Tag: spaceflight

China launches its X-37B copy on its third mission

3:52 pm

China today used its Long March 2F rocket to place its copy of the Boeing X-37B resusable mini-shuttle, lifting off from the Jiuquin spaceport in the northwest of China.

China released no real information about the mission nor did it release any images of the launch. This mission comes only seven months after the last touched down, the fastest turnaround yet, suggesting China is working out the kinks for reuse. It is also possible this is simply a second spacecraft, since they tell us nothing of substance.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
59 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab (with a launch scheduled for tonight)
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 103 to 59, and the entire world combined 103 to 93. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) 91 to 93.

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Perseverance looks at Jezero Crater in high resolution

11:52 am

Perseverance's future route
Click for full image.

The Perseverance science team earlier this week released a mosaic taken by the rover’s high resolution over three days in November, showing the entire 360 degree view of Jezero Crater from where Perservance sat during the month long solar conjunction that month, when communications with Mars was cut off due to the Sun being in the way.

Part of that panorama, significantly reduced, cropped, and enhanced, is posted above, focusing on the western rim of Jezero Crater and the route that Perseverance will likely take in the future. Below is an overview map that indicates by the yellow lines the approximate area covered by this picture. The light blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location, while the dark blue dot marks where it took the mosaic and was also stationed during that solar conjunction. The dotted red line on both images marks the approximate proposed route that the science team is considering for leaving Jezero crater. Instead of going out through Neretva Vallis, they are instead considering heading south to go over the crater’s rim itself.

Ingenuity’s present position is marked by the green dot. This is where it landed after flight 67 on December 2nd. On December 8th the helicopter’s engineering team had released the flight plan for flight 68, scheduling it for December 9th, but as of this date it appears that flight has not occurred. I suspect the delay is because communication between Ingenuity and Perseverance is presently spotty, though the Ingenuity team has released no information.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

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The scientific results from South Korea’s first lunar orbiter Danuri

9:56 am

floor of Shackleton Crater
The floor of Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s
south pole. Click for original image.

Link here. The article provides a good summary, with three results of significance:

  • NASA’s Shadowcam camera successfully obtained low light images of the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole. One of those images is to the right. All images showed no obvious evidence of ice. The arrow points to the track of a boulder that rolled down the slope.
  • A gamma-ray detector, designed to map the chemcial surface of the Moon, ended up detecting many intergalactic gamma-ray bursts, including the brightest ever in October 2022 that was observed by numerous detectors.
  • Data of the Moon’s magnetic field suggested the far side was “more electrically conductive than the near side,” a result that scientists said “doesn’t make sense.”

Danuri is still functioning, long after its primary mission was completed, and could continue to operate for years yet.

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Musk fires back at FCC decision to cancel its $886 million Starlink grant award

9:45 am

In a tweet late on December 12, 2024, Elon Musk fired back at the FCC for its decision to cancel its $886 million Starlink grant award first awarded to SpaceX in 2020 under the FCC program to encourage companies to provide broadband internet services to rural areas. As Musk noted quite accurately:

Doesn’t make sense. Starlink is the only company actually solving rural broadband at scale!

They should arguably dissolve the program and return funds to taxpayers, but definitely not send it those who aren’t getting the job done.

What actually happened is that the companies that lobbied for this massive earmark (not us) thought they would win, but instead were outperformed by Starlink, so now they’re changing the rules to prevent SpaceX from competing.

In September Musk had also endorced a Wall Street Journal editoral that suggested the Biden administration was attempting to cancel this grant because “it has it in for Elon Musk.” Musk response: “Sure seems that way.”

It seems that way even more so now. I wonder if Musk will now sue. Above all however he is right when he argues the entire program should be dissolved and the money returned to the taxpayer. There is no justification for the FCC to hand out this cash, especially when multiple private companies, not just SpaceX, are getting the job done and making profits at the same time.

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The scrub of this week’s Falcon Heavy launch of X-37B

9:31 am

In what has become quite rare, SpaceX was forced to scrub its December 11, 2023 launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket, carrying one of the Space Force’s X-37B spacecraft, due to technical problems.

