Wherein tonight's subtitle should be "two space-related and one miscellaneous."
Virgin Galactic Sets Date for First Commercial SpaceShipTwo Flight
Virgin Galactic announced on June 15 that it plans to conduct the first commercial flight of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle in late June on a mission for the Italian Air Force.
Virgin said its “Galactic 01” mission will take place between June 27 and June 30 from Spaceport America in New Mexico. That will carry three people from the Italian Air Force and the National Research Council of Italy under a contract Virgin Galactic signed with the Italian Air Force in 2019.
Virgin Galactic, of course, is the "other one" of the Virgin companies started by Sir Richard Branson, the one that has done some manned suborbital flights with its two-pilot, six-passenger VSS Unity spacecraft (photo here) that looks more like a jet aircraft than Blue Origin's more rocket-like New Shepard.
That will be followed by Galactic 02 in early August. It will be the first to carry individuals who signed up for space tourism flights with the company, paying up to $450,000 per seat. Virgin Galactic says it will conduct SpaceShipTwo flights on a monthly basis thereafter.
Meanwhile, Back at the Not Completely Gone Virgin Orbit
Back at the selling off of Virgin Orbit's assets, not everything was sold. We learned on Friday that Firefly Aerospace has agreed to buy the rest of the company's assets in the form of the remaining inventory at two company production facilities.
In June 15 filings with the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware overseeing Virgin Orbit’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, representatives of the companies said that Firefly agreed to buy the assets that has not been sold at auction in May for $3.8 million.
The assets, designated Segment 5 in bankruptcy proceedings, are the inventory at Virgin Orbit’s two facilities in Long Beach, California. That includes engines and other components built or in production for the LauncherOne vehicles that Virgin Orbit manufactured there. It also includes two engines in storage at a Virgin Orbit test site in Mojave, California.
The events and their timing between the May 22 finalization (covered at the first link in this section) and the final sale aren't completely clear. It appears Firefly had bid on everything, had the bid rejected and then additional negotiations took place. It's also not completely clear quite what Firefly was interested in buying considering other things we know about what they're working on.
“Firefly strategically bid and purchased the Virgin Orbit inventory for the significant cost savings on common off-the-shelf components that we use in our product lines, and the benefit of eliminated supply chain lead-times associated with critical flight components,” Firefly Aerospace said in a statement late June 16. “Firefly will not be utilizing all of the inventory and plans to provide additional information to parties who may be interested in purchasing.”
Virgin Orbit's main production facility, with several LauncherOne vehicles being built, in an undated photo. We have no reason to think that everything here was just bought by Firefly Aerospace, but some things in these thousands of square feet very likely were bought. Image credit: Virgin Orbit
Things I Don't Like the Looks of
As the hurricane season was getting started, there was consensus that with an El Nino starting that conditions would tend to work to give us a relatively easy season. The counter to that is that surface temperatures in the Atlantic are high and that gooses storm formation.
Today we got Tropical Storm Bret. A storm in this area, called a Cape Verde storm (after the islands off the right side of this plot), is rare this time of the year and much more common in the August through September time frame.
I couldn't tell you how many plots I've followed over the years that looked like this one, but the majority of those were August/September not June. The Central Florida Hurricane Center website that I've been following for years says, "this ties for the earliest named storm in the MDR with 2017's Bret (Which also formed June 19th)." (MDR = Main Development Region - SiG)
As always, the question is when and where does it turn to the north or northeast. Likewise as always, all we can do is keep an eye out and be ready to start putting up shutters and taking down antennas.
Hatten down the batches, mein freund, it looks to be an interesting season!
ReplyDeleteGorebull wormering, don'cha know!!
I've disliked DARPA for many years. Yes, its research but too often it continues to pump money into projects that should not be on life support decade after decade.
ReplyDeleteThen that taxpayer funded research is handed off to private contractors like LockMart.
Reviewing an aeronautical chart the other day I was pleased to see KMHV Mohave Air & Space Port bears the name of Rutan, as in Burt Rutan.
TS are now named storms. I thought that crap was only at The Weather Channel when they started to name winter storms. Now NOAA has gotten in on the action.
This may well play havoc with insured private vessels in that underwriters assign higher premiums (if not dropping coverage altogether) for vessels within a specified region between certain start and end dates.
I hadn't seen they named that airport after Burt Rutan. In my mind, that's well-deserved.
DeleteTropical storms have been named as far back as I can remember, and this one is barely a TS. The threshold is 40mph sustained, but they apparently base that on satellite observation, not flying into the thing. I'm not even sure they need any sort of measurement: radar, ship passing through it, whatever.
There's actually a bit of public controversy over the way they measure winds. They changed the methods not long ago and it does make it seem they overstate storms more now.
This is kind of a deep dive but covers a bunch of interesting anomalies with bunches of measurements during hurricane Irma in '17.
So this summer Africa is not sending us all her dirt, eh?
ReplyDeleteThe past few years have seen major dust blowing west out of Africa, which inhibits tropical storm formation..
Nota bene: Right on the heels of Bret is the soon-to-be-named Cindy.
ReplyDeleteBest wishes with your summer.