Small Space News Story Roundup 27

A handful of interesting stories that are on the small side, as we often do.  

The First New Glenn is on the Pad

As you might expect, it seems to be a full-sized mock-up, and gets almost two full minutes of coverage in NASA Spaceflight's "This Week in Spaceflight" video.  

Full-sized mock-ups are useful for testing all of things that will handle and interface with the flight-rated hardware when it's built, and during the couple of minutes of video, they show both first and second stages of the vehicle, both prominently labeled "NOT FOR FLIGHT", as well as the strongback lifting tower that moves the vehicle from horizontal on a truck to vertical on the pad.  The test vehicle (which isn't stacked yet - just the first stage so far) might be useful for cryogenic tests, although that would be more to test the ground hardware than flight.  The flight hardware has to be tested, too. 

Screen capture from the NSF video showing the second stage of the New Glenn hardware test vehicle.  Note the "Credit Blue Origin" note in the lower right corner of the video.

Astrobotic Gets the Other Payloads Working on the Peregrine

In the waning hours of the Peregrine lander's life, Astrobotic says it has successfully turned on and communicated with many of the 20 payloads onboard the lander.

Not all of those payloads are designed to generate data and downlink it to Earth, so the exact number isn't very important, but NASA said it was using two instruments on the satellite called LETS and NSS to measure the radiation environment in cislunar space.  LETS is the Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer while NSS is the Neutron Spectrometer System.  The joint observations “provide complementary insights into the galactic cosmic ray activity and space weather resulting from solar activity.” There are two other spectrometer systems on the satellite that are powered up but aren't mentioned as being used. 

A NASA technology demonstration payload, the Navigation Dopplar Lidar, is also powered up and generating data. Other payloads that are active and generating data include the IRIS lunar rover from Carnegie Mellon University, the COLMENA micro-rovers from Mexico’s space agency AEM, the M-42 radiation detector from German aerospace center DLR and Astrobotic’s own Optical Precision Autonomous Landing sensor.

A tenth payload, the Lunar Dream Time Capsule from Japan’s Astroscale and Pocari Sweat, is powered up but does not generate data. The other payloads on Peregrine are passive.

Self-Eating Rocket Engine Passes Test

An interesting little side story in the world of unconventional boosters is the self-eating or autophage engines that are solid rocket engines designed to literally burn away the booster as its working.  Instead of reusing a booster, there's nothing left to dump and reuse.  

One of my favorite stories in the life of the blog is that I posted my first article about these back in 2018 about a group in Scotland working on them.  About six weeks after I posted that, I got a comment from the principal investigator, Patrick Harkness, saying he stumbled across the article and joined in the comments adding some information.

These engines were first proposed and patented in 1938. However, it took until 2018 before his group designed and fired one in a controlled manner for the first time.  It comes to light in this week's Rocket Report that a group in Scotland test fired a prototype, dubbed Ouroborous-3, at the MachLab facility at Machrihanish Airbase in Scotland.  The engine generated 100 newtons of thrust.  And they posted this interesting little video.  Be sure to watch to the end, as they all say. 

100 Newtons, or about 22.5 pounds force, isn't much and it doesn't look particularly useful. That said, the researchers are implying it's possible that a suborbital flight using this kind of engine could take place as early as 2027.