Initially, the cause of the scrub was linked to a problem with the company’s ground systems, not the rocket itself. This in itself is significant, because of the almost hundred launches SpaceX has done this year, almost none have been scrubbed, and the few that have been scrubbed were almost always because of weather conditions. The company has gotten its launch ground systems and rockets working like clockwork, so to have a problem with the ground systems on this Falcon Heavy launch was quite unusual.

SpaceX officials initially thought they would be able to fix the problem and launch after only one or two days delay. However, shortly thereafter unstated additional problems were identified that required the company to roll the rocket back to its assembly building for more work.

As a result, the launch date is now to be determined, and could even be delayed to early next year. The article at the link focuses on how this rescheduling could impact two other launches that carry commercial lunar landers. This I think is unlikely, since both work under much more restrictive launch windows, for this reason are almost certain to get priority in scheduling.

More important is the question as to what caused the initial scrub and then the need to roll the rocket back for more checkouts. Are the problems with the Falcon Heavy or with the X-37B spacecraft, or with some issue involving both? Neither SpaceX nor the Space Force would release any details. The fact that SpaceX now so rarely has technical issues at launch suggests some problem with the X-37B, but that conclusion is pure speculation.

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Amazon files to have shareholder lawsuit dismissed

9:15 am

On December 11, 2023 Amazon requested dismissal of a shareholder lawsuit against it for acting in bad faith by excluding SpaceX in its initial launch contracts with ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin to put its Kuiper constellation of satellites into orbit.

The lawsuit claimed that the board performed little diligence on the proposed contracts to launch the 3,236-satellite constellation with the Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur rockets. The combined contracts were, it stated, the second largest capital expenditure in Amazon’s history at the time, trailing only its $13.7 billion acquisition of grocer Whole Foods.

The lawsuit stated that the board and its audit committee spent “barely an hour” reviewing those contracts, including those that would go to Blue Origin and ULA. Blue Origin is owned by Amazon founder and former chief executive Jeff Bezos, while ULA has a contract with Blue Origin to use BE-4 engines on its Vulcan rocket. The suit estimated that nearly 45% of the value of the contracts goes to Blue Origin either directly or through the BE-4 engine contract with ULA.

Amazon’s call for dismissal disputes these claims, stating that the board spent far more time on the issue, and then documents this. Interestingly, it makes no mention of the recent additional launch contract Amazon signed with SpaceX on December 3, 2023, but it is obvious that this filing was timed to occur afterward in order to strengthen Amazon’s case.

Amazon’s response (available at the link above) is heavily redacted, so some of the company’s claims are difficult to assess. For example, if the board did consider the issue of launch contractors properly, the subject of using SpaceX should have come up and been discussed at length. The redactions make it impossible to determine if this was so. If anything, what can be read suggests SpaceX was dismissed as an option far too quickly.

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December 13, 2023 Quick space links – All Russia today

3:32 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • Russia planning to lay off several major managers in manned program

    • The article at the link states that this decision suggests Roscosmos is shifting from space exploration and science to doing military and commercial missions. Sadly, these former communists still don’t understand how freedom works, which if allowed to flourish will end up paying for both.

 

  • Russia’s proposed space station is shrinking

    • This story is related to the first above. Rather than having the new station made up of several modules, like ISS, Tiangong-3, and Mir, Roscosmos’ division that builds its manned spacecraft, Energia, is working out a one-module design comparable to the Soviet Union’s Salyut stations from the 1970s.

In other words, the news from Russia today is that it is recognizing it no longer has the capability to build a manned space program. The decision to invade the Ukraine, and the resulting isolation and loss of its international satellite business, has left Roscosmos very short of cash.

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The end of a 400-mile-long Martian escarpment

2:50 pm

The end of a 400-mile-long escarpment
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on August 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It shows the cracked top of a enscarpment, with the bottom point to the west about 2,400 feet lower in elevation.

The north-south cracks at the top of the cliff indicate faults. They also suggest that the cliff itself its slowly separating from eastern plateau. North from this point, beyond the edge of this picture, are several places where such a separation has already occurred, with the collapsed cliff leaving a wide pile of landslide debris at the base.

