So That's Why There's a Banana on Starship

I learned only today why the art on the side of Starship 31 had a cartoon of a banana on it that was holding another banana marked "FOR SCALE."  It was because part of the test of the Starship was to carry a banana into space. For scale some reason I can't explain. The banana is quite visible in this photo inside the ship while it was traveling toward its reentry.

Screen capture from SpaceX's own video during the Flight Test.

Little did I know that bananas are used as standard measuring sticks on some social media sites.  This is the entrance to the rabbit hole of trying to understand how bananas became a standard when bananas aren't all the same size.  They vary widely in size. Amazon sells a "standard" banana just for this. (As always, the link is for information only, I don't make anything if you buy the banana squeeze toy.) I recommend not trying to answer that.

Picture saved from the Amazon product page. I don't know if Starship carried this, a grocery store banana or something even weirder.

There are pictures on the product page showing this "Official Banana for Scale by Citadel Black - Stress Relief Toy," alongside actual grocery store bananas demonstrating that bananas vary widely in size. 

All that aside, I haven't had the time to search for explanations of why Booster 13 aborted trying to be captured in midair like last month's flight. The Ship's hovering and splashdown was much like last month's, but was supposed to have been pushing the ship's capabilities a bit more. The inflight restart of the Raptor engine seemed to have gone as planned and then vertical landing and splashdown in the Indian Ocean looked much like last month's. This time, instead of just having a camera on a buoy, there was a vehicle close enough to the spot to allow an aerial camera - or crewed vehicle - to photograph it.

If You Should Ever Be With Gwynne Shotwell in a Meeting

It would be good idea to not expect her to be a DEI hire and an especially not to treat her like one. You might get crushed like a bug.  Figuratively speaking, of course.

Eric Berger does an interesting article on Gwynne centered around a financial conference on Friday in which she talked about her vision for SpaceX in the coming few years. 

Perhaps it's best to continue with that idea of her not being a DEI, or just being hired to be a pretty face.  She's one of the early hires at SpaceX and was leading their sales effort when there was literally nothing to sell. They were six years away from reaching orbit. 

Apart from founder Elon Musk, Gwynne Shotwell is now SpaceX's longest tenured employee. She joined the company just months after its founding in 2002 as vice president of sales. In 2008, she became president of the company and has led its operations since then. Although she is more diplomatic than Musk, her desire to disrupt the global spaceflight industry is no less intense. She relishes the fight, as her remarks at the business conference indicated.

With the time being close to the sixth test flight of Starship, it's fitting she commented a lot about the future for the groundbreaking rocket. 

"We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years," Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. "We want to fly it a lot."

I read that 400 Starship launches in four years not as 100 per year, but an increasing number every year - that's how it typically works after all. It's hard to wrap our heads around this, but there might not be enough liquid oxygen and liquid methane production capacity to do that 100/year.  Right now they only have one operational pad, with two more in the works. It helps to note that even now, with Starship flying test flights, SpaceX will launch Starship four times this year, twice the number of Falcon Heavy missions. An acceleration of Starship launches is highly likely. Yes, the Falcon 9 boosters used in the heavy consume RP-1 (high quality kerosene) so the fuel side of that observation isn't the same. 

Shotwell said SpaceX is planning to steadily replace its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches with Starship missions in the coming years. Even the last bastion of Falcon 9 flights—crewed missions on the Dragon spacecraft—will end sooner than people realize, she said.

"Starship obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule," she said. "Now, we are not shutting down Dragon, and we are not shutting down Falcon. We'll be flying that for six to eight more years, but ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship. It's bigger. It's more comfortable. It will be less expensive. And we will have flown it so many more times."

It's especially worth reading to read her views on current regulations and the possible nationalization or government priority for their missions.  Go read the whole thing. 

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and NASA astronaut Bob Behnken share a laugh. Credit: Eric Berger

Flight Test 6 Reset to Tuesday

Flight test 6 has been reset 24 hours to Tuesday.  As before, the launch window begins a 5:00 PM ET, and lasts 30 minutes.  As always, subject to change.   

Since Thursday's update, they completed stacking Ship 31 on booster 13, making this stack either 3113 or1331, depending on whether you think top down or bottoms up.  The Flight Termination Systems (explosives) have been installed, and preparations for launch have been proceeding. Safety regulations restrict the number of people who can be working on the vehicle at one time, and that everyone working on it to have some special certifications.

Reports are going around that the ship and booster for flight test 7 have been chosen and are going to be ready almost immediately.

A little more detail on my favorite image of the last week:

And if you're within a few years of my age, you'll remember a song by English artist Donovan called "Mellow Yellow".  Sort of a nonsense lyrics song, full lyrics here. Since seeing this image a verse from that song has been stuck in my head and it had to be modified.  It started as:

Electrical banana

Is gonna be a sudden craze

Electrical banana

Is bound to be the very next phase

They call it mellow yellow

(Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

(Quite rightly)

and it has morphed into 

Anthropomorphic banana

Is gonna be a sudden craze

Anthropomorphic banana

Is bound to be the very next phase

Yeah, electrical has four syllables while anthropomorphic has five, but if you say "anthropo" really fast, it kinda fits.

Blast From the Past

A day that got away from me, doing some ham-related stuff. So, as usual, some things that I thought were worth sharing. 

First, for my fellow old timers that had computers in the '70s and '80s, a friend I've known since the early '90s dropped me an email with this picture and a link to Quora where it was posted.

His remark was something like "This is how much good computers used to cost."  Back around '89, I had a computer with an 80386 processor like that one, the 80387 math coprocessor, and VGA, I think it had a 30 MB hard drive, and I just don't remember it all well enough to do more comparisons to this one. Mine cost about $600 IIRC.  

But when I see a price like that from 1989 my instinct is to see what that would cost in today's inflated currency, so off to "USinflationcalculator.com."  The phrase "pucker factor" comes to mind.

And finally one that's among the most reasonable comments I've seen on Artificial Intelligence. I don't remember where I got it but it didn't look like this. It was tilted so that woman's picture, which looks like it was cropped at an angle was really the bottom edge. I edited it to make it look more normal.

