So Is It Fixed?

Followers of yesterday's post on the problem I'm having with my station have probably read my description of today's work, but I copy it here for everyone else. 

The most effective thing I did yesterday was to unplug and replug the USB cable into the audio input box on top of the rig. It's one of those square plugs, about 1/4 on a side, so I think those are USB A family. Today, I tried the station the way it was last night and it was doing better. I did about 10 transmit tests before it went into the "audio comb mode". Once I reset everything, I grabbed my can of "Deoxit 5" spray that's always on hand and gave a small spray into the end that plugs into the audio box on top of the rig.

Since then, I worked a couple of stations on 17m, figure about 10 T/R changes (both to and from that box), for them and ran around three dozen "tune" button transmissions. No returns of the "comb". 

So given that connector issues like this are about as common as can be - although I can't say I've seen one with these square USB-B connectors - and since I've done lots of transmissions without seeing the problem again, it might well be "all better." Between working the two new countries on 17m and my roughly "three dozen" transmit tests, that's more than I tend to transmit in most full days of making contacts on any band. 

Let me add some info that I should have included last night but wasn't prepared. 

First is the "red comb" effect, at the top of this screen capture. From the start of continuous lock out of the system until this screen grab is five 15 second intervals, and this was early this afternoon before the Deoxit5.

I've seen the red comb continue after I've turned off the radio that had been transmitting, so it's got to be coming from the audio system. The transmit audio is generated by the WSJT software running on the PC that gave us this plot. The audio from the computer goes over the USB cable that appears to have fixed it. That goes to a SignaLink USB box that controls both the transmit and receive audio levels. 

It has been a tricky problem to work on because it seemed different at different times. On the first day I spent time testing other bands, I found it on 20m and while I'm not 100% sure at the moment, I'd swear I saw it on 15m. I haven't seen it on any other band as much as 17m, and none on 20 and 15 since Thursday. Intermittent or "flaky" problems can suck up a lot of time.

So while I think it might be fixed, I'll be keeping an eye out for milder issues or more cases of this. 

A day of troubleshooting ...

... a very unusual problem that I've never heard of before in my ham shack, and I'm not sure I have anything to share. If you've been down the road of troubleshooting intermittent problems you're familiar with the idea that you may spend a lot of time deciding if you've fixed the intermittent problem, or just made it more intermittent. 

For one thing, I don't have single picture of the failure when it happens. I've been too distracted by trying to "make it stop!" 

Let me start from the beginning. Back in about 2018, I started running the various modes offered by physicist Joe Taylor, the vast majority of the time on what's called FT8. Yes I've used others, mostly FT4 which is like FT8 but less sensitive (less able to copy very weak signals) by using shorter transmit and receive intervals. The trade-off being you give up some sensitivity for shorter contacts - for those days (like today) when maybe you hear another state for a minute. I've used its meteor scatter mode, moonbounce mode, and more. 

Over the years, I've worked FT8 on all HF bands and 6m. My station has antennas for 80 to 6m except for 60m, a small chunk at around 5.5 MHz. 

A couple of nights ago, with 6 being as dead as it has been, I dropped down to HF, but instead of going to 80/40/30 as I typically go, on a spur of the moment decision, I went to 17m (18.068–18.168 MHz). It's a small band that hams were granted in the '79 World Administrative Radio Conference, or WARC, and the three bands that came out of that are known as the WARC bands. (If you've never heard of 17m, this seems to be a good overview). 

One the things I'm used to doing as last check on my station before I start to operate is hit the tune button, which just transmits a carrier at whatever your rig is set to. The (always there inline) power and VSWR meters looked perfectly normal, but nothing else did. Let me show you a screen capture of FT8 software (tuned to 30m - that's the only thing that's different) to make some points.

There are two windows here, the top one is the audio channel from 100 to 3100 Hz, each of the colored areas at the top are individual stations. In general the orange strands that are the most orange (like around 1700 Hz on the top scale) are the strongest, fading down to the more yellow ones (around 2000 Hz and that green rectangle). The spectrum at the bottom is more like a regular spectrum analyzer and is only showing the very topmost thin line of colors. The taller the spectrum the stronger the signal. 

When the "bad" happened, that topmost line was replaced by what looked like a continuous spectrum of lots of narrow "spikes," all red. Except spikes tend to have points and bases. This was just alternating big signal and nothing. Maybe like a comb, but all the red "teeth" were the same height and width. 

It gets weirder. The needle in the inline power meter that had previously measured the normal roughly 100 W transmit signal was now not showing any power at all. The receiver sounded muted, as it does during transmit. There's a transmit/receive indicator LED on the radio that stayed in transmit (red) instead of receive. 

It took a while to get it to stop; I had to reset everything. Turn the radio off and back on, reboot the computer, and several things. 

Yesterday, I started looking at it in more detail. I found that it did this on 20m but not higher: 15 to 10. This is helpful because 20 and 17 are on the same antenna, my Tennadyne T6 log periodic (LPDA). The other bands I've been tending to operate, 80, 40, 30 and 6m, haven't shown the issue. Then playing around on 17m, I found I could operate CW or SSB with no problems showing up. The frequency sensitivity made me think something in the LPDA's circuitry might be the problem. Looking up from the ground shows nothing, but it's at 25' above ground, so the view isn't that great. An easy next step seemed to be to check the grounds around the antenna. 

So that was today's start. All I could say was that the grounds looked just like the last time I did my routine inspection last spring. Nothing broken, nothing missing, nothing looking like the ground wire was replaced by weeds. They just looked like they've been outdoors and corroded a bit. The next thing to check was connections in the shack and while checking things on 17m again, I noticed the rig control software (Ham Radio Deluxe - HRD) would not always see the radio. So I did the old "unplug it then plug it back in" trick. That's a USB connection from the radio to a little box that sets up the modulation for these WSJT modes. That made a difference. It was easier to recover from the "red comb". 

Late in the day (it was nearly 5PM by this time) I decided to retest the setup on 17 and the problem was gone. I tested a couple of times and it worked. I tested 20m - no problems, and worked my way back up to 10 without seeing the problem again. Then I went back to 17 to "soak in the success" of just unplugging and re-plugging one cable. That's when it failed again. 

What was that thing about making the intermittent problem more intermittent? 

Around the time I sat down to write this I realized, I could use far more pictures than I've got. So I went back to the shack, tuned to 17 and hit the tune button to transmit. No problem. Tried it again - surely it must fail by now? - Nope. I think I transmitted 10 times and it never had the failure. Then I tuned it to a band I've never seen it fail on, 30m, for the picture above. 

What's next? Can't say I really know. More experiments and measurements, but I sure don't know what to go after. It looks like it's in the computer control of the rig. I've tried two different versions of the WSJT software, the latest and a somewhat earlier release. I'm on the latest update of HRD. 

