Atlas V Booster Issue Delays Starliner CFT-1

The first Crewed Test Flight was scrubbed last night around two hours before the scheduled launch and has been rescheduled for this Friday at 6:16 PM EDT. 

... But mission teams called the attempt off about two hours before Monday's planned liftoff, after identifying a faulty "oxygen relief valve" on the upper stage of Starliner's rocket ride, a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V. The valve was "buzzing," opening and closing rapidly, during the launch countdown, forcing the delay, ULA officials said.

Admittedly, I didn't work with relays very much in my design years; they're just not used very often in the kind of work I did (radio frequency (RF) applications). The only times I've seen relays buzzing it was caused by the voltage driving the relay's coils being too low, which implies that the issue here isn't the relay but the circuit driving it - possibly including the wiring. 

Originally, everyone involved was saying they should be able to try to launch again tonight. That lasted until some time this morning when they gave the date of the next try as Friday evening. Since it's a fairly good rule of thumb that, "in Space 1.0 nothing happens quickly - and manned flight isn't even that fast" I'll just keep an eye on it. Should they need to roll the Atlas V and Starliner stack back to their assembly area, that probably adds a couple of days on to the delay.

The CFT-1 Starliner Capsule on top of its Atlas V ride at the SLC-41 launch pad. Image Credit: ULA on Flickr

Guess We Wait Another Day for Starliner

Word got out around 8:30 PM that the Crewed Flight Test of Boeing's Starliner has been scrubbed for at least 24 hours, apparently due to an out of bounds reading from the Atlas V booster.  The exact problem wasn't talked about while I was watching/listening to the video coverage on NASA Spaceflight.com.

As of now, 9 PM as I write, the scrub has been called a 24 hour scrub, but that can change as the fault is looked into in more detail. 

Payload has provided a good summary of the story behind Starliner and how it got to this point. A more pointed story comes form Eric Berger at Ars Technica, who says, “The surprise is not that Boeing lost commercial crew but that it finished at all.” 

From where we sit today, knowing the story along the way, it's easy to lose sight of important details. Ten years ago when the private crewed spacecraft contracts were first being debated and discussed, pretty much everyone thought Boeing would be the easy winner. 

Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting's conclusion, NASA's chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.

A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a "commercial crew" transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.

In addition to that $4.2 billion fixed price contract that they blew through, they've spent more money out their own pockets - an additional loss of $1.5 billion. In addition to that $1.5 billion loss, there are costs from lost opportunities. Dragon first carried people to the space station nearly four years ago. In that span, the Crew Dragon vehicle has flown thirteen public and private missions to orbit. Because of this success, Dragon will end up flying 14 operational missions to the station for NASA, earning a tidy fee each time, compared to just six for Starliner. 

The problems Boeing had were all self-created, all a result of their corporate culture not knowing how to manage a fixed price contract, instead of the cost-plus contracts behind everything else the spacecraft division of Boeing worked on. There are stories of different software groups essentially refusing to work with each other, managers creating "milestones" on their schedule that would get a payday when NASA approved but that meant little or nothing. There are stories that some Boeing managers have said, "we're never doing that again" when questioned about fixed price contracts and others say they will. In a time when the private sector is practically bursting with small, hungry, hardworking companies, if Boeing can't figure out how to live with fixed price contracts, those small companies will eat their lunch. Or buy the space division from Boeing and put them out of the business.

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner being installed on its Atlas 5 rocket last week. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA & SpaceX Moving Toward Refueling Demos

As SpaceX prepares for the coming Integrated Flight Test, IFT-4, they're still working toward their important role in the Artemis program, the version of Starship that will land on the moon, called the Human Landing System or HLS. While the target for orbital simulations is "next year", they've already begun some tests during IFT-3 to try to capture data on various aspects of the problem. 

NASA contracted first SpaceX and later Blue Origin to develop manned lunar landers. Both ships have been designed for refueling on orbit and the way Artemis has been created to establish a larger presence on the moon than the Apollo missions makes it essential they achieve refueling. 

Amit Kshatriya, who leads the "Moon to Mars" program within NASA's exploration division, outlined SpaceX's plan to do this in a meeting with a committee of the NASA Advisory Council on Friday. He said the Starship test program is gaining momentum, with the next test flight from SpaceX's Starbase launch site in South Texas expected by the end of May.

"Production is not the issue," Kshatriya said. "They're rolling cores out. The engines are flowing into the factory. That is not the issue. The issue is it is a significant development challenge to do what they’re trying to do ... We have to get on top of this propellant transfer problem. It is the right problem to try and solve. We're trying to build a blueprint for deep space exploration."

During IFT-3, it was said they were doing testing involving transferring liquid oxygen (LOX) inside the Starship; part of a demonstration funded by NASA. Kshatriya said that while engineers are still analyzing the results of the LOX transfer, the test on the March Starship flight "was successful by all accounts."

"That milestone is behind them," he said Friday. Now, SpaceX will move out with more Starship test flights. The next launch will try to check off a few more capabilities SpaceX didn't demonstrate on the March test flight.

SpaceX has released conceptual drawings that depict two Starships docked and connected belly to belly for refueling.  Image credit: SpaceX

Before Starship's first landing on the Moon with astronauts, NASA's $2.9 billion Human Landing System (HLS) contract with SpaceX includes ship-to-ship propellant transfer testing and an unpiloted landing of a full-scale Starship on the lunar surface.

But each Starship test flight builds on the prior mission. This means pretty much every Starship test flight over the next couple of years will have goals that feed into the first Artemis lunar landing. During these upcoming Starship test flights, engineers will measure the slosh of propellants inside the ship, along with tank pressures, and observe how the fluids respond to impulses from small thrusters. In microgravity, these small rocket jets provide "settling thrust" to guide the ship's liquid toward the outflow needed for refueling.

Engineers will also monitor the boil-off rates of the methane and liquid oxygen in space. Over time, cryogenic liquids transition to a gaseous state without insulation or other measures to prevent boil-off. SpaceX and NASA officials want to know how much of the propellant will be lost from boil-off to know how many refueling tankers they need to launch for a Starship lunar landing mission.

