To my reader friends and those who drop by on occasion. I know the modern thing is to refer to this as Resurrection Sunday - it's the reason for the season after all - but the old fashioned greeting is still OK by this old guy.
One year from today, the next great American solar eclipse will cover a long
stretch of the CONUS, from south Texas up through New England. Instead
of the day before Easter, April 8th next year will be after Easter, which will be on
March 31st.
The Great Eclipse of 2017 was the first one I had ever seen and the two paths overlap in the central US; this graphic extracts both paths.
Son, Dear Daughter in Law and Precious Grand Daughter live in the Indianapolis metro area almost on the centerline of this one. We met in Tennessee for the '17 eclipse and swore we'd watch this one from their backyard, but we should start figuring out travel plans. The essential difference in planning is the last one was August and the coming one is April, and typical weather is pretty different between those two months. Indianapolis might not be a good place to see it.
It's time to start making your plans.
This afternoon, I got what must have been the weirdest email of my life. Certainly of this blog's life. It was from Blogger itself:
Your post titled "Eliminating the Legislative Branch" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at:
http://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2012/01/eliminating-legislative-branch.html
Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.
The post is dated January 7, 2012 and talks about the President (Bamster) going around the law to appoint someone to the newly organized (back then) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While a bit snarky, I think it was fairly even-handed. I made fun of both W's and Bamster's administrations doing the same basic thing: pushing through an appointment for a position that requires senate approval by waiting until the senate wasn't in session so they could just appoint them.
I'll bet that post has had more reads today than at any time in the intervening 11 years since I posted it, when it combines me testing it at least twice and then having the diminutive but deadly Mrs. Graybeard test it as well.
I can't imagine what could be "sensitive content" about it, but I have a hard time believing that someone stumbled across it while blog surfing and complained about an over 11 year old post. There is nothing in their email about disagreeing with them, just what to do when you fix it, but since they never told me what was wrong with it, that's pointless. Although it's hard to be more pointless than an 11 year old blog post about something that was a minor news story back then.
Two weekends ago, I wrote about trying to resurrect an 11 year old PC to take the place of a newer but lower performance PC I use to run a few things in the shop. Since I'm here, let me do a little update to that.
By the time I posted that, I had gotten it to boot to Win7, but even the simplest things were exasperating. I'd tell it to uninstall a program, or simply delete a file from a junk directory, and it would just sit there spinning one of it's "processing... processing..." indicators for minutes. Digging through old DVDs, I found everything that came with this old Dell including some diagnostics and tried to run them. Originally, it would halt with an error saying something like it couldn't verify it was a Dell PC so it couldn't verify the tests would work and then abort. That took a couple of days to find a way around.
I gradually improved things, but every time I tried to run a functional test, it couldn't complete testing the older magnetic hard drive. It didn't fail it, it just never completed the test. It would get to some block of memory addresses and say the drive didn't provide an Interrupt Request (IRQ) reply fast enough. Then it would put up a box asking quit or keep testing. I quit the test several times, and then last Sunday decided to keep hitting Y, telling it to resume testing, thinking maybe it's just one or two bad addresses and after a few minutes, I'd have a list of the bad ones.
That's when I found out it would sit there (doing something or nothing) for up to 10 minutes before starting to retest, and then give me the same question with a different address being bad within a second. I literally spent 90 minutes waiting for those "Continue (Y)es or (N)o?" prompts. The kicker is that I could go to the Command line (i.e., DOS) and run the old CHKDSK utility. That said the HD passed.
I concluded the HD was probably bad. It's from 2011, after all, and 12 years out of a hard drive is really not that bad. I looked around the house but couldn't find another drive I could test in its place and after days of debating whether to buy a used drive from eBay, get something newer, or just can the whole thing, went with the second option.
That drive got here this afternoon, so I plan to try to get that swapped out tomorrow. And if it doesn't get that computer working, this computer gets another hard drive.
It seems that Monday's post asking the question of whether we're within a week of Starship's first orbital test was a bit premature. NASA Spaceflight .com has good coverage of all that's going on, including a few watchable videos.
Ship 24 wasn't stacked on top of Booster 7 until Wednesday and they've stated they still have several days worth of testing, including a full Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR).
On Thursday, SpaceX did confirm a forward plan. There will be another WDR in the mix, an opportunity set to be taken next week as the launch date target settles on a window the week after. This would come before the FTS arming.
Currently, the well-publicized April 10 NET (No Earlier Than) target had been ruled out by the cancellation of local road and beach closures, with placeholders for the following two days now likely to be related to the upcoming WDR.
The launch attempt would then follow a week later, around NET April 17, based on SpaceX’s updated info.
That reference to the WDR "would come before the FTS arming" refers to the fact that arming the Flight Termination System requires lifting Starship off the booster to access the FTS system.
NSF linked to this Tweet from SpaceX corporate.
The same will apply during the launch, with “priority one” involving the vehicle rising away from the pad without causing major damage to the launch site infrastructure. It could be argued that anything past that point will be a win, as the most powerful rocket in history adds the opening seconds to its maiden trip uphill.
A full mission success would result in the Booster splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, while Ship 24 re-enters and splashes down off the coast of Hawaii.
Never forget that SpaceX works by the "hardware rich" approach. They're already in process to build more booster/ship combinations; Booster 9 and Ship 25 are well along the way to being ready for more testing. B9 is getting engines installed, and S25 has been getting tested at SpaceX's Massey property - which apparently doesn't have any cameras permanently observing.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that if B7-S24 doesn't destroy the Orbital Launch Mount or do large amounts of damage, B9-S25 could fly next and relatively soon.
B7-S24 stacked on the Orbital Launch Mount. Photo from SpaceX on Twitter. Because it's a cool pic.
There's an area of the atmosphere that's almost impossible to observe regularly. At roughly 20 to 60 miles, it's too high for balloons or regular aircraft, while being much (much!) too low for satellites to survive. A New Zealand startup company called Dawn Aerospace is working to improve access to what has been called the ignore-o-sphere. They're prototyping a series of rocket-powered spaceplanes that are intended to fly research payloads into this height range multiple times a day.
