Europa Clipper Started its 5+ Year trip today

NASA's Europa Clipper satellite to explore the named moon of Jupiter lifted off today at 12:06 PM EDT from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.  The launch, originally set for Thursday the 10th, was delayed by Hurricane Milton and days of cleanup. 

The Falcon Heavy lifts off this morning (Oct. 14) from the Kennedy Space Center carrying NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft. Credit: Brandon Lindner

The skies were that clear and blue down here at "Castle Graybeard" as well, giving us good views through the two side boosters and the core booster being dropped sequentially.  All three Falcon 9 cores were expended due to the size of the satellite and the needed trajectory using up all available fuel. 

Europa Clipper is one of NASA’s most expensive science missions yet, with an estimated total lifecycle cost, including four years of operations after arriving at Jupiter in 2030, of $5.2 billion. It was one of the top priorities for flagship-class planetary science missions in decadal surveys by planetary scientists, building on proposals for Europa orbiters or flyby missions for at least two decades.
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The spacecraft weighed 5,700 kilograms fully fueled at launch (6.28 tons) and its solar arrays, when fully deployed, will make the spacecraft 30.5 meters (100 feet) long.

The solar arrays are a bit longer than an NBA basketball court, but recent experience with solar arrays like that have been easier to live with than nuclear power sources like the Radioisotope Thermal Generators that have powered the Voyager satellites for 47 years.

While you'll see many places describing the mission as searching for life on the frigid moon, NASA/JPL won't use those that term. 

The spacecraft will not search for life itself but rather see if the moon does have the right conditions to support life. “We continue to underscore that Europa Clipper is not actually a life-detection mission but a habitability investigation,” said Gina DiBraccio, acting director of NASA’s planetary science division, at an Oct. 13 briefing about the mission’s science.

“We want to understand whether Europa has the key ingredients to support life in its oceans,” said Robert Pappalardo, Europa Clipper project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the briefing.

Europa Clipper is equipped with nine dedicated instruments ranging from cameras and spectrometers to magnetometers, as well as a gravity and radio science experiment. Much like the predecessor Juno satellite which has been orbiting Jupiter for well over eight years, Europa Clipper will enter an orbit that loops around Europa, currently said to orbit 49 times.  The flight to Europa is described as taking five years, but it's more like 5-1/2, with arrival expected in April 2030.  

You probably recall that the controversy a few years ago was that Europa Clipper had been set to fly on the SLS with its Exploration Upper Stage - which has never flown. I don't know an expected date, but would guess it won't fly until the probe is orbiting Europa  and well into its mission.  Then there's the issue that SLS missions are estimated to cost $4.4 billion (WITHOUT the EUS); today's Falcon Heavy launch cost $178 million.

They're not exactly the same missions.  SLS with the EUS could have gotten Europa Clipper to Europa faster - three years instead of 5-1/2 - if only it existed. And they could afford another $5 billion for the launch vehicle. The spacecraft will instead make a gravity assist flyby of Mars early next year and of Earth in late 2026 to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030.

Wow... Just Wow... Again!

Starship Flight Test 5. This went beyond Wow, all the way to "Holy Crap!"  It's beyond testing a couple of things, and as far as I can tell, it met every objective. I was here to watch this and watched the whole coverage that SpaceX linked to on X. Full screen, 1080p video for just about all of it.

The quote SpaceX uses all the time is, "the payload for this flight is data;" the whole purpose is to examine changes made since the last test with a handful of milestones in mind. They're fond of saying that no matter what they try, only excitement is guaranteed. That was easily exceeded in IFT-5.

After a flawless liftoff and the couple of minutes until stage separation, followed by the return to the pad at Starbase Boca Chica, we saw this:

We've known about the plans to return to the Orbital Launch Mount and desire to catch the Super Heavy booster for years.  We've seen videos created by various folks depicting what it would look like. It didn't prepare me. I caught myself watching the seconds before that screen capture shown above quietly saying, "Holy Crap!" Many of us watch them land the boosters after a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy launch and say it never gets old.  I think this is going to be the same way.

Bear in mind SpaceX made a video of all the failures on the way to their first successful Falcon 9 landing called "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" - a tribute both to their work and their sense of humor.  That video was made seven years ago. There are no scenes out of today's mission for a similar video on how to catch the world's most powerful rocket booster.  Around 500 tons worth of booster. 

As impressive as catching SuperHeavy in the air was, it was only half the mission. Starship was still flying a suborbital flight to the Indian Ocean, off the NW coast of Australia. Catching SuperHeavy was 6:55 into the mission, the splashdown into the ocean was almost exactly an hour later. The plasma and heating we'd seen on earlier missions was just as mind-boggling as before but the video didn't show the flap melting away as it did on IFT-4.  Don't forget that this is SpaceX.  They went to the spot in the ocean that they were aiming for and put some buoys with cameras on them to capture the splashdown.  This is just after the still extremely hot engine nozzles dumped into the ocean.

(Screen grab from Space.com VideoFromSpace)  Yes, it exploded. As one of the SpaceX announcers said, they didn't plan to recover any part of that Starship.  The video leading up to that moment is from a camera pointed down at the bottom of the Starship from the top.  The ocean surface becomes visible, then it apparently plunges into the ocean because the entire scene changes color. 

If you haven't seen the video of the whole mission, it's worth the time. A minute or three after Mechazilla catches the booster, they go about a half hour with no chatting or narration, starting up again at about T+40 minutes. Go pick a video presenter you like or go to SpaceX's video on their own servers. It's a historic mission.

A comment I read somewhere said that with this, mankind has become a space-faring civilization. That seems a bit of an overreach to me, but it certainly made the talk about flying unmanned Starships to Mars in 2026 and sending people by 2028 sound more likely.

Just About Done with Milton Repairs

As I mentioned in my first update Thursday afternoon, we had very little damage from Milton.  Power was out very little, if at all, and there were only a couple of things that needed repair. The big one seemed to be that an element broke off of my HF Log Periodic antenna (a Tennadyne T6) on one side of the boom, very much like what happened back during Ian two years ago.  The second was that our east side fence gate broke, throwing the metal piece that latches the gate closed about six to eight feet from the fence. 