Refueling is something that everyone involved in long term planning about spaceflight and making the entire solar system more accessible has said is the big engineering problem that needs to be solved. NASA's Kshatriya is comfortable that SpaceX is making good progress with the engineering analysis. 

One of the reasons SpaceX is working hard to build a second launch pad in Boca Chica is to support multiple launches closely spaced in time. For the first full-scale refueling demonstration, still looking to be in '25, SpaceX has to launch two Starships within three or four weeks of one another. The first Starship will serve as the target vehicle in low-Earth orbit and will have an augmented power system with more battery capacity to survive in space long enough for the launch of the second Starship that will be the refueling tanker. In addition, both ships will also have thermal insulation and vacuum jacketing around their internal plumbing to limit boil-off. "Otherwise, the demo itself will not be achieved," Kshatriya said.

This is hard, but it's doable. Various engineering groups have been working on this big task in the background over the years. Computer models and flight data from numerous rockets show it is possible to control cryogenic boil-off, tank pressures, and propellant settling in space. It's just the big step, getting the cryogenic propellants from one spacecraft to another in orbit has never been attempted. 

"In my mind, all the technical issues associated with cryo transfer in space are solved," said George Sowers, former chief scientist at SpaceX rival United Launch Alliance and a longtime proponent of depoting propellants in space. "It’s just a matter of demonstrating it and fine-tuning the technology and the procedures. So, I think we’re on the cusp. I’m happy to see SpaceX taking the steps to make it work."

This chart from a NASA Artemis meeting outlines plans for SpaceX's ship-to-ship cryogenic transfer demonstration planned for 2025. Image credit NASA: Amit Kshatriya

My belief is that there will be lots of learning going on here, in the usual SpaceX mode of try - and if you fail, figure out what went wrong and fix it. Not by '25, but maybe by 2030 this will be as routine as a Falcon 9 booster landing - and you remember how insane that was thought to be just about a decade ago.

It's a Good Thing It's Star Wars Day

It's a good thing because otherwise, I've got pretty much nothing worth mentioning.

As some of the recent Star Wars movies are playing in the next room, a thought occurs to me that has infected the world before. The Evil guy in last movies was Kylo Ren and the existence of Kylo Ren implies the existence of a Kylo Stimpy. 

Image source: Imgflip

Small Space News Story Roundup 35

Well... You know...

Ariane 6 is on the Launch Pad

Over the course of April, the first Ariane 6 vehicle has been assembled on the launch pad in French Guiana. First, they raised the core of the first new version of the rocket on its launch pad, replacing a full-scale ground model used for testing last year. Then, on April 30, the ESA gave us this update.  

The first Ariane 6 rocket to take flight is being pieced together at Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The two solid rocket fuel P120C boosters have now been connected to the central core. For this, the core was raised with a lifting beam and the boosters were moved the last few centimeters into their final positions.

With that, the core is supported by the boosters and the teams on the ground could complete the mechanical and electrical connections, followed by a series of functional controls.

Ariane 6 in with the strap-on P120C boosters. Image credit: ESA/ArianeGroup/Arianespace/CNES

There's still much to be done before we can expect a launch, with fueling tests, and all of the things done to verify it has been assembled correctly and can launch. There's a projected first mission and launch window.

The small satellites that will ride the first Ariane 6 rocket into orbit are scheduled to arrive at the French Guiana launch site later this month. The satellites will be encapsulated inside the Ariane 6 payload fairing and then raised on top of the rocket ahead of the first launch attempt, which could happen in a window between June 15 and July 31.

Ariane 6 is capable of essentially the same payloads and orbits of the Falcon 9 but isn't reusable. The European Space Agency just had to hire SpaceX to launch a pair of their Galileo satellites, and have a second launch booked as well. All because the EU currently has no rockets that are flying and have paid SpaceX 180 million euros ($193 million) for the two Falcon 9 launches. The Falcon 9 booster was dumped earlier this week because the orbit required every bit of fuel a Falcon 9 can carry, and stories are that the next Galileo launch will sacrifice the booster as well. The last Falcon 9 to be dumped was 146 missions ago. 

The ESA needs to get Ariane 6 flightworthy.

China Launches Lunar Sample Return Mission

Eric Berger at Ars Technica puts it this way: 

NASA hasn’t landed on the Moon in decades—China just sent its third in six years

Stings a bit but it's the honest truth. 

On Friday the country launched its largest rocket, the Long March 5, carrying an orbiter, lander, ascent vehicle, and a return spacecraft. The combined mass of the Chang'e-6 spacecraft is about 8 metric tons, and it will attempt to return rocks and soil from the far side of the Moon—something scientists have never been able to study before in-depth.

One of the difficulties in a mission to the far side of the moon (note to Bill Nelson - NOT the DARK side) is that with no atmosphere, and especially without an ionosphere to provide a natural way to get radio signals around the moon, there's no radio contact with the lander. To address that, China launched the Queqiao-2 relay satellite in March, which will serve as a radio relay between the Moon and operators back in China.

The Chang'e-6 spacecraft is intended to return something like 2 kg (4.4 lbs) of rocks to Earth in about a month.  Such a small quantity makes it seem like it may be a "proof of concept" mission before they try to bring back lots more.

About Orion's Heatshield Issues

Thanks to a tip from SpaceNews.com, I learned that NASA's office of the Inspector General released a report on May 1 covering the aspects of the Artemis 1 mission that are behind the reschedule of Artemis 3 from the end of this year until NET September of '25. In particular, they cover the heat shield issues with photographs that I haven't seen yet. Seeing them shines a whole new light on the investigation. 

The report reviewed problems with the Orion spacecraft, as well as ground equipment and the Deep Space Network, from the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission launched in November 16, 2022. The entire report, 43 pages, is here at the OIG's site. It can be downloaded directly as a pdf. 

The problem that's discussed the most is the heat shield, as mentioned as recently as last Saturday. 