Looks Like There's a Winner in the 1-ton Race

The what?  A couple of years ago there was buzz about who was going to emerge as the winner in a race of small launch vehicles; those that can carry one ton to low Earth orbit.  (In all mentions of "one ton", think metric tons. A metric ton is about 10% bigger than an imperial system ton; since a kg is 2.2lbs, 1000 kg is 2200 pounds - 2204.6 to be a bit more precise but for one ton payloads, 2200 is close enough.)

The leader in the smaller satellite launchers was Rocket Lab, but there are two knocks on them.  First, is the Electron booster they've been using for years doesn't lift a metric ton; it's more like 300kg class. The second knock is that they've been emphasizing work on their Neutron, a more direct competitor to the Falcon 9 in lifting capacity and improving costs by reusing parts of their boosters.  It appears a winner has emerged as other companies in the race fell away. 

One of the companies that was talked about as a contender was ABL Space. Founded in 2017, despite several attempts, they have yet to achieve orbit.  Their last attempt was in January of '23, and failed early in the mission.

Tuesday afternoon at 2:27 PM local time (6:27 PM EST), smallsat launcher ABL Space failed in its first attempt to put its RS1 rocket into orbit.  More than that, it was the first launch of their RS1.

"After liftoff, RS1 experienced an anomaly and shut down prematurely. The team is working through our anomaly response procedures in coordination with PSCA and the FAA," ABL said via Twitter 23 minutes after liftoff. (The acronyms refer to the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.)

They've been going through what seems to be a great deal of financial turmoil, laying off much of their staff and reorganizing.  This week they announced they intend to pursue the military market, missile defense in particular.

Another of the companies frequently mentioned in this race was Relativity Space.  They sorta kinda reached orbit in March of 2023 in what was referred to as "a successful failure" in the first flight of their Terran 1. 

"Successful Failure" is an odd turn of phrase that I borrowed from Eric Berger at Ars Technica.  By the things that count the most, the mission was a failure.  Terran-1 failed to reach orbit, after the second stage failed to ignite properly and stay lit.  Further, their chance of being the first rocket burning methane/oxygen to achieve orbit is pretty much over, barring some strange events happening to all the other engines and platforms.  

Berger argues that the mission was successful, proving out the most important aspects of the mission.  The first stage did a complete burn, going through Max Q (highest aerodynamic pressures on the vehicle) at about 80 seconds into the ascent and burning for over two minutes.  The 3D-printed booster stage seemed to perform completely nominally as did its nine 3D-printed engines.  That has to be a great relief to all involved.   

Still, they didn't make orbit.  Like Rocket Lab, they pivoted to a larger vehicle more in line with the Falcon 9, which they're calling the Terran-R.  

Relativity opted to pour its efforts into developing a larger rocket, the Terran R, sized to compete more directly with medium- and heavy-lift launchers like the Falcon 9, Vulcan, or New Glenn. But developing Terran R is a significantly more expensive undertaking, and while Relativity is well-capitalized with a valuation of nearly $4.3 billion, the company hasn't publicized a fundraising round since 2021. At that time, venture capital firms were more freewheeling with their investments in space startups. Relativity quietly raised an undisclosed amount of money last year, resulting in a slight decline in its valuation.

So who's left? The survivor and therefore apparent winner of the 1-ton race is Firefly Aerospace.  To put it succinctly:

The company's Alpha rocket has reached orbit on multiple occasions, and just this week Firefly announced that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. The 1-ton rocket wars are over: Firefly has won.

A Firefly Alpha rocket launched the Victus Nox mission for the U.S. Space Force on Sept. 14, 2023, 7:28 PM PDT from Space Launch Complex 2 West at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Credit: Firefly Aerospace.

Assembling Starship Flight Test 6

The NASASpaceflight folks had a live feed ready to start within minutes of when I sat down to write.  Originally set to start at 8:00 PM EST,that has shifted later three times already. So far. While the expected run time isn't given they don't tend to do these live streams for more than "a couple" of hours.  The goal?  To stack the Starship on the booster to prepare for Monday's flight test 6 (IFT-6).  

Starship 31 was rolled to the Orbital Launch Mount area on Tuesday, Nov. 12. Superheavy booster 13 was rolled to the pad earlier today, the 14th, and lifted onto the OLM yielding this view, posted to X earlier today. 

Image credit: SpaceX

Unfortunately, the cropping in the photo removes this detail, which changed the ship's name in my mind from Ship 31 to Starship Banana

Image credit: SpaceX

A closeup picture I saw of the Cogent Banana holding a much smaller banana shows the word "SCALE" on the smaller banana. I got the impression that means it's painted to the size of some standardized banana, to enable quick comparisons in videos. Not that I can see how that could be useful.  But I also concluded that Cogent Banana would be a good name for rock band.  Standardized Banana would be a lower level choice.

IFT-6 is currently scheduled for a 30 minute launch window opening at 5:00 PM EST on Monday, November 18 and will look much like previous Flight Test 5. 

The next Starship flight test aims to expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities and get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online. Objectives include the booster once again returning to the launch site for catch, reigniting a ship Raptor engine while in space, and testing a suite of heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for ship reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean. 
...
Several thermal protection experiments and operational changes will test the limits of Starship’s capabilities and generate flight data to inform plans for ship catch and reuse. The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles. The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles. Finally, adjusting the flight’s launch window to the late afternoon at Starbase will enable the ship to reenter over the Indian Ocean in daylight, providing better conditions for visual observations.

Future ships, starting with the vehicle planned for seventh flight test, will fly with significant upgrades including redesigned forward flaps, larger propellant tanks, and the latest generation tiles and secondary thermal protection layers as we continue to iterate towards a fully reusable heat shield. Learnings from this and subsequent flight tests will continue to make the entire Starship system more reliable as we close in on full and rapid reusability.

The ISS News Story Gave Me A Funny Line of the Day

It's a bit involved but if you're not aware of it, some self-appointed doctor said Starliner/Crew-9 astronaut Suni Williams was looking "gaunt" and various media types ran with it.  By self-appointed I mean that I think he's really an MD but just not connected with NASA or the space station in any way and decided to let the world know his opinions. 

A few days ago, I started noticing a couple of the YouTube click baiters were running stories about Suni being sick or "in trouble" and a rescue mission being put together. After a day or so, I went to the ISS page on blogs.nasa.gov to see if there was mention of any of this.  What I found was not just nothing, but a photo of Suni hard at work and looking pretty much as normal as anyone on the ISS. So I continued to ignore the clickbait. 