They said today that they had completed the first three test flights of their Mark-II spaceplane. This is a very early prototype and Dawn doesn't expect to do more than a few test flights on this platform.
This Mk-II Aurora vehicle measures 4.5 meters long and is powered by a combustion rocket engine fueled by kerosene and hydrogen peroxide. During its initial flights, the vehicle flew to an altitude of about 1,800 meters and reached a maximum speed of about 315 kilometers per hour, the company said. [5900 feet and 195 mph - SiG]
(The Mark-I vehicle, by the way, flew on a conventional jet engine.) The test flights are being conducted out of Glentanner Aerodrome on the south island of New Zealand, and will eventually see this vehicle top out at about 12 miles altitude. The lessons learned from this plane will be put into a second version of the Mk-II Aurora, which could take flight before the end of this year or early in 2024.
In an interview, Dawn Aerospace chief executive Stefan Powell said this second vehicle would have a far lighter structure, a more powerful engine, and other features that would allow it to climb far higher. The goal is to fly the spaceplane to an altitude of 100 km, above the internationally recognized boundary of space.
The second vehicle will still be small and not capable of carrying more than perhaps 5 to 10 lbs. It's obviously not going to be carrying a second stage with that power level. Still, I think that amount of weight is in line with smaller Cube Sats or something specially designed for the purpose.
During their few days of testing, they ran into a problem that demonstrated the value of their rapid reusability model.
During the first flight, the Mk-II Aurora consumed more fuel than anticipated due to a leak in the propellant system. The next day, Dawn engineers removed the Mk-II Aurora engine, took out the oxidizer tank and found the leak.
“It was reasonably trivial to fix that, put it back together and fly again,” Powell said.
But that's getting too far from the main story: flying up to that 30 to 100 km (~18 to 60 miles) range.
"Above 30 km is too high for balloons and too low for satellites," he said. "Some researchers refer to it as the ignore-o-sphere. We know it has large implications on climate models and weather models. So there is theorized to be a lot of value in understanding this part of the atmosphere better. So we'll probably just start sticking some pretty basic data gathering payloads onboard just because they don't weigh very much."
They're also planning a larger version of the Mk-II Aurora vehicle capable of achieving orbit and carrying payloads up to 250 kg - a quarter of a metric ton. That one will be called ... (wait for it) ... Mark-III.
The Mk-II Aurora in flight. Dawn Aerospace photo.
Impressive, but impossible to scale just how big that is. So we have this photo (also from Dawn Aerospace).
That's the actual Mk-II Aurora. Stefan Powell is in the middle, crouching position.
Not that "it's over" in some final sense just yet, but Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy on Monday April 3rd, shortly after the satellite launch company failed to secure two financing deals and furloughed most of its staff. Virgin Orbit is California based, but is filing for bankruptcy in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. Its first hearing will be held virtually via Zoom on Wednesday (April 5) at 1:30 pm EST (1730 GMT). Virgin is filing under Chapter 11, commonly known as "reorganization bankruptcy" which allows the company to continue basic operations while it looks for a buyer.
Virgin Orbit's "Start Me Up" mission suffered a rocket launch failure in January 2023 due to a technical error, resulting in the loss of nine customer satellites. By mid-March, the company had paused operations and announced layoffs for about 90% of its workforce. Last week, the company was in conversation with two financers but failed to secure a deal, which seemed to be the last straw and the determining factor behind the company's decision to file for bankruptcy.
The company was valued at $65 million at the end of Monday (April 3) and had its shares plummet by 24% on Tuesday (April 4) soon after it announced bankruptcy, Reuters' Joey Roulette reported early on Tuesday.
While the failure of the January '23 mission out of the UK is probably the one
most people will think of first being the most recent, the company has
launched 33 satellites to orbit to date. I'd have to guess that the prices they can charge to put satellites into orbit this way aren't enough to cover the cost of operations.
Virgin Orbit's "first stage", named Cosmic Girl, which carries Launcher One above the densest part of the atmosphere. Virgin Orbit photo.
As recently as 10 days ago, there were reports that the first orbital test of Starship was looking to be late this month. To be more specific, there was a published tease that the date might well be April 20 - or 4/20 for the cannabis fans - and Musk is fond of making 4/20 references and jokes.
Today, there's serious talk that the launch may be sooner, with Space.com reporting that launch may be next Monday, 4/10.
SpaceX appears to have shifted gears.
On Saturday, Booster 7 which had been removed from the Orbital Launch Mount was lifted
back onto the launch pad. On the same day, Ship 24 was moved back to the
test area from the shipyard. It's expected that Ship 24 will be stacked
on top of B7 soon.
Today, the road was marked for closure from 8AM to 8PM (CDT) and B7 underwent a long cryo test session, filling both the LOX and Methane tanks, a good
test of all the work done over the last couple of months of preparing the OLM
for the launch it will be exposed to. The testing may vary, but the
rated take off thrust of Starship Superheavy boosters is over twice that of the
Saturn V moon rockets. That OLM is going to take a beating!
Then there's the fact that navigational warnings have been issued for the
Starship orbital attempt, as Netherlands-based satellite tracker
Marco Langbroek noted. Those warnings cover a window of April 6 to 12th. A fairly important
sign is pointing toward next Monday and Tuesday.
It also appears that, tentatively, NASA is reserving the use of its high-altitude WB-57 aircraft for observations of the Starship test flight on April 10 and 11. The agency is closely tracking SpaceX's progress with the massive rocket, as it intends to use the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander for its astronauts as part of the Artemis Moon missions.
Another sign arguing for later in the 6th to 12th window is that SpaceX still hasn't gotten its license for this launch. It's hard to guess what a Fed.gov agency like the FAA might do, but it appears things are lining up for sooner than the 20th,
After it launches, the Super Heavy rocket will fly from SpaceX's Starbase launch site eastward, over the Gulf of Mexico. For this test, the booster will not attempt a landing. After stage separation, the Starship upper vehicle is intended to reach orbital velocity before attempting a reentry into Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. If all goes well, it will make a controlled descent and landing into the ocean just north of the Hawaiian islands.