The antenna fix ended up being different from the last one and while I thought I could just go find a piece of the 1/2" aluminum bar that I used to fix it last time, the unnoticed curve ball was that the tubing for this element is larger diameter than the one that snapped two years ago.  That one had an Inside Diameter of 1/2" while this one was 5/8".  I went looking for a piece of 3/4 or 1" bar I could reduce in diameter until it fit in the antenna tube, but didn't have one.  I absolutely didn't want to leave this one on the ground and order a piece of bar stock - that would take days to a week. That's when I found a piece I had originally bought to fix the antenna after Ian, a piece of metric-sized aluminum tube that was a bit oversized in Outside Diameter: 17mm OD, or about 0.670".  

My lathe has been obsoleted by Little Machine Shop, but it's SIEG SC4 type, 8-1/2 by 20", they sold as their model 3540. Yes, SIEG is the Chinese machine producer that makes the vast majority of the smaller home/"hobby" lathes in the 7x10, 8x12 and similar small sizes. This one is capable of doing automated cuts by using some controls on the carriage originally intended for threading, so to reduce this bar from that 0.670" OD down to 0.620 (or so) is a matter of setting up for repetitive cuts, put the cutter in position, throw a lever and just keep an eye on things. Pretty much. At the end of the cut, flip the lever, return the carriage to the starting point, move the cutting bit to the next cut's depth and repeat.

I turned it down to the point where the ends measured close to 0.625 and then pulled the tube out to check in the antenna element. It's not uncommon for a part to not come out to the same diameter over its entire length (at least not on my lathe ... or not on these "hobbyist" lathes), and while the ends fit well, I took off another .003" and it made a nice easy fit.  As with the last time I did this, I used a gun cleaning wire brush in my battery powered drill to scrub the insides of both parts of the element.  As with the last time, it was full of dirt that I believe was stuck in the tubes by mud dauber wasps.

Here's what it looked like put back together.  Before cranking the tower back up, I did a NanoVNA sweep of the antenna and it looked fine. Then I swept my other antenna on the tower, the VHF beam, and it looked unaffected, too.

The aluminum tube has a blue line drawn on it to mark the halfway point and you can see that in the gap where the two pieces meet. I smeared the (right) half of the tube with nail polish to glue the tube in place, then drilled a clearance hole for the 6-32 hardware: a screw, flat washer on the far side, lock washer on this side. Yes, that's a brass nut on a stainless screw. 

The other issue, the fence gate had much less progress. It looks to me like that gate needs to be rebuilt or replaced.  We have a "poly-something-or-other" fence and the gate latch was ripped apart.  I forgot to grab a photo of it, but it's this basic idea, except the highlighted part looks to be about twice the size of the highlighted one in this picture and holds twice as many screws on the side of the right angle closest to the camera. That's the part that ripped off the gate post and got thrown.

Where the screw holes are in this pic, ours has slots, 1/4" wide and 1/2" long.  Every screw was ripped out of the plastic post, ripping the screw holes in the door (4x4) wider.  I found the ripped off piece about 8 or 10 feet away from the gate.  The screws are self-drilling steel screws that are just under 1/4" major diameter (across the screw threads).  While a "standard fix" might be to go to larger diameter screws, the metal won't handle that and the slots would have to be widened, perhaps going to 5/16 or 3/8".  Not an outrageous job for the CNC mill, but not a one hour job either.  The issue is how much damage that the post this mounts to sustained.

The antenna is fixed and operating; the gate not so much. Our neighbors on two sides, backdoor and next-door, have trees in corners of their lots that overgrow our lot all the time. Where the three of our lots touch, I'm constantly pruning their trees and repairing next-door neighbor's fence. Milty brought more attention to that because excessive wind from the wrong direction could have put backdoor neighbor's tree through the roof of my shop. It turns out the tree came down in their yard. This time. Turns out I had trimmed those back between Helene and Milton.

FAA Lifts Falcon 9 Flight Restrictions

In a statement late in the day on Friday, Oct. 11, the FAA said it cleared launches of the Falcon 9 that, with one exception, had been on hold since a Falcon 9 upper stage suffered a problem with a final deorbit burn on the Sept. 28 launch of the Crew-9 mission for NASA.  The engine burn occurred and the upper stage re-entered as it should but not ended up not being disposed of in the Pacific where it was supposed to end up.

The launch of the European Hera mission on Monday was given a separate permission to launch. The agency said it was because the upper stage wasn't going to reenter but was to accelerate the Hera spacecraft to escape velocity.

Gee... the Falcon 9 was grounded from just after midnight, the morning of September 29 until October 11. Twelve days! The first time was 14 days. Like the first time, this one must have been a gut-wrenching few minutes of troubleshooting - maybe a whole half hour!  (I really need to figure out where I left that sarcasm font.) Neither the FAA nor SpaceX elaborated on the findings of that investigation or the corrective actions that resulted from it.

Lift off of this past Monday morning's Hera mission from SLC-40 on Cape Canaveral SFS. T +4 seconds.

Somewhat off-subject is that Starship Flight Test 5 is still penciled in for Sunday morning at 8:00 AM EDT, although I can't find evidence the FAA has approved this test. Since it wasn't related to this FAA hold, it's not covered by this lifting of it. The last thing heard from SpaceX is that they expected approval in time for the Sunday Flight Test. 

SpaceX Upgrades the Dragon Capsules for Propulsive Landing

It's not exactly a new feature, more like an ability that was put aside in the past and got renewed interest recently.  Back on September 27th, SpaceX announced a new capability for the Dragon spacecraft. Dragon now has built-in redundancy to propulsively land using its SuperDraco thrusters. In the unlikely event of a parachute failure, the propulsive landing could save the vehicle and potential crew from a rough landing or imminent danger. 

The concept of landing on the SuperDraco thrusters dates back to 2014, when the Commercial Crew Program was getting started.

SpaceX introduced the concept of a propulsive landing Dragon over ten years ago. When SpaceX revealed Dragon 2, it was marketed as capable of propulsively landing anywhere on Earth and was initially designed to land exclusively with the SuperDracos. However, SpaceX ultimately pursued the use of parachutes as the main form of recovery for Dragon 2 missions.

A Tweet from 2014 shows this:

The reasons come back to SpaceX's overarching goal of Rapid Reusability. 

Landing on a concrete landing pad on land rather than in the ocean has many advantages, particularly when it comes to the long-term reusability and refurbishment of Dragon capsules. When landing in the ocean, saltwater can corrode the aluminum body and carbon fiber bonds that Dragon is constructed of. Propulsively landing on Earth would have prevented invasive corrosion from occurring in the first place, making rapid reusability a much more achievable goal.