Unfortunately, the media circus has continued, getting to the point where the stories attract readership on their own.  Which prompted official statements to the contrary from NASA.

Last week, media outlets like The New York Post and The Daily Mail claimed that International Space Station astronaut Suni Williams' health was deteriorating — and today, (Nov. 13), similar conjectures were made about her fellow ISS inhabitant Butch Wilmore.

In response to the assertions about Williams, both NASA and Williams herself spoke out to confirm that she's fine. Now, in response to those rumors about Wilmore, NASA has chimed in once again.

"All NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are in good health," Dr. J.D. Polk, chief health and medical officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington, told reporters in an emailed statement on Nov. 13. "It's unfortunate that rumors persist otherwise."

Which leads to the funny line of the day, from Suni Williams herself. 

"I'm the same weight that I was when I got up here," Williams said today (Nov. 12) in a video interview from the ISS, in response to a question from the New England Sports Network.

The same weight as when you got up there? Isn't that pretty much zero since you're weightless?  Sure, we can envision ways to measure weight up there, but I've never heard any talk about doing it.  In the same interview she went on to say: 

She's been riding an exercise bike, running on a treadmill and lifting weights on the ISS, and her body has changed as a result.

"I could definitely tell that weightlifting, which is not something that I do all the time, has definitely changed me. My thighs are a little bit bigger, my butt is a little bit bigger," Williams said.

But, she stressed, "I weigh the same."

One of the issues with living in zero-G is loss of lean body mass, primarily muscle, due to the absence of gravity, which provides 24/7 "resistance training" for those of us in the gravity well.  Muscle atrophy starts quickly.  Because of that, the astronauts spend mandatory time getting exercise on the ISS. They also eat a higher calorie, higher protein diet as protein is essential to build muscle.  

The important part, though, is that Williams, Wilmore, and all of the astronauts on the ISS are monitored by a team of physicians who have experience monitoring and helping people in zero G, as well as having access to every record and measurement NASA has ever taken of people on the ISS.  That's totally unlike the pulmonologist that started this with comments to the Daily Mail. Again, I don't mean to degrade him too much, but he's way out of his element. To my way of thinking this statement quoted in the NY Post is the epitome of being out of his element.  This isn't even sound advice for about half of the population who aren't in zero G.

“They’re intaking very high-calorie foods, as you can tell — cold cuts, and, you know, other meats, the proteins, but high-fat cold cuts — it’s not necessarily a balanced diet,” Gupta told the Daily Mail.

NASA astronaut Suni Williams gives a video interview from the International Space Station on Nov. 12, 2024. (Image credit: NASA)

Speculative, But Worth A Read

One of those things floating around the intertubes since Trump's landslide victory and the many other "red team" triumphs a week ago, is "where does Elon Musk end up?"  To me, it's only natural to ask that. After all, when Musk partnered up with Trump late in the campaign, it generated a lot of interest in his campaign. Many people have expressed the idea that the late additions to the campaign, specifically Musk, RFK Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, were largely responsible for swinging a lot of votes to decide on Trump.  Bobby Kennedy is already going after targets in the federal health industry, but he's the only one we really know about. I've seen nothing about Tulsi and nothing official on Musk. 

One of my favorite sources for space-related stories is Eric Berger at Ars Technica. Berger is actually a meteorologist but switched to reporting on space years ago.  An old-style reporter, he has developed a relationship with lots of sources in different companies. Because of this, it seemed natural to see his story, "Space policy is about to get pretty wild, y’all," published last Friday (Nov. 8). 

It's a bit long and more than a little bit speculative but because of his good sources, it's worth reading. His sources and experience are the good points. Some of his views strike me as listening to "Trump is Hitler!! or "the Russians control him!!" too much are the weak points. As usual in cases where I say little besides "go read the whole thing," I'll just put up a few quotes to hopefully build some interest. 

The issue, of course, is that Musk can't remain associated with SpaceX and take a job like Bill Nelson's as NASA Administrator. Conflict of interest. 

It will be a hugely weird dynamic. Musk is unquestionably in a position for self-dealing. Normally, such conflicts of interest would be frowned on within a government, but Trump has already shown a brazen disregard for norms, and there's no reason to believe that will change during his second go at the presidency. One way around this could be to give Musk a "special adviser" tag, which means he would not have to comply with federal conflict-of-interest laws.
...
Let's start with NASA and firmly establish what we mean. The US space agency does some pretty great things, but it's also a bloated bureaucracy. That's by design. Members of Congress write budgets and inevitably seek to steer more federal dollars to NASA activities in the areas they represent. Two decades ago, an engineer named Mike Griffin—someone Musk sought to hire as SpaceX's first chief engineer in 2002—became NASA administrator under President George W. Bush.
...
Notably, Musk despises NASA's Space Launch System rocket, a central element of Artemis. He sees the rocket as the epitome of government bloat. And it's not hard to understand why. The Space Launch System is completely expendable and costs about 10 to 100 times as much to launch as his own massive Starship rocket. 

Us, too, Elon. Many of us. Very likely everyone not drawing a real paycheck from SLS think it's a horrific waste of money.

Another problem with cutting the size of NASA is cutting some of the 10 or 12 NASA centers around the country. As Berger said, that bloat is deliberate. What he didn't say specifically is that it's borne of congress critters saying "I'll vote for your center if you vote for mine" and that's common throughout the Department of Defense and other government agency spending.

As I write this, it might have just become a moot point. As of moments ago tonight, Trump has announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be running the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That has been all but promised for a while, now. 

President Donald Trump steps on the stage at Kennedy Space Center after the successful launch of the Demo-2 crew mission in May 2020. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

A Space Coast Special Day

Perhaps some of you are unaware that this area on the East Coast adopted the name of The Space Coast, as other coastal areas around the state have adopted other nicknames.  It's essentially the oceanside areas in Brevard County, where the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Stations are both located.  There's only a relative handful of areas in the world where you can go outside and watch rocket launches from your yard, and this is one of them. 

We were treated to a doubleheader today. 

The first launch was midday of Koreasat-6A bound for the Geosynchronous orbit where many communications satellites like this are sent.  Launch was 12:25 PM EST or 1725 UTC.  The SpaceX Tweet to X once the mission was clearly in the books is at that link, that has four pretty pictures. 

