Small Space News Story Roundup 42

The first one is just because I think the picture is pretty.

SpaceX Return to Flight Set a Time Record

The return to flight approval from the FAA that was talked about in last night's post took place almost immediately. There were Falcon 9s loaded with Starlink satellites at both Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral and both launched early this morning. 

One Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 3:43 a.m. Eastern, placing 21 Starlink satellites into orbit. It was followed at 4:48 a.m. Eastern by another Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Space Launch Complex 4E, also delivering 21 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit. The 65 minutes between launches is the shortest interval yet between Falcon 9 launches.

In the foreground is Pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center, with a Falcon 9 and Polaris Dawn capsule waiting for their desired weather conditions. In the background of the long exposure shot, the Falcon 9 lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX photo

NASA Awards $117 Million to Intuitive Machines for a 2027 Mission to Moon's South Pole

Remember the first Intuitive Machines probe to the moon last February, Odysseus - quickly nicknamed Odie? Odie got a lot of attention and coverage here on the blog. It was, after all, the first US launched vehicle to land on the moon since the end of the Apollo program when it landed on February 22nd. Granted that "Landing" is only accurate in the loosest sense of the word - the lander broke a leg on its final approach and tipped over. Because of that, the mission was a continuous string of what I call "asbestos moments" - doing "as best as they could with what they got" and Intuitive Machines reported every paying customer was happy with their results. 

On Friday (the 30th) NASA announced they had awarded Intuitive Machines a nearly $117 million contract for a lander to deliver six instruments to lunar south pole in 2027.

"The instruments on this newly awarded flight will help us achieve multiple scientific objectives and strengthen our understanding of the moon's environment," Chris Culbert, manager of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement. 

"For example, they'll help answer key questions about where volatiles — such as water, ice, or gas — are found on the lunar surface and measure radiation in the South Pole region, which could advance our exploration efforts on the moon and help us with continued exploration of Mars."

This is not the Next lander for IM, so it's not three years between missions. Their next lander, IM-2, is expected to fly before the end of this year, also to the south pole area. It carries a NASA payload called PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1) that will hunt for water ice, which is thought to be abundant in the area. IM-3 will follow next year. That means IM landers in '24, '25, and '27.

NASA Names Half-sized Crew 9 - FAA Clears Falcon 9 to Fly

Friday afternoon, NASA announced the downsized crew for the Crew-9 Mission to the ISS, a necessity brought on by flying the Starliner home autonomously and having Starliner Astronauts move to the Crew-9 vehicle to come home. 

NASA astronaut Nick Hague will serve as the mission's commander, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will serve as mission specialist. Instead of a usual complement of four astronauts, a two-person crew was necessitated by the need to use the Crew 9 spacecraft, Freedom, as a rescue vehicle for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. They flew to the station in June aboard Boeing's Starliner vehicle, which has been deemed unsafe for them to return in.

Mission Commander Zena Cardman and Mission Specialist Stephanie Wilson will be reassigned to some unnamed future mission.

At the time, the naming of Cardman was significant—she would have been the first rookie astronaut without test pilot experience to command a NASA spaceflight. A 36-year-old geobiologist, Cardman joined NASA in 2017 and is well-regarded by her peers. The assignment of a rookie, non-test pilot to command the Crew-9 mission reflected NASA's confidence in the self-flying capabilities of Dragon, which is intended to reach the station autonomously. The assignment was made by then-chief astronaut Reid Wiseman in 2022, and the Astronaut Office was confident that Cardman, with an experienced hand in Hague at her side, could command the mission.

The source article notes that there was some division in the astronaut office, with a side that wanted Cardman to remain in the mission while others thought a more experienced astronaut would be safer than a "rookie, non-test pilot" and the last thing they need is another problem to explain now.  Hague, after all, is an Air Force-trained test pilot, survived a harrowing Soyuz mission abort in 2018, and then flew to space for more than six months in 2019. He simply has much more experience than Cardman.

The Crew-9 flying up in September will be "the two doods" in the middle - Stephanie Wilson (L) and Zena Cardman (R) will be helping as much as they can for as long as they're needed.

Final words to Zena Cardman:

There was also a classy quote in the news release from Cardman, who revealed Friday that her father, Larry Cardman, passed away three weeks ago. “I am deeply proud of our entire crew,” she said. "And I am confident Nick and Alex will step into their roles with excellence. All four of us remain dedicated to the success of this mission, and Stephanie and I look forward to flying when the time is right."

I've got to hope she doesn't have to wait too long for that next mission.

FAA Says Falcon 9 May Return to Flight

But they really want to see that failure analysis.

The FAA announced this evening (August 30, Eastern) that Falcon 9 may resume flying. No particular reason is cited in the article. Maybe someone with sense realized how stupid and corrupt the agency appeared for citing safety when the autonomously-flying rocket wasn't within miles of any people and hundreds of miles from land. The only people within a few hundred miles were the trained crew that are stationed in a ship a few miles from the landing drone, and then drive over to it to aid in securing the rocket and drone for transport. The rocket landed on a recovery drone that's tiny compared to the hundreds of miles of open ocean the booster crosses to reach it, so navigation was fine. It's hard to imagine how this was more dangerous than any other country or company dropping a booster in the Atlantic.

The grounding lasted less than two days.

NextSpaceflight.com has been showing Starlink launches early Saturday morning (ET) from Vandenberg, early Sunday morning from Cape Canaveral, and Polaris Dawn early Monday morning at the same 3:38 AM time they've been focused on. 

Artemis/SLS Late and Over Budget Again?

From the department of repetition department.  

The new Mobile Launcher Project, ML-2, for Artemis program has just been reviewed by the Office of the Inspector General at NASA. Let's just say they found nothing unusual; it's all costing far more than bid and being set for delivery far later than the contract first required. 

The OIG report highlights significant cost overruns and delays. Initially projected to cost $383 million with delivery by March 2023, the project's cost has now run to an estimated $1.8 billion. The OIG believes the final cost could yet grow to $2.7 billion — more than six times the initial cost estimate — by the time contractor Bechtel delivers ML-2. Delivery is now expected in September 2027.

Bechtel was awarded the cost-plus contract in 2019. The company has struggled with technical challenges, including issues with steel fabrication and weight management of the giant ground support structure, according to the report.

Mobile Launcher 2 is required to haul the upgraded, larger and heavier SLS Block 1B rocket to the pad, starting with NASA's Artemis 4 mission. The structure includes a base platform and a tower with various systems for fueling, power and crew access.

This isn't exactly a new problem, although it's a new Mobile Launcher. The same things happened with the ML-1 project. I posted my first report on that back in March of 2020. My first post on the ML-2 was a little over two years later in June of 2022. At that time, it was projected that original contract award of $383 million would grow to $960 million. Now, a little over two years later, we see the cost is almost double that growth estimate of $960 million - it's $1.8 billion - and expected to grow to $2.7  billion by delivery. Which is 4-1/2 years later than the contract.

