch. We shall finally know later this year if Blue Origin has solved this problem.

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Update on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander

9:56 am

The expected flight path of Peregrine
Click for original image.

The company Astrobotic has released several more updates on the status of its Peregrine lunar lander, which will no longer attempt a lunar landing because of a major fuel leak.

The map to the right shows its expected path in the coming days. While sent in a very elongated Earth orbit by ULA’s Vulcan rocket, the spacecraft was unable to do the additional engine burns that would have put it on the correct path to reach the Moon. Instead, it will fall back towards Earth, though its fate beyond that is unclear at this time.

Meanwhile, engineers have succeeded in getting data from all payloads designed to communicate back to Earth.

We have successfully received data from all 9 payloads designed to communicate with the lander. All 10 payloads requiring power have received it, while the remaining 10 payloads aboard the spacecraft are passive. These payloads have now been able to prove operational capability in space and payload teams are analyzing the impact of this development now.

Engineers have also been able to get the spacecraft to send back a number of images. These successes help the company prove out some of the spacecraft’s systems, though it is unable to test the mission’s prime goal, landing on the Moon.

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China successfully launched twice today

9:43 am

China completed two different launches from two different launch locations today, with one being the first launch of a new rocket.

First, China’s solid-fueled Kuaizhou-1A lifted off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China, placing what the state-run press described as a “satellite is mainly used for experiments such as space environment detection.” No other information was released. Nor was any information released about where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

Next, a Chinese pseudo-company, Orienspace, completed the first launch of its new Gravity-1 rocket, lifting off from a barge off the coast of Haiyang in the Yellow Sea carrying three satellites. The state-run press once again failed to mention this company’s name in its report, describing it instead as a “launch by China”, illustrating again the lack of independence these pseudo-companies have. They might design and build on their own, but they are controlled entirely by the communist government, and at any time can be taken over by it.

Though the rocket itself appears very similar in many ways to India’s largest version of its liquid-fueled GSLV rocket, very squat with four strap-on boosters, Gravity-1 is solid-fueled (thus derived from the missile technology controlled by China’s military). It is also the most powerful solid-fueled rocket now in operation, twice as powerful as Europe’s Vega-C.

The 2024 launch race:

4 China
3 SpaceX
1 India
1 ULA

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Engineers succeed in releasing two fasteners that blocked access to OSIRIS-REx Bennu samples

9:22 am

Using new specially designed tools, engineers have finally succeeded in removing the two fasteners that had prevented them from opening the sample return capsule that holds the bulk of material from the asteroid Bennu that was grabbed by OSIRIS-REx and brought back to Earth.

Curation processors paused disassembly of the TAGSAM head hardware in mid-October after they discovered that two of the 35 fasteners could not be removed with the tools approved for use inside the OSIRIS-REx glovebox.

In response, two new multi-part tools were designed and fabricated to support further disassembly of the TAGSAM head. These tools include newly custom-fabricated bits made from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel; the hardest metal approved for use in the pristine curation gloveboxes.

The fasterners have been removed, but the sample capsule still needs to be dissassembled before the samples can be accessed and analyzed. It is now expected that by the spring the material will be fully catelogued and available for scientists to study.

In an ironic twist, OSIRIS-REx brought back so much extra material clinging to the outside of that sample return capsule that such research has already begun. In fact, that extra material actually exceeded in weight the minimum amount the mission wanted to capture inside the capsule. What will be found inside the capsule will only add to the mission’s success.

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Endless ash fields on Mars

3:34 pm

Endless ash fields on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 18, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It shows the very typical surface on a high plateau in Mars’ dry tropical regions. The dunes you see here, in this very small slice, cover a region about 80 miles square, with the prevailing winds appearing to consistently blow from the northeast to the southwest and forming these endless striations.

The dunes are made of volcanic ash, and the size of this particular ash field gives us a sense of the past volcanic activity that once dominated the red planet. Once, the atmosphere was filled with ash, which covered the ground across large regions. In the subsequent eons the thin Martian atmosphere has reshaped and piled that ash into giant mounds hundreds of miles across, with the surface striated as we see here.
» Read more

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NASA awards more money to two private space station proposals

10:34 am

Because Northrop Grumman has dropped its plans to build its own private space station, joining instead the Starlab station consortium led by Voyager Space, NASA has been able to shift the funding planned for Northrop Grumman’s station to two other two private space station projects.