NASA lays out updates to Artemis III mission

NASA had a live teleconference today to talk about the coming Artemis III mission to prepare for the next moon landing. It's all in a slightly over two hour video on YouTube.  Ars Technica has a good summary, and since most of this info has been covered there, and I've brought it here, their summary is easy to read. 

An important thing to put out early is that NASA is still planning to launch Artemis III by next summer, but they don't get more specific than that. This is a demonstration mission in near Earth orbit involving docking with both Blue Moon and Starship. The lunar landing mission will be "in 2028" but nothing more specific about how long after Artemis III they think they'll need to prepare. Let's say III launches in July of '27; will IV be able to roll in January or February of '28, or will it be in November or December? 

“This is an achievable path we are on right now,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said. “We have the mandate, we have the resources, and the support from our stakeholders to be able to execute, and that’s what we intend to do.”

It is commendable that Isaacman and his leadership have taken a hard look every element of the Artemis Program and sought to make changes where they can help the lunar lander companies execute and accelerate their plans. But can they hold to those dates?

It's important to remember that among this mission's objectives is to rendezvous and dock with both Starship and Blue Moon, so there are really two complete mission plans at play and it's only fair to present both of those here. 

First, SpaceX. You'll recall that the starting point before Jared Isaccman and when the current version of Artemis involved a lunar-orbiting space station called the Lunar Gateway. When SpaceX won the Human Landing System contract, that was a requirement. Isaccman ditched Lunar Gateway earlier this year, and SpaceX has adapted their HLS to the current requirements. They will fuel a Starship lunar lander in low-Earth orbit before docking with Orion in high-Earth orbit. For the landing mission, the crew will fly to the Moon inside Orion before two of four astronauts transfer into Starship for a landing on the Moon.

The SpaceX version of Artemis III's requirements 

Image credit: NASA

This week, the Rumor Mill got excited when a NASA Safety Panel reported that the current number of Starship tanker launches that will be required is “about 22.” As always, that rumor went around world several times before Elon Musk heard of it and said that estimate was wrong, and the actual number will be six to eight. 

I think it's fair to say that nobody really knows because of the vast amount of unknowns to consider. Jared Isaacman said essentially he didn't accept Musk's statement and thought it meant maybe six to eight "some day." So say it'll be somewhere between six and 22. 

Blue Origin's version of Artemis III's requirements 

Under the concept of operations released Friday, a New Glenn rocket (this could be an expendable version of the smaller 7×2 variant of New Glenn, or a reusable 9×4 rocket) would launch three “transfer stages” to low-Earth orbit. These transfer stages are modeled after the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, but have some significant modifications.

Then New Glenn would launch the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander into orbit, where it would rendezvous with the transfer stages that will push the stack to the Moon. This is not new information, as Ars first reported this architecture in March. However, NASA did reveal a potentially significant change on Friday.

Image Credit: NASA

The chart shared by NASA showed Orion docking with the Blue Moon lander in an elliptical lunar orbit, approximately 8,500 km above the Moon’s surface. However NASA is also working to have the option of docking with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.

The advantage of the low-Lunar orbit is it could significantly reduce the propellant needed by Blue Moon to bring astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up. As always, "engineering is the art of compromise" and the mass of propellant required to handle the higher orbit could be used elsewhere. Plus the different orbit could offer mission flexibility that's not available in the 8,500 km orbit. 

There's more to this conference than easily fits in this space. One of those is that since the SLS (Space Launch System) was designed, Artemis has been hampered by not having an upper stage (to include the Orion service module) that's got enough thrust to be useful. NASA announced they're working with ULA to specify and develop a different version of the Centaur Upper Stage of SLS. The concept is an upper stage replacement that would allow Orion to reach low-lunar orbit.

In fewer words, that's spending millions to fix a problem that SLS has had for as long as it has existed. For a rocket system that's already obscenely expensive to launch. As I've said so enough that I'm bored with it, a single SLS launch costs $4 billion. A Falcon Heavy costs a small percentage of that. It has less payload capacity than the SLS but not much less, so launch TWO modified Falcon Heavies for less than 10% of the cost of an SLS launch and get more payload to the moon. 

Europe's first reusable spacecraft has a major "oops!"

Europe has been working for some time on a spacecraft called Space Rider designed to be reused. The European Space Agency (ESA) performed a drop test back on October 6 intended to test out its parachute system, and it failed. Badly. 

The incident occurred during an Oct. 6 drop test of the full-scale Space Rider model, from the European Space Agency (ESA). The robotic vehicle's initial drogue parachute deployed successfully, but its main parafoil detached during deployment, leaving the prototype unable to slow its descent before crashing into the ground, according to ESA officials. The cause of the failure remains under investigation.

"Following several successful tests using representative vehicle masses, the latest system-level drop test in October was not completed as planned due to an anomaly during the parafoil deployment sequence," an ESA spokesperson confirmed in an email to Space.com. "An independent investigation is ongoing to determine its root cause and inform the next steps."

Render of ESA's Space Rider orbiter. (Image credit: European Space Agency)

Space Rider isn't intended as vehicle that takes a crew to a space station (ISS or another). It's designed to carry scientific experiments to orbit for up to two months, then return them to Earth for analysis. Its method of return, though, differs from that of any other spacecraft in use today. Space Rider's wingless, lifting-body design relies on a steerable parachute, or parafoil, to maneuver toward its landing area. This allows it to perform runway-style touchdowns, as opposed to the less accurate parachute-based systems in current use. The higher accuracy, in turn, allows heavier lift vehicles to recover the payloads, rather than picking up a capsule in a desert - like the picture of the capsule that returned the samples of asteroid Bennu in this post. The lifting body design is similar to something like the Dream Chaser or even the Space Shuttles, but neither of those systems had a lifting body-shaped parachute. 

According to Géraldine Naja, ESA's director of space transportation, the failure of the steerable parachute doesn't halt the program. 

"We hope that this test will not damage, or let's say lead us to modify, the remaining schedule and qualification activities," Naja said during an ESA Council media briefing on Oct. 22. "In any case, the remaining qualification activities are not on the critical path of the development of the Space Rider."

Naja described the incident as an unfortunate but important event. "We have had many successful tests before, but testing and validation is part of the development of a space system," she said.

The test vehicle that was destroyed was a full-sized model, referred to as being "minivan-sized" for a mental picture, reproduced the size and flight characteristics of its reentry module, with avionics to control its autonomous guidance and navigation systems, but the vehicle was far from a space-ready article. 