The ML-1 is being left alone for the remaining Block 1 SLS missions and Block 1B is what we're talking about here. This image shows the differences between the two.  

Image from NASA Office of the Inspector General in the 2022 piece here. Image credit: NASA OIG

The changes were required just to add the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) to the SLS stack. The development of the EUS isn't done, either.

If anything is going to kill NASA, it's things like this. 

EDIT 8/30/24 1115 AM ET to Add: Ars Technica's Rocket Report this week adds this Fun Fact on the price of the ML-2: (the $2.7 billion) cost is nearly twice the funding it took to build the largest structure in the world, the Burj Khalifa, which is seven times taller. 

It might not be a totally fair comparison since the Burj Khalifa doesn't need to handle tons of cryogenic fuels  or stand up to millions of pounds of thrust in fire, but it has to do things the ML-2 doesn't.

SpaceX Loses Fleet Leader Booster on "Routine" Flight

Early this morning, after the Polaris Dawn mission was scrubbed due to weather in the recovery area, SpaceX launched a completely routine Starlink mission, delivered the upper stage to the right location and later delivered the 21 Starlink satellites, including 13 of the larger satellites with direct-to-cell capabilities, to orbit properly.  

The problem occurred at landing of Booster B1062 on its fleet-leading 23rd mission. Something went wrong and the booster apparently caught fire, exploded and fell overboard. This is the first time since February of 2021 that a landing has failed. Last December (2023) B1058 fell over in rough seas after its landing and was scrapped. That was 1058's 19th mission.

Flames erupt from the base of B1062 upon landing after its Aug. 28 launch. The booster tipped over seconds later. Image credit SpaceX (webcast)

Here's a video from Space.com. The accident is all in the first 30 seconds, really between 21 and 30, and doesn't loop or repeat on its own.

Prior to Wednesday's landing failure, SpaceX had landed 267 boosters in a row. The cause of the failure was not immediately clear, and SpaceX said "teams are assessing the booster's flight data and status." Looking at the video at 0.5x speed, it appears that all the engines cut off and then more flame appears. It doesn't look like the landings we're used to, where a small amount of flame exists for a few seconds before going away.  

B1062 had its first mission in November of 2020, a GPS Satellite for the US Space Force (GPS III-04). 

Booster landings are considered secondary objectives to a launch's primary mission of delivering payloads into orbit. However, in recent years, SpaceX has delayed launches due to poor recovery weather conditions, as it does not want to lose the first-stage hardware, which probably costs at least $20 million to $30 million to manufacture, test, and deliver to the launch site.

An immediate consequence of this failure was cancellation of a Starlink mission from Vandenberg also supposed to have been in the predawn hours (ET) this morning. 

Earlier in the evening, Polaris Dawn mission commander Jared Isaacman had announced a decision to put off that launch at least until Friday.

"Our launch criteria are heavily constrained by forecasted splashdown weather conditions," Isaacman wrote on X on Tuesday evening. "With no ISS rendezvous and limited life support consumables, we must be absolutely sure of reentry weather before launching. As of now, conditions are not favorable tonight or tomorrow, so we’ll assess day by day."

In the competition for video clicks, there were already posts up on YouTube by 8 or 9 this morning suggesting that SpaceX has lost their abilities given two mission failures in two months or whatever it has been since the upper stage failure that grounded them for two weeks. That was before I knew that (1) the mission was a success and (2) this was the oldest booster in the fleet, the fleet leader in its 23rd mission. I'd seriously be looking into whether there was something worn more than their inspections showed or wondering if it might be an early indicator not to try for 30 missions.

Boeing's Morale "In the Toilet" After Starliner Decision

The New York Post ran a story on Sunday, Aug. 25, saying that Boeing employees have felt humiliated since NASA decided to bring back Starliner unmanned and have the two astronauts brought back by SpaceX. 

It's actually not a terribly surprising or even interesting story. The summary on Teslarati might save you some reading time, depending on how your browser handles advertising. The bottom line summary isn't surprising. These have been a tough couple of years, with the various aircraft problems - although 75% or more of those could be the result of aircraft maintenance crews or pilots not being up to snuff.  Then there's the perennially bad Artemis/SLS program, and now Starliner. Because of all that, it's easy to feel picked on. Even worse, the fact that Butch and Suni are being rescued by the company that's constantly upstaging them makes it that much more humiliating. 

“We have had so many embarrassments lately, we’re under a microscope. This just made it, like, 100 times worse,” said one worker, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“We hate SpaceX,” he added. “We talk s–t about them all the time, and now they’re bailing us out.”

“It’s shameful. I’m embarrassed, I’m horrified,” the employee said.

With morale “in the toilet,” the worker claimed that many in Boeing are blaming NASA for the humiliation.

The employees interviewed felt Starliner could have safely returned Butch and Suni without having them extend their stay on the ISS until February (at the earliest). They seem to not register that their representative was on the NASA investigation board that made the recommendation, and Bill Nelson is determined to improve NASA's safety mindset. 

“Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and most routine. A test flight, by nature, is neither safe, nor routine. The decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring Boeing’s Starliner home uncrewed is the result of our commitment to safety: our core value and our North Star,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the post. “I’m grateful to both the NASA and Boeing teams for all their incredible and detailed work.”

and...

“Decisions like this are never easy, but I want to commend our NASA and Boeing teams for their thorough analysis, transparent discussions, and focus on safety during the Crew Flight Test,” Ken Bowersox, an Associate Administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate said. “We’ve learned a lot about the spacecraft during its journey to the station and its docked operations. We also will continue to gather more data about Starliner during the uncrewed return and improve the system for future flights to the space station.”

While the point of the whole thing is how bad the poow wittwe Boeing wowkews feew^*, humiliation can be a positive motivator, too, if they choose to let it be so. Resolve to be better, to do something every day to be better. 

While I can't argue with Elon's logic, it might be a case where not saying anything might have been a slightly better response. If somebody you don't know tells you they're so down they want to kill themself, it's probably best not to agree with them on how badly they've screwed up.

Boeing still has the Starliner business. If the flight test capsule successfully and uneventfully returns to the ground, all those who argue it could have brought Butch and Suni home will feel vindicated and can do a victory dance. If that doesn't happen and the empty capsule is lost...

^* The Internet has some pretty amazing things if you look. That's from a website the translates any text you give it into the way Elmer Fudd would say it.

Polaris Dawn on 24 Hour Delay

As I sat down to write this piece I suddenly ran into two dates for the launch - Tuesday or Wednesday morning. If the mission hadn't launched, you'd know by the time you read this, but after a bunch of running around, I found a tweet (or whatever they're called on X) from SpaceX saying that a problem with ground support equipment has surfaced and liftoff is re-scheduled in a four hour window starting Wednesday, August 28 at 3:38 AM, with two additional launch opportunities within the window at 5:23 AM and 7:09 AM (both ET). The original place I found the discrepancy was on their "Launches" website but all the news sources still had it Tuesday morning.