Voyager Space’s Starlab station development will receive an additional $57.5 million from NASA, which brings NASA’s total funding for Starlab so far to $217.5 million, the space agency said.

…The Orbital Reef space station of Blue Origin and Sierra Space is receiving an additional $42 million, bringing that project’s total NASA funding so far to $172 million.

NASA says the extra money will help both consortiums meet their schedules.

A third private station, Axiom, also under development in partnership with NASA, plans to dock its initial modules to ISS, and then undock when completed to fly free.

A fourth American private space station is also being built, but independent of NASA entirely. The company, VAST, has teamed up with SpaceX to launch its first modules on Starship/Superheavy, followed by at least two manned missions.

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Private spaceport proposed on coast of Oman

10:25 am

Middle East, showing Oman's proposed spaceport

A private commercial company has proposed building a new spaceport on the coast of Oman near the town of Duqm, as shown on the map to the right.

The commercial spaceport, called Etlaq, is designed to host all sizes of launch vehicles in the port town of Duqm, and would meet US Federal Aviation Administration standards to attract international launch companies.

The National Aerospace Services Company (Nascom), which is overseeing the spaceport, unveiled its plans at the Middle East Space Conference in Muscat, more than a year after initially announcing the project. Nascom chairman Azzan Al Said told The National that the Etlaq Space Launch Complex was in the planning phase and development would start by 2025, with the spaceport set to become fully operational by 2030.

Nascom is apparently Oman’s space agency, and appears tasked to remove barriers to this private project. It is trying to ease the State Department ITAR restrictions that make it impossible for American rocket companies to launch from countries such as Oman. It has also contracted with a UK company that speciallizes in building spaceports.

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Peregrine only has hours left, its fuel leaking away

10:02 am

According to a number of recent updates by Astrobotic, its Peregrine lunar lander only only a few more hours of life left, its fuel leaking away due to the failure of a valve to close inside its oxygen tank.

Astrobotic’s current hypothesis about the Peregrine spacecraft’s propulsion anomaly is that a valve between the helium pressurant and the oxidizer failed to reseal after actuation during initialization. This led to a rush of high pressure helium that spiked the pressure in the oxidizer tank beyond its operating limit and subsequently ruptured the tank.

The company also noted that the Vulcan rocket did no harm to the spacecraft during launch, placing it in the correct orbit. The tank rupture however means it will not land on the Moon, and in fact is likely not going to escape Earth orbit. Sometime in the next day or so the spacecraft will run out of fuel, and at that point it will be fly out of control, its batteries draining because the solar panels will no longer point to the Sun.

How this failure will impact Astrobotic’s next and larger lander, Griffin, remains unknown. It is presently scheduled to land on the Moon in November 2024.

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Another giant star undergoes dimming

9:51 am

The changes seen in RW Cephei
Click for original image.

Astronomers have detected another giant star dimming in a manner similar to the dimming that Betelgeuse experienced around 2019.

Old stars display light variations that are related to changes in their outer layers. The changes are usually small, so scientists were amazed when astronomers Wolfgang Vollmann and Costantino Sigismondi announced in 2022 that RW Cephei had faded dramatically over the previous few years. By December 2022, RW Cephei had faded to about one third of its normal brightness, an unprecedented drop.

You can read the published paper here. The researchers believe the dimming was caused by the release of dust from the star, blocking its light, much as what is believed happened with Betelgeuse.

RW Cephei, like Betelgeuse, is like a giant gas bag that fluctuates in shape like blob of water in weightlessness. This blob however so big that if placed where the Sun is its surface would be about the orbit of Jupiter. As shown in the two pictures to the right taken by this research team, the shape changed during this dimming.