Musk said recently that Starship has about a 50% chance of success on that debut try. But SpaceX is building multiple Starship prototypes at Starbase and plans to launch them in relatively quick succession when they're ready.
"So I think we've got, hopefully, about an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year," Musk said on March 7 during an interview at the Morgan Stanley Conference (video).
I spent some time relearning something about this blog's history over this weekend. On Friday, I thought I had done one or two April Fool's Day posts over the years. I decided I'd do a three-day weekend this year, because - hey, it's a weekend - why not? I sat down with the Blog Archive tool on the bottom of the right hand column and looked at April 1st posts. There were more April Fool's Day posts than regular posts.
There are two things to bear in mind.
Since I violated the first law by saying tonight's post is the third of three April Fool's Day posts I'll just say it's one of my favorites. From 2021...
The Fjord Motor Company, a Norwegian electric-vehicle startup, has announced it’s accepting deposits for orders of its unique and revolutionary Mocky SUV Crossunder. The five-place Mocky is packed with all of the features offered by its competitors, including a 350HP fully electric drivetrain (available in 2- or 4-wheel drive), a 300-mile range, a center screen display, and reconfigurable seating.The feature that stands out from other “green” automotive market leaders, like Tesla with its ultra-fast-charging vehicle offerings, and Toyota with its “self-charging” hybrids, is a true, off-grid, point-of-energy-source, self-charging capability. Fjord’s Mocky incorporates a patent-pending tire design, developed in collaboration with Korean global tire giant Yancancook, that features a water-wheel-like tread that’s said to also have exceptional hydroplaning and snow/mud performance.
"Apart from killing Toyota’s ‘self-charging’ hubris, and Tesla’s now-Lilliputian charging rates and abilities, the only unaddressed advantage Tesla has over Fjord is autonomous self-driving, though Elon Musk has delivered more hot air than full capability to date," said Lief Niessan, CEO of The Fjord Motor Company.Niessan relates some of the interesting issues they've encountered with OpenAI "trained by crawling the entire expanse of the internet" in the Evaluation Engineering article. He relates, for instance, that the system would add 2Ï€ MPH (or 3Ï€ kmh on metric highways) to the legal speed limit, having determined a speed that created the shortest travel times and carried an almost zero probability of a speeding citation being issued.
“As a startup, we had limited engineering resources and cash available to us, so we looked for an AI (artificial intelligence) toolset that was available in the Open Source community to form the basis of the Mocky’s self-driving capability,” continued Niessan. “Our engineers worked closely with OpenAI and we managed to score a beta copy of their GPT-3 Artificial Intelligence toolset.”
For those unfamiliar with GPT-3, the toolset features an AI engine that was trained by crawling the entire expanse of the internet. GPT-3 has been demonstrated to compose music, write essays, perform medical diagnosis, and has even been used to complete partial photographs.
One of the things I love about this post is the photo of the Mocky. It looks virtually identical to the Mustang Mach-E, except right in the middle of where a grill ought to be, the Mocky replaces the galloping horse with a galloping reindeer.
A serious article 11 months later featured Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer
Granholm next to the car they drove to a serious PR event on how serious the administration is about building charging stations. What was that car? The Mach-E.
Georgia State police today announced the arrest of a suspect with a long record of arrests for fraud, scams and cons. The suspect's name and other details have not yet been released. The indictment was for selling entry-level electrical-engineering students at the Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”) small parcels of real estate, leveraging the fact that they had been told their circuits and systems needed as much “ground” as possible.
The unidentified man says he got the idea from listening to his niece, a first-year student in an electronics program. She told him that the instructor and textbooks repeatedly cited the need for more and better “ground” to make circuits work, or for system safety—you could never have enough of this so-called “ground.”
After listening to her, the alleged con artist developed a long list specific ground types to sell, such as signal ground, ac-line ground, power ground, RF ground, and shield ground. It did seem like you just never have enough of this thing called ground.
In the world of scams and cons that I've heard of, this one sounds like it will be hard to get a conviction on, because the only dishonest thing about this appears to be selling misinformation; selling pieces of land to students as a way to get more and better ground.
The indicted man would find odd-shaped pieces of real available land (similar to fabric remnants) and work with the owners to buy those few square feet here and there. He would then resell these small pieces at a much higher price complete with a legitimate deed to the students, saying “you’ll be needing more ground for your projects to succeed, and as you know, they’re not making more land.”
Note that the charges don’t claim he sold land that he did not own or misrepresented the land itself. Instead, the charges are focused on selling land under false representation of the application of the land. Ironically, it’s not entirely clear if the charges against him (no pun intended) will actually “stick,” since the transactions themselves were completely legal and properly done.
Selling misinformation, of course, is something the government does all day, every day - with exceptions for weekends and every holiday known to man. I suppose it's the old story that the reason men like this get arrested is that the government doesn't want the competition.
An ironic twist to this story will be most familiar to hams, hobbyists, and engineers who specialize in broadcast; especially in the AM Broadcast Band (AM BCB) or lower frequencies.
Of course, for higher-power transmitter towers and antennas such as those used by commercial broadcasters, especially in the lower-frequency “medium wave” band (several megahertz and lower frequencies/long wavelengths), the land on which the antenna sits actually is critical. In most cases, these antennas need acres of relatively conductive ground to form a ground plane under the antenna, as well as install grounding rods for the lightning rods protecting the antennas. But that’s a different “ground” story and a few square feet won’t make a difference.
As always, a handful of stories that caught my eye but I don't have a page worth to say about them.
On Friday the 24th, Rocket Lab launched two BlackSky optical Earth-imaging satellites from their facility on the north island of New Zealand. Instead of attempting helicopter recovery of the returning booster by grappling it with a helicopter, they allowed the booster to fall into the Pacific. It's part of a longer term study comparing results of helicopter recovery vs. allowing it to be immersed in saltwater and then cleaned out.