What’s more, landing Dragon propulsively would’ve also been safer for the crew when exiting the spacecraft. Getting astronauts out of a capsule is an extended process, especially when they have been exposed to microgravity for extended periods of time. The motion of ocean waves and the process of retrieving Dragon from the water has proven to be quite lengthy, and landing on a solid pad on land would have allowed recovery teams to approach and egress the crew inside Dragon substantially quicker.

The role of getting NASA approval for every aspect of the certification of the Dragon played a part in the decision to downplay the propulsive landing and emphasize using parachutes to splashdown in the ocean. 

With parachutes now serving as Dragon’s main landing system, propulsively landing Dragon was no longer a main focus of Dragon 2’s development. It was later revealed that NASA desired a higher “loss of crew” reliability rating for Dragon and felt more comfortable with a parachute landing system than a propulsive landing system. NASA also believed that the small openings in Dragon’s heat shield for the four extendable landing legs could lead to the quick formation of hotspots during reentry, potentially leading to the break up of the vehicle. 

Followers of SpaceX and the Crew Dragon may recall that in 2019, after a test mission of one capsule to the ISS, it was subjected to a test of its SuperDraco thrusters and exploded on the test stand less than one second before it was to have ignited its thrusters. It suffered an anomaly, NASA speak for "cratering explosion on the test stand".

Today, Crew Dragon is known to be an extremely reliable and well-tested vehicle — flying 15 successful crewed missions to the ISS and other low-Earth orbits and suffering little to no issues with its parachute landing system. During the Crew-9 pre-launch briefing, NASA announced that Dragon now had the capability to activate its SuperDraco engines and perform a propulsive landing if a failure of the parachutes were to occur. Should an anomaly with the parachutes occur, the four main parachutes would be cut and Dragon would ignite its eight SuperDraco engines to slowly perform a propulsive splashdown. NASA stated that such a landing would be “tolerable” for any crew inside Dragon.

SpaceX testing Dragon’s eight SuperDraco’s during a hover test in 2015. Image credit: SpaceX

Perhaps surprisingly, the propulsive landing system was available for the first time on Crew-7 in August 2023 and has been functional on all private SpaceX missions since then.  It's expected to be used for future NASA ISS crew missions.  Now I'm stoked to watch a returning Dragon spacecraft do a vertical propulsive landing at one of the poured concrete Landing Zones that returning Falcon 9 boosters have landed on.

A Milton Update

I don't have a personal weather station, but since I'm within a few miles of Melbourne International Airport, I tend to use their numbers for what we experienced.  Those haven't been posted so the best summary I can give is that we had minimal to no damage -  the metal part of one of my fence's gates was ripped out. Weather Underground showed we had max sustained winds of 68 mph in the early morning. Every other time I've looked wind gusts were 15 or more mph higher, so I'll guess it gusted to the mid 80s.

I was awakened at about 1AM and heard our backup generator running.  As I tried to force some sense into my head, the generator shut off. The rule of thumb on this generator is that when the power goes down, it waits 10 seconds before starting up to ensure the power isn't back, yet.  Once it has been running, if power returns, it keeps running for around 10 minutes in case the power coming back on is intermittent, or too low.  Basically, if power is out for 15 seconds, the generator turns on and will run for 10 minutes. 

That's just a long way of explaining that our power might have been off for all of about 15 seconds, although it could have been off longer. I woke up, heard the generator and moments later heard it go silent. 

Aside from that, the work is mostly to clean up leaves and broken branches on the yard, and take down the shutters.  Virtually all of the leaves and branches are from my neighbor's trees.  I had one element of my log periodic HF antenna snap off, just like happened with hurricane Ian a couple of years ago.  I believe I have the metal to fix it so that shouldn't be a big deal, either. 

Not losing power is the big deal.  Kudos to Florida Power and Light.

Someone else is dumping on SLS and NASA

It's not just me. If you want to find out about all of NASA's problems, all the things they just do wrong, there's simply no better place to start looking than the Space Launch System or SLS, the launch vehicle for the Artemis program. When you're looking at SLS, look at Artemis, too. The last time I did a dedicated post on this was about a key addition to SLS, the Exploration Upper Stage and how awful its development has been.  

It's not just me harping on SLS. Blogger Casey Handmer is back on more space-related topics from blogging about the business he started and has done a post entitled, "SLS is still a national disgrace" and he's back to doing good posts. But this isn't just about SLS; it's about so much more - virtually every NASA program in the last 20 years. 

As usual, some snippets to whet your appetite to go read more. 

Four years ago, I wrote that the SLS was a cripplingly embarrassing national failure and a tragedy waiting to happen. That remains true, of course, but now I will go further and underscore that by continuing to humor this monstrosity, NASA has squandered its technical integrity and credibility.
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Four years ago, I wrote that the best time to cancel the SLS was 20 years before, and the second best time was then. Four years on, the program has consumed another $20b with nothing to show for it. $20b, bringing total development cost to over $100b. This program burns $12m per day!
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NASA managers routinely complain of difficulties in hiring and retention – difficulties they never faced 20 years ago, before the SLS and before the private space companies that, unlike NASA, are able to offer some combination of market-rate compensation, a career track that rewards ambition and competence, and a workplace that swiftly departs underperformers.

Just imagine the mental agility required to actually want to work for an agency that continues to insist on technical doctrine no less absurd than “2+2=5” from top to bottom, from onboarding documentation all the way up to press releases, bilateral agreements and policy papers. Everyone at NASA knows the SLS is a looming catastrophe, but no-one can say it. Officially, it’s still the most powerful rocket ever built (except for Starship) and our official vehicle to the Moon and Mars! In reality, it’s insanely expensive, dangerous, and underpowered and can barely lift a reasonable payload to LEO.

Program by program, example by example, from Mars Sample Return to Space Suits for Artemis, or from the James Webb Space Telescope to the Orion (Artemis capsule) heat shield, there's a simply amazing compilation of facts.

Liftoff of Artemis I on the SLS in the early morning of November 16, 2022. Image credit: NASA

I think it was at the last Shuttle flight in 2011 that I first came to grips with NASA being as bad as every other agency in the Fed.gov hydra. If the budget problems are ever going to be resolved, the old mindset of "cut everyone's programs - except mine" has to go away. I was ready to see NASA cut to the core back then. This just reinforces that.