This cliff actually continues north for another 400 miles, suggesting that the ground shifted along this entire distance, with the ground to the east going up and ground to the west going down. Because the cliff is such a distinct and large feature, it has its own name, Claritas Rupes, “rupes” being the Latin word for cliff.
» Read more

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FCC denies Starlink $886 million grant

9:48 am

Despite the fact that SpaceX Starlink constellation is presently providing internet access to more rural customers than any company worldwide, the FCC yesterday announced that it will not award the company a $886 million subsidy under its program for expanding broadband service to rural areas.

The FCC announced today that it won’t award Elon Musk’s Starlink an $886 million subsidy from the Universal Service Fund for expanding broadband service in rural areas. The money would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), but the FCC writes that Starlink wasn’t able to “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn’t be “the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.”

That was the same reason the FCC gave when it rejected Starlink’s bid last year, which led to this appeal. SpaceX had previously won the bidding to roll out 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload “low-latency internet to 642,925 locations in 35 states,” funded by the RDOF.

This decision can only be explained by utterly political reasons. SpaceX right now is experiencing a booming business, with its traffic up two and a half times from last year,almost all of which is in rural areas. That number is from a news report today, the same day the FCC claims Starlink can’t provide such service. As noted by one SpaceX lawyer:

“Starlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in the rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was supposed to connect.”

The initial award was made in December 2020, when Trump was still president. It was first canceled in August 2022, after Biden took over. SpaceX appealed, but today’s announcement says the FCC rejected that appeal.

While there is absolutely no justification to give any company this money — SpaceX is proving private companies don’t need it to provide this service to rural areas — this decision is clearly political, driven by the hate of Elon Musk among Democrats and the Biden administration. They don’t care that SpaceX is a successeful private company providing tens of thousands of jobs as well as good products to Americans. Musk does not support them, and so he must be squashed.

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JAXA identifies cause of Epsilon-S solid-fueled engine failure during test

9:23 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA has now identified the cause of the explosion that destroyed an Epsilon-S solid-fueled engine during a static fire test in July.

The explanation at the link is somewhat unclear, but the bottom line is that the failure was caused “by the melting and scattering of a metal part from the ignition device inside the engine.”

JAXA is working on a fix to prevent the part from melting, but the report provides no timeline on when the next Epsilon launch will occur. Nor do we know when Japan’s larger new rocket, the H3, will launch next as well, having failed during its first launch in the spring. At the moment, Japan is essentially out of the game.

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Russia & China appear to time their secret space operations to American holidays

9:13 am

According to data gathered by the startup LeoLabs, which attempts to track objects in orbit, both Russia and China appear to time their secret space operations to American holidays, likely in the hope fewer eyes are watching at that moment.

The latest evidence happened on Nov. 23, US Thanksgiving, when Russia’s Cosmos 2570 satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) revealed itself to be a Matryoshka (nesting) doll system — comprising three consecutively smaller birds, performing up-close operations around each other, according to the company. This “spawning” event mimicked the activity of Cosmos 2565, launched on Nov. 30, 2022 and believed to be an electronic reconnaissance satellite, which released a daughter satellite (Cosmos 2566) on Dec. 2, and which, in turn, released its own baby satellite on Dec. 24 (Christmas Eve), according to LeoLabs.

Similarly, on the 25 and 26 of November 2022, LeoLabs said it observed China’s spaceplane, which Beijing calls Test Spacecraft 2, “conduct[ing] rendezvous and proximity operations” that involved a docking maneuver by a satellite it released, Victoria Heath, LeoLabs team lead for communications and marketing, told Breaking Defense. A second docking “likely took place” around Jan. 10, 2023, she said.

In the end it appears this effort only delays observations, at best, but that does give these countries a slight window to do some tests unobserved.

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Stripped screws preventing access to Bennu samples

9:07 am

According to the scientists working to extract the samples from the asteroid Bennu brought back by the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule, the work has been stymied because of two stripped screws.

Last month, researchers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, discovered that two of the 35 screws that fasten the lid of the sample-return canister couldn’t be opened — blocking access to the remainder of the space rock. Curators used tweezers to pull out what they could, but NASA is now making new screwdrivers so it can get into the equipment it flew billions of kilometres across the Solar System to the asteroid Bennu and back.