The star however is much farther away, 16,000 light years compared to Betelgeuse’s 550 light years. Because of Betelgeuse’s size and nearness, until recently it was the only star outside of the Sun whose actual disk had been imaged. That astronomers can now get images of a star as far away as RW Cephei illustrates the incredible improvement in astronomical technology in the past three decades.

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SpaceX: Ready to launch Starship/Superheavy by end of January but it won’t

9:28 am

Surprise! During the NASA press update yesterday making official the new delays in its entire Artemis lunar program, a SpaceX official revealed that the company will be ready to launch the third orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket by end of January, but it also does not expect to get a launch approval from the FAA for at least another month.

Speaking during the press conference, SpaceX Vice President of Customer Operations & Integration Jensen said Starship hopes to be ready to test Starship once more by the end of January and to receive the necessary license from federal authorities to do so by the end of February.

During the conference Jensen made it repeatedly clear that it will require numerous further launch tests to get ready ready for its lunar landing mission for NASA — about ten — and that the company hopes to have this task completed by 2025 so that the agency’s new delayed schedule can go forward as now planned.

Yet how will SpaceX do this if the FAA is going to delay each launch because of red-tape by at least one month? SpaceX might be confident the FAA will give the okay for a launch in late February, but no one should be sanguine about this belief. Bureaucrats when required to dot every “i” and cross every “t”, as it appears the Biden administration is demanding, can be infuriatingly slow in doing so, even if they wish to hurry.

This news confirms my prediction from November that the launch will happen in the February to April time frame. It also leaves me entirely confident that my refined December prediction of a launch no earlier than March will be right.

SpaceX wants to do about six test launches per year. I don’t know how it can do so with the FAA holding it back.

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NASA makes it official: The entire Artemis schedule is delayed

9:17 am

Surprise! NASA yesterday officially confirmed the rumors reported earlier about delays in its Artemis Moon program, outlining a new schedule that pushes all the launches back from months to more than a year.

NASA will now target September 2025 for Artemis II, the first crewed Artemis mission around the Moon, and September 2026 for Artemis III, which is planned to land the first astronauts near the lunar South Pole. Artemis IV, the first mission to the Gateway lunar space station, remains on track for 2028.

The agency cited issues with its Orion capsule that need fixing, including unexpected damage to its heat shield during the first test flight in 2022, battery problems found during ground testing, and new issues discovered with the as-yet unflown environmental systems designed to keep the astronauts alive.

One rumor that did not turn out to be true was the suggestion that first manned lunar landing would be shifted from Artemis 3 to Artemis 4, to give NASA more time to test things.

More details about the press briefing can be found here.

No one should take any of these dates seriously. NASA technique for announcing delays in this moon program have consistently been wrong. It announces small delays incrementally, to hide the fact that it knows the actual launch will be delayed far more that politics allows. The program was first proposed in 2004 with a planned landing in 2015. Since then NASA has announced numerous delays numerous times, always in small amounts. Yet by 2015 it was clear the first landing wouldn’t happen for at least a decade (after a decade of work), because of Obama’s unilateral cancellation of the initial program and Congress’s demand that it be re-established in a different form. By 2022 it was clear that the first manned landing mission was at least five years away.

Thus these new dates will certainly slip. You can bet on it. As I noted yesterday, NASA will be lucky to make that first manned lunar landing by 2030.

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The Surt volcano on Io

1:19 pm

The Surt volcano on Io in close-up
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by Juno during its 57th close-fly of Jupiter on December 30, 2023. It shows of one of the many volcanoes that cover and continually recoat the surface of the Jupiter moon Io.

The picture was initially processed by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt. Thomas Thomopoulos then zoomed in and added additional enhancements to this particular area. (I thank Thomas for his additional help in making this post happen.)

The location is an active volcano named Surt, which has been observed to erupt several times since the 1970s, with its February 2001 eruption the most powerful yet observed on Io, though the pictures by the Jupiter orbiter Galileo taken before and after revealed few significant surface changes.

The picture itself shows a region where major changes have definitely occurred. The large arc of mountains across the photo’s center suggests the remaining half of a large caldera, its northern half now either buried or destroyed. The deep obvious hole inside that crescent appears to be the main vent from which the recent eruptions have spewed, as indicated by the light-colored apron surrounding it.