The booster was expected to reach a top speed of 5,150 mph (8,300 kilometers per hour). Aerodynamic drag slowed the rocket’s velocity as external temperatures built up to 4,350 degrees Fahrenheit (2,400 degrees Celsius). Then a drogue chute and main chute deployed to slow the booster’s descent for splashdown. Rocket Lab confirmed the booster reached the Pacific Ocean as intended.
Rocket Lab has recovered six Electron boosters since the first try in November 2020. Four were intentionally recovered from the ocean, and two involved a helicopter catch attempt. The company originally aimed to catch boosters with the helicopter to prevent corrosion on the rocket’s engines and avionics from sea water.
Murielle Baker, a Rocket Lab spokesperson, said “It turns out Electron survives a swim in the ocean well enough that many of its components actually pass re-qualification for flight, so for this mission we are putting the theory to the test of whether we need a helicopter at all.” Part of the experiment will have the recovery ship flush critical parts of the booster, such as its Rutherford engines, with fresh water to get the salt out of areas most susceptible to the damage.
Once the booster is back at Rocket Lab’s Auckland factory, the company will
disassemble and inspect the nine main engines and remove avionics for
examination and re-testing. Rocket Lab has already hot-fired a Rutherford
engine recovered from an Electron flight and found it passed all tests to fly
again.
In the longer term, they're studying what can or should be redesigned to make it more tolerant of the saltwater environment.
In Tweet dated Wednesday, ULA CEO Tory Bruno relayed that the Vulcan's upper stage suffered "an anomaly" without specifically saying what happened.
When asked for more details, such as what sort of test it was undergoing, he
simply said, “Extreme structural load testing of various worst possible
conditions” and added in another tweet that this was "very unlikely" to have
implications for the Centaur to be used for Vulcan's debut flight.
Considering the flight is penciled in for No Earlier Than May 4, less than
five weeks from today, most anything would affect that unless it was clearly
some error in the testing or setup that didn't damage the Centaur V.
Meet GigaGalactic Rockets, a company that states, "our mission is to make the galaxy accessible to all. We envision a future where space travel is as commonplace as air travel, and where people can explore the cosmos freely and without limitations."
To do that, they are working on creating the GigaGalactic Improbability Drive (GGID), a concept first popularized by space travel theorist Douglas Adams. Essentially, if you examine the probabilities of being anywhere in the universe, there are only two places you can assign the probability of being. The probability of being where you are is 1.0. Conversely, the least likely place you could be is the place you want to go because if you were there, you wouldn't want to go there. While practically you may not want to go anywhere else, there's a very large number of places with very low probability you'd want to be. The probability of being where you want to go is 0.0. If it could be done this simply, you could feed the probabilities of every location in the universe into an inverter making the highest probability being where you want to go. By using quantum observation principles and manipulating probabilities you're virtually certain to get where you want to go, although you might be a different species when you get there.
Briefly, their GGID works this way:
Last Friday, there was a story that Virgin Orbit may have had an investor step in and rescue the company. Today, the story is that the deal fell through and the company has laid off a large majority of its employees.
In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Virgin Orbit announced it was laying off approximately 675 employees, or 85% of its workforce. The company said the layoff was necessary “to reduce expenses in light of the Company’s inability to secure meaningful funding.”
The company had furloughed most employees March 15 as part of a pause in operations as it sought to raise money. A week later it brought back a small number of employees to continue preparations for the next LauncherOne mission from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
Last week, the company and venture capitalist Matthew Brown were optimistic that the details could be worked out and had set the date of last Friday (March 24th) as when they would complete things. That deal has evidently fallen through. Virgin has said they are looking for other investors but as of March 30th have not announced anything.
As talked about in a March 17th posting on Virgin's troubles, the company raised $60 million in four separate fundings from Virgin Investments Limited (VIL), the investment arm of Virgin Group. Those deals came with interest rates as high as 12% and gave VIL “first-priority security interest” to Virgin Orbit’s assets, including its Boeing 747 aircraft.
Independent estimates suggest that Virgin Orbit spent as much as $1 billion to develop and test its LauncherOne rocket and air-launch system. The company made its first successful launch in January 2021 and has averaged one mission every six months since then. Virgin Orbit went public in 2021, but it raised just $68 million and had to turn to private investments for an additional $160 million to keep operating.
Most recently, Branson has been propping up the company's finances. He invested $25 million in November 2022 and another $20 million in December 2022. Importantly, this was a secured note, giving Branson priority as a creditor for the company's assets, including "all aircrafts, aircraft engines (including spare aircraft parts), and related assets."
Virgin Orbit's "first stage", named Cosmic Girl, which carries Launcher One above the densest part of the atmosphere.
When the financial agreements stipulate that VIL gets, "all aircrafts, aircraft engines (including spare aircraft parts), and related assets", I assume that has to include this aircraft. Look for it to be Richard Branson's plane.
EDIT to ADD: Just as I'm getting ready to hit the "Publish" button, a UPI story breaks through saying,
Earlier this month, Virgin Orbit furloughed nearly 600 of its employees and suspended operations after a failed satellite launch.
A week later, the company said in an SEC filing it would start an "incremental resumption of its operations."
Thursday's news the company was unable to secure new funding means the restart will not happen.
Not even a week ago, I reported that Starliner's Crew Flight Test was slipping out at least a month, saying:
Space.com is reporting the Boeing's Crew Flight Test of their Starliner Capsule has been bumped out from the planned April launch date, NET May but probably into the summer.
Today, SpaceNews is reporting the flight is NET July 21. There are several reasons for this, but one that was mentioned among the first was review of the parachute system's performance.
The manager of NASA's Commercial Crew program, Steve Stich, said the delay was attributable to the extra time needed to close out the pre-flight review process of Starliner and also due to traffic from other vehicles visiting the space station in June and the first half of July.
"When we look at all the different pieces, most of the work will be complete in April for the flight," Stich said during a teleconference with reporters. "But there's one area that's extending out into the May time frame, and this really has to do with the certification products for the parachute system."
Parachutes? They flew the capsule twice with no issues. In fact, back in the first flight, the parachutes may have been the only thing that worked properly! OK, that's probably an exaggeration, but the software was so bad that they're lucky they got that vehicle back.