Something that I still consider very impressive is that this was the 23rd flight of this booster:

This was the 23rd flight for the Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13G, O3B mPOWER, PSN SATRIA, Telkomsat Marah Putih 2, Galileo L13, and 12 Starlink missions. 

The booster did a Return To Launch Site landing instead of on one of the drone ships, and there's a pretty pic of that in that X link above.  Whenever I hear of some booster making it's 23rd flight, I recall the discussions of whether or not they'd ever get 10 flights out of a Falcon 9 booster.  While 23 is currently the group leaders, there's more than a few that have made it.

Later in the day we got to see a launch group 6-69 of Starlink satellites that had been delayed a couple of times for weather in the recovery zone.  Launch was a 4:28 PM EST, 2128 UTC. This booster was "middle-aged" for a Falcon 9, this was its 12th mission. Landing was on ASOG - drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas - about 8 minutes after launch. 

The novelty was that for the first time in months, we had a combination of  virtually cloudless skies and a trajectory to the SE down toward the Bahamas.  The sky was bright enough that we pretty much lost the second stage after it ignited, but the rumble got better as it went farther SE, and was a good, feel-it-in-your-chest, rumble.

We didn't get a good look at the Koreasat launch; our skies were too cloudy so that we never really got a good look at it and practically no rumble. We did hear the sonic boom of the booster returning to the launch site.

Perhaps an hour after the launch when NASASpaceflight was collecting various camera angles for a highlight reel, they shared this.  Their cameraman saw the moon happened to be in a place where he figured that he could capture the full Falcon 9 passing close by the moon in the distance

I don't know the closest that SpaceX has ever launched Falcon 9 missions from Pad 39A and SLC-40, but today's 4 hours 3 minutes seems like it has to be close to the record to me.  The SpaceX Statistics site lists a shorter time between two launches but doesn't exclude one of them could have been from California and the other from Florida.

Veterans Day 2024

Looking back over the 14 years of this blog, it stands out to me that I've really said very little about Veterans Day. I suppose the main reason for that is that I'm not a veteran, but I do care about the cause and the day.  A few things this year have gotten me reminded of the day early enough to collect some thoughts. 

Image found online with no credit given, but it speaks to me.

A week ago, Quizikle posted a thing over on his blog that got me thinking. We're about the same age, he might be a year or two older than me, so when we were 18 we were both contemplating the draft implications and had decided the same thing. If we were going to get drafted we would have tried to enlist in the Air Force. For me, the year I turned 18 was 1972 and while Vietnam was still going on, it seemed to be winding down. It was a year or two after the draft lottery system was introduced, and I lucked into having a number that the press said was unlikely to get drafted that year.  

My parents were the first generation in both of their families to be born in the US, and while dad had enlisted in WWII, there was no long history of service in my family. It wasn't a topic of conversation around the dinner table and nobody I read or saw on the TV made it seem like enlisting would be a good thing. It really never occurred to me except as a last ditch effort to avoid being on the front lines. Big brother and I had known people who went and didn't come back. Or came back with fewer functional body parts than when they left.

Like everyone else, this was the end of my last year of high school, meaning I had applied to a couple of colleges and was trying to set up to start that life in a few months. Because of my SAT and NMSQT scores, I was immediately accepted to the two I applied to and invited to apply to many more. While I had been an electronics hobbyist for five years, my plan wasn't to go for Electrical Engineering, but to study Nuclear Engineering.  Why, according to all the ex-spurts we'd have fusion reactors going everywhere in 20 years. That would be before I was 40!

Unfortunately, my dad had an accident at work (sorting mail for the US Postal Service when that was done manually) and re-injured an old injury from a training accident in WWII and being on some sort of injury leave, their ability to help fund my college fell apart. The injury eventually forced his retirement. He passed away a decade later.

That's a bit of a long story, but only a setup for the really long story of how that year screwed up all my well-imagined plans and took practically the next decade to unscrew.  One thing I probably never imagined I'd ever say, back when I was 18, was that I would have gotten a lot of good out of some of the training and work in the military - specifically the weapons side. There could have been a lot gained.

My deepest respects to those who took the road I didn't. Far more than I could say. 

NASA Extends Commercial Resupply Services to 2030

NASA as extended the contracts of the three companies that fly the Commercial Resupply Service (CRS) cargo flights to the Space Station, through the expected rest of the life of the ISS.  

In procurement filings Nov. 8, NASA stated it planned to extend the existing Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contracts with Northrop Grumman, Sierra Space and SpaceX that were set to expire at the end of 2026 through the end of 2030. NASA’s current plans call for retiring the ISS in 2030.

The three companies received CRS-2 contracts in 2016, and NASA announced in March 2023 its intent to extend the contracts. “There are no other CRS-2 certified visiting vehicles in the current marketplace for providing cargo resupply to the ISS,” NASA stated in a document justifying the extension of the three contracts. “Extension of the existing contracts is the most effective means of ensuring continued provision of these services for the extended duration of the ISS.”

The source article goes into more detail than it seems to deserve, but in March of '23 NASA specifically invited new companies to submit proposals to join the current three contractors. I say more detail than it seems to deserve because none of the three went any farther than that first submission. 

One response came from Gravitics, a company developing modules for future commercial space stations, including one called StarMax. “The response does not provide a description of an end-to-end cargo service capable of reaching, attaching, and departing the ISS, but suggests a next generation launch vehicle could get it to low Earth orbit,”...

A second response came from The Exploration Company, a European startup developing cargo return spacecraft. NASA apparently dismissed them because they were to use only US-based companies.

Finally, a third response came from GEPA Logistics, which NASA described as a British company that handles land, sea and air cargo transportation but does not appear to have any experience in space transportation. It seems that not having any space launch capabilities would be an automatic disqualifier for a space launch job.

SpaceNews goes on to say that the CRS-2 contracts have a combined not-to-exceed value of $14 billion - through the end of the program in 2030.  According to SpaceNews NASA has obligated $2.7 billion to Northrop Grumman, $1.4 billion to Sierra Space and $2.8 billion to SpaceX to date, for a total of $6.9 billion. Doubling that gets the cost to $13.8 billion so it doesn't seem to have much room to stay under $14 billion.  Also, there's no mention of the fact that while SpaceX has been obligated $2.8 billion to Northrop Grumman's $2.7, SpaceX has provided launch services for their Cygnus cargo modules, since Northrop Grumman's launch vehicle went non-procurable. 

Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo ship arrives at the ISS and is guided to the docking port by the stations remote manipulator arm. This mission was in August 2024 and launched by SpaceX. Image Credit: NASA

Northrop Grumman has contracted with Firefly Aerospace to produce their new Antares 330 launch vehicle for the Cygnus, and hope to have the first mission "before the end of the year."

About That Vote Graph

Since Wednesday, people have been posting about this plot from Zero Hedge with comments about the big, obvious thing in blue on the right.  It's hard to find this without mention of 21 million votes missing and I can't see where that comes from (which is sorta OK - there could always be other sources of numbers although it's proper to mention them). But there's just some things in there that keep gnawing on the back of my brain. First, the plot with a couple of things I added - numerical values for some things I'm going to keep referring to.

Take a look at the vertical axis on the left and you'll notice that it's scaled from 50 to 85 (in millions) by five. Along the red and blue bars on the last two elections, you'll see numbers I wrote. I rush to point out that (for example) the blue 2020 bar is not minus 82, that's a tilde which is short hand for "approximately" - at least in my world. I did the two blue bars first, and was working on this in what will be full scale when you click on it. I dropped the tilde and didn't go back and redo the plot. Mea culpa. Forgive me.

So back to the 21 million missing votes question.  Where does that come from?  The blue bar goes from 82 to 66, which is 16 million.  Where are the other missing five million?  This doesn't demonstrate that there aren't fraudulent votes there, but nothing at this scale (the whole country) could possibly show that.

The thing about the graph that's kind of gnawing at the back of my mind is that the red column also got smaller in the '24 election than the '20 election. Granted that it's still bigger than '16 and didn't fall as much as the blue did between 2020 and 2024 (dropping 2 million vs 16), but everything we're hearing is about this election being record-setting. The number of red votes going down implies Trump is less popular than he was in '20 and I just don't see evidence to back that anywhere.  Some of the vanished 16 million blue votes could have moved from blue to red, which could explain why '24 is bigger than '16, and some blue votes probably did.  After all, one of the most consistent stories we heard around the election was about people leaving the Democratic party (and most often saying the party actually left them first). See, for example, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, RFK's running mate, Nicole Shanahan... I've heard of record numbers of Hispanics, blacks, and other regular big D voting blocks having gone for Trump.

As a simple scaling, the increase from 2016 to 2024 seems realistic - if you just look at red votes. What looks to be essentially the same number of blue votes for Kamala as the Hildebeest got seems pretty weird to me. If the country had a constant percentage of blue and red voters, they both would have gone up just from population growth (not that I'm sure we'd have growth without the illegals).

SpaceX CRS Dragon set for Unique Test at ISS

The CRS (Commercial Resupply Service) Dragon currently docked to the International Space Station is about to be tested in a way the Dragon family has never been tested.  

A Dragon cargo spacecraft docked to the International Space Station (ISS) will fire its engines for 12.5 minutes on Friday (Nov. 8), NASA officials said at a press conference Monday (Nov. 4). Other spacecraft have done this before, but it will be a first for a SpaceX capsule — and an important precursor to a bigger Dragon vehicle that will one day drive the ISS to its demise.

"The data that we're going to collect from this reboost and attitude control demonstration will be very helpful ... and this data is going to lead to future capability, mainly the U.S deorbit vehicle," Jared Metter, director of flight reliability at SpaceX, told reporters at the livestreamed teleconference. 

All of this relates to NASA hiring SpaceX to develop the "US Deorbit Vehicle" to bring the Space Station down from its orbit in a controlled reentry.  This is loosely set for "No Earlier Than 2030" after new commercial space stations are ready to take over for the aging complex. 

To date, Russian Soyuz spacecraft have done this heavy lifting when periodically required, and Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo craft has done a similar test to the one being done Friday on the CRS-31 Cargo Dragon. 

"It's a good demonstration," Metter said of the reboost. He did not immediately have the expected delta v, or the impulse per unit of spacecraft mass that the maneuver would impart, but emphasized the duration would be enough to "gather a lot of data" for the U.S. deorbit vehicle.

The CRS-31 dragon launched Monday, Nov. 4 evening (Eastern time) and docked with the ISS on Tuesday Nov. 5. Image credit: NASA

Starship Flight Test 6 Looking to be in Less Than 2 Weeks

Starship flight test five was less than a month ago, October 13, and that was four months and a week after flight test four on June 6th.  When I saw a report today that the next test looks to be under two weeks from today, it shocked me, but the important difference is the delay from flight test four to five was because of the FAA. 

The improbable but successful recovery of the Starship first stage with "chopsticks" last month, and the on-target splashdown of the Starship upper stage halfway around the world, allowed SpaceX to avoid an anomaly investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Thus, the company was able to press ahead on a sixth test flight if it flew a similar profile.

And that's what SpaceX plans to do, albeit with some notable additions to the flight plan.

As you would expect (this is SpaceX, after all) they intend to fly the same basic mission but with all the lessons learned from Integrated Flight Test 5 (IFT-5) added in to the hardware and software already. 

In a statement on its website, SpaceX said the first stage—known as Super Heavy—would fly a similar trajectory to the fifth test flight, which took place on October 13. However, the booster hardware and software will be modified with learnings from the test flight last month.

"Hardware upgrades for this flight add additional redundancy to booster propulsion systems, increase structural strength at key areas, and shorten the timeline to offload propellants from the booster following a successful catch," the company said. "Mission designers also updated software controls and commit criteria for the booster’s launch and return."

My gut feeling is that if this amount of change were being done to SLS, it would take more like a year than a month or five weeks.

In addition to those fixes to the Superheavy booster, they're adding something I've honestly been expecting for quite a while: they're going to relight one of the Starship's engines in space.  The trajectory is going to be suborbital so that the ship will splashdown into the Indian Ocean again even if the Raptor engine fails to relight but the ability to get those engines to relight reliably in space is essential to all of the real missions. Reigniting a Raptor is therefore the next milestone on the development path for Starship.

Besides that...