The Oct. 6 test took place at a military range on the Italian island of Sardinia, where the mockup was released from a helicopter at an altitude of approximately 2 miles (3 kilometers). According to Naja, the vehicle's initial drogue parachute triggered as expected and began slowing the Space Rider mock-up's descent before its larger, steerable parafoil was supposed to unfurl. The parafoil, however, detached during deployment, leaving the vehicle in freefall before impacting the ground. ESA has subsequently recovered all the craft's components.

I'd like to say something like "parachutes fail... it happens," but that sounds a little lowbrow. It's certainly something that shouldn't happen on a real mission, but, it sounds like they're operating with the belief that they need to build a replacement model to continue or re-start the testing and just the fact it's a model means many retests are required. That means this failure doesn't affect the rebuild and retest much at all.

The target for a "real" mission of the Space Rider system is just "later this decade." The could mean tomorrow or it could mean December of 2029. 

Looks like it's time for the BIG test flight

Word has started getting around that the next Starship Flight Test, FT-15, will be set up to attempt recovery of both the Super Heavy booster - which has already been done - and Starship, which has never been attempted. 

During their recent 3rd quarter financial update meeting, both Elon Musk and SpaceX president and Chief Operating Officer, Gwynne Shotwell, provided new performance targets for the vehicle. 

It has been a little more than three weeks since the 14th test flight of the massive rocket, which largely went well despite some issues with the Raptor rocket engine. SpaceX has gleaned enough data from that test, Musk said, to attempt a catch of both the Super Heavy first stage of the rocket and the Starship upper stage on the next flight.

Musk said he believes success is “more likely than not” for these attempts, but he added the company is hardware rich if there are failures. Both catches would happen at the company’s launch site in South Texas, Starbase. SpaceX is currently targeting November for this 15th test flight.

While the technical hurdles are well-known, and it's hard to imagine that after almost 700 Falcon 9 flights there's any company that knows more about landing things like this, there's at least one new aspect to this mission. Since Starship has to fly over Mexican territory to return to Starbase, the Mexican equivalent of the FAA will have to approve the mission. 

“We have had significant constructive engagement with the FAA, and we expect the license for our Flight 15 to include return to launch site and tower catch for both stages,” Shotwell said.

SpaceX is doing all they can to increase the Starship flight cadence. At the start of the month, the long version of the NextSpaceflight "next launches" page had two Starship flights, one in Texas and the other from Cape Canaveral SFS shown as a Starlink mission (so a "working flight"). Now there's a second Starship launch from Texas between those two, also shown as a "working flight" full of Starlink Satellites. Saying it's "between" might imply a definite order, but without specific NET dates in order, I wouldn't interpret it that way. Both are shown as NET 2026. Which includes now.

After this, COO Shotwell said they're going to start working on the orbital refueling flights they'll need to be doing soon for Artemis “early” next year.  

The company will also seek to complete a long-delayed refueling test of Starship early in 2027. This Starship-to-Starship refueling demonstration is an important milestone for SpaceX and NASA to prove the viability of Starship being refueled in low-Earth orbit for lunar missions.

Refueling on this scale has never been done before, and the company needs to get data on the efficiency of such transfers and the rate of boil-off of liquid oxygen and methane in space. This data will refine projections for how many launches are needed to support a Starship landing on the Moon for NASA as part of the Artemis Program.

For SpaceX, the first priority is reaching a high flight cadence for Starship and pushing the boundaries of vehicle reuse to enable it. Musk says he has high confidence they'll be able to catch Starship, but one flawless, successful catch would silence a lot of critics. He has also said he expects to reach a “weekly” flight cadence during the first half of 2027 and to launch twice weekly during the second half of the year. The key will be how quickly Starship can be restored to flight ready. 

“The rate at which we launch Starship will increase dramatically as we solve rapid and complete reusability,” Musk said. “At first there will be a little bit of refurbishment that’s needed between each flight, and we’ll iron out the need for any refurbishment such that you can immediately land the rocket and launch it again, just like an airplane.”

That’s the vision, at least. Achieving complete reusability with an orbital rocket has never been done before, so SpaceX’s engineering team will undoubtedly face some significant hurdles. Over time, however, they are likely to get close to the vision of launching, landing, and reflying rockets.

SpaceX's 14th Starship test flight on Monday morning, Sept. 28 from Starbase, Texas, looking north along the gulf coast. Image Credit: SpaceX

EDIT to Add 10/22/26 11:15AM: Correct date in the image caption. Short circuit in the headset.

Since there's no real big news

Since it's a slow day, I'll fill in some pictures I took of this morning's Bandwagon mission from SpaceX. 

I told the story yesterday of getting up at 6:00 AM and immediately finding the launch had been scrubbed a few hours before. I repeated the setup for this morning and quickly found the mission had been slipped from 6:00 to 7:05 this morning. That's big because what was getting me up to watch the mission was just in case there was a repeat of the Space Jellyfish phenomenon that happened last week. It was big, beautiful and was visible over a wide area of the country. 

It didn't take terribly long to decide we'd just wait until launch time rather than try to nap for the extra half hour. Sunrise here was 7:27 so while the launch time was before sunrise it was still massively lighter than it was that 45 minutes earlier when I found out the mission was moved to 7:05AM, but after watching the lead-up to the launch on NASASpaceflight's YouTube channel, I grabbed my backup, more or less point and shoot camera and wandered out onto the back porch waiting to take some pictures. 

The first one is looking SE just after Main Engine CutOff (MECO). The white contrail off to the left was from the booster on this flight, then there's a clear spot when no engines were running, followed by the short white line from SES, Second Engine Start, which is the second stage's contrail. 

Next is several seconds later when both the main and second stage contrails are expanding a bit, and there's a start of Space Jellyfish starting up around the second stage. 

If you look closely in the jellyfish, you'll that the second stage engine is a visible bright spot with a triangular (almost fan-shaped) white spot and just behind that is a small white spot which (I think) is from the booster dropping away. 

Here's a zoomed in pic of just that jellyfish with things enlarged and spread out, so easier to see. 

By this time, around three minutes after launch, the show is moving farther southeast, which translates into lower in the sky and closer to behind a neighbor's tree, so we came back in to watch the booster land on the recovery drone ship. All pictures by me, SiG.

Unlike the enormously big and beautiful jellyfish produced last week, this one was neither unusually big or beautiful. It was more like the vast majority of these that we've seen. There are advantages to living near one of busiest spaceports in the world.

Weather forced a scrub of this morning's SpaceX mission

This morning's 6:30 AM EDT launch of the Bandwagon-5 Ride Sharing mission was scrubbed due to weather well before the published launch time. I had set my alarm for 6:00 AM EDT so that I could feed the master (Tyla the cat) and be able to check the status without getting too close to the launch time. I turned this computer on so it could get connected while I fed her. The first time I could look at the screen for the launch was pretty much 6:15 and the coverage wasn't on, just a "click here to be notified" notice that had a time listed from tomorrow morning, 6:30 AM on 10/20. 

