The response to a statement like that used to be "funny as in ha-ha, or funny as in strange?" Funny strange.
Stephen Clark at Ars Technica pointed this out last night, saying "There's a secret reason the Space Force is delaying the next Atlas V launch." I was quickly going from not having noticed it to the "now that you've mentioned it" side.
As the title suggests, the weirdness started on the scheduled next launch of an Atlas V back on April 9th, a mission to carry 27 Kuiper satellites for Amazon.com's version of a satellite internet constellation like Starlink. While working on that night's post (about Jared Isaacman's first senate confirmation hearing), I had the live coverage of that mission playing audio, so I heard it going on and switched to watch things a couple of times. It looked like a plain old scrub due to a line of storms violating some launch criteria or another. No big deal. Happens fairly often.
I expected (along with many others) that they would do a 24 hour reset and go the next night. The next morning, a time for the next launch attempt still hadn't been posted to NextSpaceflight.com. April 9th was Wednesday, and it wasn't until the weekend that a Monday launch time was announced. Then that launch date was deleted, too. At some point, I start wondering if something else really caused the launch scrub and it was just convenient to blame it on the weather.
At first, there seemed to be a good explanation for the extended turnaround. SpaceX was preparing to launch a set of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket around the same time as Atlas V's launch window the next day. The Space Force's Eastern Range manages scheduling for all launches at Cape Canaveral and typically operates on a first-come, first-served basis.
Except that SpaceX was delayed, too.
It wouldn't have been surprising for SpaceX to get priority on the range schedule since it had already reserved the launch window with the Space Force for April 10. SpaceX subsequently delayed this particular Starlink launch for two days until it finally launched on Saturday evening, April 12. Another SpaceX Starlink mission launched Monday morning.
There are several puzzling things about what happened last week. When SpaceX missed its reservation on the range twice in two days, April 10 and 11, why didn't ULA move back to the front of the line?
Clark says that ULA has always been pretty transparent about launch scrubs, but they've never said anything detailed about the reasons for waiting to launch, only saying, "a new launch date will be announced when approved on the range." After being sure to say, "The rocket and payload are healthy."
Then, a few days ago, SpaceX postponed one of its Starlink missions from Cape
Canaveral without explanation, making this a rather rare week without a launch
on the Eastern Test Range. NextSpaceflight says SpaceX is planning their
next launch early this coming Monday, 4/21 (4:15 AM EDT); that delayed
Starlink mission will launch around 16-1/2 hours later, Monday evening at 8:48
PM EDT. The early morning launch is a Cargo Resupply Mission, Cargo
Dragon, to the ISS and those missions seem to be higher priority to the Space
Force Station.
One more twist in this story is that a few days before the launch attempt, ULA changed its launch window for the Kuiper mission on April 9 from midday to the evening hours due to a request from the Eastern Range. Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, the range commander, spoke with reporters in a roundtable meeting last week. After nearly 20 years of covering launches from Cape Canaveral, I found a seven-hour time change so close to launch to be unusual, so I asked Panzenhagen about the reason for it, mostly out of curiosity. She declined to offer any details.
"The Eastern Range is huge," she said. "It's 15 million square miles. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of players that are using that range space, so there's a lot of de-confliction ... Public safety is our top priority, and we take that very seriously on both ranges. So, we are constantly de-conflicting, but I'm not going to get into details of what the actual conflict was."
Stephen Clark comes to the conclusion that there's something going out in
those 15 million square miles that is making Space Force clamp down on
launches and it's secret enough that they're not going to say anything about
it. There are several possibilities that can be considered, for example,
launches of vehicles that the public isn't supposed to know about.
Perhaps submarine launched missiles or new missiles that the Space Force wants
to keep as secret as possible. That sort of testing, typically leads to
cautions in "Notices to Mariners" for boaters or "Notices to Air Men."
Searches for those kinds of notices don't show any released lately.
It's possible that there's something (or some things) that are broken or that need some sort of maintenance.
When launches were less routine than today, the range at Cape Canaveral would close for a couple of weeks per year for upgrades and refurbishment of critical infrastructure. This is no longer the case. In 2023, Panzenhagen told Ars that the Space Force changed the policy.
"When the Eastern Range was supporting 15 to 20 launches a year, we had room to schedule dedicated periods for maintenance of critical infrastructure," she said at the time. "During these periods, launches were paused while teams worked the upgrades. Now that the launch cadence has grown to nearly twice per week, we’ve adapted to the new way of business to best support our mission partners."
Perhaps, then, it's something more secret, like a larger-scale, multi-element military exercise or war game that either requires Eastern Range participation or is taking place in areas the Space Force needs to clear for safety reasons for a rocket launch to go forward.