Because the capsule is kept within a sealed glovebox to prevent the samples from being contaminated by the Earth environment, removing the screws requires NASA to manufacture special screwdrivers that will also not contaminate that environment. This work is what is causing the delay.

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NASA updates status of three private space stations

8:58 am

NASA today posted a short update of the development status for the three private space stations for which it has signed contracts.

Not surprisingly, Axiom’s station appears to be the most advanced.

Axiom Space, which holds a firm-fixed price, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract with NASA, is on schedule to launch and attach its first module, named Axiom Hab One, to the International Space Station in 2026. A total of four modules are planned for the Axiom Commercial Segment attached to the station. After the space station’s retirement, the Axiom Commercial Segment will separate and become a free-flying commercial destination named Axiom Station.

With the remaining two stations, Starlab and Orbital Reef, the update provided no schedule information. While both Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, and Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin, appear to be making progess, the former appears to be accomplishing more than the latter, though that impression could simply be what NASA decided to report. For example, in describing the work being done on Orbital Reef, NASA chose for some reason to say nothing about the testing Sierra Space has been doing to test the inflatible module planned for the station. By leaving that out it makes it appear as if less has been done in developing that station.

These are not the only private space stations being proposed, only the ones that have contracts with NASA. A fourth station, Vast, is being built using funding from private sources, and is partnering with SpaceX.

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A tour of Blue Origin’s Huntsville Machine Shop & Manufacturing Facility

9:36 pm

Video below, which is heavily focused on machining and machine shop work. The facility, the Machine Shop & Manufacturing Facility in Huntsville, appears to build the BE-3U engine (to be used for the New Glenn upper stage), though I thought some of the engines shown could be BE-4’s. I hope my readers can help clarify this.

While this video actually reveals very little solid information, one important fact was disclosed near the end, when the tour reached the final engine assembly point. There the Blue Origin employee mentioned that they are assembling three engines at this facility. Considering facility’s size and the number of engines that will be needed once New Glenn begins flying, I was not impressed. Does it really take this much space and equipment to only build three rocket engines? Am I wrong?

Hat tip to reader John Harman, who is himself the owner of an aerospace manufacturing company.

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Martian crater or mud caldera?

2:13 pm

Martian crater or volcano?
Click for original image.

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

The scientists only call this a “feature,” likely because they don’t wish to guess as to its nature without more data. However, the 2.5 mile wide splash apron around the central double crater certainly merits a closer look. That double crater could be from impact, but it also could be a caldera, with the apron the result of material that flowed from the caldera.

That there appear to be fewer craters on the apron than on the surrounding terrain strengthens this last hypothesis. The apron would have erased many earlier impact craters, resulting in this lower count.

The location however suggests that if this feature was volcanic in origin it might not have been spewing out magma.
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Chinese pseudo-company successfully completes second rocket vertical take-off and landing

9:31 am

Ispace hopper about to land, December 10, 2023
Ispace hopper about to land, December 10, 2023.
Click for video.

The Chinese pseudo-company Ispace on December 10, 2023 successfully completed the second veritical hop flight of a rocket prototype, testing vertical take-off and landing for the eventual purpose of recovering its first stages, as done now routinely by SpaceX.

ISpace’s Hyperbola-2Y methane-liquid oxygen reusable verification stage lifted off from a pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert at 4:07 a.m. Eastern (1107 UTC) Dec. 10.

The Hyperbola-2Y reached an altitude of 343.12 meters, translating 50 meters to a landing zone and touching down with a velocity of 1.1 meters per second and an accuracy of 0.295 meters. The entire flight lasted 63.15 seconds, according to an iSpace press statement. The flight came just over a month after a first hop test Nov. 2. That test reached 178 meters and returned to its landing spot. iSpace says it will attempt a test at sea next year after completing ground tests.

Right now the race to become the second company or nation after SpaceX to return and reuse a first stage is between Ispace and Rocket Lab. No one else is even close, though there are a number of other Chinese pseudo-companies that are doing hop tests. Though Rocket Lab — which is not attempting a vertical engine landing but recovering the stage from the ocean — has already flown a recovered engine, as well as recovered several first stages for refurbishment, it has not yet flown a reused first stage. Based on its schedule, that might happen ’24.