Updating

It's an odd week in that real space news seems hard to find, the stories are preliminary news about potential contracts or programs, so nothing we'll see for a while. So since the news I'm seeing is wrapped around the coming Hurricane Milton and the recovery operations ongoing after Hurricane Helene up in the SE stretching from Georgia and the Florida panhandle up to Tennessee and Virginia, that has sucked up a lot of my time and attention. 

A starting point is that I still swap emails from time to time with a former office mate I've known since we worked on hardware for the space station in the early 1990s. He's a fellow RF engineer who grew up in Tennessee and went to college there. As news started coming out of NC, he sent me this photograph from one of the local papers up there. In the distance, what I take to be flood waters can be seen.  It's a landmark sign about the Flood of 1916, apparently knocked down by something, presumably Hurricane Helene itself. 

It's hard not to notice it's just over 100 years ago, and while most places keep track of "hundred year floods," it takes some determined research to find out lots about it. Was the catastrophic flood of 1916 worse than this year's flood?  Or was this year's worse?  Are they really spaced around a hundred years from each other? 

It's so common that it's a cliche' that every change in weather, every bad day, whether cold or hot, dry or flooded, gets blamed on "climate change."  It isn't surprising or unexpected, then, that Watts Up With That, one of the most authoritative counterpoints to blaming everything on anthropogenic climate change, would run an article on this 1916 Flood, which also happens to have been caused by a hurricane. Interestingly, every place named on that sign is named in that article linked to on WUWT.

The 1916 Major Hurricane Asheville culprit is Number 4 on the list at a time when names were not given to hurricanes and there were no satellites, hurricane hunter aircraft or long-range weather radar systems available to identify and track storms.  

There were 15 numbered Atlantic storms in 1916 even though there easily could have been many more that were never observed during this season because of observation inadequacies compared to today’s available technology.

The year of 1916 had more numbered storms at 15 than we've had named storms (Milton is number 13), and that big disclaimer saying there could have been more storms, or even many more storms than we have had is quite important, as hurricane season starts to wind down. Back in 1916, if a storm stayed out of shipping lanes, or wasn't active in them when ships were there, it's far more likely it could live out its life without being known about than today.  With our satellites and other ways of knowing they're out there, that's pretty much impossible today. 

A measure of the activity of a hurricane season is accumulated cyclone energy, ACE, a product of the strength of a storm and how long it exists.  The 1916 Atlantic season had a total ACE of 144 compared to the 2024 season total 115.6 as of October 7, 2024.  The Atlantic Season 30-year ACE average (1991 – 2020) is 122.5 so the year 1916 was an above average ACE hurricane year, and 2024 is still below average. Hurricane season runs until the end of November so there's close to two months left. While early predictions were for a very active season, it hasn't been. Even with Milton - so far.

The number of storms through the Atlantic hurricane season, showing the peak on September 10th, and a "You Are Here" box around October 10th, or so. Just to show that while we're well past the peak, we're nowhere near as inactive as through August 1st, or from mid-November until December 1. 

If you haven't seen it, yes, Helene and Milton both have been blamed on climate change.  It's a different subset of people than the ones blaming it on weather modification or malicious forces trying to buy up all the land so they can mine the shi..er.. mine the lithium out of it.  In both cases the basic idea seems to be, "it seems abnormal to me, so it must be this instead of just plain weather" - where "this" is climate change, cloud seeding, Black Rock, the military, or whatever.

SpaceX Returns to Flight, Launches Europe's Hera

I was shocked when I saw that SpaceX was listed as set to launch from Cape Canaveral this morning. I've been watching the reliable news sources to see if they've been given a reprieve by the FAA, which clamped down on the company after they announced they were voluntarily grounding the Falcon 9 while they troubleshot the problem encountered on the Crew-9 mission a week ago. I haven't seen any articles about what they've found or saying the FAA has completely cleared them to launch, though. Nevertheless, they launched this morning at 10:52 EDT from SLC-40 and the mission seemed as routine and successful as any we've ever observed.  With the local weather preventing seeing anything, we watched the launch on NASASpaceflight. 

Screen capture from the SpaceX video, with some stretching of levels since the original was darkened by the camera's auto exposure. 

Hera is an interesting mission, described using words I've never seen in a serious sentence before: it's a planetary defense mission. From SpaceX:

Hera is a planetary defense mission that will study the impact NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission spacecraft had on the Dimorphos asteroid, which Falcon 9 launched in November 2021. Hera will provide valuable data for future asteroid deflection missions and science to help humanity’s understanding of asteroid geophysics as well as solar system formation and evolutionary processes.

An interesting side note to this mission was that it flew booster B1061 on its 23rd mission. The required orbital performance of the mission consumed the fuel that would ordinarily be used to land, so B1061 was disposed of. More like, well, everybody else's launch vehicles, not a Falcon 9.

"Farewell, 1061, and we thank you," SpaceX's John Insprucker, principal integration engineer, said to the booster after stage separation.

As has been talked about before, SpaceX developed the booster recovery and refurbishment technologies on their own Starlink missions, and very experienced boosters like 1061 don't tend to get used on "paying customer's" flights - especially since 23 flights is currently what the fleet leaders have flown. This seems to indicate a growing confidence in and acceptance of these refurbished boosters among customers.

The $398 million (363 million Euro)  Hera spacecraft, accompanied by two smaller cubesats called named Milani and Juventas, is scheduled to arrive at Dimorphos in late 2026 to look at DART's work up close. On the way, Hera will swing by Mars in 2025 to nab a gravity assist for its asteroid trip.

The NASA mission shortened Dimorphos' orbit by 33 minutes and may have changed the shape of the little moon as well.

Hera will look at the depth and size of the crater that DART gouged out on Dimorphos and confirm the impact's changes on the moon, if any, against early simulations. 

The two cubesats, meanwhile, will examine the structure of Dimorphos along with its surface minerals and gravity, all of which will help to refine models.

An artist's impression of Hera, and two cubesats, named Jethro and Bodine, - no... just checking if you were really reading - named Juventas and Milani, which will assist Hera in its study of Didymos and Dimorphos. (Image credit: ESA/Science Office)

Space.com noted that SpaceX launched after receiving authorization from the FAA, "to resume flights after an anomaly last week." They didn't mention if this was a one-time approval, perhaps because of it being a European Space Agency mission, or if they're going to resume regular operations.  Checking NextSpaceflight, it appears they're resuming regular operations.