As of this evening, that Atlas V launch (Project Kuiper (KA-01) ) is back on the schedule. Monday, Apr 28, 7:00 PM EDT
Pushed by trackmobile railcar movers, the Atlas V rocket rolled to the launch pad last week with a full load of 27 satellites for Amazon's Kuiper Internet megaconstellation. Credit: United Launch Alliance
Many strange events lately. Somethings happened like things we are not privy too.
ReplyDeleteIt could be something as simple as issues with power systems, as Florida Flicker and Flash (Florida Power and Light) are the electrical suppliers to the Cape. Though you'd think there were backup generators, so maybe not a system-wide electrical issue (think Puerto Rico.)
ReplyDeleteIt could be something like an issue with the wildlife. Space launch cadence, as you noted, used to be in the maybe once a month or twice a month if lucky. The newer 'Launch em as fast as possible' schedule may be impacting some of the more endangered wildlife. And we've seen environmental issues affect launch schedules before.
Or, well, issues with security and terrorism. Of which, in the correct course of things, we normal people will never hear about. Could be some sabotage or 'chatter on the interwebs' are causing the deep security folks to get quietly panicky about stuff.
Or it could be supply/storage issues with volatiles. People don't understand how destructive the salt air environment is on metals if they haven't experienced it. As the quotes above point out, lots of maintenance, and maintenance deferred is maintenance made harder. The overall infrastructure of the Cape is OLD, really OLD, some of it as old as the late 50's and early 60's.
We aren't seeing constant upgrading like we see at Boca Chica, which is a site that's gone active started in 2016, and SpaceX has emplaced, replaced and scrapped whole generations of ground support equipment. Think about that. In 9 years or so, SpaceX has built, tore down, rebuilt, tore down, rebuilt, tore down succeeding waves of buildings and pipelines and stands and fixtures and towers and platforms.
In comparison, the pace of construction, refurbishment, replacement, scrapping et al at the Cape is glacially slow, with only SpaceX going full bore in construction and management and all of that.
Lots of reasons for launches to be cancelled. Lots of things that we normies don't need to know. Yes, it's curious, weird and somewhat concerning. But we're dealing with generations of management and mismanagement at the Cape, along with a whole lot of factors we can only speculate about.
I'm pretty sure that SpaceX, given half a chance, would have loved to build a facility in Florida like at Boca Chica, separate from any other previous space systems.
If I had to pick one, I'd probably go with the "issues with security and terrorism" including possible war gaming exercises anywhere in the 15 million square miles General Panzenhagen mentioned.
DeleteThat said, there are always complaints from the greenies because you inconvenience the wildlife on the Cape, and complaints from moe-rons who buy a home within a few miles of the launch pads and then complain about the noise. I think we'd hear about those groups, though, so that goes back to the first one.
Don't forget that it is a military range first, then a space range. There could be high priority Navy or Air Force activities out there.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen a map of the area in a while - is it big enough to cover, or touch, Navy op areas off Eastern Florida?
I've seen other reports of Chinese soy ships off shore - maybe the military is waiting for them to leave?
Jonathan
I think the Navy operates offshore pretty much all the time here, so I don't know how to answer that properly. They have used the AFETR (Air Force Eastern Test Range - as it used to be called) to test submarine launched missiles for decades.
ReplyDeleteChinese spy ships are among the "things I assume are always there" and I wouldn't be surprised if this is related to "what if?" planning for Iran and Iranian operators were on the Chinese ships. War gaming? Maybe I'm paranoid and maybe I'm not paranoid enough.
Thanks, SiG. You are my way of tracking all things space news, so it is always interesting to hear of things like this.
ReplyDeleteIf I had to hazard a guess, I might likely go with security as well. These are troubled times.
Don't forget that large parts of this safety area are in international waters - we can ask foreign ships to stay out but we can't make them.
DeleteEdwards is seeing this alot more with California's ban on traditional maritime fuels; ships heading north pass farther off shore to avoid CA waters and mess up planned military testing in those waters.
Jonathan
We totally needed another conspiracy theory.
ReplyDeleteAnything related to CMEs?
ReplyDeleteDoubtful...
DeleteMaybe a stupid question, but could the downrange weather conditions influence a launch?
ReplyDeleteNot usually, but I wouldn't say it's impossible. It was every launch during the Shuttle days because they had to land downrange if something went just the right amount of wrong. They never did one of those aborts but they could scrub a launch if the needed airports had bad weather. They were scattered around a wide area.
DeleteThese days, I don't know of vehicles that need that, but I wouldn't say it'll never come up again.
Just for fun, UAPs?
ReplyDelete