Getting up at 6:00 AM to watch the launch was pretty much because I missed the "space jellyfish" last launch, and I want to be outside for this one. That and the fact that views should be far better than last week because the general direction of this one is SE instead of NE. Once I found the launch was scrubbed and I knew Tyla wouldn't pester me for breakfast within an hour, I went back to bed and slept 'till 8:30. While having the launch scrubbed is less than ideal, I wouldn't object much if the same thing happened tomorrow. The alarm is already set. I'm not outside at 6:30 in the morning much, so I don't know how bad the mosquitoes will be this year.

There are some interesting aspects of this launch. You may recall reading that SpaceX introduced a reentry vehicle called Starfall back on June 19. I tried several times to find info on the status of that test flight, but never found anything. Until now. The Starfall reentry vehicle will fly again tomorrow. SpaceX didn’t state what, if any, payloads will be onboard this Starfall mission so we don't know if it's considered operational or still in development.

The Federal Aviation Administration noted in an environmental assessment of Starfall that the vehicle is about 0.75 meters (2.5 feet) tall, 3.1 meters (10.2 feet) in diameter, and has a mass of about 2,100 kilograms (4,600 pounds). The FAA said a single Starfall capsule has the ability to support up to 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of payload mass. 

Starfall isn't the only reentry vehicle on this Bandwagon mission. 

Varda Space Industries, which focuses on pharmaceutical research missions, is launching its W-Series 7 spacecraft, which is about three times smaller than Starfall. 

Varda is a pharmaceutical company and they're exploring whether they can improve the physical characteristics of the drugs by doing some stages of manufacturing in zero G. 

“In microgravity, molecules can crystallize differently than they do on Earth, potentially producing crystal forms with improved properties, including better solubility,” Varda wrote on its website prior to launch. “If successful, the experiment could help turn powerful protein-degrading molecules into more practical and effective cancer treatments.” 

Many of the 32 payloads onboard SpaceX’s Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission are pictured prior to full encapsulation inside a Falcon 9 payload fairing. Image: SpaceX

So let's all hope this mission goes as planned at 6:30 tomorrow morning. 

Do you remember this name?

The name is Dr. Judy Shelton. She's a long-time advocate for what I consider sane monetary policy, and "real money" - which is to say money that can't be created in any quantity whenever desired. She once called the Federal Reserve Bank "almost a rogue agency" and questioned whether it could be trusted in having oversight of the dollar. 

What brings her name back? To be 100% open, I've been pondering writing on some of the economic mess that's in the back drop for all the politics sucking up headlines all the the time. I was looking at some of my previous pondering on going back to something like a gold standard that can't just be revalued at any time the bankers want. While looking around, headlines showed up saying Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent had hired Dr. Shelton as a counselor to the Secretary. That was back on October 9th, so recent news that I was unaware of. 

October 9, 2026

WASHINGTON— Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent announced today a key senior appointment at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Dr. Judy Shelton will serve as a Counselor in the Office of the Secretary.

Shelton is an economist and author specializing in international financial and currency issues. She previously served as U.S. Director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and as Chairman of the National Endowment for Democracy. She has testified numerous times before Congress as an expert witness on international financial relations and has consulted with national security officials on global economic developments.

At Treasury, Shelton will advise the Secretary on currency policy, with a particular focus on evaluating financial conditions in China.

Dr. Shelton has been involved politics as far back as I can read, working on the campaigns of Bob Dole ('96), Trump (both campaigns) and Dr. Ben Carson's ('16). She has advocated that the US Treasury should sell not just "futures" to pay some return after some number of years, but sell Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) which would be redeemable in either dollars or gold, effectively tying the two together without a formal gold standard. 

One of the things I bitch about pretty regularly is that we've been off a real money system for so long - really since the 1913 creation of the Fed, with some historical events along the way that made things worse - for so long that people don't think at their gut level that the prices associated with things like the assessed value of their house, or even their pay, go up partly to cover the "constant benign inflation" the Fed pushes on us. The Fed claims they're aiming for 2 to 3% but rarely achieve that. They create that inflation by printing more money, more money drives prices of everything up. If you work providing "goods or services", you have to pay more for your raw materials to make your product and you have to pay more to the people that turn things into that product. If you're that worker, you expect your pay to go up at least every year. If there's no Central Bank driven inflation, you probably don't get that automatically. The trade being that the cost of everything hasn't gone up, either. 

Dr. Shelton on a Fox Business News video dated September 21, 2022. Image credit: screen capture from the video. Interview with Larry Kudlow.

A mission I've been waiting for is on Monday

Since the first time I saw a reference to MMX - the Martian Moon eXploration - mission, I've been looking forward to this. The vast majority of the time up to now that's just been noting its place in the NextSpaceflight lineup and keeping an eye on it. It has been set on a date that we've been closing in on, and is now scheduled for a launch Monday, US Eastern time. In Japan it's 4:41:03 JST on Oct. 20 - which is 3:41:03 PM EDT / 1941:03 UTC on Monday Oct. 19. Spaceflight Now adds: 

An H3 launch vehicle, a rocket developed through a partnership between Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), will launch the Martian Moons eXplorer (MMX) mission to survey the Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos. This is set to be the first sample return mission from the Martian sphere of influence with the samples from Phobos expected to return to Earth in fiscal year 2031. The mission is supported by NASA, CNES, DLR, and ESA. 

Next Spaceflight's mission page adds:
A small French rover, built in cooperation with Germany, will also be embarked on the mission and should be able to explore the moon's surface.

To me, the mission is one to watch for a variety of reasons. The obvious first one is that no probe from any nation has ever visited the Martian moons before. Compared to Earth's moon, the Martian moons are tiny so it'll be interesting to see them actually land on Phobos (their target) and maneuver around on the surface to get the mission done. Granted that small probes don't sneeze, but I think if any of us could sneeze on Phobos, it would be enough to reach escape velocity. (Warning: Do Not Try This at Home on Phobos- simply not wearing your space suit would be fatal)

Finally, there's the whole matter of returning the samples gathered by their Rover and compare that to the samples obtained by the Perseverance Rover currently on Mars. When that mission was conceived, the plans were for Percy (the Rover) to pick some interesting samples, store them in titanium tubes ("the size of a large hot dog") onboard the rover and wait for some miracle mission out of nowhere to send a spacecraft to retrieve the samples and then fly them back to Earth. That's an exaggeration, but not a huge one. The bottom line is that NASA gave up on the Sample Return in 2024 after a couple of attempts to come up something they could afford. They had expected to pay $4.4 Billion for a mission to go get those samples, and cancelled when the Requested Proposals were in the range of $8 billion to $11 billion. 