The Falcon Heavy launch of NASA's Europa Clipper had been scheduled for Thursday, October 10th. That's pretty much the worst day of Hurricane Milton over here on the Space Coast. The five day forecast plots have moved the point projected to be where the storm goes back offshore farther north, but it appears to be over Playalinda Beach just north of the KSC.  The vehicle and payload will have to be rolled back to their integration facility for safety.  The currently listed date and time is Saturday, October 12th at 12:19 PM EDT.

The real surprise is they list the Starship 5 Flight Test as this coming Sunday, Oct 13, at 8:00 AM EDT

Since There Will Be Lots of Antenna Related Work ...

My standard hurricane preps up to a few years ago included cranking my tower over, removing the antennas and leaving them on the ground, then cranking the tower back up.  We haven't had a direct hit in a while, and when tropical storm Ian (a really bad hurricane over in SW Florida) came through in late September of '22 I made the mistake of not doing what I'd always done. From the looks of Milton, I'm going to go ahead and do that. Most likely that'll be Tuesday morning - and hopefully be done quickly.  

I know I've said before that my antenna projects all tend to start with the words, "when it cools down."  This year, I've been playing with the idea of automating something I do manually, selecting the antenna the radio will connect to automatically when I change the band I'm operating on. 

Right now I use two switches, and here's a diagram I posted in June of '23 to illustrate things. 

All of this is indoors on the radio desk. The top switch selects which of the three antennas I have (or a dummy load) connects to the next switch, which then selects which of four radios to connect to. Since I don't have an antenna for that VHF/UHF port on my backup radio (IC-7000), the last label on the right, I just leave a short coaxial cable jumper (RG-58) to use with either the QRP IC-703 or test equipment like the NanoVNA H4. 

In general, I only need to change the top (antenna) selector when I'm operating. Right now, I'm looking into ways to automate that and whether or not there are advantages to doing that - besides a little convenience.  There's one advantage that shows up immediately: it replaces three cables coming in through the wall with one - the output of a remote switch.  Since the pipe through the wall for the bunch of cables is already there, that really doesn't buy me much. Each of those three cables would be shortened, go to a lightning protector, and then to the switch outside (possible examples of lightning protector and switch). The lightning protectors could be mounted to a separate ground rod for each antenna; I've also seen a larger chassis that more than one protector could be mounted to and that chassis mounted to a separate ground rod. 

Remember, when it comes to getting rid of a lightning strike, the more ground the better.  As we used to say to newbies trying to layout a printed circuit board: "groundliness is next to Godliness." 

My main station radio is the IC-7610, and it has enough memories for frequency and mode that I can press a front panel button and immediately change frequency. The radio will remember how its antenna tuner is set, but it has no way of selecting the antenna that it "knows" how to tune.  It would be convenient to press that button and have it select the antenna for me at the same time. Failing that, the various pieces of software I'm running all the time might be able to generate a command to switch the antenna.

The research aspect of this has been the most time consuming, so far.  And, yes, since I have my small machine shop, I have thought about making a cute little robot that stands on top of the shelf where my switch is located and just rotates the antenna switch knob for me.

Marvin the Paranoid Android - from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Image credit: Blenderartists (.org)

Looks like our turn this time

The messy area in the Gulf of Mexico that has been actively tracked for weeks has spun up yet another tropical storm.  The current predictions show it going virtually overhead Wednesday evening through Thursday morning.  

Meet tropical storm Milton.

This storm has developed fast. The first chart like this was posted at 2PM ET as a depression; this one was 5PM ET as a tropical storm. Since the Time of Arrival of first tropical storm winds here looks to be Wednesday morning, it looks like Tuesday will be the last day to get everything done.  Our local forecast for Sunday Oct. 5th through the next Friday (11th) has been calling for rain every day this coming week for as long as those days have been in the 10 day forecast, so it will most likely be raining as we do all that. 

So... here we go again! 

Vulcan Centaur Cert-2 Flight Had "an Anomaly"

I have to confess to not getting up to watch the scheduled 6:00 AM Vulcan launch this morning. It has been a few days with things going on that have been a bit more tiring than usual and sleeping in sounded better.  Not so much storm cleanup but what could be prep for the inevitable next one.  Sleeping in made it impossible to know that the launch was aborted in the last minute, and after various precautions they recycled to launch at 7:25 AM (1125 UTC) this morning.

A friend of mine sent a quickie email saying, "looked OK from the front yard" but he's a bit farther from the Cape than I am and I don't think what happened would have been visible without a powerful, guided telescope from here. What happened? Essentially a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) of one of the two solid rocket boosters strapped onto the core stage of the Vulcan. The (composite, not metal) exhaust nozzle of one those boosters broke apart in flight. The booster didn't blow up, the Vulcan Centaur continued on its mission with one of the boosters putting out significantly less thrust than the other. 

As the rocket arced east from Cape Canaveral, a shower of sparks suddenly appeared at the base of the Vulcan rocket around 37 seconds into the mission. The exhaust plume from one of the strap-on boosters, made by Northrop Grumman, changed significantly, and the rocket slightly tilted on its axis before the guidance system and main engines made a steering correction.

Videos from the launch show the booster's nozzle, the bell-shaped exhaust exit cone at the bottom of the booster, fall away from the rocket.

"It looks dramatic, like all things on a rocket," Bruno wrote on X. "But it’s just the release of the nozzle. No explosions occurred."

As is often the case in situations like this, a good guy to check out is Scott Manley, and he posted a good video on this early today.  This is a screen grab of Scott's screen grab from another source (D Wise at NASA Spaceflight).  The broken off section of the nozzle is in the red circle. It was tumbling and the moment I grabbed the picture was when you can look through the nozzle - still glowing hot - and see the sky behind it.

Remarkably, the solid rocket didn't explode, the Vulcan's control systems saw that the thrust was lower than expected and the rocket wasn't on the planned trajectory, so it adjusted what it could to regain a nominal flight.  The main stage with it's Blue Origin-supplied BE-4 methane/oxygen engines burned seconds longer than the normal, expected flight, and then shut down and fell away, as it should have. The Centaur V upper stage started and burned, with the onscreen video's timer showing the Centaur's RL-10 engines burned approximately 20 seconds longer than planned, apparently also to compensate for the lower thrust from the damaged booster during the first phase of the flight. The Centaur upper stage completed a second burn about a half-hour into the mission.

ULA CEO Tory Bruno considered the mission a success, saying "Orbital insertion was perfect" on X. The US Space Force hailed the test flight as a "certification milestone" in a press release after the launch. Clearly, both ULA and Space Force have a vested interest in certifying the Vulcan for the National Security missions it will carry; equally clearly, US Space Force would face more criticism for approving the Vulcan if this should recur. Or get worse.  