Ispace meanwhile hasn’t yet flown to orbit the prototype’s rocket, Hyperbola-3. It hopes to attempt the first orbital test flight in 2025, with the recovery of its first stage in 2026.

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The Polaris Dawn private space mission now targeting an April ’24 launch

9:14 am

The Polaris Dawn private space mission, the first of a three-mission private manned program being financed by billionaire Jared Isaacman, is now targeting an April 2024 launch.

In social media posts Dec. 9, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire backing the Polaris program and who is commanding the initial mission, said the launch of Polaris Dawn is now scheduled for April 2024. “April is the goal to launch & the pace of training is accelerating,” he wrote, stating that he was at SpaceX that day for testing of extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits that will be used on the mission.

Conducting a spacewalk is one of the major goals of Polaris Dawn, requiring both development of an EVA suit as well as modifications to the Crew Dragon, which lacks an airlock. Both of those have been challenges, he suggested in a subsequent post. There is a “big difference,” he wrote, between the pressure suits worn by Crew Dragon astronauts and an EVA suit “engineered from the start to be exposed to vacuum outside the spaceship.” The lack of an airlock also requires changes to Crew Dragon software and hardware to enable depressurization of the cabin before the start of the spacewalk and repressurization afterwards.

The mission’s launch has been delayed several times from its first launch target in 2022. This first flight of Isaacman’s Polaris program will, as noted, attempt the first spacewalk by a private citizen. The second would also fly on a Dragon capsule, but its mission remains unclear. Both NASA and Isaacman’s Polaris team have been studying the possibility of a repair mission to Hubble. The third mission would be on Starship, once it begins flying operationally.

Isaacman previously paid for and flew on SpaceX’s first commercial manned flight, Inspiration4, in September 2021.

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Voyager-1 has computer issues

9:03 am

According to the Voyager-1 science team, the probe has developed a problem with one of its three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS), that is preventing it from sending back useable data.

Among other things, the FDS is designed to collect data from the science instruments as well as engineering data about the health and status of the spacecraft. It then combines that information into a single data “package” to be sent back to Earth by the TMU. The data is in the form of ones and zeros, or binary code. Varying combinations of the two numbers are the basis of all computer language.

Recently, the TMU began transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros as if it were “stuck.” After ruling out other possibilities, the Voyager team determined that the source of the issue is the FDS. This past weekend the team tried to restart the FDS and return it to the state it was in before the issue began, but the spacecraft still isn’t returning useable data.

Engineers are trouble-shooting the problem, and expect it will take several weeks at best to identify and then fix the issue. The 22-hour travel time for communications to reach the spacecraft, now beyond the edge of the solar system more than 15 billion miles away, means that it will at minimum take about two days to find out if a transmitted fix works.

As the spacecraft was launched in 1977, most of the engineers now working on it were not even born then, and must deal with a technology that was designed before personal computers, no less smart phones, even existed. Like the entire 1960s space race, the two Voyager craft now beyond the solar system were built by engineers using slide rules.

Voyager-2 also had problems in August that engineers were able to fix, so the prognosis here is not bad.

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Craters in a row

11:20 am

Craters in a row
Click for original image.

Cool image time from Mars! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It highlights a string of craters, all lined up in an almost straight line.

Were these craters caused by the impact of an asteroid that broke up as it burned its way through the thin Martian atmosphere? The lack of any raised rims argues instead that these are sinks produced not from impact but from a collapse into a void below, possibly a fault line.

Yet, almost all of the craters in this image, even those not part of this crater string, show no raised rims. If sinks, the voids below don’t seem to follow any pattern, which once again argues in favor of random impacts, with the string produced by a bolide breaking up just prior to hitting the ground.
» Read more

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Galaxies in a row

9:18 am

Galaxies in a row
Click for original image.

Cool image time from Hubble! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of nearby “pecular” galaxies. What makes it unusual is the line of distant galaxies below the largest on the left.