NASA's (Science.NASA.gov) web page on this mission goes into details on NASA's contributions to the mission. 

“The samples from MMX will bring forth paradigm-shifting science on the Mars system for generations to come, especially as NASA prepares to send the first humans to Mars,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. ...

NASA’s contributions to the mission include the Mars-moon Exploration with Gamma rays and Neutrons (MEGANE) spectrograph instrument, the Pneumatic Sampler (P-Sampler) technology demonstration, and communications and navigation support from the agency’s Deep Space Network, as well as funding United States scientists participating on the MMX science team.

The MEGANE (pronounced meh-GAH-nay, the Japanese word for eyeglasses) spectrograph will help scientists “see” what Phobos is made of by measuring neutrons and gamma rays emitted from the moon’s surface and determining its chemical elemental composition, which will provide important clues about its origin.

An artist’s concept of JAXA’s MMX spacecraft during its Mars’ orbit insertion. The Martian moon Phobos, which MMX will explore and sample, is in the background. Image credit: JAXA

I'm planning and hoping to watch this mission begin on Monday afternoon.

Blue Origin expanding its expansion

Blue Origin, already enlarging its operations launch facilities on Cape Canaveral, announced an expansion of this expansion with the intent to launch over a hundred times a year. How much expansion is that? Double what we've already heard of.

The company said it would add two launch pads for the New Glenn rocket, in addition to two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.

The company also plans to procure two additional landing ships to catch and return the first stage of the New Glenn rocket (it currently has one, named Jacklyn). Finally, Blue Origin said it would add a new customer integration facility, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will feature four payload bays to process multiple missions at the same time.

“These investments are centered on one goal: building the capacity to support more missions, more reliably, and more efficiently,” wrote Ian Richardson, senior vice president of operations at Blue Origin, in an update on the company’s website this morning. “As we look ahead, this infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade.

Blue Origin is already one of the largest investors in the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, as well as in the surrounding counties that the CCSFS is part of. 

“Our manufacturing and operations footprint has more than doubled in the last couple of years, now spanning more than 20 sites across Brevard and Orange Counties,” Richardson wrote. “Blue Origin is the only company—and the largest employer—to manufacture, launch, and refurbish rockets on the Space Coast.” 

They're already invested about $3 billion in facilities and infrastructure in Florida, as well as having 5,000 employees working in Florida. In addition, we need to recognize that (like all companies) they provide sales for other companies. They say there are 500 companies around the state they do business with. 

Much like was mentioned about Rocket Lab in the previous post, Blue sees the potential for sales from organizations that stand to lose their rides into space as SpaceX retires the Falcon 9. 

This has created an opening for medium- and heavy-lift vehicles that, if Blue Origin can get New Glenn flying successfully and frequently, it is poised to fill. The company’s previous investments, along with the new infrastructure, suggest Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is deadly serious about making this a reality.

Some of this work has been ongoing for a while. Of course, there has been continuous effort to rebuild the launch pad for New Glenn after the explosion of the first stage during a test firing at the end of last May - in preparation for a reuse launch by June 4. In addition to that, there's an effort to both complete building infrastructure for and then start launching the heavy lift 9x4 New Glenn. 

A map of some of Blue Origin’s key CCSFS facilities. LC-36A, on the left is pad that was destroyed in May and being rebuilt. LC-36B, the biggest, is for the 9x4 New Glenn. Credit: Blue Origin

The 9×4 rocket is designed to carry 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, and more than 20 tons to trans-lunar injection. The company has not confirmed this, but Blue Origin likely needs the 9×4 variant as part of its plans to launch a human lander to the Moon for NASA as part of the Artemis Program. It could debut in 2028 if development goes well.

Rocket Lab won't be launching Neutron in '26

It stuck me as ironic when I saw the headline about the Neutron's First Launch slipping again this evening, because we had just put up a little reference to the Neutron back on October 5 saying it wasn't slipping.

The last thing I published about the Neutron was just over three weeks ago, August 11, and the focus was on their goal to launch the new rocket before the end of this year. While they didn't say anything like, "2026 ain't happening; the new date is ..." the deadline is squeezing them, but they haven't given up on it.

They announced today that their Neutron launch vehicle won’t fly until 2027, citing an issue discovered during manufacturing of the rocket’s carbon composite fuel tanks. This probably falls into the category of being a news story because it's a statement by Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck. It was pretty widely known that they were being pushed to their limits with this vehicle and entering domains of the industry they're not experts in. 

Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, identified a manufacturing defect as the reason for Neutron’s latest schedule slip. The problem lies in the dome sections at the ends of the rocket’s first stage propellant tanks.

“Recently, we identified an issue with the manufacturing process for the propellant domes specifically, and this caused us to delay production and investigate further,” Beck said in a video released by Rocket Lab.

This is leading to some probably inevitable discussion of whether or not they know what they're doing with carbon fiber construction. Carbon composite structures, are generally low weight, high strength, and corrosion resistance. But it's not like laying down metal tubes and joining pieces together, and especially not when designed for ultimate strength to weight ratios with minimum amounts of the carbon fiber cloth and epoxy. They want the epoxy to completely cover every graphite thread, but not one gram of epoxy more.

Engineers discovered voids, or air pockets, between layers of carbon fiber that make up the domes’ composite structure. Carbon composite manufacturing involves laying down carbon fiber layers in a mold, then curing, or heating, the material to bind the fibers together. But this is a tricky process, especially for large structures that won’t fit into an autoclave, a high-pressure thermal curing chamber common in modern aerospace factories.

The Neutron rocket’s first stage is the “largest pressurized structure ever made out of carbon composite,” Beck said. “Because of its scale, we’ve had to develop new out-of-autoclave processes to build Neutron, and this includes custom cure cycles for the very large pieces, like the forward and aft domes for the propellant tanks on Stage One.”

They believe that these voids came from an attempt to fix an issue found after a Neutron propellant tank unexpectedly ruptured during a hydrostatic pressure test in January, a failure blamed on a manufacturing defect at a “critical join” in the tank.

Propellant tank domes inside Rocket Lab’s Neutron factory. Credit: Rocket Lab

Rocket Lab said the problem appears to be solved after modifying the manufacturing process again. An aft propellant dome made with the updated procedure passed inspection.

“We’ve solved the problem,” Beck said. “That gives us complete confidence to move forward with the new forward dome. That process to make a new forward dome, combining with all the time that it took to investigate, identify, and resolve the issue, has pushed Neutron’s first launch date to next year.”