In the southwest section of that large mountain arc is a distinct ridgeline with a small circular curve in its middle that suggests a former volcanic cone, its northern half now gone.

To put it mildly, Io appears a very alien place, shaped entirely and continuously by endlessly volcanic eruptions that spread lava across its entire surface repeatedly.

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UK spaceports to UK government: There’s too much red-tape!

9:58 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

At a hearing this week before the Scottish Affairs Committee of the United Kingdom’s parliement, the heads of the two spaceports being built in Scotland demanded that a single senior minister be assigned to handle all regulation for space launches, because the present system involves too many different agencies from too many different UK governments.

The result has been endless delays, and no launches.

“For me, there’s almost too many cooks involved,” [according to Scott Hammond, deputy CEO of SaxaVord Spaceport.] “I think what we need to look at is having a senior politician directly responsible for space and space launch and I would suggest that at cabinet level.” Despite the UK Government space portfolio, he said it is still “difficult to know who’s actually running launch in the UK”.

He gave the example of seeking permissions from Scottish Government’s marine directorate, something he said was taking six months rather than 14 weeks as promised.

The CEO of the company Orbex, which has a fifty-year lease to launch from the other spaceport in Sutherland, admitted that the spaceport “had appeared to be in a ‘better place’ in 2018 but acknowledged circumstances had changed since then.” In other words, regulation was now threatening the company’s operations at Sutherland, and it is beginning to look elsewhere for future launches.

Saxavord had hoped to do its first launch this year, but now is looking to the summer, all because of the long delays experienced in getting government approvals.

The map shows other space ports being developed in Europe. These, as well as new spaceports elsewhere, might end up getting all of this UK business because of the continuing red tape issues in Great Britain.

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JPL lays off 100 contractors due to expected budget cuts

9:45 am

JPL last week laid off 100 contractors due to expected budget cuts in its troubled Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission.

A JPL spokesperson confirmed Jan. 7 that the center laid off the contractors and took other measures, such as across-the-board spending cuts and pausing work on one aspect of MSR, because of the “uncertain federal budget” in fiscal year 2024. The Los Angeles Times first reported the layoffs.

NASA announced in November that it would slow down work on MSR because of sharp differences in proposed funding for the effort in separate House and Senate bills. A House appropriations bill would provide the agency’s full request of $949.3 million while the Senate version allocated only $300 million.

Since the final budget has not been determined, nor has NASA made any decisions on what will happen to the sample return mission, these cuts (as well as NASA’s slowdown in November) are as much a political act as anything. JPL and NASA are trying to pressure Congress to fully fund everything, and by imposing cuts now the agencies generate news that elected officials don’t like. Routinely the legislators then back off of any budget cuts.

We shall see. Congress remains bankrupt, treating its budget as a blank check with money that grows on trees. Yet the sample return mission as presently designed is a mess. It needs a major reshaping in every way.

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China launches X-ray space telescope

9:25 am

China early today successfully used its Long March 2C rocket to launch its new Einstein X-ray space telescope, built in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA). The rocket lifted off from the Xichang spaceport in the southwest of China.

Astronomers will use the telescope to study the high energy released by during supernovae. It will also be used to study black holes and other high energy deep space phenomenon.

Meanwhile, the lower stages of the rocket, which use toxic hypergolic fuels, fell somewhere in China. No word if they landed anywhere near habitable areas.

The 2023 launch race:

3 SpaceX
2 China
1 India
1 ULA

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Layered volcanic vent on Mars

3:53 pm

Layered volcanic vent on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 31, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the science team labels as a “vent near Olympica Fossae.”

The grade within the fissure is downhill to its center. Outside the vent the grade is downhill to the north and south, with the overall grade sloping to the west as well. Note the layers on each side of the depression. Each indicates another volcanic flood event that laid down another layer of lava. At some point this vent either blew up through those layers, or it had remained opened during all those many events, the lava flowing out and acting like water to erode the layers on the north and the south.