While there are a lot of videos around about the mission, I liked this one I stumbled across: 

Yeah. CBS News. Probably the first thing I've watched from them in at least 10 years. Maybe 20. Are you familiar with that old saying, "even a blind pig finds an acorn?"

Learn Something New Every Day - If You're Lucky

Where this comes from is rather far from the stuff I usually post here, but still post about regularly enough that it ought to have its own label. Weather and in particular watching hurricanes and tropical storms progress in the Atlantic basin. I've been following this - to at least a conversational level - for around 45 years. I've kept an eye on things like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO); the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO); the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (as best I can) not for the full 45 years but more of those as the years went by. 

It turns out there's a big one I wasn't aware of: the Atlantic Niño, referred to as El Niño's little brother. Much like "big bro'," the Atlantic Niño is close to the equator, except it's between South America and Africa rather than the SW pacific area near Papua New Guinea extending to the west coast of South America. 

Like El Niño, Atlantic Niño is characterized by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial basin and weaker-than-average trade winds throughout the east-central equatorial Atlantic.

However, there are some important differences between the two. For instance, as has been discussed in this blog, El Niño usually builds up slowly during northern summer before reaching maximum strength in late fall or winter, bringing a wide range of climate impacts throughout much of the planet. Atlantic Niño, in contrast, tends to peak in summer when ENSO is usually inactive, is usually shorter in duration, is overall much weaker than ENSO, and has more modest and local climate impacts. For example, Atlantic Niño often disrupts the West African summer monsoon, leading to reduced rainfall in the Sahel region, and is linked to increased frequency of flooding in northeastern South America and the West African sub-Sahel countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea.

A key phrase there is “Atlantic Niño, in contrast, tends to peak in summer when ENSO is usually inactive ...” Back in May, when I posted about the forecast for this coming hurricane season, the ENSO state was predicted to turn into a fairly active La Niña. So far, that hasn't materialized; this is the ENSO state snapshot from today, August 25th from Watts Up With That. 

That sure looks to me like ENSO is inactive. It has been sliding slowly in the direction of La Niña but has taken since late May to get to (pretty much) zero from a little less than 0.5. 

Much like El Niño has an opposite phase of the oscillation - a sister if you will - La Niña, Atlantic Niño has an opposite phase called Atlantic Niña that tends to produce cooler waters toward the east (African) end of the path. 

I learned about this Atlantic oscillation through a source I hardly ever use anymore, The Weather Channel. Four years ago when we "cut the cord" (dropped cable) and went over to streaming services, we lost TWC, and after a couple of years and different streaming services, we went to one that includes them, but not exactly. If you have cable and watch them you know TWC has the "weather on the 8s" that includes things like your local radar, local data and forecast. That information is provided by the cable company so the channel we get just shows the weather in some selected cities around the country. 

In an effort to avoid the 24/7 coverage of the DNC convention, I stumbled into TWC talking about the tropical update and the host talked about the Atlantic Niño, although he didn't use that exact phrase (or it just didn't register with me). He said the waters off the coast of Africa were cooler than usual because of this and that might be contributing to conditions not being as favorable as expected for storm formation.

An overview of an average year's conditions, not this year's. Image credit to the NOAA page. Their caption follows.

(top) The sea surface temperature (shaded contours), 10-meter wind (vectors), and (bottom) rainfall departures from average in June – August during an average Atlantic Niño. The gray dots in the bottom panel indicate that the rainfall departures are statistically significant (5% significance level), indicating a high degree of confidence that the rainfall departures are associated with Atlantic Niño. Climate.gov figure adapted from Vallès‐Casanova et al. (2020).

As we approach the peak of the season, September 10th, development is more likely, and the next two months should be more active than the season until now. Unfortunately, while I can find deep resources related to the ENSO, I haven't yet found anyone showing the Atlantic Niño oscillation state.

Everybody Knows Today's News

If everyone knows it I suppose that means it's not news. The NASA/Boeing team announced today that Butch and Suni will return on the Crew-9 Dragon capsule. This will be in February, after they serve as half of Crew 9, turning their 8 day mission into an 8 month mission. As we talked about before, this means that September's launch of the Crew-9 mission will be with two of the four pictured astronauts in that post and the other two will presumably be reassigned to another mission. 

This has been a tough decision and the final vote was a poll between NASA administrator Bill Nelson, deputy administrator Pam Melroy, the Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich, Boeing's Commercial Crew Program Manager and Vice President Mark Nappi.

Therefore, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will undock from the station early next month—the tentative date, according to a source, is September 6—and attempt to make an autonomous return to Earth and land in a desert in the southwestern United States.

Then, no earlier than September 24, a Crew Dragon spacecraft will launch with two astronauts (NASA has not named the two crew members yet) to the space station with two empty seats. Wilmore and Williams will join these two Crew-9 astronauts for their previously scheduled six-month increment on the space station. All four will then return to Earth on the Crew Dragon vehicle.

The Starliner program itself is still ongoing and there will be more changes to the spacecraft. They weren't shy about saying they were surprised at things they discovered during their investigations including the duplicate thruster system tested at White Sands. This was taken from the capsule intended for the next manned Starliner flight and showed the same problems as the one at the ISS.

"I would say the White Sands testing did give us a surprise," Stich said Saturday. "It was this piece of Teflon that swells up and got in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the thruster the way it needs to. That's what caused the degradation of thrust. When we saw that, I think that's when things changed a bit for us."

When NASA took this finding to the thruster's manufacturer, Aerojet Rocketdyne, the propulsion company said it had never seen this phenomenon before. It was at this point that agency engineers started to believe that it might not be possible to identify the root cause of the problem in a timely manner and become comfortable enough with the physics to be sure that the thruster problem would not occur during Starliner's return to Earth.

It sounds to me like that system needs either to be re-designed, or there are problems with how its handled or how it's stored on the ground. It was also determined that environment seen by the thrusters was more severe than specified; in particular, one thruster in its "doghouse" portion of the system was hotter than the system was specified to work in.  

Of course, this means SpaceX helps out Boeing, nominally a competitor, but the whole idea of having two commercial crew providers was to deal with situations like one of them being unable to fly or get a crew home.

It won't be the first time that SpaceX has helped a competitor recently. In the last two years SpaceX has launched satellites for a low-Earth orbit Internet competitor, OneWeb, after Russia's space program squeezed the company; it has launched Europe's sovereign Galileo satellites after delays to the Ariane 6 rocket; and it has launched the Cygnus spacecraft built by NASA's other space station cargo services provider, Northrop Grumman, multiple times. Now SpaceX will help out Boeing, a crew competitor.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams at the docking port entry to the ISS, back around their June 6th arrival at the ISS. Image credit: NASA 

Oh, and that talk about the spacesuits not being compatible? There's already one spare Dragon suit onboard the ISS, the two tried it on and it fit one of them (the video conference didn't say which of them it was). The Crew-9 flight in September will bring a suit for the other. Somebody in the process knew how to specify that suit to SpaceX.