NASA disclosed months after the flight that more of the ablative heat shield material had been lost during reentry than expected, but added that it has not posed a safety risk to the spacecraft.
...
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. The report included images showing pockmarked portions of the heat shield that had not previously been released by the agency.

"More than 100 locations" isn't a safety risk? They include one photograph. 

To me, that looks terrible, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm radio designer, and know next to nothing about heat shields.

The heat shield material, known as Avcoat, “wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed,” the report stated. “The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions.”

NASA has yet to find a root cause for the behavior of the heat shield material. In a response accompanying the report, Cathy Koerner, NASA associate administrator of exploration systems development, stated that ground testing “successfully recreated char loss” and that that the material in those tests “has the same features as observed on the Artemis I heat shield.” But the OIG report noted that while NASA was able to recreate the char loss, “they could not reproduce the exact material response or flight environment experienced during Artemis I.”

NASA has yet to identify a root cause of the behavior seen on Artemis I, and they consider that the biggest risk for the next Artemis mission. Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Program, said their emphasis was to understand the physics going on here. 

“We’re getting close to the final answer in terms of that cause,” he said, while others analyze potential changes in the reentry trajectory to alter the heat load on the capsule.

“When we stitch it all together, we either will have flight rationale or we won’t,” he concluded. He didn’t estimate when that would be done, although NASA’s response to the OIG report offered a planned completion date of June 30. 

In addition to this big problem, there was another one in the same heat shield area. Three of four separation bolts on the base of the heat shield, used to separate the service module before reentry, experienced “unexpected melting and erosion” that post-flight analysis blamed on a “thermal model discrepancy.”

The bottom right picture looks more like corrosion on top of the molten bolt than just being melted, perhaps corrosion from being in saltwater. The answer is they'll design that area differently for use after Artemis II, but for the next mission, they've made some minor design changes to the bolt and will add some more heat resistant stuff around the bolt.

NASA Looking for Funding to De-Orbit Space Station

On one hand, de-orbiting the ISS isn't going to be hard. Get everyone and everything that's valued in any way out of it and stop those periodic missions to lift its orbit. It'll come down eventually. As the song says, "what goes up, must come down."  

Oh, wait. You want a controlled de-orbiting? Not like the way China does these things, but controlled so we can have a pretty good chance of not killing people or breaking valuable things on the ground? Well, that's gonna cost you. 

A roundabout and satirical way of introducing the story that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is lobbying congress for more money to de-orbit the ISS.  The real problem is that some congress critters with some common sense are trying cut spending and Nelson can't see a way to do all of what NASA wants with the spending caps he has been faced with. 

The caps, in place for the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, limit non-defense discretionary spending and were part of a deal enacted nearly a year ago in the Fiscal Responsibility Act to raise the debt ceiling. “These two years, ’24 and ’25, NASA has been cut between the two years $4.7 billion from our original request,” he said. “That’s going to have an effect on some of the contracts at all NASA centers.”

NASA, in its fiscal year 2024 budget request, sought $27.185 billion for the agency and projected requesting $27.729 billion in 2025. NASA received $24.875 billion in the final 2024 appropriations bill enacted in March and is requesting $25.384 billion in 2025, a difference of nearly $4.7 billion from the original projections last year.

In particular, this circles around a project called the United States Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), a spacecraft NASA plans to develop to handle the final deorbiting of the International Space Station at the end of the station’s life. That's been talked about as being 2030. 

NASA had requested $180 million for USDV in its fiscal 2024 budget request and $109 million for it in the 2025 request. Nelson, though, told members NASA wanted to get full funding for the vehicle as part of a domestic emergency supplemental spending bill proposed by the White House last fall for disaster relief and other purposes, but yet to be considered by Congress.

First thought: Bill, don't let the SLS folks near this. You want $289 million over two years? I know that can't be anything but a study, so don't let the SLS team touch those studies. Their version of the USDV will cost billions more than they bid and left to themselves it wouldn't be ready until 30 years after the station comes down randomly on its own. 

Second thought: don't go with the argument that we need this to protect us from Putin. It's a pretty sad line that reeks of a lack of imagination.

“Why is it an emergency?” he said. “Because we don’t know what Vladimir Putin is going to do.”

He suggested Russia might terminate its role on the ISS early or decide not to participate in the controlled deorbiting of the station. “We don’t know what the president of Russia is going to do, and we could be in an emergency situation that we have to get this structure that is as big as a football stadium down, and down safely, in 2031.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, April 30, in congressional meetings. Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

For those who don't know, Bill Nelson used to be our local US representative and lived somewhere not too far from here on "the Space Coast." The first place we ever saw him was in a church in the northern part of Melbourne. He's a schmoozer, a politician. Don't depend on him to make difficult decisions. He can, however, put together a team of bright, accomplished people and let them make the decisions he can't.

New Space Startup Aiming to Solve Changing Orbits

For the entire space age, going back to the late 1950s, the vast majority of satellites have been launched into space with virtually no propellants. The extent of their ability to move has been small movements with small thrusters - primarily station keeping, that is maintaining their position and orientation. 

It has often been said that once a satellite achieves its desired orbit, it's not going anywhere. That's because the energy needed to make significant changes to one's orbit is very high.

In space today, the current choices of on-orbit maneuverability are not optimal. There are conventional rocket-powered thrusters that require an extraordinary amount of propellant to move around. There are ion thrusters, which are significantly more fuel-efficient, but cannot make changes quickly. And that's really about it.

You've long heard the saying, "space is hard" and this is a shining example of that. Changing velocity, usually referred to by the more or less mathematical shorthand "delta-v," is the way orbits get changed. More than that, it's how one can get around the solar system, or from Earth orbit to a different Solar orbit.

But a new company, Portal Space Systems, emerged from stealth on Tuesday with an alternative: solar-thermal propulsion. The company's founder, Jeff Thornburg, said Portal Space will focus on mobility in orbit.