Rocket Lab's Electron, small payload-class rocket, has been very successful and made them one in the industry to keep your eyes on. The Electron rocket is 3.9 feet in diameter, capable of putting 660 pounds into Low Earth Orbit, while the new Neutron measures 23 feet across at its widest point and will be capable of putting 29,000 pounds into LEO. That's quite a step up. 

I think it's a bit unfair to emphasize their failures and ignore their successes in the Neutron development. They've achieved quite a lot, but still have more than a little bit left to go. As a rough guess, say they're around 80% done. The remaining work could go quickly. Or not. 

They still have lots to do before they can do the first launch. The one that sounds biggest is qualification of the rocket’s methane-fueled Archimedes engine, nine of which will power the Neutron booster. They reported in August that it was heading into the “final stretch” of engine qualification testing. 

Once that is complete, teams will begin the launch campaign on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Launch campaigns for new rockets often take months before a first flight, involving multiple integrated fueling tests, countdown rehearsals, and a static fire.

Engineers often discover new problems during integrated testing, requiring repeat tests and tweaks to procedures and hardware on the launch pad and the rocket. ...

And that's why they do such testing. 

Neutron seem to be being designed "from the ground up" to be a competitor to SpaceX's Falcon 9, reusable and similar payloads. It looks like Neutron will be hitting the market as Falcon 9 is being retired - as SpaceX has talked about doing soon as they move more toward Starship. 

Illustration of Rocket Lab's Neutron with the "Hungry Hungry Hippo" system delivering an upper stage with payload. Image credit: Rocket Lab

We're looking at the first probes to Venus in over 35 years

NASA's last long duration mission to Venus was the Magellan probe, launched in 1989 and ended its mission in 1994. Magellan was a radar mapping mission (Synthetic Aperture Radar) that never landed on the planet but generated the most complete, highest resolution, radar map of the planet long thought to be the one in our solar system closest to being Earth's twin - at least in size. Again, that ended in 1994, 32 years ago. 

There's a couple of satellites being prepared for missions within a few years. 

Two NASA missions are on track to launch to Venus in the early 2030s. The first, known as the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI), is now scheduled for launch in December 2030, a year earlier than previously planned. DAVINCI will send a parachute-assisted descent probe through the atmosphere of Venus, returning the first direct images of the planet’s surface since 1982. A second mission, Venus Emissivity, Radio science, InSAR, Topography, And Spectroscopy (VERITAS), will follow with a launch in November 2032 to map the Venusian surface by radar from orbit.

The European Space Agency is building another orbiter, Envision, for launch to Venus in 2032. The Venus armada might get started as soon as next year, when Rocket Lab aims to launch a privately funded probe to search for signs of organic material in the planet’s clouds.

That comes from an update last week at a meeting of the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG), a worldwide group of scientists focused on research of the planet.

There has been virtually no talk about any of these missions in the press I read; the vast majority of what gets talked about pretty much is split between Mars, the moon, and Earth observation, especially anything that can be linked to "global warming." If you've read anything about Venus, you'll know it's a rather hostile and difficult place to visit.

Venus is roughly the same size as Earth and may have once shared a similar climate, but something happened to turn it into an inhospitable world with an atmosphere made of nearly pure carbon dioxide, clouds of toxic sulfuric acid, and temperatures hot enough to melt lead, about 872° Fahrenheit (467° Celsius).

There’s still plenty to learn about Venus. The planet is less well mapped than Mars, and scientists aren’t exactly sure what triggered Venus’ runaway greenhouse effect. It is notoriously difficult to land on Venus, where the air pressure is 93 times that of sea level on Earth, equivalent to about 3,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface.

While Japan and Europe launched orbiters to Venus in 2005 and 2010 with instruments to improve the Magellan SAR results from the 1990s, let's just say it apparently has taken around 30 years to get NASA onboard with doing this.

“The Venus community is absolutely elated and excited and wants to just get to work and see this happen,” said Ellen Stofan, a Venus scientist and under secretary for Science and Research at the Smithsonian Institution, in an interview with Ars at the time. 

The reality of the situation is that there is constant pressure to cut NASA's expenses, and no organization, no company, nobody can do everything that's a good and interesting idea. You might recall that the Mars Sample Return mission, expected to return samples gathered by the Perseverance Mars Rover and planned for during that whole mission development, was cancelled. It was simply too expensive to send another Mars mission over to pick up the samples. You'll find similar talk about all of these Venus missions. 

NASA’s planetary science budget remains under pressure. The Trump administration has twice proposed deep cuts in planetary science. Congress restored most of the funding for fiscal year 2026 and is expected to do the same in the 2027 budget.

Ending support for Europe’s Envision mission and canceling Mars Sample Return freed up enough funding for NASA to move forward with DAVINCI and VERITAS, and in some cases, buy back some of their past delays. DAVINCI is now targeting a launch in December 2030, a year earlier than the previous plan.

“Thanks to encouragement in early ’26 from our leaders at NASA Headquarters and the Planetary Science Division,” said Garvin, who leads the DAVINCI science team. “This is our new scenario for the most cost-effective and science-effective launch to Venus … What we’ve done now is accelerated launch by 54 weeks to a case where we have a very low delta-V trajectory that gets off the ground in late December 2030.”

At the moment, then, both DAVINCI and VERITAS have budget and support to get to their launch dates. VERITAS is targeted to launch in November 2032, the month after DAVINCI arrives at Venus. The two teams are working hard to get their missions to succeed. 

This Magellan (false color) radar image aligns with the surface features seen on WISPR images captured by Parker Solar Probe during its third flyby of the planet in July 2020. Image Credit: Magellan Team/JPL/USGS  The picture can be downloaded here.

[As an aside, I never cease to be amazed at programs with names like DAVINCI or VERITAS that come from acronyms of the most obscure sounding words or phrases you can think of. Which comes first? One would think the instruments and mission get defined, but I'm not convinced it doesn't turn into something like, "I need another 'I' to complete the name we came up with." ... "If we talk about imaging for the 'I', can we add something to do the imaging?"] 

A couple of SpaceX news items

First, about this morning's launch from Cape Canaveral's SLC-40 at 6:33, after writing last night's post I weighed getting up at around 6:15 for this morning's launch. The positive side was hope it would be an eye "candy" treat, while the negative was the fact that the launch was to the northeast and that's generally the worst launch direction for visibility to us here. Many times we get no more than a glimpse of a spot of light moving in the distance. The launch being 45 minutes or so before sunrise increases the chances of seeing that spot, but the prettiest launches to watch tend to be between east and south. Both of those are unusual, with southeast being the most common. 

So do I get up? Getting up to get ready for work isn't a concern but her majesty (Tyla the cat) wakes me up virtually every morning for breakfast the only question is when. I figured if she woke me up in time, I'd go outside. The law of "the general perversion of nature" therefore demands she wouldn't wake me up until well after the launch and that's exactly what happened. 