A Blue Origin Oopsie and a Starliner Promise

Oopsies First

It's hard to get more details without subscribing to Bloomberg, if they even have the details, but the Rocket Report relays Bloomberg is saying they lost the upper stages for the next two New Glenn flights; that is, the second and third flights, after the fast-approaching first flight.

Blue Origin experiences rocket stage incidents. Blue Origin sustained failures in recent weeks of testing, including a factory mishap that damaged a portion of a future New Glenn rocket, Bloomberg reports. The upper portion of one rocket crumpled into itself, in part due to worker error, while it was being moved to a storage hangar, the publication reported. In a separate incident, another upper rocket portion failed during stress testing and exploded. Repairs are underway, another person said, noting there were no injuries during either episode.

Running into a tight timeline ... Notably, the incidents with these stages involved hardware that had been intended for use on the second and third launches. The upper stage that will be used by the first launch of New Glenn appears to not have been impacted. It is unclear whether these incidents will impact the debut launch of New Glenn, which is facing a tight deadline in mid-October to launch a Mars mission for NASA.

I'm having a hard time reconciling "exploded" and "repairs are underway." I suppose I'm envisioning something like the RFA explosion in the UK Spaceport (first story) and it could have been something much smaller and therefore less destructive. The first one, with the second stage crumpling in onto itself "in part due to worker error" could have a very simple explanation. As Inc. (magazine?) stated:

Though we don't know exact details, in this case what seems to have happened is that workers moved the rocket stage from a place where it had been exposed to Florida's typically hot weather into a cool, air-conditioned space without controlling its pressure valves properly. When it cooled enough, the gas pressure inside dropped too far for the structure to withstand.

It's actually a well-known problem with examples that go back to the early days of spaceflight. 

A few hours ago (on Friday, August 23) a launch date for the New Glenn first flight, the ESCAPADE probes to Mars, was announced: No Earlier Than Sunday, October 13.  

Dave Limp, Blue Origin's new CEO, left, and founder Jeff Bezos observe the New Glenn rocket on its launch pad, February 21 at CCSFS.  Image credit: Jeff Bezos via Instagram.

As for that Starliner Promise

Boeing and NASA experts have been continuing their efforts to determine how to return astronauts Butch and Suni from the Starliner test flight. While I've read things that sounded more definite than this, like "they're going to announce their decision Saturday," at the NASA blogs they say:

NASA’s decision on whether to return Starliner to Earth with astronauts aboard is expected no earlier than Saturday, Aug. 24 at the conclusion of an agency-level review chaired by Ken Bowersox, the associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. The agency flight readiness review is where any formal dissents are presented and reconciled. Other agency leaders who routinely participate in launch and return readiness reviews for crewed missions include NASA’s administrator, deputy administrator, associate administrator, various agency center directors, the Flight Operations Directorate, and agency technical authorities.

NASA will host a televised news conference following the review’s conclusion to discuss the agency’s decision and next steps. More information on the news conference will be shared once confirmed.

How can you see it? Space.com has a YouTube channel that you can check on during the day - since we really have no idea when they'd have the video conference. You can check them during the day, either at their home page or the article on this announcement. 

SpaceX Delays Dawn for One Day

Not like sunrise around the entire planet, the Polaris Dawn mission. Originally scheduled for Monday morning, August 26 at 3:38 AM, the delay is 24 hours to Tuesday, August 27, same time, same launch pad (39A). 

The delay was announced Wednesday night (Aug. 21), in a post by SpaceX on X, formerly twitter, accompanied by a a mission preview video highlighting the crew, modified Dragon spacecraft, and SpaceX's new extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits.

"The new date allows additional time for teams to complete preflight checkouts ahead of next week’s launch," SpaceX wrote in a follow-up post, specifying the reason for the 24-hour schedule change.

Over the course of the last couple of years, I've read some of the stories of the changes SpaceX had to make to the Dragon, and the spacesuits.  Dragon never had the type of airlock they need for opening and re-sealing in space or enough compressed air storage to refill the capsule for all of the walks they might want to do. Clearly this all needs to be tested, but testing the ExtraVehicular Activity or EVA suit is the biggest milestone of the mission. Much like the first spacewalk by Ed White back in the Gemini days, when the airlock is open, everybody is exposed to the hard vacuum of space, so all four of them will be wearing the EVA suits, not just Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis who will do the actual EVA. 

Testing SpaceX's EVA suit is Polaris Dawn's most critical experiment, and will take place on the third day of the mission. Visually, the spacesuit appears similar to SpaceX's IVA (intravehicular activity) suits, which are worn only inside the spacecraft. Opening Dragon's hatch to expose the cabin and its occupants to the harsh environment of space meant redesigning the spacecraft's interior and upgrading the spacesuits with an enhanced thermal management system that uses additional insulative materials, as well as a new coating on the visor of the suit's helmet.

The spacewalk on flight day three - now August 29 - is expected to last two hours from cabin depressurization to repressurization. Since the modifications to the airlock go in the area that Inspiration4 had a cupola to stare out of, one might think the crew isn't going to be able to spend lots of time looking around at the beauty outside. I imagine they'll get some time, somehow.

The Polaris Dawn Crew, even in the same order we usually see them, in their EVA suits in front of the Crew Dragon they'll fly. That's (L-R) Mission Specialist Anna Menon, Pilot Scott Poteet, Commander Jared Isaacman, and Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis. Image credit: ShaneMielke.com the developer of the Heads Up Display (HUD) inside the suits. 

Small Space News Story Roundup 41

Unusually soon after Roundup 40 but a couple of stories that are short but important. 

Germany's Leading Rocket Developer Loses First Booster in Static Firing.

The dramatic first. 

The German private rocket developer, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), has been making steady, regular progress on getting ready for their first orbital launch attempt. That was stopped this week when the first stage of the inaugural RFA rocket was destroyed in a static-fire test Aug. 19 at the UK's SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands. 

RFA was quick to announce that nobody was hurt, the pad had been evacuated and secured for this potentially dangerous test, as it should have been. The video of the explosion was a little rough to find yesterday but several show up in the searches today.

Two other German companies, HyImpulse and Isar Aerospace, are also developing orbital vehicles but have not yet set launch dates although Isar has reportedly hinted at a launch "later this year."

SpaceX Rarely Surprises, But...

They launched a load of Starlink Satellites from Cape Canaveral SFS, Complex 40 Tuesday morning at 9:20AM (1320UTC) successfully putting the satellites into orbit and recovering the booster on ASOG, or more formally, A Shortfall Of Gravitas. Everything here is about as unsurprising as it gets. All the numbers we usually get were recited: this was the 57th launch of the Starlink satellites this year, the 80th landing on ASOG and the 341st booster landing to date. Then the surprise came: this was the first launch of Booster 1085.  

It took a while to hit me, but then "wait a minute... the first launch of B1085? Don't they only use brand new boosters for some customers who want only new, and always use "experienced" boosters for their own launches?" Just the other day I was joking with a friend about, 'do you remember when we didn't know it would be possible to get 10 launches out of a booster? And now we're saying 'that booster has 9 launches? - that's almost new." Why wasn't this a booster with at least five flights?

It turns out B1085 was intended for Crew 9, originally intended to launch before today, and now looking to be late September. They flew this booster because it had moisture intrusion as it was delivered by road from Texas to Florida back in late July.

“There was some moisture that went into the fuel in the [liquid oxygen] tank of that booster when it was transported from McGregor to the Cape. The desiccant system didn’t perform the way it was supposed to,” Stich said. “That desiccant system is supposed to keep that air dry and so, it didn’t perform the way it was supposed to. So we had to dry those tanks out and then replace a few components on the vehicle.”

In other words, they flew B1085 to test their repairs in the best way possible, and it was fine. Once back at land, B1085 will be readied for the Crew-9 launch, currently targeting launch no earlier than Sept. 24, from the same pad 40 it flew from Tuesday.

NASA Says Don't Stack Artemis II Until Orion Heat Shield Issue is Understood

That kinda says it all. The segments of the two solid rocket boosters for the Artemis II mission, and the core (center) stage are all in storage at Kennedy Space Center, and the natural progression here would be to stack the solids then attach the core stage to them on the mobile launch platform. Stacking the first segments of the solids could be as soon as next month. The hidden problem is that this starts a clock ticking on how long the pieces of the Artemis/SLS system can stand there. The joints connecting each piece of the SLS rocket's side boosters were originally certified for one year, but NASA nearly doubled the time limit for the Artemis I launch and could do so again for Artemis II. Much like they doubled the 45 days the batteries on Starliner were allowed to sit.

While the exact problems with Starliner and the Orion heat shield are very different, the situation ends up sounding very similar. Orion's heat shield is theoretically fine, but the only shield flown in the intended way, on the intended trajectory, didn't match the analysis. 

The spacecraft safely splashed down, and if any astronauts had been aboard, they would have been fine. However, the inspections of the recovered spacecraft showed divots of heat shield material were missing. The heat shield material, called Avcoat, is designed to erode away in a controlled manner during reentry. Instead, fragments fell off the heat shield that left cavities resembling potholes.

Nobody understands why. They could replace the heat shield but that would probably push the mission from '25 (which is dubious to start with) out to '27. The main alternatives to replacing the heat shield are to fly a different trajectory that would stress the heat shield less, or fly with it the way it is. Nobody is sure any one of the three approaches would work.  

Orion's heat shield showing some of the divots and missing heat shield. According to the OIG report, NASA found more than 100 locations on the heat shield where material “chipped away unexpectedly” during the Artemis 1 reentry.

Polaris Dawn Crew Arrives at KSC for Final Preps

The four member crew of Polaris Dawn arrived at the Kennedy  Space Center on Monday, August 19, to work in the final preparations for their flight, currently scheduled to launch next Monday, August 26 at 3:38 AM.  Amid the August conditions of high heat and humidity - but no thunderstorms - the four arrived in two of the camouflaged Dassault jets owned by mission commander Jared Isaacman, founder of The Polaris Program.

Left to right: Mission Specialist Anna Menon, Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Commander Jared Isaacman, Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now 

As has been mentioned here before, “Kidd” Poteet is former USAF fighter pilot. He will pilot the mission. Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis are both Lead Space Operations Engineers in the manned spaceflight side of SpaceX.  The best-known highlight of this mission is that it will be the first private mission to do a spacewalk. The two astronauts doing the spacewalk will be Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis. 

“It’s been two-and-a-half years since we announced the Polaris Program and Polaris Dawn,” Isaacman said. “It’s been a really exciting journey of development and training.”
...

Isaacman and his crewmates have four main objectives over the course of the five days they will spend on orbit:

• Achieve an Earth-orbit altitude record at 1,400 km (879 mi) apogee
• Conduct the first commercial spacewalk using SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity (EVA) suits
• Perform a technology demonstration of Starlink onboard the Dragon spacecraft
• Conduct about 40 experiments from 20 partner research institutions

Menon said the science data collected during the mission doesn’t end when the crew splashes down off the coast of Florida at the conclusion of their mission.

“When we get back, we will be recovered by the SpaceX recovery vessel and then we will owe some time to science and research and reconnecting with our families,” Menon said.

The Monday morning launch will push the Dragon capsule into a 190 x 1,200 km (118 x 746 mi) orbit. The first day on orbit will include raising Dragon’s apogee and passing through the inner regions of the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belt, an area that sees additional charged particles, largely from solar wind, a target of the mission. 

“We stand to learn quite a bit from that, in terms of human health, science and research. If we get to Mars someday, we’d love to come back and be healthy enough to tell people about it,” Isaacman said. “So, I think that it’s worthwhile to get some exposure in that environment.

“It also informs vehicle architecture because, generally speaking, vehicles don’t like radiation. So that’s why we’re going to stay there for the shortest amount of time that’s necessary to gather the data we want.”

Beyond the human research benefit of this, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, said the mission’s dynamic flight profile will also help the company towards certifying their Crew Dragon spacecraft beyond five flights.

“The high altitude will give us exposure to this high-radiation environment, which will test a lot of avionic systems and their ability to recover,” Gerstenmaier said. “We build a lot of auto sequences to take care of that for us, but we’ll see how it really works. We’ll also get a chance to see the laser communication, which I think is a big deal moving forward.”

The laser communication will be a test between the Dragon capsule and the Starlink network, which currently can communicate by laser. SpaceX Engineer Anna Menon teased that test by saying, “You’ll want to stay tuned for that,” but didn’t go into details about the planned demonstrations. It's set for flight day four.

The highlight of the mission, though, is the space walk.  It has been an emphasis of the mission since it was first publicized, partly because of this artist's rendering you might have seen before:

Image credit: PolarisProgram

It won't be like that. 

One of the marquee moments of the mission will be when the crew brings the Dragon down to vacuum and performs the first commercial spacewalk. The full operation will take roughly two hours, during which time, both Isaacman and Gillis will egress the vehicle, one at a time, while remaining attached to a roughly 12-foot-long tether.

...

“We’ve covered everything from life-cycle testing, pressure testing, MMOD testing, extreme hot and colds testing, an entire campaign on ESD and flammability testing. It’s been a really impressive amount of work by the SpaceX team to test this suit for flight,” Gillis said. “As a crew, we’ve spent probably more than 100 hours in this suit at this point… We’re really looking forward to testing this first generation of suit.”