"All propulsion has historically been designed for station keeping for satellites, not maneuverability," he said in an interview. "And too many commercial and military customers are struggling with how to spend the very little delta-v they have before they end the life of their asset."

"Delta-v" is how the space industry measures the change in velocity that a spacecraft is capable of—more precisely, it is a measure of the impulse per unit of spacecraft mass. So if your spacecraft has a delta-v capability of 500 meters per second (1,120 mph), and starts at a velocity of zero, then after it burns all of its propellant it would be traveling at 500 m/s.

You know the saying that the first step is the hardest and it applies in extreme to getting around in space. 

It requires an extraordinary amount of delta-v to go from the surface of our planet into low-Earth orbit (LEO)—very nearly 10,000 m/s. This is why powerful rockets are needed to launch satellites. After reaching LEO, the relative delta-v costs to go places from there are lower, but still high. For example, it costs another 6,000 m/s to reach the surface of the Moon from LEO.

Note that most satellites are capable of 500 m/s delta-v, or less, compared to that 6,000 to get to the moon.

This is where Portal Space believes it has a solution. Thornburg says the company is developing a spacecraft built around the concept of solar thermal propulsion, which uses solar energy to heat propellant and produce thrust. Such engines have been studied for decades, but have never been developed for practical purposes. The company has not disclosed its propellant of choice, but Thornburg said it is storable on orbit, and not toxic like hydrazine. (It might be something like ammonia.)

For most of the three years since the company was founded in 2021, the small crew of just Thornburg and his cofounders Ian Vorbach and Prashaanth Ravindran, has been working on the engineering of the engines they envision. Turning the vision into hardware.  There are ~25 employees supporting Portal now, per Thornburg, and the company’s plans for growth over the next year are aggressive. 

He envisions a fleet of refuelable Supernova vehicles at medium-Earth and geostationary orbit capable of swooping down to various orbits and providing services such as propellant delivery, mobility, and observation for commercial and military satellites. His vision is to provide real-time, responsive capability for existing satellites. If one needs to make an emergency maneuver, a Supernova vehicle could be there within a couple of hours.

"If we’re going to have a true space economy, that means logistics and supply services," he said.

Developing a spacecraft with a novel propulsion system and an enormous amount of delta-v capability may sound ambitious, especially for a small startup. However, Thornburg has some credible experience, having worked in the military, for NASA, and at various space companies, including SpaceX, where he was a vice president of propulsion and a lead designer of the Raptor rocket engine.

To Thornburg's statement that a true space economy means logistics and supply services, I would add the ability to repair satellites on orbit and refuel the ones that are exhausting their maneuvering fuel. A long way of saying maintenance. 

Concept drawing of a possible Supernova spacecraft design. Image credit: Portal Space Systems

Portal Space announced Thursday that it has received $3 million in funding from the US Space Force to support development of the Supernova satellite bus. Thornburg said the company plans to launch its first satellite toward the end of 2025 or in early 2026. It will likely go to medium-Earth orbit and, at a minimum, demonstrate its large delta-v capability.
...
“Our DoD customers have said they have real needs that really need to get met by 2026,” Thornburg said. “So…how can we accelerate this capability that the warfighter says they want as fast as possible to meet some of the needs that they’re looking at here in the next couple of years?”

One Week From Tonight, Monday, May 6

Just a reminder that Monday May 6 at 10:34 PM Eastern, the Starliner Crew Flight Test, CFT, is scheduled. All information we can get suggests things are moving smoothly toward that test. 

The last major review was held last Thursday, April 25, and the mission passed the review. 

“I can say with confidence that the teams have absolutely done their due diligence,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free. “There’s still a little bit of closeout work to do, but we are on track for a launch.”

That remaining work is what Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, described as “a couple standard things” for pre-launch preparations. They include replacing a valve in a liquid oxygen replenishment system at SLC-41 and performing additional analysis on a part of the parachute system that releases a cover called the forward heat shield so that the drogue and main parachutes can deploy. That additional analysis is being done “out of an abundance of caution,” he said.

A major milestone that had to happen was that Cargo Dragon CRS-30 had to undock from the ISS to return to Earth. That was originally scheduled for Friday but delayed due to weather in the areas SpaceX recovers them. Word today is that the undocking occurred Sunday. In typical ISS traffic juggling, members of the Crew-8 mission would then board their Crew Dragon spacecraft and move it from the forward port to the zenith port on the Harmony module. That movement is to free up the forward port for Starliner, which is only approved for docking to that port.

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle being installed on its Atlas 5 rocket for the Crew Flight Test mission. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett 

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will be the crew in the Starliner, and they project a good combination of not expecting everything to go flawlessly, but seeing their role as to see just how far they can push to the edges of the envelope. At one of the interviews along the way, Butch Wilmore was quoted as saying, “It’s a test pilot’s dream, if you will, everything that we’re doing from start to finish.”

Weekend Odds and Ends

A project that has been going on for at least half of April has been my semi-annual testing of various batteries around the house. Primarily, not the stuff I use regularly, but stand by batteries for after a hurricane or other extended power outage. As usual, some of them were fine and a couple others weren't. It's a topic I've written on many times.  

The "problem child" this time around was pictured in a post from December 2015, and the battery has a label on it with the date 1/5/14 so it was nearly 2 years old in '15. That battery has been getting lower and lower in capacity for years and it's finally time to say good bye and send it off to the recycling center. A year ago that 35 Amp*Hour battery delivered 10 AH. Clearly not good, but a thought that has to be addressed is "how good does it have to be?" If I'm running things that don't take much current, and that can be used longer with the 10AH battery, why not keep it? Even or especially if it's a "backup to a backup." 

This time around, that battery hasn't been able to deliver more than 3 AH. That's approaching practically worthless. It's also just over 10 years old now, so that's yet another sign that it's past time to set it out to pasture. 