On a more serious note, Boeing has conducted more than 20 tests of its parachute system, including dropping the vehicle from different altitudes to test their deployment sequence and how the parachutes perform in different environments to simulate returning from space. The main effort related to the 'chutes is studying the reams of data to make sure that the system is good. There is one additional test on the books:
There is one final test to be completed on the ground, he said, of a parachute subsystem that pulls Starliner's forward heat shield away and sets up deployment of the drogue and then main parachutes. That test is targeted for May.
The other thing pushing the launch schedule out is more mundane. The ISS is small compared to the number of people and groups that want to go there, so resource allocation is always a big deal. The Crew Flight Test will carry two astronauts that will live on the station for a short duration stay, not the five or six months of a regular crew rotation. As such, it requires a docking port to be dedicated to the capsule for its time on the station different from the one the crew rotation uses; currently Crew-6.
While they expect that Starliner could be ready to launch by June, that interferes with a higher priority mission. NASA plans to launch SpaceX's CRS-28 cargo resupply mission in June, which will
tie up one of the lab's docking ports. CRS-28 is bringing
solar arrays to the station. Delays to that would cascade delays to the spacewalks planned to install them. The lack of a docking
port pushed the Starliner flight into the second half of
July.
This will be the third flight on Boeing's Starliner. After the nearly catastrophically bad December 2019 mission, a massive rework effort was begun on the vehicle, at Boeing's expense. That culminated in the May '22 mission. That second try can't be described as faultless, but it has led to being ready to try the Crew Flight Test.
I'm referring to the Lunar Flashlight, a cubesat launched in December by SpaceX, on the same mission as the ispace Hakuto-R M1 carrying the Rashid lunar lander by the United Arab Emirates.
I haven't been watching carefully for updates, and found out as part of today's story that Lunar Flashlight has had problems with its propulsion system thrusters since it launched. It currently looks like the probe will not be able to get to its intended Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit and there looks to be a pretty good chance the mission will never achieve its goal of looking for water ice in craters around the lunar south pole. NASA/JPL (and others) have been working to get the thrusters working but are saying that if they don't get it fixed by the end of April it's probably all over for the mission.
... on the way to the moon, the cubesat experienced thruster glitches on its mission to test a new "green" propellant. NASA officials downgraded its mission from orbiting to lunar flybys weeks ago. Yet the amended mission remains uncertain, agency officials said on Thursday (March 23).
"The operations team has been working on ways to restore partial operation of one or more thrusters to keep the spacecraft within the Earth-moon system," NASA officials stated in a blog post.
By early February, engineers at JPL and Georgia Tech had developed a novel way to use one working thruster.
The spacecraft was spun at a rate of 6 degrees per second, or one revolution per minute, around its directed axis. Then the thruster was fired while commanding the spacecraft to remain pointed in the right direction. There was potential after 20 days, these mini-trajectory correction maneuvers would guide Lunar Flashlight to its planned near-rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon.
The team successfully completed quite a few 10-minute sequences on the single thruster, but soon after, that thruster also experienced a rapid loss in performance, and it became clear that the thrust being delivered was not enough to make it to the planned orbit.
By later in February, the team decided to switch their emphasis to getting the existing thrusters to work well enough to keep the Lunar Flashlight in Earth orbit with a high enough apogee to image the moon's south pole region once a month. They have had some success but are still trying to overcome the thruster problems.
The rest of systems on the spacecraft continue to work as intended and the
mission has met all of its other objectives short of studying the lunar south
pole region. The new technology "green propellant" is a technology
demonstration that has never flown before. Demonstrations like
this are always high-risk, high-reward endeavors intended to push the
envelope of space technology. The lessons learned from this mission will be
part of developing the new technology, if it's deemed worth spending more
money on.
An artist's depiction of Lunar Flashlight looking for ice in a crater on the moon. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
For more on the Lunar Flashlight,
there's this pdf from JPL.
A little over six months since the failure of Blue Origin's NS-23 New Shepard mission, the company has released the detailed failure analysis of what failed and caused the mission abort.
The direct cause of the NS-23 mishap was a thermo-structural failure of the engine nozzle. The resulting thrust misalignment properly triggered the Crew Capsule escape system, which functioned as designed throughout the flight. The Crew Capsule and all payloads onboard landed safely and will be flown again. All systems designed to protect public safety functioned as planned. There were no injuries. There was no damage to ground-based systems, and all debris was recovered in the designated hazard area. Blue Origin expects to return to flight soon, with a re-flight of the NS-23 payloads.
The failure occurred at 64 seconds into the test mission on September 12, 2022.
The emergency escape system performed as intended, rapidly pulling the spacecraft away from the disintegrating rocket. Had a crew been on board this flight, they would have experienced a significant jolt and some high gravitational forces before landing safely in the West Texas desert.
Blue Origin led the investigation, with assistance from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. There was plenty of data available from both telemetry during the flight and post mortem on the remains that fell into the Texas "designated hazard area." On the engine nozzle, investigators found "hot streaks," indicating that the engine was running hotter than it was designed to. I'm not sure where he gets this but Eric Berger at Ars Technica notes:
Although the summary does not explicitly say so, it appears that at some point in the flight campaign of this booster, design changes were made that allowed for these hotter temperatures to be present.
In their report, Blue notes:
Aided by onboard video and telemetry, flight hardware recovered from the field, and the work of Blue Origin’s materials labs and test facilities, the MIT [Mission Investigation Team - SiG] determined the direct cause of the mishap to be a structural fatigue failure of the BE-3PM engine nozzle during powered flight. The structural fatigue was caused by operational temperatures that exceeded the expected and analyzed values of the nozzle material. Testing of the BE-3PM engine began immediately following the mishap and established that the flight configuration of the nozzle operated at hotter temperatures than previous design configurations. Forensic evaluation of the recovered nozzle fragments also showed clear evidence of thermal damage and hot streaks resulting from increased operating temperatures. The fatigue location on the flight nozzle is aligned with a persistent hot streak identified during the investigation.