Successfully demonstrating the capacity to re-relight Raptors in space enables SpaceX to begin flying commercial missions with Starship and likely opens the way for Starlink launches, possibly as early as the first half of next year. These larger Starlink satellites can only fit within Starship’s capacious payload and will provide direct-to-cell Internet capability.

First half of next year? As in we might see a Starlink launch on a Starship eight or nine weeks from now?  Again, as you would expect, there's more to be tested. 

"Several thermal protection experiments and operational changes will test the limits of Starship’s capabilities and generate flight data to inform plans for ship catch and reuse," the company's statement said. "The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles. The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles."

In addition, this will be the last flight of a first generation Starship - the only ones to have ever flown.  The next generation Ships include redesigned forward flaps, larger propellant tanks, newer tiles and secondary thermal protection layers.  

Screen grab from the Space.com video showing IFT-5's Starship moments before landing vertically in the Indian Ocean NW of Australia. This is video from a camera SpaceX mounted on a buoy where they intended for the Starship to land. And did.  

A major difference between the previous tests and the coming IFT-6 is that while the previous flights lifted off from Boca Chica, Texas in the morning, around 0830 local time, they are looking for a launch time later in the day, so that when Starship splashes down half a world away it will be in daylight.

Having reached a near monthly cadence for Starship launches is impressive in itself, but it's essential for the visions Elon Musk has for the Starship/Superheavy vehicle. It's essential if SpaceX wants to unlock the full potential of a rocket that needs multiple refueling launches to support Starship missions to the Moon or Mars.

EDITED Nov. 7, 2024 at 1707 ET to add: SpaceX announces the launch is to be No Earlier Than Monday, Nov. 18 at 4:00 PM CT

So Where Are We? What Now?

As I sit to write, it's before 8:00 PM ET and polls all along the time zone are either shut down or getting ready to shut down.  Florida has a section in the panhandle that's on central time, pretty much the 10 westernmost counties in the state but with one exception along the gulf coast, and as a general rule the state doesn't like to give the results out until after the central time results are done.  The state got a well-deserved reaming after the Bush-Gore recounts in 2000, but it has almost gone completely unmentioned in TV coverage that the state dramatically improved after that and the votes will be completely counted soon.  Around 7:30 I saw a news report that the state had around 66% of all ballots counted.  Due to the time, I'd assume that excluded the Central Timezone counties.

I used to write much more about politics than I do now, so forgive me this rant down this old road. 

Early voting started in early October, but Mrs. Graybeard and I voted on Wednesday, October 30th. I won't get so boring as to list entirely who I voted for, but I voted for Trump/Vance, Voldemort -um, I mean Rick Scott, and pretty much what I consider a "conservatarian with Christian backing" approach.  For example, the ballots we get for every statewide election have votes on whether judges in the various courts should be retained. This year I adopted a new algorithm for deciding who to keep: I looked up how long those judges have been on the benches and if they were there three terms (12 years) I instituted my own term limits.  To my surprise, most of them were there less than 8 years and I said OK; ISTRC one judge had been there 15 years and I said "go home." 

Our long time US representative, Bill Posey, decided not to run for reelection this year and in the primaries a former state senator ran to replace him and won. Posey was good, but I was getting uncomfortable with how long he was working up in DC with no term limits.  Due to a roundabout story that I won't get into, the guy running for Posey's old job is in a "friend of a friend" of ours circle and got our votes. Note that's FOAF and not FAFO. 

In general while I don't think term limits are ideal, I tend to like them. In Florida law, we have term limits. The problem is that too many people seemingly tend to vote on name recognition so office holders just kind of rotate between jobs without ever getting off the government payroll and becoming useful citizens again. It's not like after some number of years as a representative they get a promotion to the senate, they go back forth.

As usual, there were a handful of state constitutional amendments to vote on as well as county and city charter issues.  The two state constitution amendments that got talked about the most were the "Big Weed" amendment 3 and "Big Abortion" amendment 4; I voted against both - and primarily because they both favored the big powers and didn't seem to make either situation better. 

I've read various estimates of what the marijuana industry pumped into #3 that would widen the uses of their products, but Open Secrets shows that by the middle of October, they had spent over $81 million.  I'd guess they probably got close to $100 million in the last couple of weeks.  Those opposed didn't quite get to the $20 million spent line, but perhaps by now. The bill looks to cause more problems while not solving anything I know of. 

The other one, #4, looked like it allowed everything and used vague terminology where precise wording is called for. A glaring example is it didn't define who a "medical provider" is and yet they can approve anything.  It doesn't say medical doctor, or any other state recognized term so I can envision a Haitian Voodoo practitioner, or worse, saying they're the provider. It totally removes parental rights to even know if their daughter is being sent for an abortion. I could easily see it harming women instead of helping them.  In this case, Open Secrets shows the abortion industry spent $60.7 million while those opposed to it didn't even get to 1/6 of that; spending $9 million. 

Interestingly, those two amendments had a total, in mid-October, of $171.9 million spent on them (for and against).  Of the remaining amendments, Open Secrets shows nothing spent either way.

The county passed out these stickers instead of the American flag ones they've been using for as long as I can remember.

China Shows Plans to Develop Starship Copy

The only thing surprising about that is that they announced it publicly.  Eric Berger at Ars Technica (that link) has been following them for years and reports on the changes to what has been called the Long March 9 since the initial concept was released about 10 years ago. The initial design concept drawings were a pretty conventional-looking rocket. It was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides. That sounds like the US Space Launch System (or SLS).  

All that changed. Two years ago, China had re-imagined the design with a reusable first stage.

Now, based on information released at a major airshow in Zhuhai, China, the design has morphed again. And this time, the plan for the Long March 9 rocket looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX's Starship rocket.

Let me be clear that the Long March 9 is not a direct copy of Starship and Superheavy.  It's smaller and less powerful. 

Based on its latest specifications, the Long March 9 rocket will have a fully reusable first stage powered by 30 YF-215 engines, which are full-flow staged combustion engines fueled by methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of approximately 200 tons. By way of comparison, Starship's first stage is powered by 33 Raptor engines, also fueled with methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of about 280 tons.

The quick multiplication is that the Long March 9 will have 6000 tons of thrust while Starship Superheavy has 9240 tons of thrust, over 1.5 times the thrust of the Long March 9.