My battery farm contains three Lithium-Ion car jump starting batteries (like this but not this one) that were chosen because they have USB outputs that can charge a phone or run anything that uses USB power, and they also have 12V outputs. Next, I have that dead AGM battery, and two more sealed lead-acid batteries I recovered from my old UPS that died last October. Then there are a few Ryobi "One +" 18 V batteries primarily for the tools that take down (and put up) hurricane shutters and all, and finally a few 18650 cells that were bought as an experiment, for no particular application. 

In the decade since I bought that AGM battery, a "new hotness" has made tremendous inroads in home use, coming down steeply in price and becoming more widely available. These are Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, usually designated LiFePO4 (or LiFePO₄) and called by a handful of other names. I've had tendency to call these Life-po, with the first syllable being the word "life" and the last is pronounced "po" with a long "o". I maybe the only person on Earth using that. 

As class of batteries, LiFePO4 batteries have a substantial number of advantages over lead acid and AGM (really just another type of lead acid - adsorbed glass mat). This illustration taken from a product listing on Amazon is a good summary. The only thing lead-acid batteries might be better at is a lower starting price.

Let me be go all disclaimer. This isn't any sort of endorsement of Eco-Worthy batteries or this specific one, but it's correct to the best of my knowledge and convenient to post here. I haven't bought this or any other LiFePO4 battery. Somewhere in the last year or two, I think I heard they were a good brand, but I have nothing to base that on. 

An important point is that specification second from the bottom: Depth of Discharge (DOD). The exact number for what a lead-acid battery can discharge to depends on what kind it is; starting batteries are different from deep cycle batteries, which are different from sealed lead-acid (SLA) or AGM. Still, the best they do is to around 60% DOD - which says that 40% of the capacity is unusable. That says that if my 35AH AGM battery was really delivering 35AH, I could discharge it to 14AH (40%) using 21AH, or perhaps 17.5 AH (50%) using the same. That 30AH LiFePO4 battery would give me much more - even if I stopped using it at 90% discharged, that's 27AH. Instead of this pictured 30AH battery, I'd get the same amount of usable AH as the AGM gives with a LiFePO4 half that size.

Most (if not all) of the Life-PO batteries have a battery management system built in which I believe means none of my lead acid battery chargers will work with one. The cars still have lead acid starting batteries, so I'll keep one of those chargers around. Switching over to the new battery chemistry brings up all sorts of questions, so I'm digging for information. With pretty much 30 days to the start of what looks to be an active hurricane season, I need to get moving fast. 

Thoughts, recommendations or sick jokes are welcome from those of you familiar with these things.

NASA Still Doesn't Understand the Orion Capsule's Heat Shield Issues

Can the Artemis SLS booster and its Orion capsule fly again. More than likely. It's just as we're approaching a year and a half after the first Artemis lunar flyby mission, NASA still doesn't understand why the heat shield on the Orion capsule had damages that the models didn't predict. 

This topic first showed up as soon as the recovered Orion capsule was inspected and was made public around March of '23. Like the Apollo capsules and really most everything except for the Shuttles and the few other vehicles using ceramic tiles, the Orion capsule uses ablative heat shielding.

"During inspections there were more variations across the heat shield than we expected," said Howard Hu, the Orion program manager for NASA. "Some of the charred material ablated away differently than what our computer models, and what our ground testing, predicted. More of this charred material was liberated during reentry than we had expected."

When an ablative shield burns away differently than the models say, that investigation is about as serious as it gets.  The Orion capsule was never in any danger, and a crew onboard would have been safe, but that's no excuse to stick with a model that may be lying.  That's too much like saying your Russian Roulette game with a revolver hadn't killed you the first time so it must be safe. Like the Russian Roulette, what happens the next time it reenters?

Amit Kshatriya, who oversees development for the Artemis missions in NASA's exploration division, said Friday that the agency is still looking for the root cause of the heat shield issue. 

Engineers have performed sub-scale heat shield tests in wind tunnels and arc jet facilities to better understand what led to the uneven charring on Artemis I. "We’re getting close to the final answer in terms of that cause," Kshatriya said.

NASA officials previously said it is unlikely they will need to make changes to the heat shield already installed on the Orion spacecraft for Artemis II, but haven't ruled it out. A redesign or modifications to the Orion heat shield on Artemis II would probably delay the mission by at least a year.

One of the possible approaches to resolving this problem is to determine if small modifications to the flight's path - how the reentry happens - could be instituted. 

On Artemis I, Orion flew a skip reentry profile, where it dipped into the atmosphere, skipped back into space, and then made a final descent into the atmosphere, sort of like a rock skipping across a pond. This profile allows Orion to make more precise splashdowns near recovery teams in the Pacific Ocean and reduces g-forces on the spacecraft and the crew riding inside. It also splits up the heat load on the spacecraft into two phases.

The Apollo capsules didn't do that. They just plunged into the atmosphere and reentered directly. There are other approaches to reentering and NASA wants to understand how the Orion heat shield would perform during all of the possible reentry trajectories for Artemis II.

There are other issues from the Artemis I mission that need to be addressed before it flies its next mission.

After its Artemis 1 flight, technicians inspect the heat shield anomalies on the Orion capsule. Image credit: NASA/Skip Williams 

Mark Your Calendars - New Glenn First Flight to be September 29

The reports have been coming in since the start of this year that this will be the year that Blue Origin's New Glenn Launches. We now have a date.  

In a presentation at a meeting of a planetary protection committee of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) in London April 24, Nick Benardini, NASA’s planetary protection officer, listed a Sept. 29 date for the launch of Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, a pair of smallsats that will go into orbit around Mars to measure the interaction of the planet’s magnetosphere with the solar wind.

NASA selected Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to launch ESCAPADE, awarding the company a $20 million task order through the agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare contract in February 2023 for the mission. The award at the time mentioned only a late 2024 launch, with the expectation that ESCAPADE would be on one of the first, if not the first, flight of the rocket.

To say this is a much anticipated and ballyhooed launch is a bit of an understatement. I've lost count of the real estimate for how far behind schedule this is, but I have a pretty good idea they were late when I first started blogging on space stories. (A quick search found a 2017 post saying New Glenn might launch by 2020)

That said, I should point out that the estimate isn't from Blue themselves, but from NASA. 