The emergency escape system is seen firing on the New Shepard spacecraft Monday morning after its rocket was lost. - Blue Origin photo
Their report concludes by saying they expect to return to flight soon, but doesn't say much else. Insiders who track this sort of thing (in this case Eric Berger at Ars), report they only know of one operational booster left.
The company has used its newest rocket, Booster 4, exclusively for human launches. It has some modifications from Booster 3 to qualify it as a human-rated rocket. The company has also built a fifth booster that may be ready for its debut flight.
The capsule from NS-23 survived with no known issues, and Blue has said they plan to re-fly the same payloads as on the NS-23 mission on a similar, uncrewed mission.
No, not that resurrection. That resurrection weekend is still two weeks away. This was about as far from that as one can get.
Back in '18, I needed a little computer that could run my Computerized Battery Analyzer (CBA-IV) and since the native software is Windows, ended up buying a small computer probably more intended for running an audio-visual setup of some kind, called a NUC, made by Intel. It was fine for that, but it's a Windows 10 box (pretty sure it was my first introduction to Win 10) and like all Windows versions, it slows down over time as the OS gets more bloated. As I wrote about in July '21, when I told the story of getting 3D Printer control program called Pronterface running:
To make the long story short it took a couple of days to get that to work. Hours upon hours of those days were waiting for Windows to stop doing shit so I could do what I wanted to. With machines that aren't on regularly, Windoze 10 is a giant Pain In The Ass - calling home and tying up the machine literally for hours over my WiFi network.
This is a computer I run maybe every few months for a day or two or maybe less than that.
Like all Windows10 computers I've seen, there's no place to tell it that I
don't want it to play music files, or show me videos. I want it to run
my battery analyzer or talk to my printer interactively. Still, every
time I turn it on, it has to go look for security updates, and if I have a
battery to test that I think is going to run for hours, I need to turn the NUC on
two hours before I can start. And every few cycles of that, I have to sit around and tell it, no I don't want to pay for your cloud storage, I don't want to sync my Android phone because I don't even have one, I don't want your browser because this little machine doesn't need to have a browser on it, and a bunch more crap.
Plus it does other things I personally find annoying, like changing my desktop
picture to something I have on one of my other computers. Doesn't
anybody at Microsoft who designs this software think that a user might have more
than one picture they want on their computers? And they might not want them all to look the same? How about interacting with software like, "when I want it to do something, I'll ask?"
As a result, I got pretty tired of putting up with the NUC and realized I
still have the computer that used to be my desktop here, that was replaced in
November of '19. The NUC is on top of the older Dell desktop.
Resurrecting that computer and getting it to run the way it should has been
the big job this weekend. I can't say I'm done, yet. The biggest problem was that the little CR2032 battery used to backup the clock (and whatever else) had died and getting it to even boot up took most of yesterday. Since it's a Win 7 machine, long out of support, I don't want it going out on the network. There are no updates for it to go find and install, so no need for WiFi to be on. That might be part of what's slowing it down, but I really don't want it calling home all day long to check on something.
It still
takes it far too long to do simple tasks like uninstalling a file, and I'm
troubleshooting that. The root problem, though, is that I haven't had to do anything like this in years, and it has been longer since I had to work on a Win 7 machine. The other Win 7 computer I have (runs the CNC mills and lathe) has been off the network since Win 7 went away. It does what I need, when I need it to, every time I turn it on.
Larry Lambert over Virtual Mirage, one of the more eclectic minds you'll come across in the blogosphere, led
us to a post on American Thinker called, "Dodging the Apocalypse" about the recent geomagnetic storms and the apparently truly Epic Coronal
Mass Ejection that led to the storm. Credit where due, the first person
I saw writing about this event was the
Come and Make It blog.
The article is by a regular writer there, J.R. Dunn, and while I'm going to do my best to cut him slack, he really triggered me. The biggest thing is tying this CME to the Carrington Event in 1859, which I've written about a half dozen times before. For the uninitiated, the Carrington Event was a massive solar geomagnetic storm that happened around the start of the widespread use of electricity. Widespread electric power was still a half-century away, but the telegraph had led to long wires being used to communicate by what we now call On Off Keying or OOK. The disruptions to the geomagnetic field around Earth caused open telegraph keys to spark, insulators on poles to arc over, started fires and more.
The event was witnessed in real time by British astronomer Richard Christopher
Carrington.
"Two patches of intensely bright and white light broke out," he later wrote. Carrington puzzled over the flashes. "My first impression was that by some chance a ray of light had penetrated a hole in the screen attached to the object-glass," he explained, given that "the brilliancy was fully equal to that of direct sun-light."
Note that these flashes were so much brighter than the projected image of the sun in his dark room that he thought daylight was somehow getting into the room. The story itself is amazing. That evening, when the Coronal Mass Ejection hit, telegraph operators were able to run without batteries; the flare-induced voltages on their wires working better than batteries. The aurora display was global, even in the deep tropics.
The American Thinker article quotes "experts" saying the March 13th CME was "was ten to a hundred times more powerful than the one of 1859." My immediate problem with that is how do we know that number? The 1859 event happened only one time in human history and it happened in a time when instruments today's experts would use didn't exist. There are other things that have been attributed to massive Carrington-like storm but the problem of no measurement is compounded by no observers, and the most remote-sounding observations imaginable. To quote from this blog in 2012 about an increase in Carbon 14 levels being attributed to a Carrington-like storm in the year 774 AD,
There are a couple of known mechanisms for creating C14 in the atmosphere, one is a massive solar flare. 774 AD was 600 years or so before the first telescopes were used, so there was no Carrington to be watching.
So when a college student from UC-SD found a record of a “red crucifix” in the skies over Britain in that year, Nature published his note.
I've never heard of anyone saying there was a crucifix of any color in the skies back in 1859.