A photo taken a few seconds after liftoff shows the BE-4 Main engines with their light blue Mach Diamonds, accompanied on both sides by the solid rocket boosters. Both appear to be "normal and healthy" in this photo. Image credit: United Launch Alliance

Voyager 2 Has Another Instrument Turned Off

Space.com reports that NASA engineers have turned off one of the few remaining scientific instruments that was running on Voyager 2, as the power available on the space probe continues to fall with age.  

Voyager 2 launched back in August of 1977 on a trip to Jupiter and a "Grand Tour" of the outer solar system. That mission was completed decades ago, and the probe left the solar system on Nov. 5, 2018.  Yeah, you can say the two Voyagers are in the 47th year of a 4 year mission. 

...It is currently 12.8 billion miles (20.5 billion kilometers) from Earth and is using four science instruments to study space beyond the heliosphere, the sun's bubble of influence around the solar system. NASA thinks that Voyager 2 has enough power to keep running one science instrument into the 2030s, but doing that requires selecting which of its other instruments need to be turned off. 

Mission specialists have tried to delay the instrument shutdown until now because Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 are the only two active probes humanity has in interstellar space, making any data they gather unique. Thus far, six of the spacecraft's initial 10 instruments have been deactivated. Now, losing the seventh has become unavoidable, and the spacecraft's plasma science instrument drew the short straw. On Sept. 26, engineers gave the command to turn off the instrument.

The plasma science instrument is an interesting concept.  It consists of four "cups" - detectors - to sense the amount of plasma flowing around the spacecraft.  Three of those are pointed toward the sun to measure the charged particles in the solar wind while the fourth is pointed forward, to look for charged particles coming from interstellar space.  To be honest, the instrument really hasn't done much since the probe left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. Ironically, though, it was that instrument that verified it had left the heliosphere.  

This NASA graphic shows the locations of NASA's Voyager spacecraft in interstellar space. NASA announced the arrival of Voyager 2 in interstellar space on Dec. 10, 2018. Voyager 1 reached the milestone in 2012. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The situation was that the three detectors pointed back where it came from didn't detect anything because there's no solar wind after it crossed the heliopause, and the other detector only provided useful data once every three months when the spacecraft made a 360-degree turn on its axis. It was a very practical choice of an instrument to shut down.

Both Voyagers are in the same condition, losing about 4 Watts every year.  In the 1980s, after their primary mission to the outer planets was complete, several instruments were shut down; things that were never expected to be used again. Voyager 1's plasma experiment equivalent to this one failed back in 2007 and has been off since then.   

It's a common thing among human beings to look for "big round numbers" and the race that both of the Voyagers are in is to see if they make their 50th anniversaries in space. They've both recently crossed into their 47th year, having launched in August and September of 1977.  

Reality, though, is that the Voyagers don't have much time left.  Both probes are powered by Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs) and those are expected to keep the few instruments that need to run alive until 2025, but that could change with the random failure of any one of thousands of components.  The RTGs might operate longer than 2025 although probably not much longer.  Either way, eventually the RTGs will no long be able to power enough of the instruments to get data and transmit it back.  Eventually, first one Voyager then the sister spacecraft will go silent.  Even though they won't generate enough heat to power the instruments, the RTGs might keep the Voyagers a little warmer, but eventually they'll cool to almost absolute zero.  

As I said over a decade ago, if we're lucky some day a ship from Earth may find one and bring her back to whatever serves as the equivalent of the Smithsonian in those days.  In all probability, they will simply follow the Newtonian laws of motion, cool to a couple of degrees Kelvin and glide away forever, all alone in the night.

About that Spruce Pine (NC) Quartz Mine Story

One of the stories that immediately caught my attention as soon as the reports from the Hurricane Helene disaster started coming in was the one about how a small quartz provider in Spruce Pine being shut down had the potential to shut down all semiconductor manufacturing and seriously impact the modern world.  

Let me repost the first story I ever saw on this, from Virtual Mirage on October 1st one of my daily (or more) reads:

In March, a Wharton professor who studies artificial intelligence and start-ups claimed on X, “The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.” Ethan Mollick noted at the time, “There are no alternative sources known” if supply disruptions were seen in Spruce Pines. It looks like rail and road in the area are gone, along with a chunk of Spruce Pines. [NOTE: that statement that there are no alternative sources known is contradicted by another reference I've found that says there are two large sources in India and Brazil. - SiG]

This was forwarded to Larry at VM by a friend and he noted some immediate questions about it in the comments, in particular that quartz is a "simple compound, SiO₂ with a (relatively) low melting point so that it can be made in an autoclave or similar industrial oven. Silica is the second most common mineral on the planet, so there is no shortage. I think that the industrial application finds it less expensive to mine." All of that is exactly correct. Further, every part of "modern electronics" you have, be it computer, tablet, iPad, Kindle, your phone, everything, already relies on a quartz crystal.  

As a radio designer, I couldn't tell you the number of quartz crystals, as just components I've built into oscillators (sources of radio frequency on specific frequencies) or purchased as already-built components. This goes back to the early 1980s. While in the never-ending search for ways to take costs out of computers and other consumer items, there has been a move toward less accurate ways to create a master clock for everything in the computer (or whatever), crystals still have their place where frequency accuracy is important.  It's not unusual to buy a crystal specified as some frequency even in the "several hundred" MHz range and specified to within a small number of Hertz. An off the shelf clock oscillator may be specified to within 25 parts per million (25 ppm), a temperature compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) may be specified to 1/2 ppm or less. (For example, a 10.000000 MHz crystal to 1/2 ppm will be within + 5 Hz of that at all times.) The most tightly controlled oscillators are Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillators (OCXO) and they are more stringently specified. (TCXOs run at the ambient temperature but have their frequency drift controlled with some clever circuit design; OCXOs run at a high (higher than the ambient temp rating) temperature and reduce variation by locking the temperature, and using quartz cuts optimized for that temperature - as well as some clever circuit design).  

I can't give a precise date but I don't believe a quartz crystal resonator or oscillator has been made with slices of quartz crystals out of the ground since the 1970s.