Luckily though, in this morning's email, commenter Ralph last night had emailed me a spectacular photo of the launch and something that I never thought about last night at all. These effects are called Space Jellyfish and this is probably the most photogenic one I've ever seen. 

Space Jellyfish - Image credit above ("commenter Ralph")

It's worth a little time in description because the three sections might not be what you think. The big, fairly oval-shaped whitish cloud with what looks like a six pointed star on the bottom left is the second stage carrying the payload and while it seems closer to us, it's the farthest away of the three main things you can see. The middle area that looks like a cotton ball or a bunch of loose threads is where the separating booster heading back to us and that second stage going away from us at the bottom both blew rocket exhaust into each other. At the top right, you'll see a sort of pointed triangle shape which is the booster heading back for its landing and reuse. It's still going up at that point in time, but eventually flies a planned trajectory to the recovery ship.  

I just wish I'd gotten up to see this. 

SpaceX launched the first Starlink mission from Vandenberg in over 3 weeks

That was last night (Oct 12) at 8:28 PM EDT 5:28 PM CA time and 0028 on Oct 13 UTC. Space.com points out this was the first such mission since September 19, three weeks and two days ago. That was a very long delay between Starlink missions based on the rates when they were launching from both coasts (Vandenberg SFB and Cape Canaveral SFS). Though they don't go into the reasons part of the reason must come from the transition from the Starlink versions 1 through 2 that the Falcon 9 can handle and the Starlink V3 satellites that need to be launched by Starship - or something rated heavier lift than the Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 seems to be the most phenomenal rocket ever developed, with 708 missions through last night, out of which 705 were successful, a mere 99.6%.

Back on the September 28 flight of Starship 14, the ship carried and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites.

This will happen many more times going forward, if all goes to plan: The Starlink V3 constellation will eventually consist of about 100,000 satellites, all of which will fly on Starship, Elon Musk has said. 

100,000 Satellites? What's that old song that says, "when you dream, dream big"?

Booster 1088 lands on OCISLY (Of Course I Still Love You) after last night's Starlink mission, the booster's 20th mission. Credit: SpaceX

Early Tuesday morning SpaceX launch to the ISS

Well before sunrise on Tuesday, 6:33 AM EDT with sunrise at 7:22 AM, SpaceX is set to launch a cargo payload of about 6300 pounds to the ISS. The mission is known as CRS-35 and, yes, the "35" means it's the 35th of these Commercial Resupply Service missions.

This mission will deliver the fourth pair of iROSA solar arrays which will be used to provide additional power to the station. 

The mission can be watched via NASASpaceflight (.com)  or via Space.com's link on NASA video on YouTube as well. The NASA Spaceflight video will start around one hour before liftoff, while the Space.com video starts quite a bit later 6:15 a.m. EDT (1015 GMT) or 45 minutes after NASASpaceflight.com's video starts. 

Not the last launch but a "file photo" of a 2021 Cargo Dragon launch (where "file photo" means the file is my Blogger account), CRS-21 mission lifting off December 2020 - SpaceX Photo

How 'bout some Holiday Weekend Memes?

I'm not sure how I didn't get to most of wanted to do today, but it was a "hey, why not?" kinda moment.

 One that I've loved since the moment I first saw it:

Note the logo on top right of the box for Glaxo Smith Kline drugs. This is genius-level artwork. 

How'd you like to find this file of miscellaneous forms where you work? Or at your doctor? Or...?

This is a different form but the subject is exactly the same joke my son and I would laugh over while he was starting out in Chemistry at Florida State University. That was about Y2K, so years before this story.

 

The season is coming for snow plow shoes 

 And finally

 

All I could think of.

On 10/10 day

October 10th, which is 10/10 both for the way Americans and the rest of the world write the date, could well mean more to hams than to "regular" people. Some of you are nodding in agreement already. 

Quick explanation, among ham radio's relatively strange habits is to refer to the wavelengths of various frequencies we're allocated by their metric lengths. The High Frequency spectrum is spread across the 3.0  to 30MHz frequency range, but there are more allocations above and below the HF band. Now, I don't personally have any radios that read out in wavelengths in metric or US numbers but that could be done. It just isn't done routinely. 

The general allocation of HF bands for hams in the US, given in meters is 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10 meters. It's not universally true that the bands we use contain any frequency for those wave lengths. Most of the time it's just "close enough" for someone naming it. When I was first licensed, in 1976, the bands labelled 60, 30, 17, and 12 meters weren't available to hams, it was just 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters. 

For working far away stations, the higher frequency bands tend to propagate over longer distances due to using the higher F2 layer of the ionosphere. That means that when conditions are good, you'll hear places on 10 meters that are farther than you'll hear on lower frequencies. The other side of that is that more people will tune their rigs to 10m than when conditions aren't as good - also called "when the band isn't open." 

So some time ago - I really haven't found a summary of that today - a group of guys who wanted to try to encourage more use of 10 meters got together and started a club called 10-10 International and one of their "tricks" to get more people on 10 was to issue "Ten Ten numbers" which fed into contests and other activities on the air in which transmitting a receiving each other's 10-10 numbers was the way scores were determined. I got my 10-10 number early in my "ham life", July of '77.

Since today was 10/10 (until 7:59:59 PM in EDT), I thought it would be a good time to get on 10m and see if there was any activity going on where stations were swapping numbers. Bottom line: nope. In close to an hour tuning around the SSB portion and FT8 channel I heard and saw (read? "copied?") nobody giving a 10-10 number. In fact, I heard one other person and he was calling CQ from California.

Today's Planetary K index (K_P). The three tallest bars on the right include my time listening in. (Source, but you won't get this one, you'll get the one closest to the UTC time that you click on the link.) Was the dead band due to the Geomagnetic storm (G2 in the orange)? Could be. 

NASA issues RFP for private space stations

Today, Friday October 9, NASA released a Request For Proposals (RFP) to the US commercial space industry to develop private space stations that, as early as 2030, will succeed the International Space Station as a place for astronauts to live in low-Earth orbit.

In a cover letter accompanying the 360-page “request for proposals,” NASA stated its plan: “This will ensure NASA has a sustained human presence in LEO for crew members to perform science and exploration.” Several private companies that have worked for years on designing and developing such stations have been keen to learn exactly what capabilities NASA is seeking. These new documents finally provide some answers.

NASA’s solicitation can be found here. Industry responses are due back to NASA on December 8. NASA said it plans to select “two or more” contractors in this phase of the competition, and intends to make a final decision in April.

In a statement accompanying the RFP, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said they will never give up their presence in Low Earth Orbit. 