We've seen this kind of hype more recently. Back in November of 2003, toward the end of cycle 23, there was a super flare that was genuinely scary and the kind of flare to worry about. The biggest flare seen since the satellite age started, it was classed as X28 in retrospect - only because it saturated the X-ray detectors on the satellites and they couldn't measure it properly. Why didn't it harm us? Because it was on the limb of the sun and the CME went 90 degrees to our direction. So not only does this extremely rare event need to happen, but it has to be pointed at Earth - basically perfectly centered on the sun from where we view. It's important to remember that during the peak days of cycle 23 we were getting X-class flares a few times every month, and the grid was fine, wasn't it?
I haven't seen anyone say that last week's CME came with an X-class flare or
put a number like that X28 on it, but that would be interesting to find
out.
Probably the most obviously wrong thing he said was “We do know that we have
two more years before the current solar cycle tops out, and so far, this has
been one of the most intense on record.” The best answer to show just how
wrong that is to show this plot of just the five most current solar cycles
from Solen.info.
The current cycle, 25, is at the bottom left in kind of a brown or olive drab
color and ending at 32 "Months after cycle start." It can be seen that
it's higher than the previous cycle (in pink) at pretty much every point and
it's currently stronger than cycle 24 was at this point. It's just that
being better than cycle 24 isn't really saying anything impressive.
Cycle 24 was the weakest cycle in the last hundred years. Cycle 25 is
predicted to be stronger than 24 but might not even equal the next stronger
cycle, 23. It obviously isn't cycle 23 level yet (23 is red). Where he says, “...so far, this has
been one of the most intense on record,” it has actually been one of the weakest on record.
This chart, by the way, doesn't include the strongest cycle since the 1780s,
cycle 19 from the late 1950s.
It's almost guaranteed that someday there will be something like a Carrington Event again, we just don't and can't know when. When something has happened once in recorded history, it's hard to assign a periodicity to it. If that observation about the 774 AD CME is correct, does the 1085 years between them mean anything to predictions? I don't think we can just say it's a thousand year cycle. To say a massive CME has something to do with solar cycles isn't much of a reach, given what we know from observing hundreds or thousands of solar flares and CMEs and knowing those track with solar cycles.
I know alarmism sells but I find it exhausting. I try to bound problems to give me some feel for how likely some problem is. In the case of the CME it's not just that probability there's also the probability of it being optimally placed on the sun to do the most damage. Is that two degrees of solar longitude? Five degrees? The probability of independent things like this get multiplied. If the chance of a big enough CME to cause a disaster is 1 in 100 years and the probability of it being in the right place on the sun is 1 in 180 (two degrees longitude), the probability of both is 1/100 * 1/180, or .0000555 (55.5*10-6).
Sort of Weekly? #3 was two weeks ago.
On Wednesday, Reuters reported that the company may have arranged a $200 million deal with Texas-based venture capital investor Matthew Brown.
The space startup did not comment on the likely deal, but said on Wednesday it would resume operations on March 23 and prepare for its next mission by recalling some of its employees, sending its shares up 60% in premarket trading.
The two parties (Virgin Orbit and Matthew Brown) aimed to complete the deal by
Friday (today) with Virgin saying more employees will be back to work on March
27, Monday. As of
this afternoon's updates, I see that Virgin stock is up 50% on the day but nothing saying the deal
has been finalized.
NextSpaceflight.com's extended schedule today
is showing that April will feature a launch of Falcon Heavy on the 8th and a
Delta IV Heavy 12 days later. Both dates should be considered No
Earlier Than and preliminary/subject to change. There are launches
between these two but a little semi-skilled photo editing makes it look like
they're this close.
ULA has only two remaining Delta IV Heavy rockets; the one for this mission and one set to fly in 2024.
Since SLS has successfully flown, although still not out of its qualification missions, it's now the most powerful rocket in the US inventory. Falcon Heavy is number two and Delta IV Heavy is number three.
I've long since lost count of the number of tentative launch dates for
SpaceX's Starship's first orbital attempt that have been cancelled.
Space.com reports. "SpaceX will be ready to launch Starship in a few weeks, then launch timing depends on FAA license approval. Assuming that takes a few weeks, first launch attempt will be near end of third week of April, aka …" SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said via Twitter.
The "aka..." bit, by the way, is presumably a nod to the possibility that Starship could launch on April 20, which is a sort of holiday for cannabis culture. Musk is fond of making 4/20 references and jokes.
Considering the number of times this test flight has been talked about and then postponed, it's best to consider this Extremely Preliminary.
Space.com is reporting the Boeing's Crew Flight Test of their Starliner Capsule has been bumped out from the planned April launch date, NET May but probably into the summer.
"We're adjusting the @Space_Station schedule including the launch date for our Boeing Crew Flight Test as teams assess readiness and complete verification work. CFT now will launch following Axiom Mission 2 for optimized station operations," NASA human spaceflight chief Kathy Lueders said via Twitter on Thursday (March 23).
Axiom Mission 2, or Ax-2 for short, will be the second crewed mission to the ISS operated by Houston-based company Axiom Space. It will employ a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, as Ax-1 did in April 2022, and is tentatively scheduled to launch in early May.
I find it a little curious that Boeing's CFT is being assigned lower priority as a mission than Axiom Space's Ax-2. I think Boeing's CFT is under their contract with NASA to deliver "taxi rides" to the ISS, so while it's arguable Ax-2 is a private mission, CFT is a NASA-Boeing mission. Perhaps Ax-2 is a paying customer while CFT isn't? Or is that too cynical?
Relativity Space's video coverage last night, which they were calling part 3, began the same way as the first two attempts I watched. When I turned on the coverage, it was T-25 minutes and counting. Then, just like every other one I watched, they went into a hold. At that point, knowing that both it was going to push the liftoff until well after 10:30 PM and that it was the one night/week when we just can't stay up to any time we might want, we shut down the computers and went to bed.
Which meant Murphy's Law demands it would launch last night, and it did, lifting off at 11:25PM EDT.
"Successful Failure" is an odd turn of phrase that I'm borrowing 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. Furthermore, 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.
After all that and stage separation, something went wrong. It appeared the
second-stage engine attempted to ignite but could not sustain this ignition.
So far the company has not stated precisely what went wrong and we can only hope
they got crap loads of data, enough to diagnose what happened. Scott Manley has some video of the failure, and some of his analysis, but no major revelations.
Eric Berger writes:
It is proper to characterize Wednesday's launch as a success. Of the new era of commercially developed small launch vehicles, the Terran 1 rocket made it further on its debut flight than Astra, Virgin Orbit, Firefly, and ABL Space Systems. Only Rocket Lab, with the debut of its smaller Electron rocket in 2017, had a more successful initial flight. In producing a rocket with about 85 percent additively manufactured material, Relativity has flown with a substantially new manufacturing process.
The extent to which Wednesday's launch validated the additively manufactured structure of the Terran 1 rocket will need to be assessed with data from the flight—was it a close call, or was the structure genuinely robust? This information will likely help determine how much of Terran R is produced through 3D-printed technology.
Back in October '22, I had posted that CEO Tim Ellis was very aware that no privately funded company has achieved orbit on their first attempt but thought the mission might be graded on a curve. That is, if they don't make orbit, customers pretty much get to decide if it was "close enough." As he put it:
"While the rocket-loving engineer in me wants to say it's really orbit or nothing for the first flight, I think the business leader part of me knows that customers are going to tell us what enough looks like for the first flight."
Without hard data on what happened to the second stage anything here is guessing. I mean, Virgin Orbit's mission had the same basic failure - second stage didn't work right - and that was a bad fuel filter in a system that has made orbit a few times. The ESA's Vega C launch in December failed because of its upper stage on its second orbital mission. It's not unprecedented for a rocket that has flown before to have that sort of failure.
The big questions are whether or not the customers give the rocket a passing grade and if Relativity Space does another Terran-1 mission or goes directly to the bigger Terran-R. We'll have to wait to find that out.
Terran-1 lights up the sky last night from Cape Canaveral, its methalox engines creating an unusual blue color in the flames. Relativity Space photo.
Over the course of the last few days (it seems) I noticed some blurbs saying that the Russian space assets had been taken over by Kazakhstan, the country they're located in. None of my usual sources had anything concrete on it until today. It's a real standoff between Russia and Kazakhstan, there are real problems stemming from this and it doesn't look to blow over or otherwise go away on its own in a few days.
Let's start here because people who don't study this area (like me!) might be hazy on some of these details. Kazakhstan was part of the USSR when they (the USSR) decided to build their launch facilities, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, on the vast open plains of Kazakhstan beginning in 1955. A few years later, it became the world's first spaceport with the launches of the Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1 missions.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia leased the spaceport from the government of Kazakhstan and currently has an agreement to use the facilities through the year 2050. Russia pays an annual lease fee of about $100 million. Neither country is particularly happy with the relationship; the Kazakh government feels like it is under-compensated, and the Russian government would like it to be in its own country, which is why it has moved in recent years to build a new launch site for most of its rockets in the Far East of Russia, at Vostochny.
Screen capture of a Duck Duck Go map, with the red bubble pointing out the
Baikonur Cosmodrome. Note at the far left of the screen is Ukraine and
north of that "all roads lead to Moscow."
Russia's rocket industry has fallen behind the west and desperately needs that facility to be available. They're in the early stages of developing a new launch vehicle, the Soyuz-5, a three-stage rocket powered by RD-171 engines that will burn kerosene fuel. It's a medium lift vehicle but they hope to be able to compete cost-wise with SpaceX. Their most recently publicized plans say they intend to launch the Soyuz-5 from the "Baiterek" launch pad at Baikonur and intended to start preliminary construction on that launch pad last year. It doesn't appear that they've started.
Earlier this month, a Kazakh news site, KZ24, reported that the Republic of Kazakhstan had seized the property of TsENKI, the Center for Utilization of Ground-based Space Infrastructure, in Kazakhstan. This firm, which is a subsidiary of Roscosmos, is responsible for launch pads and ground support equipment for the Russian space corporation. According to the report, [be aware - in the Kazakh language (?)] which was translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell, TsENKI is barred from removing any assets or materials from Kazakhstan.
"A ban on utilizing resources and conducting financial operations, as well as instability in negotiating positions as a whole are slowing down the priority direction of work at Baikonur, namely the construction of a new launch pad for the Soyuz-5 Booster," the report states.
Look at that map again. Note the size of Kazakhstan compared to Ukraine, Georgia, and "the 'stans" (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and so on). With the exception of Russia itself, Kazakhstan is the biggest country you can see on that map. Perhaps that's why there's a lot of politics at play here. Kazakhstan has nominally been a sovereign nation since 1991, but in the last three decades, it has maintained close ties to Russia and lies well within the Russo-political sphere.
...Russia's invasion of Ukraine appears to have changed the calculus of this relationship. Namely, Kazakhstan's president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, apparently sees Russia's preoccupation with Ukraine as a window of opportunity to assert greater autonomy for Kazakhstan.
Russia, for its part, has pushed back on further autonomy for Kazakhstan. Weakening ties with the large country to its south could lead to a further crumbling of the Russian Federation. At times, the rhetoric has grown heated. For example, former Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev has called Kazakhstan an "artificial state" and, on the Russian social media site VKontakte, accused the neighboring country of planning genocide against ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan.
It wouldn't be a story involving Russia without that sort of blustery rhetoric. The former head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Grogozin, was pretty well-known for that. The current head, Yuri Borisov, is quite a bit more restrained.
Borisov, who prefers to keep a low profile, and at least in his public dealings with NASA has struck an apolitical posture, has so far not commented on the dispute. Nor has Roscosmos said anything on its Telegram channel [apparently in Russian], which now effectively acts as its primary public outreach tool.
It strikes me that this is some sort of political standoff, and until it's resolved the development of the Soyuz-5 is on hold. An interesting side note is that Russia has been working toward moving their launches into their own country, which is why it has moved in recent years to build that new launch site at Vostochny in the Far East of Russia. A quick search for that name doesn't show me anything that I can pin down to a location. There is a mountain (or mountain range) by that name on the Kamchatka peninsula which is pretty much on the Pacific, but I don't know if that's what they're referring to.
"May you live in interesting times," right?