The article that many have referred to appears be this one on Wired by Vince Beiser. There's a vast misunderstanding or failure to communicate. This is what the source article is referring to as coming from Spruce Pine's deposit of high purity quartz (HPQ):

Rocks like these high-grade silica samples mined near Charlotte, North Carolina, are the basis for the quartz crucibles being discussed.  Image credit: Charles O'Rear/Getty Images

This lab-grown quartz crystal is what the crystals used in oscillators, crystal filters and other circuits are cut from. Millions of these have been made to cut crystal blanks from. This is a sample of an early effort to grow crystals at Bell Labs in 1956. Image credit Weinrich Minerals.  The rusted steel on both ends (more visible on the right) held a "seed" crystal for the new crystals to grow on.

Yes, the wired article referred to quartz crucibles used for purifying Silicon, not creating oscillators and other resonators. The crucibles look more like the rocks in the first picture - not a crystal structure like that. I interpret that to mean the crucibles are made from polycrystalline quartz and not a single big crystal like the one above. 

Notice the white rim (most prominent at the bottom front and top back) surrounding the silvery chunks of silicon? That's the crucible.  

The point is that the crystals grown for those other uses have been purified. Everything that reduced the purity of the crystals they started with has been removed.  If it can be done for that use, it can be done for crucibles or any other use. 

What's going on here is strictly economic. The silicon wafer makers would rather take the high purity quartz (HPQ) or ultra-pure quartz mined in Spruce Pine (or a few other places in the world) to make the crucibles from than purify lower grade quartz. How big those cost trades are, including going to "slightly lower quality quartz" or importing from the other couple of places on earth, is never talked about.

The Sad Truth is We're Stuck With SLS

I assume you're probably familiar with this old saying, BOHICA. If not, it's an acronym for Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. You're about to get something shoved up your ass. 

In this case, it's the Space Launch System, or SLS, the extremely overpriced rocket system that is the launch vehicle for NASA's Artemis program to return to the moon. I've basically been a one note song on getting rid of SLS since I first started studying it. A recent example here has leapt up my list of most read posts in the last year.

They're talking about launches that cost $4.1 billion each, and a system that couldn't launch more than (maybe) twice a year even if we could afford it. It turns out that practically every date associated with Artemis and returning to the moon slides farther into the future every time they update the schedules, and in step with that, every cost estimate goes up every time the question gets asked.  

Why talk about this again? Where is this going? Eric Berger, the senior space correspondent at Ars Technica has put up a post today about rescuing the Artemis program, "The politically incorrect guide to saving NASA’s floundering Artemis Program." In it, he modifies SLS somewhat, but mostly attacks the needless complication of the moon landing program. In doing so, he concedes we're stuck with the SLS.  His main target is getting rid of the needless complication of the Lunar Gateway (some background info) but his overall plan is:

• Cancel the Lunar Gateway
• Cancel the Block 1B upgrade of the SLS rocket
• Designate Centaur V as the new upper stage for the SLS rocket.

The Block 1B SLS is the largest version, which is dependent on getting the Exploration Upper Stage running.  My first link (2nd paragraph) concentrates on what a hideous mess the EUS has been and continues to be.  Eric envisions using the Centaur upper stage in place of the EUS. 

Essentially, Block 1B of the rocket exists solely to build out the Gateway. There is no need for this new SLS stage for human landing missions. Nor is it needed to deliver material to the Moon. NASA’s two largest lunar landers under contract, SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon, plan to use their own large rockets. Far from needing the expendable SLS rocket, NASA will have two reusable means to deliver large cargo to the Moon.

By canceling Block 1B, NASA would not only save billions of dollars in yet-to-be-expended development costs but also significantly reduce the per-launch cost of the SLS rocket. That’s because the cost of a single Exploration Upper Stage is likely to be around $1 billion, which is ludicrous for just a rocket’s second stage.

Time for some tough truths. We're currently in 1960s-style "moon race" and we're headed for a loss. Everything has been sliding farther out; nothing is ahead of schedule.

• The first crewed flight on the Orion spacecraft, a vehicle that has been in development for two decades, remains in doubt due to concerns with the heat shield.
  
• The first lunar landing mission has no reliable date. Officially, NASA plans to send this Artemis III mission to the Moon in September 2026. Unofficially? Get real. Not only must Orion’s heat shield issue be resolved, but it's unlikely that both a lunar lander (SpaceX’s Starship vehicle) and spacesuits (built by Axiom Space) will be ready by this time. The year 2028 is probably a realistic no-earlier-than date.
• The space agency’s plans after Artemis III are even more complex. The Artemis IV mission will nominally involve the debut of a larger version of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, a new launch tower, and a stopover at a new space station near the Moon, the Lunar Gateway.
• There is increasing evidence that China is pouring resources into a credible lunar program to land two astronauts on the Moon by 2030, seeking a geopolitical “win” by beating America in its return to the Moon.

The way to get back to the moon isn't with the sort of needless complication shown in this GAO illustration. It's more like we did it in the 1960s: concentrate on getting there and landing, not all this other stuff.

The big problem here is that there are no immediately ready replacements for SLS, the Orion capsule or Starship HLS (Human Landing System). There's no existing way to put an Orion capsule on anything besides the SLS. Could SpaceX design an improved Crew Dragon with a heat shield designed for the higher temperatures of lunar re-entry? Has anyone asked?

Closing words to Eric (and go RTWT) 

Proponents of the Lunar Gateway argue that it adds sustainability to the Artemis Program by providing a way station. The problem is that this way station, in an orbit far from the lunar surface, really isn’t on the way to anywhere.

To get somewhere, Artemis must avoid going nowhere.

Not Space as in Rockets, but as in Astronomy

It's a strange week, with SpaceX temporarily halting Falcon 9 launches. That means for the first time in memory, ULA is going to launch more than any other US launch provider. Typically, ULA launches as many in a year as SpaceX does in a week.  OK, some years ago, ULA launched in a year a SpaceX month's worth, and their goal is to launch Vulcan 25 times/year.   

The next launch in the US will be the Cert-2 flight for ULA's Vulcan on Friday morning, October 5, at 6:00 AM ET.  

Given that, there are currently three rather rare astronomical events either coming in the near future or currently happening. There's only one of the three that can't realistically be thought of as a once in a lifetime, and that's the last one.  It's a "once every few years" event.

That comet is Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, a comet first sighted at China's Purple Mountain Observatory on Jan. 9, 2023 and independently verified on Feb. 22 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS).  Given that long name with a large part that most westerners wouldn't have a clue how to pronounce, it's widely being referred to simply as comet A3. The story early in September was that A3 was going to take its closest approach to the sun on the 27th of the month and since that often destroys the comet, I thought I'd wait to try and see it if it survives the pass by the sun. Well, it survived, and while it's in the predawn skies right now, it will be moving later into the evening skies as we go into October.  