The wonderful quality of this image also reveals several further galaxies, not associated with this system but fortuitously positioned in such a way that they appear to be forming a line that approaches the leftmost (in this image) component of Arp-Madore 2105-332, which is known individually as 2MASX J21080752-3314337. The rightmost galaxy, meanwhile, is known as 2MASX J21080362-3313196. These hefty names do not lend themselves to easy memorisation, but they do actually contain valuable information: they are coordinates in the right ascension and declination system used widely by astronomers to locate astronomical objects.

Both larger galaxies are thought to be about 200 million light years away, with the smaller ones far more distant. If you look at the full resolution image, you will see that there are at least six galaxies in that line, one that appears to be an elliptical galaxy with all the rest a variety of different types of spiral galaxies. The detail provided by Hubble is truly astonishing.

Though they are not linked to the larger galaxies, it is not clear if they are linked to each other.

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Webb takes infrared false-color image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A

8:54 am

Cass A in infrared
Click for original image.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have obtained the first wide full infrared view of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the remains of a supernova that occurred about 11,000 years ago. That image is to the right, reduced to post here.

The most noticeable colors in Webb’s newest image are clumps represented in bright orange and light pink that make up the inner shell of the supernova remnant. Webb’s razor-sharp view can detect the tiniest knots of gas, comprised of sulfur, oxygen, argon, and neon from the star itself. Embedded in this gas is a mixture of dust and molecules, which will eventually become components of new stars and planetary systems. Some filaments of debris are too tiny to be resolved by even Webb, meaning they are comparable to or less than 10 billion miles across (around 100 astronomical units). In comparison, the entirety of Cas A spans 10 light-years across, or 60 trillion miles.

…When comparing Webb’s new near-infrared view of Cas A with the mid-infrared view, its inner cavity and outermost shell are curiously devoid of color. The outskirts of the main inner shell, which appeared as a deep orange and red in the MIRI image, now look like smoke from a campfire. This marks where the supernova blast wave is ramming into surrounding circumstellar material. The dust in the circumstellar material is too cool to be detected directly at near-infrared wavelengths, but lights up in the mid-infrared.

The four rectangles mark specific features of particular interest, with #4, dubbed by the scientists Baby Cas, the most intriguing.

This is a light echo, where light from the star’s long-ago explosion has reached and is warming distant dust, which is glowing as it cools down. The intricacy of the dust pattern, and Baby Cas A’s apparent proximity to Cas A itself, are particularly intriguing to researchers. In actuality, Baby Cas A is located about 170 light-years behind the supernova remnant.

By comparing this infrared view with Hubble’s optical and Chandra’s X-ray views, astronomers will be able to better decipher Cas A’s make-up and geometry.

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ULA likely to delay first Vulcan launch to January launch window

8:31 am

According to a tweet yesterday by ULA’s CEO, Tory Bruno, the final dress rehearsal countdown of its new Vulcan rocket had some “routine” issues that will require a redo and thus prevent the planned launch on December 24, 2023.

WDR [wet dress rehearsal] update: Vehicle performed well. Ground system had a couple of (routine) issues, (being corrected). Ran the timeline long so we didn’t quite finish. I’d like a FULL WDR before our first flight, so XMAS eve is likely out. Next Peregrine window is 8 Jan.

Peregrine is Astrobotic’s lunar lander, which must launch within certain time frames to get to the Moon as planned.

As many news sites are noting (almost certainly because they read my launch race reports), ULA will likely complete 2023 with only three launches, its lowest total since it was formed in 2007 from a merger of the launch divisions of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Prior to 2017 the company had averaged about one launch per month. In 2017 however SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket finally reached full operations, hitting 18 launches and steadily since then increasing that total. Its success (and lower prices) shifted the business from ULA, causing its annual launch totals to drop significantly, as shown in my 2022 global report.

Once Vulcan begins launching finally ULA should recover, especially because of its large contract with Amazon to launch the Kuiper constellation totalling almost fifty launches. A large percentage of those launches must be completed before 2026 for Amazon to meet the requirements of its FCC license.

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China’s Long March 2D rocket launches classified remote sensing satellite

8:57 pm

Early on December 10, 2023 (Chinese time) China successfully launched a classified remote sensing satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in the south of China.

The state-run Chinese press released almost no information. Nor did it say where within China the lower stages of the rocket, using toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed.