She noted that during the spacewalk, the Dragon spacecraft will be oriented in a way that will shield the crew members from direct sunlight.

Isaacman said that while he and Gillis in turn won’t be free-floating outside of the spacecraft, he said they will fully exit the vehicle during the spacewalk. He said during the operation they will be “well above where the hatch is.”

“We have a hands-free demonstration where it’ll only be our feet engaged in a mobility aid, we’re just not going to be just floating around,” Isaacman said. “It takes a lot of effort to move in the suit when it’s pressurized. What looks like really heavy clothing, becomes super rigid when it’s pressurized.

“So, you want to be very deliberate with your movements. You want to make good use of mobility aids.”

The mission has been a long time coming. Part of that was development of the suits, and part has been modifications to the Dragon capsule itself. A neat little tidbit I picked up at SpaceNews.com is that Kidd Poteet (remember, a former Air Force fighter pilot), said that he spent 1500 hours in simulators for combat training during 20 years of Air Force service. In the 2-1/2 years training for Polaris Dawn, he noted the crew spent 2,000 hours in simulators. 1500 hours over 20 years for combat training vs. 2000 hours in simulators over 2-1/2 years? Which group seems more serious? He said the four of them also did other training that ranged from scuba diving to mountain climbing. 

Closing words I found inspirational.

[Bill] Gerstenmaier, who came to SpaceX following a decades-long career at NASA said it’s been a fun process creating the suits and now being on the cusp of seeing them used in practice. He described the process as leveraging knowledge from NASA and “then we push it a little bit further in other areas,” making sure to share lessons learned along the way.

“This pace of development that we get to do at SpaceX is very much like the pace of development that was required back in the early Apollo days,” Gerstenmaier said. “We’re getting a chance to do that again where we’re really starting to push frontiers with the private sector and learning new things that we would not be able to learn by staying in the risk-free environment here on Earth.

“It’s time to go out. It’s time to explore. It’s time to do these big things and move forward.”

New Glenn's First Launch by Mid-October?

The industry and tons of pundits have been talking about Blue Origin's New Glenn for years and the observation that it still hasn't made Low Earth Orbit. Despite that, there has been a noticeable move toward more hardware in the last year. Are we about to see the first attempt to fly a mission of the heavy lift rocket? It seems the story from last April that we'd see the first launch on September 29th might have been on the money - or no later than mid October. 

The reason is that New Glenn is to launch a pair of identical satellites to Mars and one of those launch windows timed to get the shortest travel time to Mars is coming up.  

The launch period opens on September 29. The two identical Mars-bound spacecraft for the ESCAPADE mission, nicknamed Blue and Gold, are now complete. Rocket Lab announced Friday that its manufacturing team packed the satellites and shipped them from their factory in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend, they arrived at a clean room facility just outside the gates of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians will perform final checkups and load hydrazine fuel into both spacecraft, each a little more than a half-ton in mass.

Wait... Rocket Lab built them? The company launching small satellites on their Electron rocket while they develop the heavier-lift Neutron?  That just became the fastest company in history to make it to orbit 50 times?

Rocket Lab designed, built, and tested the two ESCAPADE spacecraft in a little more than three years. This is relatively fast for an interplanetary science mission. NASA selected the ESCAPADE mission for development in 2019 as part of a new class of small planetary science missions in which scientists can propose concepts for modest probes to explore the Solar System.

The Escapade mission was originally supposed to be launched as a piggyback payload with NASA's Psyche asteroid mission in 2022, but NASA switched that to launching on a Falcon Heavy. That shifted the Psyche launch to October 2023, and forced a redesign of the ESCAPADE pair of spacecraft. 

"So that was the first thing, and then there were certainly challenges on the Rocket Lab side," Lillis told Ars. "The thruster changed. There were also significant problems getting the tanks delivered ... so they really went into hero mode. They went and actually spun up an entire internal 3D tank-printing capability from nothing. Once things started looking shaky with this tank supplier, they came through.

"Those printed tanks are on the spacecraft, and they're all qualified, etc. So that was a huge win," he said. "That could have totally been a mission killer, the tank issue."

The name quoted, Lillis, is Rob Lillis, the ESCAPADE mission's lead scientist from the University of California Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory. 

After the pretty serious Reset when the launch vehicle and mission concept changed, getting the two flight-ready satellites ready in just over three years is impressive. 

As Rocket Lab went into "hero mode," to borrow Lillis' term, it's now Blue Origin's turn to go into full hero mode. A lot of important things that should be tested before trying to launch a mission like this still have to be tested. They've put the New Glenn on the launch pad but they haven't done a wet dress rehearsal in which they fully fuel the rocket and check out all of that system, and they haven't done a static firing of their BE-4 methane/oxygen engines to fully test the fuel delivery system and the engines on that booster.  They have filled the New Glenn with liquid nitrogen, one of the first tests SpaceX does on their Starships and Super Heavy boosters, commonly called a cryo or cryogenics test.

As Stephen Clark at Ars Technica points out, even a heavy lift vehicle the size of New Glenn has to follow the prescribed launch window. At some point in late October or early November, that launch window closes and the two year wait for the next launch window starts ticking.

The two spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab's factory in Long Beach, California. Image credit: Rocket Lab.

Quiet Weekend

I really didn't think I'd be doing so little today, but going through my most regular news feeds, I really see hardly anything I find interesting, let alone anything that will be widely considered interesting. There are YouTube Clickbait artists posting things saying all sorts of things to get clicks, things ranging from saying they have the date when Butch and Suni come home, to Starbase is going to be shutdown by the FAA or some agency or other, to Starbase is fine and the next Starship test flight is any day now. I always check those video titles against other news sources I trust and can't confirm any of it. 

So I played on the radio. 

We had a short geomagnetic storm that peaked yesterday in the afternoon through early evening Eastern time but the Planetary K index didn't really settle down to quiet levels until after noon today. I operated on HF both yesterday and today: 20m to 10m during the day and dropping down to 30m after dark. The only rare place I contacted was an uninhabited island that's a US possession, called Jarvis Island. In the funny world of ham radio "wallpaper collecting," it's considered a separate country due to its distance from the US mainland or any other country.  

Jarvis is a rather small island, less than 2 square miles and the high point is about 22 feet above sea level - like my house.  Since it's in a group of islands in the south pacific called the Line Islands I'm thinking the most likely folks to have ever seen it are some of you ex-Navy or ex-Marines.  

I mentioned dropping Casey Handmer's blog because of him writing very little about space topics in the last year or so. I still get an email whenever he posts something new and got one today.  This time it is space-related, in the "maybe we'll get there this century" sense. "Antimatter is the best post-chemical rocket propulsion system" and opens with what I'll call a subtitle of "Or, how to explore the solar system and be back in time for Thanksgiving."

From an image search. Credit was to https://www.janeresture.com/jarvis but the site returns some sort of error and nothing else.

And that's all, y'all.

Post #5000

This is it, and I don't have much to say except thank you to my regular readers and to everyone who stops by.  Since Blogger tells us the number of the post, I've known this has been coming for quite a while and have been counting down for a while. You regular readers will have noticed I tend to put up one post a day, so a thousand posts takes about three years. My 4000th post was on Halloween 2021, so 2-1/2 months shy of three years.  

Among the interesting things in the "what else is going on?" thread is the sun's magnetic field looks to have reversed, a sure sign that the present solar cycle has peaked. Solar flux and smoothed sunspot numbers aren't likely to change right away, but it's a sign of being at solar maximum. This is from the latest video by Scott McIntosh who did the single best prediction of this solar cycle's activity and has apparently left the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for the private sector.  The video says he's VP of Space Operations from Lynker Space, and they appear to be starting a space weather forecasting service.

The part of this plot that shows the reversal is on the right, in the red ellipse,and you can see the north polar field (in gray) going south behind the south polar field (in ... not gray). 

By the way, you'll hear people talking about the sun's poles flipping. "Flipping" brings to mind those amazing Olympic gymnasts. It's not that dramatic, and nowhere near that fast. Reversing is a better word because it brings to mind putting a car in reverse and moving cautiously (slowly). You can see it takes from the left edge of the plot in 2010 until 2016 for the south pole field to get as far south as it goes. The Reversals are in late 2013 and mid 2024 close enough to 11 years to sound like what we call a solar cycle - which is one half of the real 22 year solar cycle.

EDIT Aug. 17 1826 EDT to correct:  Of all things to forget, I went and found an image for the number 5000 and completely forgot to put in the post.

Small Space News Story Roundup 40

A Nice Round Number... I remember when I was 40.  At least some of that year.

ULA is losing engineers; SpaceX is launching every other day

That's the heading for Ars Technica's Rocket Report newsletter for this week.  I watch a good percentage of those SpaceX launches (and miss about half) and I didn't notice the pace since the Falcon 9 resumed flight after being grounded for two weeks.

In 19 days, SpaceX has launched 10 flights of the Falcon 9 rocket, taking advantage of all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads. This is a remarkable cadence in its own right, but even though it's a small sample size, it is especially impressive right out of the gate after the rocket's grounding.

The average rate of 10 flights in 19 days hasn't been one launch every other day, but has tended to be two from the east coast and one from the west. I think there was one day that met to the "two east, one west" schedule, but there have also been one a day from each of the three launch pads and I'm guessing all combinations of the three. Still, they've launched 80 flights of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy family so far this year. That comes out to an average of one launch every 2.9 days

Thursday morning's launch from "up the road" was at 9:00 AM, an inconvenient time, as well as cloudy enough that we couldn't get a get look at it. Today's launch was from the left coast, (Vandenberg) and was a Rideshare launch of 116 satellites called Transporter 11. I embed the video because it's pretty.

About those ULA Engineers 

The Rocket Report passes on from the Financial world:

With a record number of launches due next year, United Launch Alliance is losing key staff to competitors, including Blue Origin and SpaceX, Bloomberg reports. This year alone, ULA has lost about 45 of its 105 launch operations engineers—the people who test, assemble, and prepare every rocket and its cargo to fly—at its primary launch site in Florida, a source told Bloomberg. The lack of experienced personnel has postponed work for future missions, the person said. During preparations for two missions earlier this year, ULA had to fly in workers from other locations to help prepare rockets for liftoff.

Credit where it's due, I first read a prediction of exactly this ULA story from a blog I used to link to, Casey Handmer's  In that piece, dated October 28, 2021, and that I wrote about two weeks later. Handmer wrote:

At this point, the real fear of other industry players should be that SpaceX won’t even ask them to try. Instead, they’ll wake up one morning and find that all their ambitious junior engineers have taken a pay cut and moved to Texas, while no-one can work out why Starliner’s valves refuse to work properly.

You can't call the reference to Starliner's valves nearly three years ago "prescient." There were problems back then, too. I have to add that I dropped the link to Casey Handmer's blog because he mostly got off the topic of space and got into so-called "renewable energy." I believe because he started a solar electric business. My bottom line was I so rarely read anything there that I was wasting time going to see what's new.

The Earth Caused Auroras on the Sun?!?

I didn't know this was possible, but thanks to Space.com for an article with lots of information on Earth/Sun physics (and links) have a crude understanding.  

You probably know the basics of how a CME interacts with Earth. The solar wind reaches earth, compressing and distorting the electromagnetic shield of the magnetosphere. It's not unlike a bow shock wave as a boat pushes into the water in front of it. 

On April 24, 2023, however, something peculiar happened. This is when a surge of charged particles blasted from the sun and lit up skies as far south as Arizona and Arkansas as well as parts of Australia and New Zealand. Unconventionally, these particles momentarily switched off our planet's bow shock, an anomaly that opened up a "two-way highway" through which charged particles also flew from Earth to the sun, where they sparked a solar light show. Compared to the sun's brightness, however, those auroras were likely far too dim to see.

"Particles trapped by Earth's magnetism suddenly had an escape — a direct path to the sun!" NASA posted last week on social media.

The "highway" was created largely due to a plasma-rich component of the solar wind called a coronal mass ejection (CME), which typically travels faster than the speed at which magnetic waves known as Alfvén waves move through plasma. That speed is known as the Alfvén speed.

But during the April solar eruption, NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft recorded the latter to be faster, which caused the bow shock to temporarily disappear. It was by Alfvén "wings" that magnetically connected our planet to the portion of the sun that had recently erupted, NASA said.

NASA went on to say that the spacecraft's instruments recorded plasma spewing from our planet into the sun for about two hours. "The data revealed unprecedented insights about the sun-Earth connection." Nobody was there at the sun to record what the auroras looked like, but probably couldn't have seen them anyway with incredible amounts of light present. Not to mention being instantly incinerated (I know; fly at night).

The story links to the original paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and the entire article appears to be readable there. It's titled, "Earth's Alfvén Wings Driven by the April 2023 Coronal Mass Ejection" and is by a large team so Chen et al is probably how it will be referred to.

At this point, I'd love to have a perfect illustration to put here. Many of you are going to be thinking this even before I say it, but magnetic fields and things like Alfvén wings are terribly hard to do drawings of because magnetic fields are inherently three dimensional and depicting real fields in two dimensional drawings (or on computer monitors) can be tricky. One of the figures in Chen et al's paper shows the Alfvén wings this way:

Earth is barely noticeable in the center of green curves, as a gray sphere. I'm not as clear on the other descriptions there, in particular the dawn and dusk portion of the wings' names. The few modeled field lines are red for the wings pointing toward the sun, blue for pointing to the Earth (from the sun) and green appears to be field lines originating from and terminating on the Earth.

A Small Story

It was a slow news day, which is kind of good in a way because life was interrupting anyway and decreasing the amount of attention I had to pay, but not good in every other way. I listened to the NASA teleconference about Starliner but it was close to content free, it's just that someone (Steve Stich?) said he wanted a decision by mid-month instead of the end of the month and scheduled this one.

The small story is that NASA has shut down an old satellite that (like so many) far exceeded its expected life and accomplishments. Its last commands were to reduce its altitude, increasing drag to speed its de-orbiting. It's expected to reenter before the end of the year. One of the aspects that makes it hard to predict is that the atmosphere expands and contracts with solar activity and we're clearly at much higher activity than we've been in quite some time. Just today, there was another X1.1 solar flare. The electromagnetic effects get here at the speed of light while it can take days for a Coronal Mass Ejection to get here.

The satellite is called NEOWISE, a 15 year old satellite that was the first one launched to survey the sky for near earth objects. The name appears to be a combination of Near Earth Object and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. NEOWISE was launched in December 2009, on a seven month mission. That's right, we're four months short of 15 years out of a seven month mission. 

In fact, it was launched as WISE, lived out a mission and then was put in hibernation.

After WISE completed checkouts and ended its primary all-sky astronomical survey, NASA put the spacecraft into hibernation in 2011 after its supply of frozen hydrogen coolant ran out, reducing the sensitivity of its infrared detectors. But astronomers saw that the telescope could still detect objects closer to Earth, and NASA reactivated the mission in 2013 for another decade of observations.
...
"We never thought it would last this long," said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE's principal investigator from the University of Arizona and UCLA.

While a lot of NEOs have been found, most have been found with ground-based telescopes. Where orbiting telescopes stand out is observing in the infrared.  Earth's atmosphere absorbs most of the infrared light coming from faint objects like asteroids. Warm space rocks.  

The common tradeoff with telescopes and camera lenses involves field of view vs. magnification. Larger telescope optics (mirror or lens) tend toward higher magnification and smaller fields of view. NEOWISE's mirror is 16-inches diameter, compared to something like the James Webb Space Telescope, which has a multiple piece mirror that totals 256 inches aperture, 16 times the aperture of NEOWISE. Of course, the side of that trade NEOWISE wins is a wider field of view. 

But its wide field of view allowed NEOWISE to scour the sky for infrared light sources, making it well-suited for studying large populations of objects. One of the mission's most famous discoveries was a comet officially named C/2020 F3, more commonly known as Comet NEOWISE, which became visible to the naked eye in 2020. As the comet moved closer to Earth, large telescopes like Hubble were able to take a closer look.

“The NEOWISE mission has been an extraordinary success story as it helped us better understand our place in the universe by tracking asteroids and comets that could be hazardous for us on Earth,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate.

Artist's concept of the NEOWISE satellite with a comet (upper right) and a sweeping belt of "space rocks".  Image credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech

WISE, and then the extended mission of NEOWISE, helped scientists estimate there are approximately 25,000 near-Earth objects. 

It's impressive results, but it's just the start. A replacement is in the works called NEO Surveyor, which will be placed so it orbits around the L1 Lagrange point nearly 1 million miles from Earth and the same neighborhood as NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Satellite SOHO. Launch is currently targeted for 2027.

SpaceX Announces First Human Flight to Polar Orbit

On Monday, SpaceX announced they will provide launch and space hardware for the first human flight that will go into a polar orbit. The previous highest latitude a manned spacecraft has flown to is 65.1 degrees, done by the Soviets 61 years ago (1963). The private mission will be led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years.

The "Fram2" mission, named after the Norwegian research ship Fram, will launch into a polar corridor from SpaceX's launch facilities in Florida and fly directly over the north and south poles. The three- to five-day mission is being timed to fly over Antarctica near the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, to afford maximum lighting.

The four-person crew will fly, fittingly, aboard Crew Dragon Endurance, which is named after Ernest Shackleton's famous ship that was trapped in the Antarctic ice and eventually sank there about a century ago. The spacecraft will be fitted with a cupola for both photography and filming.

The summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere is the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, so they're hoping to launch in four months, but while look-ups will confirm for you that the date is December 21st, we don't know what kind of "tolerance" goes along with that. That is, can they launch on any date within one week either side of that, one month either side, or just what?

It's also an unusual mission in private spaceflights in not being funded (or flown) by Jared Isaacman, who has been involved with both the Inspiration4 mission in September of '21 and the coming Polaris Dawn mission, currently set for August 26th. During an interview, Wang said he modeled the Fram2 mission's crew and public outreach programs on the template established by Isaacman. 

Wang had said that he became a billionaire when cryptocurrencies soared in price in 2021. He had always been interested in flying into space and started asking SpaceX about the cost to take a ride. In 2023 the discussions matured, and Wang realized that if he bought an entire mission he could set its parameters. Since another love of Wang's is the arctic and antarctic, it seems like an obvious choice. 

The crew of Fram2 from left to right: Eric Philips, Jannicke Mikkelsen, Chun Wang, and Rabea Rogge.  Image Credit: SpaceX

The mission's three crew members joining Wang are:

Jannicke Mikkelsen, Vehicle Commander: A film director and cinematographer, Mikkelsen specializes in remote and hazardous environments such as the Arctic, ocean, aviation, and space. In 2019, she served as Payload Specialist on the record-breaking polar circumnavigation flight One More Orbit mission in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

Eric Philips, Vehicle Pilot: A professional polar adventurer and guide, Philips has completed dozens of ski expeditions to the North and South Poles since his first polar expedition in 1992. He is co-founder of the International Polar Guides Association and co-creator of the Polar Expeditions Classification Scheme.

Rabea Rogge, Mission Specialist: A robotics researcher from Berlin, Rogge is currently pursuing her PhD in Norway. Her work spans from having led a satellite mission to researching ocean robotics in the Arctic, reflecting her commitment to advancing technology in both the polar regions and space.

"I'm amazed that you can now become a commercial astronaut," Mikkelsen said in an interview. "I have a pretty gnarly injury background, being in a wheelchair for a good year, and then learning to walk again between three and five years old. I wish I could tell that girl that she can become an astronaut."

Wang said he met two of the crew members while on a ski trip several years ago, and another in Svalbard. All share his interests in exploration, adventure, and the poles. He said it is his hope that they will all help the mission contribute to increasing humanity's understanding of the Earth's poles and spread the inspiration of spaceflight.

In my mind, I can see Wang talking with someone from SpaceX and asking about the cost to just "buy a seat" on another mission. After a lot of back and forth someone tells him a number. He says to himself, "is that all?!?  Gee, I should just buy all four seats and take a lifetime dream flight."