“We will continue to need a place to conduct research, develop technologies, train crews, and prepare for missions to the Moon and Mars. Commercial space stations may provide that capability while creating new opportunities for American industry and allowing NASA to concentrate more of our resources on the near-impossible missions ahead.” 

We can speculate which companies are likely to respond to this request. We know that Axiom Space, Vast Space, Voyager (Starlab) Space, and Blue Origin have all talked about putting up their own Space Stations, so those are probably most likely. The big question is the who the wild card will be - or if there will be several new wild cards.

On the mildly surprising side, SpaceX has not expressed any interest in Space Stations, so they're not expected to bid.

Which adds to the other big question: how will travelers get to and from this Space Station?

In earlier discussions with potential space station providers, NASA had indicated it may leave acquiring transportation to the contractors—basically saying it was their responsibility to sell an end-to-end service to the space agency.
...
But in the new request for proposals (RFP), the space agency goes further in support of would-be space station operators. As part of their bids, contractors do not need to provide proof of a signed contract with Boeing (or another transportation provider), or even a letter of intent. NASA is even offering to “furnish” transportation for the first four NASA service missions to the private stations, likely meaning it will help broker deals between the private companies and Boeing.

Artist's concept of the Vast Space Haven-2 space station. Image credit: Vast Space

That looks more like a "Space Station" than the Haven-1 we talked about almost exactly one year ago today.

The most important SW engineer that most people don't know passes

Ten years ago, in July of 2016, I ran into a story in an engineering magazine on the computer hardware and software used to help Apollo 11 become the first time people from Earth laid foot on the moon. Buried in that post is an introduction to someone who appears to have been the software creator behind the Apollo Guidance Computer, and much of the Apollo software, a young woman named Margaret Hamilton. 

Margaret Hamilton passed away last week at the age of 90. Ars Technica runs a biography of Hamilton today. Much of it resonated with me.

Margaret Hamilton, who coined the term “software engineering” and led the development of onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo program in the 1960s, died last week at the age of 90. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, Hamilton was also immortalized as a LEGO minifig the following year—part of the “Women of NASA” set that also included astronauts Mae Jemison and Sally Ride.

“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer—to say she was ahead of her time—would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved,” said Olivier de Weck, interim head of the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program’s success.”

After graduating from Earlham College in 1958 with a degree in mathematics and a minor in philosophy. She married for the first time to James Hamilton, also in 1958. The plan was for her to work until he finished his law degree, after which he would support her through graduate school to earn a PhD in mathematics.

At this point, she ended up working for MIT Mathematician Edward Lorenz. If you've ever been around fluid mechanics, you're probably familiar with the term "Lorenz Equations" - he was trying to construct a mathematical model of the weather using a set of differential equations representing changes in temperature, pressure, wind velocity, and the like. You'll know that he discovered a problem with sensitivity, now widely referred to as "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," and considered a major impact of chaos theory.

You’ve probably heard the famous story of how Lorenz kept a continuous simulation running on his LGP-30 computer, and of that fateful 1961 day when he realized that even small differences in starting values could lead to very different outcomes—a sensitivity to initial conditions that is a hallmark of chaos theory, along with strange attractors. You might not have known that it was Hamilton who was responsible for programming the LGP-30. 

Computers were still pretty unusual things for scientists to work on. To borrow from that linked article:

(About the Royal McBee LGP-30.) This “desk” computer — it was the size of a desk — weighed some 800 pounds and sounded like a passing propeller plane. It was so loud that it even got its own office on the fifth floor in Building 24, a drab structure near the center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

There really weren't things like compilers they could have bought to take typed input and compile it into computer code. They had to invent that. 

Computers were still a novelty at the time, and neither Lorenz nor Hamilton had any programming knowledge; they taught themselves. Per a 2019 Quanta article, Lorenz was amused by her unusual methods: For instance, she once bypassed the “clunky debugging process” by rolling the paper tape down the hallway and editing the binary code by hand with a pencil. “I’d poke holes for ones, and I’d cover up with Scotch tape the others,” she recalled. Hamilton moved to another project in 1961, but not before training her replacement: a recent math graduate from Mount Holyoke named Ellen Fetter. Lorenz acknowledged the contributions of both women in his papers.

...

By 1965, Hamilton was all set to go to graduate school as planned when her husband spotted a newspaper ad saying that MIT’s Instrumentation Lab needed people to develop onboard guidance computer software for NASA’s Apollo program. She was the first programmer hired, and the first woman, working on six lunar landing missions from 1969 to 1972. At the time, binary code was stored using copper wires wound around cores. A “1” was a wire passing through a core, and a “0” was a wire bypassing the core. New England textile workers were hired to weave them together into long ropes, earning Hamilton the moniker “rope mother,” since she was responsible for those ropes.

Can you envision editing your code for a critical piece of software like that? A wire through or bypassing a toroid core? 

There's more to the story just in that Ars Article, and I'm sure more if I looked around a bit more. For example, at one point, Hamilton would routinely bring her daughter Lauren to the lab on nights and weekends. One time, the kid was playing around at a computer that was running software and entered something on a keyboard that crashed the system. While nobody was advocating for putting this sort of "idiot proofing" into the software for the Apollo missions, she could see it as a possibility with astronauts floating around in zero G with little control of their position. She asked NASA higher-ups if she could add a safeguard to prevent this from happening on an actual mission, but those higher-ups didn’t take it seriously.

Until astronaut Jim Lovell actually made an error like that during the Apollo 8 mission, the first to orbit the Moon, causing all the navigational data to vanish. Hamilton was called in to retrieve the data, jokingly referring to this as the “Lauren bug.” 

Hamilton in 1969, standing next to listings of the Apollo guidance software she and her MIT team produced. Image credit: NASA

By 1968 Hamilton was "assistant director in charge" of the Command and Service module software. She thought it would be a good addition to incorporate a failsafe into the system software’s “priority display” interface routines, should the onboard guidance computer become overloaded with more tasks than it could handle in real time.

That’s exactly what happened on the historic Apollo 11 mission in 1969. As the Eagle lunar module approached the Moon, Buzz Aldrin entered the codes to display altitude and other relevant data on the screen. The onboard computer started flashing alarms, forcing Mission Control to consider aborting the landing. Hamilton’s fail-safe meant that the computer was prioritizing essential tasks and canceling nonessential ones, and the alarm was to let astronauts know that this was happening. Thanks to Hamilton’s foresight, Eagle still safely landed on the Sea of Tranquility.

After the Apollo program, Margaret Hamilton worked in the same basic place, then called Draper Lab, until 1976. She went on to found two companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1985. Its main product is the Universal Systems Language (USL) for developing complex software systems that prioritized error prevention and defensive programming. 

RIP Margaret Hamilton. Not everyone gets to say they left the world a better place than they found it. Many try. You achieved it.