Comet A3 is moving to a position in between the Earth and the sun. On Sept. 27, comet A3 reached its perihelion — the closest it gets to the sun — at about 36 million miles (59 million km). Comet A3 will get closest to Earth on Oct. 12, when it will pass about 44 million miles (71 million km) from Earth.

That link at the end of the previous paragraph to Forbes magazine is something I stumbled across that includes a long section toward the bottom that helps you figure out where to look.  If you'd like to play with a planetarium-style program to see where it will be from where you are, consider Stellarium's open web app.

Frankly, I haven't paid much attention to this story because I couldn't begin to list the number of times I got suckered in by talk about how bright a comet was going to be, only to have it not live up to the hype. As it is, this is barely a naked eye comet. It might get brighter and it might not. 

The second one is very likely a once in a lifetime event because it's a recurring event that comes around every 80 years.  Some child around 8 or 10 could conceivably see this one and the next one, given some luck and medical advances.  

That's the recurring nova - star explosion - of a dim star called T Coronae Borealis or T CrB.  When it goes off, it will be visible to the naked eye, a new star - the reason for the word "nova" after all.

Already, the stellar remnant, a white dwarf called T Coronae Borealis that's feasting on material from a nearby red giant star, has revealed a tell-tale dip in brightness that "is right on top" of the one that preceded its previous outburst in 1946. Astronomers don't yet know for sure what's causing the dip, but they say it's just a matter of time before the nova satiates its hunger and explodes into a spectacular nova. "We know it's going to go off — it's very obvious," Edward Sion, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, told Space.com.

An artist's concept of the binary star system known as T Coronae Borealis, in which a white dwarf star will burst with bright light after siphoning material from its larger red giant star companion. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

While this sort of nova has been known of for a long time, and this particular star's case as well, there were no X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes in space 80 years ago, the last time the nova erupted. All of this will be new information.  

T Cor Bor is being watched by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope every day — and, most of the time, every few hours. As soon as the nova erupts, gamma rays will skyrocket alongside a similar spike in the nova's brightness, allowing astronomers to decipher just how hot material is getting soon after the eruption, and how fast that material blows away from the white dwarf. Astronomers are also eager to learn more about how shock waves will whiz through space in the moments following the explosion, the specifics of which are not very well understood.

Finally, a once or twice in a lifetime story (I've been interested in astronomy since I was about 12, and it's the first I know of). I mention it because you might have seen the fun headlines that the Earth has captured a second moon.  It should have done that on Sunday. 

This temporary, and so far from Earth it won't complete a single orbit before it "escapes" from us again. 

"According to the latest data available from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons system, the temporary capture will start at 15:54 EDT (1954 UTC) and will end at 11:43 EDT (1543 UTC) on November 25," mini-moon event expert and Universidad Complutense de Madrid professor Carlos de la Fuente Marcos told Space.com on Wednesday (Sept. 25).

I read over the weekend that this is not only far too dim to be a naked eye object, but if you're a hobbyist with a 10 or 12" reflector - the largest common sizes - you still won't see it.  This is an event for 30" or larger observatory telescope, with very sensitive CCD imagers.  Face it. We ain't seeing it with our eyes and a telescope. Unless you work on Mt. Palomar or something.

SpaceX Grounds Their Falcon 9 Fleet After Crew-9

Word broke early this morning (Eastern Time) that the very last operation of the Falcon 9 that had launched Crew-9 yesterday didn't go as it should have, and that SpaceX was halting Falcon 9 operations until they fully understood what happened. In a post to X timed at 12:20 ET, SpaceX said:

After today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9’s second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area.

We will resume launching after we better understand root cause

Unfortunately, that's the extent of what's known at the moment.  

You might remember that SpaceX had an upper stage anomaly on a July 12 launch, that was from an upper stage relight to raise the orbit of the load Starlink satellites it was carrying and the resulting RUD ended up taking out the load of satellites because of their not achieving the desired orbit. After a gut-wrenching few minutes of troubleshooting, SpaceX identified the issue as "a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s oxygen system. This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line."  They were back to flight in two weeks.  (Now where did I leave that sarcasm font?)  

One can't help but wonder if this is related.  

The Important Aspect of Crew-9 Launch Not Being Talked About

Well, not being talked about much...  This was the first crewed mission from Space Launch Complex 40, (just called "slick 40" locally) using modifications to the pad that SpaceX has made over the last two years. 

Crew-9 was the 15th crewed launch by SpaceX, including the eight previous ISS crew rotation missions, Demo-2 test flight for NASA, three private astronaut missions to the ISS for Axiom Space and the Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn private missions. All those previous missions, though, launched from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center rather than SLC-40, a pad dating back to the 1960s that hosted Falcon 9 launches since the vehicle’s debut in 2010.

SpaceX started work on a crew tower at SLC-40 two years ago at NASA’s request. The agency wanted a backup option in case something happened at LC-39A, which is used extensively by SpaceX for other Falcon 9 missions as well as the Falcon Heavy. SpaceX also has plans to launch its Starship vehicle from that facility.

NASA elected to use SLC-40 for Crew-9 because LC-39A is being prepared for the Falcon Heavy launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission as soon as Oct. 10, a process that takes at least three weeks to complete. NASA had planned to use LC-39A for the mission before the agency delayed its launch from August as part of deliberations on Starliner.

SpaceNews also reports that there have been some lessons learned about differences between LC-39A and SLC-40. A major lesson was a static firing done four days ago (9/24). Soot from the static test blew back onto the vehicle, requiring some work to clean surfaces on the Dragon spacecraft and repaint a radiator on the spacecraft to ensure it would operate properly in orbit.  The reason is that the flame trench on 39A is longer and points in a different direction: north instead of east like SLC-40. Since prevailing winds here are from the eastern quadrant, due east plus or minus 45 degrees, they might have to do that sort of work regularly.  

Liftoff from SLC-40 of the Crew-9 mission to the ISS Sept. 28. Credit: NASA

Remember when Elon Musk said an indicator of success would be if SpaceX makes launches boring?  Do they make news where you are? It was very cloudy here, and with the trajectory going to the northeast (which is the worst direction for us) we sat indoors and watched it on NASASpaceflight on YouTube.