As always, the scale of Martian geology is daunting, as shown by the overview map below.
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Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander suffers major failure

12:10 pm

According to updates by the engineering team running Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, launched early today by ULA’s Vulcan rocket, the lander’s propulsion system suffered a major failure shortly after activation.

After successfully separating from United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander began receiving telemetry via the NASA Deep Space Network. Astrobotic-built avionics systems, including the primary command and data handling unit, as well as the thermal, propulsion, and power controllers, all powered on and performed as expected. After successful propulsion systems activation, Peregrine entered a safe operational state. Unfortunately, an anomaly then occurred, which prevented Astrobotic from achieving a stable sun-pointing orientation.

The company later released an update, stating that the failure caused “a critical loss of propellant” that will make the mission impossible as planned. They are reassessing to see if they can come up with an alternate plan, but without sufficient fuel no lunar landing will be possible under any mission profile.

Peregrine is a smaller test version of Astrobotic’s larger Griffin lunar lander, which has contracts with NASA and ESA for later missions. This failure will likely impact those missions, forcing either delays or redesigns.

This mission was always an engineering test mission designed to prove out Astrobotic’s landing design, so experiencing a failure was not a surprise. The problem is that this failure occurred so soon after launch that it prevents the company from testing that landing design, at all.

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One spiral galaxy eating another

9:51 am

One spiral galaxy eating another
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of an on-going survey of known pecular-looking galaxies. This pair is believed to be 570 million light years away. From the caption:

Galaxies are composed of stars and their solar systems, dust and gas. In galactic collisions, therefore, these constituent components may experience enormous changes in the gravitational forces acting on them. In time, this completely changes the structure of the two (or more) colliding galaxies, and sometimes ultimately results in a single, merged galaxy. That may well be what results from the collision pictured in this image. Galaxies that result from mergers are thought to have a regular or elliptical structure, as the merging process disrupts more complex structures (such as those observed in spiral galaxies). It would be fascinating to know what Arp 122 will look like once this collision is complete . . . but that will not happen for a long, long time.

From our viewpoint, the spiral galaxy at the top appears warped by the gravitational pull of the face-on spiral at the bottom, as if it is being sucked into the bottom galaxy. In truth, both galaxies are pulling on each other. If we could circle around and see them in three dimensions we would almost certainly see distortions in the bottom spiral as well.

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Scientists: Suspended iron minerals floating in Venus’s atmosphere explain dark UV streaks

9:37 am

Venus as seen in ultraviolet by Mariner 10, February 5, 1974
Venus as seen in ultraviolet by Mariner 10,
February 5, 1974

The uncertainty of science: Since the mid-1970s scientists have been trying to figure out the cause of the dark streaks seen in the atmosphere of Venus when photographed in ultraviolet. The image to the right was the first such UV image, taken by Mariner 10 during its fly-by on its way to Mercury. These streaks are caused by some unknown material that absorbs the UV light.

Researchers have now proposed that two different iron-bearing minerals, floating in Venus’s atmosphere, are what cause these dark UV streaks. From the absract:

Our results demonstrate that ferric iron can react with sulfuric acid to form two mineral phases: rhomboclase [(H5O2)Fe(SO4)2·3H2O] and acid ferric sulfate [(H3O)Fe(SO4)2]. A combination of these two mineral phases and dissolved Fe3+ in varying concentrations of sulfuric acid are shown to be good candidates for explaining the 200- to 300-nm and 300- to 500-nm features of the reported unknown UV absorber.

Iron has been detected in the atmosphere previously, and is theorized could come from volcanic eruptions on the planet’s million-plus volcanoes.

This new hypothesis explaining the dark UV absorber however remains unconfirmed, and joins a list of other candidates for that absorber, many of which propose either iron or sulfur in different combinations. Because so little data really exists about the atmosphere of Venus, with what is known also uncertain, it is presently impossible to solve this mystery with confidence. The problem is made even more difficult in that scientists understand almost nothing about the chemistry of materials under the conditions seen in Venus’s atmosphere, which is extremely hot (800 degrees Fahrenheit) and very thick and dense (100 times that of Earth).

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