Among the pacing items for this mission are seven BE-4 engines, which will power New Glenn's first stage. A handful of sources inside Blue Origin believe the company is making credible progress toward a launch attempt this year.

You'll recall that Blue Origin rolled out a "Pathfinder" vehicle out to SLC-36 on Cape Canaveral SFS for testing back in February.

“Everything on the pad is real New Glenn hardware,” the company said in a Feb. 21 statement about the pathfinder vehicle. That vehicle, though, lacked BE-4 engines in its first stage, and some components of the pathfinder were not flight hardware.

The New Glenn Pathfinder, photographed in February. Image credit: Blue Origin

What do you think? I don't think I'd schedule a big trip to see it, but it's worth keeping an eye on the status. If those seven BE-4 engines run into trouble, New Glenn's not going anywhere, so especially look for news on that.

With No Fanfare SpaceX Lands Booster #300 April 23

It just seemed to be a matter of time, considering how routine they've apparently made landing Falcon 9 first stages, but mark down that on Tuesday evening, April 23, 2024, SpaceX landed their 300th booster. As always when talking about counts of Falcon 9 boosters flown, this number includes Falcon Heavy launches, which use three of the boosters. Note the 300 does NOT include two boosters that landed successfully but were lost at sea. A Falcon Heavy center core and a Falcon 9 tipped over at sea after successful landings.

Now think about this observation: at the pace SpaceX is operating, it's entirely possible they will recover their 400th booster before the end of this year.  

The Tuesday evening mission was Starlink 6-53. It flew from SLC-40 (Space Launch Complex 40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:17 pm ET and delivered the satellites to a 43-degree orbital inclination. Just under two weeks ago, the new fleet leader of SpaceX boosters, B1062, flew its 20th mission. The booster for this mission isn't even halfway there. 

The Falcon 9 that made the 300th overall landing was Booster 1078, which flew for its 9th time. B1078 made a smooth landing on the droneship ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ and is now on the way back to Port Canaveral. B1078 last flew just 29 days prior to this mission.

B1078 has now launched 4 Humans, 2 telecommunication satellites (on 1 flight), 1 classified payload, and now 6 Starlink missions.

Original X post here. You can click on the video over on X and make it full screen, just not longer duration. This 24 second video is from the landing burn through a quick look at B1078 landed and standing on JRTI

Small Space News Story Roundup 34

As always, small stories that caught my eye

JAXA's SLIM Lander Continues to Surprise 

It was a surprise when JAXA's SLIM lunar lander (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) survived its first lunar night, considering it was never designed to survive the extreme cold of the two week lunar night. Temperatures can reach minus 274 F (minus 170C).

It was also surprise when it survived its second night in mid-March, and probably a bigger surprise.

SLIM has done it again, surviving its third night and responding the night of April 23 in Japan.   

On its X feed, JAXA shared an image captured by SLIM as it was coming out of its third lunar night spent on the moon.

In the translated tweet, the Japanese space agency wrote: "Last night (the night of April 23rd), we were able to successfully communicate with #SLIM, which had started up again, and confirmed that SLIM had survived for the third time. 

"Here is a photo of the surface of the moon taken last night with the navigation camera. As this photo was taken at the earliest age of the moon so far after the overnight awakening, the moon is bright overall and the shadows are very short."

 

Interestingly, India's Chandrayaan 2 was used to photograph SLIM on the moon. 

While SLIM was sending back images of the lunar surface, independent researcher in India Chandra Tungathurthi was using the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter to check up on the Japanese lunar lander. He shared some of the images he captured on his X feed.

Tungathurthi wrote: "I found SLIM using the Orbital high-resolution camera onboard Chandrayaan-2. The below picture was captured on 2024.03.16 at a pixel resolution of 16cm per pixel! Because of the low elevation of the sun, you see long-drawn shadows."

NASA Confirms Dragonfly Mission to Saturn's Moon Titan 

Remember the discussion about Mars Sample Return mission essentially being on hold due to skyrocketing costs and schedule delays? 

Last October, I ran a story about a very different mission to Titan, with a vehicle inspired by the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, but massively different. "Massively" in a couple of meanings of the word. First, instead of a small helicopter, they're talking about a nuclear-powered, car-sized, eight propeller drone. Much, much larger and much heavier as well.

(Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

NASA announced April 16 that the Dragonfly mission had passed its confirmation review. Passing the review allows Dragonfly to move into full-scale development. 

The confirmation review sets a formal commitment by NASA to the cost and schedule for a mission. NASA said that it confirmed a July 2028 launch for Dragonfly and a total mission cost of $3.35 billion.

If Dragonfly launches in 2028, it should arrive at Titan in 2034. NASA is saying they'll choose the Heavy Lift vehicle to allow that six year travel time. Being a one-way trip, it makes sense the overall mission cost should be a bit lower, but that Dragonfly copter will be an obvious place where costs could grow. 

As a reminder, the Mars Sample Return mission's cost was estimated at $8 to $11 billion, with the samples being returned to Earth in the late 2030s to 2040. Given the life of other projects, Dragonfly should still be returning data in the 2040s but the first returns will come well before that.

Voyager 1 is Awake and Communicating!

This past Saturday, April 20, Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status with a coherent message for the first time in 5 months. While she still isn't fully operational and sending science data back to Earth, Voyager 1 is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard systems. 

If you're a regular reader, you'll recall that back in November, Voyager suddenly started acting like something was seriously wrong. I likened it to the probe having had a stroke, although that's too anthropomorphic. The probe seemed to take commands and respond, it still kept its position and kept the data link back to Earth running, it's just that the replies it sent back were more like incoherent ramblings. Something about its uncle having been eaten by cannibals before the mission started. No, sorry. I made that up. 

In the months since that first post on December 12, we've gotten a few updates. The last things we heard were in mid-March, that they had run a memory "poke" and had a pretty good idea of what the problem was. 