The new specifications also include a fully reusable configuration of the rocket, with an upper stage that looks eerily similar to Starship's second stage, complete with flaps in a similar location. According to a presentation at the airshow, China intends to fly this vehicle for the first time in 2033, nearly a decade from now.

A translated slide from a presentation on China's latest plans for the Long March 9. Credit: Weibo 

Note the Total Length of 114 meters; the Starship web site shows 121 m. On the other hand, this slide shows the diameter of the LM9 body to be 10.6m, while Starship is 9m. A direct comparison is difficult. Eric Berger adds:

In related news, last week, a quasi-private Chinese space startup, Cosmoleap, announced plans to develop a fully reusable "Leap" rocket within the next few years. An animated video that accompanied the funding announcement indicated that the company seeks to emulate the tower catch-with-chopsticks methodology that SpaceX successfully employed during Starship's fifth flight test last month.

Let's be real for a minute. These are not the first times Chinese rocket programs have emulated SpaceX, such as when Space Pioneer planned to develop a Falcon 9 clone. Both the state-run rocket agency and the company's private industries are copying the best practices of SpaceX as they seek to catch up. At this point, China's launch industry is basically hanging out in the SpaceX waiting room to see which ideas it should swipe next.

The idea that the Chinese are embedding people in American companies to return design information is practically as widespread as one could get. The big thing I notice here is that the Chinese (party) Space Agency recognizes that reusability is the key, while the NASA and the US congress still seem to want cost-plus jobs like the SLS. This excess cost, which some have noted seems to simply flow around between the space industry and the regulators, could be directed toward the kind of technological advances that might keep the US civil space program ahead of China.

A miniature model of the Long March 9.  Image credit Weibo. 

I'm Tired... So Tired of it over and over again

Today, it's not just the Flying Fertilizer (a creative way of saying bullshit) as we approach the election. It's also switching the clocks back to standard time, despite the passage of state and national laws to stay on one time all year long. 

Florida's law was passed in 2018 and it's probably not necessary for me to point out: that was six freaking years ago!!! The kicker is that Florida did it wrong (I know: quelle surprise). 

By overwhelming, bipartisan majorities, the normally fractious Senate and House agreed this week to make Florida the first in the nation to adopt year-round daylight saving time statewide. It would mean later sunrises and sunsets from November to March, peak tourist season for many beach cities.

That's right, for some reason, they want us to stay on DST all year long - in essence, putting us in the next time zone east of us. According to Federal law, a state can refuse to go on DST and they're free to do so, but to stay on DST requires congressional approval. That's even illogical for something coming out of Washington. 

As I've said before, if I wrote such ninny legislation, I would have made Standard Time the standard time.  Solar noon is when the sun is on the meridian, that line that goes from north to south passing directly overhead.  With DST, solar noon occurs closer to 1PM, not 12 noon.  Maybe I'm anal-retentive, but having solar noon at 1PM forever is just wrong. 

It's not just Florida, though, three of the New England states, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, want to stay on DST all year, too (or move one time zone east, however you like to think of it). I don't see where the authority to regulate clocks comes out of the constitution, but to mimic Dr. McCoy from the original Star Trek series, "dammit Jim, I'm radio designer not a lawyer." 

Which makes me ask why doesn't congress scrap their legal control over staying on DST making staying on DST like a state deciding to never go on DST?  Cancel all those laws. Instead, the Senate passed a bill in March of 2022 to end DST. I assume the bill must have been killed in the house when it had to go there for approval. 

Since 2015, 30 states have introduced legislation to end the twice-yearly changing of clocks, with some states proposing to do it only if neighboring states do the same. A 2019 poll found 71% of Americans prefer to no longer switch their clocks twice a year. The only controversy seems to be if states prefer to stay on standard time year round or stay on DST all year.

Yeah, you'll have groups in each state that want the opposite times.  That's inevitable.  In Florida it appears the main tourist industry reps wanted to stay on DST. The tourist industry backing is how they got the law passed while some other groups wanted to stay on standard time.  The inevitable physics of the situation is that states get different variations of their amount of sunlight because that varies with latitude and it changes far more the farther north you get. That change in sunlight hours with the seasons is caused by the 23.5 degree inclination of Earth's axis.  

Here in the southernmost reaches of the US, (I'm not in the tropics - none of Florida is) we have less variation.  On the summer solstice, our day is just short of 14 hours long - 13:55.  On the winter solstice it's 3 hours 34 minutes shorter, 10:21. (source)  In Minneapolis, MN, their longest day is 15:37 - just over an hour and half longer than ours - and the shortest day shortens down to 8:46, virtually seven hours shorter than their longest day.  Compare that to our 3-1/2 hour difference between the longest and shortest days.  Nothing can be done to change those times.  All DST does is change what we call them. 

It may be a bit melodramatic to say the clocks are killing people, but there are some well-documented side effects of the "jet lag" people get from the time changes: more car accidents, more accidents at work, higher rates of heart attacks and strokes, and more. This image is from entrepreneur Scott Yates, who runs a website called #LockTheClock, dedicated to keeping pushing on this issue. That website is quite different from 2020 when I first used the image.  He's trying to push that boulder uphill and it's tough. 

Once in a Lifetime

You know the old song: 

Once in a lifetime
A man has a moment
One wonderful moment
When fate takes his hand

I thought this looked like it could be my weekend for a once in a lifetime moment, but reality said not me, not now. 

Relax, I'm not talking about normal, human stuff, like this love song. I'm talking ham radio here. I'm talking one of those goals that virtually all hams strive for at some point, Worked All States or WAS. In this case, on the VHF band where I tend to spend more hours than on any other band, 6m (50.0 to 54.0 MHz). 

In my first couple of years as a ham, I targeted getting my WAS using only CW.  It took me three years and I recall trying for a long time to get my last state, which was Idaho.  This time, my last state is Alaska. In my lifetime on 6m, I started playing on the band in 2002, I have met and read of many people who have WAS, but it's hard from Florida. Here in Central Florida, we're about as far from Alaska as we can be and still be in the continental United States. 

The key this time is we're in the peak of solar cycle 25 and we're getting solar flux numbers we haven't seen since cycle 23, 22 years ago.  This week, the F2 (longest range ionospheric) propagation has shown up as the Solar Flux Index spent days at 270. The rule of thumb for F2 propagation is that it's not just a daytime phenomenon, if you have a directional antenna, you should point it under where the sun is beating down. That is, in the morning point toward the East, as the sun goes through the meridian, propagation will start to favor north/south paths and in the afternoon, point toward the West.  

