Small Space News Story Roundup 66

Because Slow News Day  

The Launch Industry's biggest problem is exactly what you think 

It's one word: cadence.  

At the World Space Business Week this week, executives speaking at the Sept. 15 panel highlighted their problems scaling up flights of new vehicles that have entered service in the last two years.  

“The key for us is cadence,” said Laura Maginnis, vice president of New Glenn mission management at Blue Origin, citing investments in tooling and automation “so that we can scale up with a really dramatic increase in the coming year to meet the needs of all of our customers.” 
...
At the same conference a year ago, another Blue Origin executive projected the company would conduct 8 to 10 New Glenn launches in 2025. To date, New Glenn has launched once this year, the vehicle’s inaugural mission in January.

A quick check of Blue's page at NextSpaceflight shows they have a target of three more launches this year, with the next launch being the Escapade mission to Mars for NASA and targeted as "No Earlier Than October," which is uncomfortably (to me) nonspecific.  SpaceNews adds:

Rocket Lab, which built the twin spacecraft, noted in a Sept. 12 social media post that it had yet to ship them to the launch site, suggesting liftoff may still be a couple of months away. 

It's not news that ULA is in a similar boat.  CEO Tory Bruno was quoted saying that between Atlas V and Vulcan they would aim for 25 launches this year.  In August CEO Tory Bruno said the company now expects nine.  And it's not just US companies. 

As recently as June, Arianespace projected five Ariane 6 launches this year, including the debut of the more powerful Ariane 64, with four solid-rocket boosters, but has completed only two Ariane 62 flights, including one in August. 

One of the two ESCAPADE spacecraft undergoes final test in Rocket Lab's clean room.  Image credit: Rocket Lab

NASA reports passing a major milestone for the number of exoplanets discovered 

I remember fairly clearly where I was when the first planet outside our solar system was discovered and verified, Oct. 6, 1995.  In my real job, I was still working at the second to last company I'd ever work for, and the project I was working on was communications systems working around 60 GHz, well into what are called "millimeter waves" or the spectrum above microwaves.   

NASA reports we have crossed the 6,000 line of discovered and verified planets.   We're just short of 30 years since that discovery in October of 1995, which seems to indicate a rapid pace of discovery, but it's more than that.  

In fact, only three years ago, that figure was at 5,000. At least at face value, the rate of discovery appears to be exponential — which is good, because, theoretically, there should be billions more worlds out there for us to locate. 

I'm going to rush to add that while the whole concept (and the source article) are full of the stuff of dreams - not just new planets and imagining what they may be like, but the thought of visiting them to see and experience what they're really like.  That's where reality diverges dramatically from those dreams.  Without those staples of science fiction, like "warp drives" or traveling at multiples of the speed of light, we'll never see those places.  I've gone through some of the numbers before.

Voyager 1 is currently 22 hours, 37 minutes and change away at light speed. I'll call it 22-1/2 light hours away. The nearest stars are just over four light years away. Assuming it's even going in the right direction, it'll take Voyager 1 almost 77,000 years to get to the Alpha/Proxima Centauri star system. 

It's safe to say that there's no way we could mount a mission to the nearest star with any technology we know of. What moving machines do you know of that could work for 77,000 years? If we could go 10x faster than Voyager, it's still 7700 years. We'd have to go a significant portion of the speed of light to even get there in an adult's lifetime. The problems are mind boggling - and this is for the nearest star. Our galaxy is thousands of times bigger than the distance to Proxima centauri; around 88,000 light years in diameter. It's practically impossible to go those distances. Even going 100 times the speed of light it takes far too long to get there.