As expected, China’s launch pace in December has picked up, as it has routinely in recent years. The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
58 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches, 103 to 58, and the entire world combined 103 to 92. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies), 91 to 92, though it plans two launches on December 10th.

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Momentus fails to deploy three satellites on SpaceX’s multi-smallsat launch

10:06 am

The orbital tug company Momentus failed to deploy the satellites of three of its customers following November’s SpaceX multi-smallsat Transporter launch.

Momentus announced Dec. 5 that three of the five satellites that it flew on the Transporter-9 launch Nov. 11 did not appear to deploy from the Falcon 9’s upper stage. The company used a third-party deployer, rather than its own Vigoride tug, on that mission, and said that it was able to confirm that the Hello Test 1 and 2 satellites from Turkish company Hello Space were released.

The Momentus deployer remained attached to SpaceX’s upper stage, which as planned fired a de-orbit burn after completing the deployment schedule of its 90 satellites. All the satellites that used SpaceX’s deployment system apparently deployed properly.

In 2022 Momentus’s own orbital tug, Vigoride, had problems deploying some satellites on its first test launch, though its second flight in July 2023 was completely successful.

The failure here will not only pose problems for that third-party deployment company as well as Momentus, it will do serious harm to the startups that launched the three lost satellites. One was American, while the other two were South Korean and Polish. The American company, Lunasonde, has been trying to develop a constellation of satellites designed to look for underground resources.

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China launches three satellites using methane-fueled rocket

9:54 am

China's spaceports
China’s spaceports

The Chinese pseudo-company Landspace yesterday successfully used its methane-fueled Zhuque-2 rocket for the third time, placing three satellites into orbit from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

As China’s state-run press is now consistently doing, its report fails to mention this pseudo-company at all, recognizing the reality that it is actually controlled and owned by the Chinese government, though structured to function like a private company to enhance competition within China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
57 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches, 103 to 57, and the entire world combined 103 to 91. SpaceX by itself is now tied with the rest of the world (excluding other American companies), 91 to 91, though it plans two launches tomorrow.

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GAO wants the FAA to exert more control over future launch mishap investigations

9:46 am

We’re here to help you! A new GAO report now calls for the FAA to change how it does investigations after launch mishaps, both exerting more control of the investigations as well as demanding companies release more proprietary information after the investigation is complete.

The Government Accountability Office wants the FAA to improve how it investigates space launch mishaps, especially how it decides whether to do an investigation itself or allow the operator to do it. Historically operators are allowed to investigate their own mishaps under FAA supervision, but over the course of 50 mishaps since 2000, GAO found the FAA has not evaluated whether that’s an effective approach. GAO also champions creating a mechanism for sharing lessons learned among operators even though efforts in the past have not succeeded.

This GAO report proves several conclusions I have noted in the past year.

First, the so-called “investigation” by the FAA into the first Starship/Superheavy launch was utterly bogus, as I have repeatedly suggested. The FAA had no ability to do any investigations on its own. It merely rubber-stamped SpaceX’s conclusions, but did so as slowly as possible so as to delay the company’s effort. Before Joe Biden was installed as president, the FAA would quickly permit further launches once a company completed its investigation. Under Biden, that policy has changed to slow-walk approvals.

This also means the present “investigation” by the FAA into the second Starship/Superheavy launch is bogus as well. When SpaceX announces its investigation is complete and all engineering fixes have been accomplished, any further delay from the FAA will be entirely political.

Second, it appears the Biden administration is applying pressure to both the GAO and the FAA to increase this regulatory control. It wants the FAA to write new procedures for determining when it will take control of an investigation rather than let the company do it. While providing some clarity to this decision could be beneficial, it is likely this change under the Biden administration will work against free enterprise. It will give the government a procedure for grabbing control, and holding it for as long as it desires. Politics will become part of any mishap investigation, rather than leaving it solely to engineering.

Third, the desire of the goverment to make companies reveal the details of the investigation, including propertiary information, will only squelch future innovation. Why develop new technology if you will be forced to give it away free during testing, when things are certain to go wrong?

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NASA to allow bidders on de-orbiting ISS to work under cost-plus contracts

9:19 am

In a major change of recent policy trends, NASA has decided to allow any bidders on the project to deorbit ISS to have the choice of working under either a fixed-price or a cost-plus contract.

In a procurement notice posted Dec. 5, NASA announced it would allow companies the choice of using either firm fixed price or cost plus incentive fee contract structures for both the design and the production of the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV).

When NASA issued the original request for proposals (RFP) for the vehicle in September, the agency gave bidders a choice. They could propose to develop the vehicle using a cost-plus contract and then produce it under a fixed-price contract, a so-called “hybrid” approach. Alternatively, they could propose doing both development and production under fixed-price contracts.

The revised approach now adds an option to perform both the development and the production under cost-plus contracts. NASA, in both the procurement notice and a blog post, did not disclose the reason for the change.

In recent years NASA had been shifting more and more to fixed-price contracts, because it works. It either forces discipline on companies, making them get the job done at cost and on time, or it reveals that the company is incompetent (as in the case of Boeing and its Starliner capsule), valuable information for future bidding.

I suspect that Boeing’s recent decision to refuse to sign any fixed-price contracts played a hand in this decision. For the last decade or so there have been many government officials who like to treat Boeing as their best friend, despite its recent failures. By doing so they increase the chances the company will hire them as consultants when they retire from their government job. Also, politicians tend to bow to this big company due to its large footprint in many congressional districts.

The result is this shift back to cost-plus. This will also mean that this project will likely go overbudget and behind schedule, as such contracts routinely do. The winning bidder will have no incentive to rein in costs. In fact, the nature of the contract will encourage just the opposite, as any cost overruns will be picked up by the government.

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Hubble to resume science operations using three gyros

9:02 am

Engineers have apparently figured out the issues with one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s three gyroscopes, and plan to resume science operations today using all three gyros.

After analyzing the data, the team has determined science operations can resume under three-gyro control. Based on the performance observed during the tests, the team has decided to operate the gyros in a higher-precision mode during science observations. Hubble’s instruments and the observatory itself remain stable and in good health.

This is excellent news. If it had been determined that the funky gyro was no longer functional, the telescope would have shifted into what the engineers call “one-gyro mode.” By using only one of the two remaining gyros, Hubble’s life could be extended. However, while it would allow the telescope to point and continue observations, the images would no longer be as sharp.

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SpaceX launches 22 more Starlink satellites

1:17 am

SpaceX early in the morning on December 8th successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage successfully completed its twelfth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
56 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches, 103 to 56, and the entire world combined 103 to 90. SpaceX by itself has once again taken the lead over the rest of the world (excluding other American companies), now leading 91 to 90.

At this moment, based on the pace SpaceX is setting, the chances it will make its goal of 100 launches in 2023 seems very likely. Not that it matters should the company fall short by one or two launches. At this moment it already has achieved more launches in a year than the entire world managed per year for most of the history of the space age, since Sputnik in 1957. It has also established that it can do this, which means its goal of 144 launches next year is quite reasonable.

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The steep mountain slopes inside Valles Marineris

1:28 pm

Overview map

The steep mountain slopes inside Valles Marineris
Click for full image.

Time for another cool image showing the dramatically steep terrain of Valles Marineris on Mars, the largest known canyon in the solar system. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on October 31, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists rightly label this picture “Steep Slopes in West Melas Chasma”. The red dot marks the high point on this ridgeline. The green dot at the upper left marks the lowest point in the picture, about 4,800 feet below the peak. The blue dot on the right edge marks the low point on the ridge’s eastern flank, about 4,600 feet below the peak. The cliff to the east of the peak drops quickly about 1,300 feet in less than a mile.

On the overview map above, the white dot marks the location. The inset is an oblique view, created from a global mosaic of MRO’s context camera images, with the white rectangle indicating approximately the area covered by the picture above.

The immense scale of Valles Marineris must once again be noted. The elevations in this picture are comparable to the descent you make hiking down from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. They pale however when compared to Valles Marineris. In the inset I have indicated the rim and floor of Valles Marineris in this part of the canyon. The elevation distance between the two is 18,000 feet.

In other words, the canyon to the east of this ridge is quite comparable in size to the Earth’s Grand Canyon, and it is hardly noticeable within the larger canyon of Valles Marineris.

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