On Thursday morning, propagation reports showed dozens of contacts from Europe into the Eastern US, spreading farther west as the day went on. Eventually, around 1800 UTC to 1930 (2:00 to 3:30 PM EDT), Alaskan stations started being heard across the country, starting in northern tier of states and spreading south. I saw the reports but never heard one of the Alaskan stations. 

On Friday morning, I prepared for a repeat and essentially got one.  The big picture, if anything, was a little better than the day before, evidenced by the Alaskan stations being heard by some stations around Florida much later into the evening, even showing up in reported spots as late as 2330 UTC (7:30 PM EDT). In keeping with being a repeat I never heard one of the half dozen different Alaskans, only other stations calling them with very, very few of those others stations completing a contact. At one point, I noticed my station had copied a station in the Midwest working Alaska and looked up where they were about 800 miles NW of me in Missouri. 

Today, the solar flux had dropped into the 250s and the propagation suffered.  Yes, there were some Alaskan stations on the air, but they never made it even as close as that 800 miles NW of me. 

Here's a plot I’ve shown regularly which shows the SSN for the last five cycles back to 1975. I like this plot because it’s my ham radio biography in one plot. That is, every cycle I’ve been through is on this plot (and I was a shortwave listener for the cycle before the first one here). The plot is posted to Space Weather News, but is created by a separate site, Solen.info. The last time I posted this was back in May, which is about midway between 40 and 50 months on the X-axis. The smoothed sunspot number has taken a dramatic rise since then, and looks like it may exceed cycle 23 in the next few months.  I may get more chances at Alaska as the cycle peak unfolds.

Voyager 1 Switches to Backup Transmitter to Phone Home

The punch line to this story is that backup transmitter hasn't been used since 1981.  

About two weeks ago, October 16, Voyager 1 put itself into a safe mode after receiving a transmission from its mission control via the Deep Space Network commanding the satellite to turn on one of its heaters.  Because it takes just about a full day for radio transmission to get to the satellite and another full day before the response is known, they found out on October 18 that Voyager failed to respond.  

According to a post from NASA, it took a little while to discover that Voyager had switched off its primary X-band transmitter and switched over to its secondary S-band radio transmitter, which uses less power.

Then, on Oct. 19, communication appeared to stop entirely. The flight team suspected that Voyager 1’s fault protection system was triggered twice more and that it turned off the X-band transmitter and switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band. While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal [and] is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.

While the first thought might be to turn the X-band transmitter on, the Voyager team is more cautious than that, wanting to understand what caused the fault protection system to trigger and switch the transmitters. 

[T]he team sent a command on Oct. 22 to confirm the S-band transmitter is working. The team is now working to gather information that will help them figure out what happened and return Voyager 1 to normal operations.

Two days later on the 24th, the team was finally able to connect with the elderly spacecraft, now in the 47th year of its four year mission. Voyagers 1 and 2 (a few weeks older than 1) are the only man-made objects to reach and operate in interstellar space.  Their advanced age has meant an increase in the frequency and complexity of technical issues and new challenges for the mission engineering team. Which has met those challenges so far.

How do you hear a signal from a low power transmitter that's 23 light hours, that is, 16 billion miles away? A high gain antenna. This the Deep Space Network antenna in Canberra,Australia.  With a diameter of 70 meters, or 230 feet, the DSN stations are the three most sensitive radio receiving stations on Earth. Image credi: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Small Space News Story Roundup 45

Is the "reusability changes everything" idea catching on? 

European Space Agency Commits to Two Reusability Programs

The ESA has selected four European companies to work on two new programs aimed at reusability.  

On 9 October, ESA held its Future Space Transportation Award Ceremony in Paris. During the event, the agency announced the four awardees under two initiatives focused on the development of reusable rocket technology: the Technologies for High-thrust Reusable Space Transportation (THRUST!) project and the Boosters for European Space Transportation (BEST!) project.

Gee...THRUST! and BEST! sure sound like serious names. I have a personal bias against the excessive use of exclamation points, but that's just me.

The THRUST! initiative aims to push forward the development of European liquid propulsion systems, and Rocket Factory Augsburg and The Exploration Company were selected to develop projects under this initiative. The Exploration Company is already working on a high thrust engine in the 200 tons of thrust class, called the Typhoon, while Rocket Factory Augsburg has been working on considerably smaller engines (more like 10 tons) so it's a bigger leap for them.

The BEST! project was launched to stimulate the development of future reusable rocket first stages or boosters; ArianeGroup and Isar Aerospace were chosen for this. Europe has a number of initiatives now aimed at developing a reusable rocket, but it seems doubtful that a European rocket will launch to orbit in the 2020s and successfully return to Earth.

UK Startup Aiming at Fully Reusable Rocket

SpaceNews is reporting that Astron Systems is developing a fully reusable two-stage rocket that will be able to transport about 360 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. That payload, around 790 pounds, puts it in the small payload class, but still bigger payloads to LEO than Rocket Lab's Electron, which advertises 300 kg or 660 lb. Rocketlab is progressing in the reusability direction, but hasn't achieved the kind of "fully reusable" level Astron appears to be aiming for. 

“The main driver of cost and time for putting stuff into space is production and assembly,” Eddie Brown, Astron Systems founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “If you can spread out that cost over many flights, the per-flight cost can be a lot lower. And you can ramp up to a higher cadence and be much more responsive to customer schedules.”

Astron Systems, founded in 2021 and located at the Harwell Science Campus in England, is one of 12 startups in the Fall 2024 class of the TechStars Space Accelerator. Prior to TechStars, the European Space Agency Business Incubator Centre United Kingdom supported Astron Systems’ early hardware development.

Founder Eddie Brown noted, “If you want a small rocket engine to use for 50, 100 flights today, that’s not something you could buy off the shelf.”  He said Astron is driving towards a methalox engine: methane and oxygen, like SpaceX's Raptors and Blue Origin's BE-3 and BE-4 engines, to name a few.  Their twist is the desire to use biomethane "to reduce its environmental impact." 

Artist's concept of a reusable booster after landing, from the French space agency CNES.