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

With a light travel time of 22-1/2 hours, it takes a couple of days to do an experiment, so it's a good practice, perhaps even more than usual, to be pretty darn sure it's going to work. The software was sent to Voyager over the Deep Space Network on Thursday, the 18th. On Saturday, several dozen scientists and engineers gathered in a conference room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to wait for a new signal from Voyager 1.

“In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. "It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated."

And then the celebrations began.

After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Of course, with the Voyagers being over 22 hours away at the speed of light, and it having taken them 46 years to get that far away, nobody's going out to Voyager 1 to replace a memory chip. No single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely. The team can slice it into sections and store the slices separately. There are more details, as always, which come down to essentially recreating a storage system and ensuring that will work. Redesigning the computer on the fly. As it approaches its 50th birthday in 2027. And "document, document, document" what you've done - like every space job.

One of the first references I found to this story started out with a line that I think I'll finish with. I can't find the article but it was something like, "the miracle workers at the JPL have done it again." Well done, everyone. Well done, and good luck with the work left to be done.

It's Time to Celebrate Earf Day 2024!

It's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of.  Yes, even more than Kwanzaa.

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is almost entirely recycled, and is almost entirely useless. Plus, it's late. The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong. Everything here is factually correct. 

I've posted on Earf Day so many times that it's hard not to be repetitive, even if I was trying not to. So nothing this time about Ira Einhorn murdering his girlfriend or the almost completely discredited book, The Population Bomb. No, wait. I just did. Rats! 

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they consider to be unspoiled. They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, that's fine. 

Under that picture, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life. Of course we should all protect the wilderness! It's theirs! That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago. He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and need electricity. Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Probably the worst example is the on that we get beat up about every day: climate change. Notice they don't mention "global warming" any more. It just change. As if the worldwide climate has always been the same. Let's start with that simple observation. They scream that the temperature has gone up since 1850! We're all going to die! Phrased a little differently, the temperature has gone up compared to the coldest period in the last 10,000 years.

That's Indonesia. How about if we reconstruct the temperature half a world away? North Atlantic instead of south Pacific; Greenland instead of Indonesia.

Those match fairly well but 1200 years ago was colder than the little ice age, while not as cold as about 8300 years ago.

Sorry. The temperature has gone up from one of the coldest periods in the last 500 million years. 

The closer you look, the worse the picture is. Borepatch ran a piece a little over a week ago about one of the more insidious things they do: they change the historical records to make the older temperatures look cooler and the newer ones look hotter. That's right; they're lying in all the official documents and have been for as long as this Con has been going on. One of the things that convinced me that skepticism was proper was the Surface Stations Project that Watts Up With That? started back in the '00s. It was a report on the official stations that create the weather record and how large percentages of them weren't sited properly; over 62% were incapable of accuracy better than 2 degrees C. Another 6% couldn't measure within 5 degrees C. They're too close to roads, too close to sources of heat like air conditioner outputs, even airport runways, and more problems. Then there was outright fraud in editing records. 

I'm old enough to remember when the fear was a coming ice age. Anything to scare you into compliance. 

And this isn't even going near things like how bad their models are. They still basically can't handle clouds properly. Virtually none of their predictions ever actually prove to be the case. Instead we get useful idiot celebrities who are too young to understand weather and climate both change (to be charitable). If a 20 or a 40 year old can't remember similar weather, it doesn't mean anything.

Do You Think This is the Only Place Where This is True?

Well, this being a weekend, the news is pretty empty, and that's a good thing because today has been long day of sit around and then rush. So I thought of something I've meant to rant on. 

This is a meme that has appeared in dozens of places. 

First off, I really don't think that's the way the comic first appeared back in '06 (according to the upper right hand corner). The obvious place to start is that the text on the blackboard is nothing like any other text in the cartoon. It's not that it's not a good cartoon, it's just that it doesn't look like a Bizarro.com. But that's not important. 

The point of the meme is obvious: if big pharma and big medicine cure you, they make a small number of sales. One visit or a dozen? It doesn't matter. If you're not going back for treatment, whether it's doctor visits, drugs, or hospitalizations, they all make more money if you're treated regularly and not cured. To use the analogy that I'm sure lots of people are thinking of: why cure a disease if they can just vaccinate you for it or sell you pills for it for the rest of your life. Better yet, what if they can sell massive quantities to governments and maybe put it in the water supply or something? Guaranted sales for decades to come!

The first time I saw this cartoon, I thought, "and you think that doesn't apply to vitamins, supplements and all the other stuff that's being aimed at you?" If you're good at your research and testing, you may find a certain supplement takes care of some symptom you're having. Without fooling yourself with the placebo effect. Congratulations. Now, do you need to take that pill For The Rest Of Your Life? Did you get the dose right and does it change as you get older? The only thing that can be said in favor of fixing issues with whole foods is that you have to buy food anyway and even expensive food might be cheaper than a lot of those vitamin, mineral and whatnot pills. 

When Hobbies Converge or What The Heck is Meteor Scatter?

It's no secret that I'm a radio amateur (ham radio operator); I've talked about that hundreds of times over the life of the blog.  There has been a Radio Sunday series and a specific Ham Radio Series. This will go with the ham radio series. 

Something I haven't mentioned as often, but still have several times, is that one of my hobbies as far back as I can recall has been astronomy and telescopes. I haven't been active in that for a while, but there are posts here about that I found by going back and searching the blog for specific words. I've built telescopes, reflectors from grinding the mirror from a plate of glass, and refractors from things like copier lenses. Some background here, although not related to tonight's post. 

As an amateur astronomer, I've gone to places near and far where I could observe a meteor shower that was supposed to be particularly good. People who aren't in to this hobby generally aren't aware that there are regularly recurring meteor showers several times a year. If you follow meteor showers to observe the pretty light streaks the meteors leave, you quickly learn that showers are best in the early morning hours, or between midnight and first light. If the moon is close to full and bright, it can wipe out the best of showers.  The reason for the timing is that as the Earth moves in its orbit, the rotation that brings night and day rolls the planet onto some meteors, so more are seen. The meteors have to be moving faster to catch up with the planet.

Back in the 1950s, hams discovered that the trail created in the upper atmosphere by meteors burning up acted like a radio reflector, as if the ionosphere was enhanced. The effect is most beneficial to VHF stations which typically don't have regular, predictable ionospheric propagation. In the early days, this was done with Morse code, or CW as the hams typically call it (CW for Continuous Wave). Now that we're firmly in the age of computer assisted modulation modes, most people trying to bounce signals off the meteor trails are using a computer assisted mode. The most popular appears to be MSK144 (.pdf alert).

MSK stands for minimum shift keying, a form of continuous-phase frequency-shift keying (FSK) with shift equal to half the baud rate. MSK144 uses message frames of 144 bits and modulation at tone frequencies 1000 and 2000 Hz to transmit channel symbols at keying rate of 2000 baud. The resulting audio waveform can be viewed as a form of offset quadrature phase-shift keying (OQPSK) with individual pulses shaped like the first half-period of a sine wave.

Although there are other modes still used for meteor scatter, this is the dominant mode. 

So how do you operate meteor scatter? Have contacts with people hundreds to perhaps 1500 miles or more by bouncing a signal off a meteor trail?  

This is why the talk of meteor showers. This time of year has an annual shower named after the constellation it appears to radiate from, Lyra (the lyre) and called the Lyrid shower. Meteor showers don't just happen, they ordinarily happen when the Earth goes through the trail left by comet; the Lyrids are the trail of comet called C/1861 G1 (Thatcher). That's right, it's a comet that was first named in 1861, and it's a long period comet with around a 422-year orbit. It's expected to return around 2283. Thatcher is the discoverer. 

The Lyrids are predicted to peak Monday morning. Interestingly, another shower is already starting to build, coming to its peak two weeks later on May 5th. This is called the Eta Aquariids because it appears to radiate from close to the star Eta Aquarii. This shower is dust from the trail of Halley's comet. Halley's comet is another relatively long period comet although at 76 years quite a bit shorter than Thatcher's; its last close approach to the sun or perihelion was in 1986, and its next perihelion will be in 2061. I remember taking my son to the beach to see Halley's comet; he was five. I haven't asked him if he remembers that in years. 

Given the shower to provide the meteors and the software to interface to your radio to modulate and demodulate the data stream, if your antenna is directional, it makes sense to point it toward the radiant because the trails will be denser there. Most people use a 15 second transmit period followed by 15 seconds receive. The protocol is that if you're trying to contact people to your east, you transmit on the minute and half minute marks - or 0 and 30 seconds. Those are referred to as the even intervals, so they give rise to the acronym PETE: Point East Transmit Even. If you're trying to contact people to your west, you transmit on the 15 and 45 second marks. 

You'll get the best reflections where the trails are the densest, so unlike the case with other modes, you don't necessarily point your antenna at the person your contacting. It works best if you're both pointed at the radiant. Remember, the radiant is like everything else in the sky: it raises in the East and sets in the West.  The exact position in the sky of the radiant isn't extremely important, but the astronomy observing-oriented websites help you learn where the radiant is. There's a program aimed at ham use that seems helpful, called Virgo.

It's important to know that while the astronomy websites are concerned with the peak number of meteors visible per hour, and the Lyrids aren't impressive that way, the showers are perfectly usable for radio after first light and well into the morning. The things that make a shower a highlight for visual observation don't mean much to radio use. I've played at this mode only a few times, and copied signals off the meteor trails until 9 to 10 AM. 

Mars Sample Return and Space Bugs

As a followup of sorts to Monday's post on the Mars Sample Return mission and its problems, Space.com reports on an "Astrobiodefense" committee, the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, and their concerns about not just the MSR, but any mission and what it could bring back to Earth. They consider the threat that ecologically-hungry Martian microbes might pose to our biosphere.

The Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense is a privately funded entity established in 2014, set up to evaluate the status of U.S. biodefense efforts and issues recommendations to produce meaningful change.

The only names they associate with the commission are former Democratic Congresswoman Donna Shalala and Susan Brooks, a former U.S. Attorney and Republican Congresswoman. Of course, Donna Shalala was Secretary of Health and Human Services during the Clinton Administration. Congresswoman Brooks served parts of Indiana. 

While many debate the possibility of advanced, intelligent life elsewhere, few consider the probability of non-intelligent alien microorganisms. These life forms could exist on other planets or moons, hitchhike on spacecraft, or move through the universe in the asteroids they inhabit. 

They could also be Earth microbes that mutate or evolve in response to the stress of spaceflight, becoming more virulent, resistant, or invasive. Either would seriously threaten the public health, safety, and security of humans, animals, and plants operating in space or living on Earth," they noted.

To be honest, it was something I thought about when the samples from asteroid Bennu were returned to Earth back in September, and then it turned out the sample container wasn't as well sealed as they may have wanted. That meant if there was a bad organism in that partially sealed container, it would have been released before the sample container was opened. 

Perhaps you might remember The Andromeda Strain, a big seller book early in the career of Michael Crichton and a popular movie in the early '70s. It was the first book of his I read, around 9th or 10th grade. The source of the bug that killed off the town was a satellite that was supposed to capture potential bioweapons high in the atmosphere and hit the ground in this town. A long way of saying the idea of something like this happening has been around a while.

Shalala and Brooks state that the U.S. needs to invest in research and development of new technologies and medical countermeasures to detect, diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases in space and on Earth.

Furthermore, there is need to enhance our bio-surveillance and symptom monitoring to track and analyze space-related biological threats in real time.

“We need to strengthen our coordination and collaboration between agencies and partners, both nationally and internationally," they continue, "to share information and resources without compromising the kinds of competition that result in scientific advances and economic gains."

Early in the Andromeda Strain movie ('71), two researchers recover the capsule that brought back a bug that killed off the small town where it came to the ground. Image published at IMDB.

Let's just say the last few years have dramatically altered the general likelihood that people will want to give much power to the the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense.