The VHF Contest is about what I expected

I had to shut down the station for an hour or so to let the daily thunderstorms roll past (it is August 43rd, after all), but I had the station on for a couple of hours before that and since then. 

The short summary is it's pretty much as I expected last Sunday night. Most of what I heard were stations within a 25 mile radius of my place, but I'd get maybe one or two 15 second windows when I'd hear someone farther away. A couple of stations around Atlanta and about that radial distance.  I'll go back when I'm done here and try not to fall asleep from boredom as the night goes on.  

In other places around the country, people will load up a van or car with radios, computers and portable antennas they can set up - like this guy. Not here. At least no one I know of does it. It is August 43rd, after all. Maybe in January.  

Photo from the ARRL.org. This link says the guy in the photo is Ed Parsons, K1TR, but no more details than that. 

On that Super El Nino Season

Yesterday, September 10th, was the peak of the Northern Hemisphere's hurricane season, I generally always run a post about that. So far this year, it has been very quiet, but I didn't realize it was this quiet until I saw this headline from Watts Up With That.  

There have been no hurricanes in the Atlantic — Yet! Making 2026 the quietest since satellite tracking began in 1966

Sure enough, I went to the National Hurricane Center (one of my everyday visits) and found this map.

Pretty much since last spring, the weather sites have been saying this year's El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle was looking to be a very strong or even "Super" El Nino. As soon as I heard that, my memory fired on the other years we've had that were the El Nino side of the El Nino/La Nina cycle. In El Nino seasons, the north Atlantic storms tend to either be weaker or they stay away from Florida. Many re-curve out to the North Atlantic farther east than during La Nina years, even east of the Bahamas. I was looking forward to it. The fear mongering about how bad a Super El Nino is just seemed like the regular "if it bleeds it leads" Golden Law of the TV news.

You may have heard that Hawaii is having a busier hurricane season than usual. 

There are currently THREE hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean: Lowell, Karina, and Marie. The warming El Niño trend in the Pacific is increasing storm activity there while the Atlantic remains calm. 

That's the other side of the story.  They're not having a La Nina out there - that name applies to both the tropical Atlantic and Pacific waters. We're having very unusual conditions here, and I assume they're having very unusual conditions there. It's just that we're having better conditions, while they're having worse. 

The number of storms per 100 years - plot from 2024. As you can see, September 10th is the peak but the curve is a bit higher on the "later than" (right) side than earlier. Our lack of storms so far this year isn't an excuse for all my fellow Floridians to not keep an eye out for things that could develop. Hurricane season lasts until the end of November ("close enough" to Dec 1 on this graph) and what has happened so far this year has little to nothing to do with what's coming in the second half of the season. We have had storms in November before. 

To borrow someone's quote and beat it about the head and shoulders, "the season's not over until it's over." Keep your eyes open and enjoy the quiet times we're having.

On the 25th anniversary of 9-11

For me, 9-11 always rolls in like a fog of memory.  Like the tragedies of JFK's assassination, space shuttle Challenger exploding on ascent, or the triumph of Apollo 11's landing, I'll always remember where I was and details of the day it happened.  As I've said before, 

On that bright Tuesday morning, I was out of the office at a small company that we contracted to do some testing on our radios. As the technician and I were setting up the test, the company's secretary/receptionist came in and said the local radio station had a bulletin that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. My first reaction, perhaps strangely, was that radio navigation systems can't be that wrong, it must have been a terrible accident. Act of war did not enter my mind. As the morning went on, a TV set was put in place and large antenna hooked up outside (there are no local over the air TV channels). We watched the second plane hit and quickly realized this was no accident. That's when the thoughts of Pearl Harbor and other acts of war started. I've heard it credited to Ian Fleming as his character Auric Goldfinger, but the saying goes, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." And so it appeared that day.

In the days that followed, I learned that friends were affected by the events of 9-11, but weren't directly involved. A co-worker was on business at Boeing, and had to rent a car to drive home. A very close friend was waiting at JFK airport to fly home, and saw the attacks in real time. He also had to rent a car and drive home. A cousin lives within viewing distance of the Twin Towers and watched it. And now I have friends who have sons in the armed forces in Afghanistan, and others who have been in Iraq. We need to remember we are at war, even if our enemy isn't a convenient nation-state. You can pretend we're not at war if you'd like, but if someone swears to destroy you, it's prudent to believe them.

I'm a mix of groups of responses. The first group of feelz is "remember the fallen", "remember the first responders who ran into the buildings", "remember the dead and wounded servicemen, the ones who came back with missing limbs, or injuries that can't be seen" and "remember their families." The second group of feelz is along the lines expressed best by Aesop at Raconteur Report in his excellent post in 2018: "Every Day is 9/11. That's Exactly the Problem". Unfortunately, while his blog is there with a six month old post, this one doesn't come up. While I'm not sure, that may be the column that made me a regular reader over at his place. 

But then came 2021 and the Bidenistas. We weren't defeated, we formally demonstrated defeating ourselves to the whole world. We lost in what might have been the most incompetent cluster fuck in the history of man. A team of Brownie Girl Scouts could have planned and executed that abandonment of Afghanistan better than the Biden military did. As Keith Finch, a former Marine writing for GAT Daily, says:

That’s the strangest thing about this longest war. We weren’t defeated. We won the fights. We’re damn good at fighting. We lost because ‘winning’ never had a defined end state. It wasn’t ‘When we get Bin Laden’ or ‘The Total Annihilation of the current Al-Qaeda structure no matter where they hide.’

This would have been a very different war if we had told certain states to shove it, we are going hunting anyway. It wouldn’t have been diplomatic, but with the righteous rage of the United States at that moment who could have lodged more than token protests?

We lost because we just said, okay we’re done and went home in a way that looked shaky weak and deceptive… we didn’t even have the fortitude to stand up and declare, Afghanistan you are on your own guys because we’re out. Biden boldly promised that he didn’t believe and we had no indication that the Taliban would roll up the country… which was utter bullshit of course. They were our escort out. An ass-backwards neobarbarian culture that we kicked out was back in the seat of power.

It makes it feel like we were never there to many.

While that's a good summary it ignores the aspect of the war that may be the most telling.  The incredible transfer of wealth to the so-called beltway bandits - the contractors that profit off war.  Everyone focuses on the businesses, especially the defense contractors, but it's just as big a crime for the congress critters and the Fed.gov employees who participate with the dirty money, too.  Early on, we could have easily turned Afghanistan and more of the Mideast into plains of Trinitite, but we didn't do that "for the chidrin."  We didn't do it because our civilization respects not punishing innocents for things they didn't do. That's hard to believe when you look at things from abandoning people like Biden's translator in Afghanistan to the Covid response. The problem is that nation building doesn't really work.  Does it ever? I don't really know. Maybe now and then.

Just to be clear, it's not that I think we should still be in Afghanistan, I'm closer to those who have said we should have gotten out long ago, only we should have done it competently. We didn't leave from any position of strength, we left with our tails between our legs looking so weak as to be pitiful to the charitable observers and pathetic to the rest of the world. I'm sure we're especially pathetic to the heirs of Bin Laden who declared us "a weak horse" easy to roll over. I expect lots more actual attempts to emulate 9/11 while we're showing weakness. Less like shirtless guy with buffalo horns and more like, you know, actual acts of terrorism. 

In the end, I always think of it by personalizing it. Imagine you were in those buildings. It's a normal workday, maybe you had the usual morning rush, getting your kids off to school. All normal. You get to work, get settled into your place, start digging into whatever sort of problems your job has you solving. Just like every other day. Suddenly, because of a 7th century mandate, as interpreted by a nutjob in a cave half a world away, your building shakes. Pretty soon it's on fire. You try for the stairs but can't get there, the stairwell is choked with flames and smoke. You're trapped. The fire is getting worse. There's nobody coming to help you that can give a tiny bit of hope. The only way out is death. But staying where you are means being slowly burned to death. Which way do you take? Do you burn to death, slowly, agonizingly, or jump and get it over with in one moment, after a long fall to think about it? 

A group of 9-11 victims who chose the "get it over with in one moment" option.

European space business. Is it dead?

Is the European space capability stuck with turn of (this) century technology? We know that European Space Agency (ESA) has a couple of launch platforms, but nothing is reusable. Nothing has landed and been flown again even as test. On this side of the Atlantic, the goal is "rapidly reusable," as in being able to depend on a short inspection and then launch. Nobody has actually achieved that yet, but that's the stated goal. We saw Isar Aerospace launch on Saturday afternoon as planned, a company started by a couple of young engineers from a German university. Isar hasn't successfully launched two of anything. 

Ars Technica today devoted an article to The Exploration Company, being led by Hélène Huby (Huby and her company have been featured here before), and went with the headline “Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment.” For her part, Huby said, “We will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence.” Sounds right to me! They open by noting Huby seems to suddenly be everywhere.

This week she is serving as one of two envoys, alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet, at a high-profile International Space Summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. The government’s website [in French - SiG] for the event describes her as chief executive of “the fastest-growing space company in Europe.”

Also this week, that firm, The Exploration Company, announced a significant capital raise of $450 million in Series C funding. Although not spectacular by the standards of some US space businesses, this is the largest-ever Series C funding round by a Europe-based space company, and likely the largest funding round ever raised by a female-led company in Europe.

When I led off by saying the European space industry is stuck at turn of the century technology, I meant things like this quote. 

So many of the biggest European space projects of this decade feel dated. The flagship rocket, the Ariane 6 vehicle, is flying. But its costs are high, it is fully expendable, and its flight rate of 10 launches a year feels antediluvian in the megaconstellation era. Europe’s response to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is a project called IRIS², which is already years behind schedule and has seen its estimated cost balloon to more than $15 billion before much metal has even been cut.

"Estimated cost" (which you know is going to be cheaper than reality) is $15 billion and the program is already "years behind schedule?" Who's running this? Gavin Newsom? Who or whatever is going on has led to a situation where it's easy to say Europe's space efforts are going to keep them low on any measures of success. Eric Berger at Ars Technica sees a positive light here.

All of this makes Huby refreshing because she is honest about the situation and has big ambitions. She seems to be one of the only people in Europe who recognizes these problems, speaks publicly about them, and is trying to do something about it. 

Huby's background is as an economist, and while there are some flaming basket cases that are university-trained economists, they do tend to be a bit more reality-bound than many other "degreed professionals."

After working in the existing European space industry, Huby founded The Exploration Company. Their first goal was cargo ship similar to the Cargo Dragon SpaceX is flying to the ISS. This resulted in the Nyx spacecraft, now undergoing NASA safety reviews for a cargo mission to the International Space Station as early as November 2028. She is said to also be working on a manned version like the Crew Dragon, which has pretty thoroughly taken over crew flights to the ISS. 

Her work in this area could be rewarded in Europe, where there is growing frustration with the United States as a reliable partner in space and a desire to have independent access to orbit for European astronauts. The leader of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, said this week he hopes to receive a mandate from European leaders to develop this capability by the end of the year. The Exploration Company, which is already deep into the development of a cargo spacecraft, would instantly become one of the frontrunners in a competition to provide crewed service.

That's not all the Exploration Company has in its sights. Remember her quote, “We will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence?” They have announced the development of an engine named “Storm,” a full-flow staged combustion engine fueled by liquid oxygen and methane with approximately 400,000 pounds of thrust. This would be used to power a reusable rocket intended to launch 40 metric tons in reusable mode, and 60 tons in expendable mode. An aggressive timeline for the rocket’s development, she said, is 2033. Huby notes that no European company produces anything like that. 

At this point, it's entirely appropriate to remark that The Exploration Company has had one, single, partial success in spaceflight to its credit. That's a lot of big talk for the equivalent of a baby. What they have over the big competitors in European Spaceflight is the vision of what they want to do and when. Much like here in the states, the big companies have spent their time seeking government handouts to protect their turf. Sure sounds like “Starliner.” What the US has, and this is probably mostly an effect of being a much larger economy than the European Union, is the billions of dollars that companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Amazon and the smaller companies have invested in space. Add in the many imitators of the US in China, and it's all radically transforming spaceflight. 

Hélène Huby, chief executive officer of The Exploration Co., during an interview in London, UK, on Friday, March 8, 2024. Credit: Betty Laura Zapata/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Can they do it? Can The Exploration Company do these things? Good question! We get to see how it progresses. The answer to whether or not the European space industry is dead might well be, "Ask me again in five years." 

Stoke Space sets another milestone

Remember Stoke Space? They developed a novel way of making a rocket's stages steerable that depended on regulating the fuel flow to the engines on a ring, so that instead of moving the engine bells in angles to the vertical, the engines are fixed and the fuel flow is varied. 

Shown here are the upper stage engines of their first test vehicle, named Hopper 2, which flew in September of 2023. The difference between this ring and a conventional array of engines steered by changing the directions they point kinda jumps off the page at you. There are no engine bells, just spots on the ring that appears to be flat. Above each plume you can make out what appears to be the rest of the engine. 

The Kent, Washington-based company just raised $1 billion via its"Series E" capital campaign, bringing Stoke’s total investor haul to $2.3 billion. The Sept. 8 announcement provided a development update for Stoke’s fully reusable Nova Pathfinder launch vehicle and included plans for its never-before-seen Nova Block 2 rocket, a more powerful system designed to be able to deliver up to 15 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). 

Stoke is actively developing two launch vehicles: the Nova Pathfinder and Nova Block 2. Pathfinder will be the first one to be test flown and results from the testing figures to be incorporated into Nova Block 2.

The initial version of Nova is planned to have a lift capacity of 3 metric tons in fully reusable mode and up to 7 tons in a fully expendable configuration. The rocket’s first stage is powered by seven Zenith engines, with a combined thrust of 700,000 pounds. The novel upper stage features a ring of 24 thrusters that surround a regeneratively cooled heat shield to protect the rocket during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

After completing an extensive set of structural tests earlier this summer on the first stage, CEO Andy Lapsa said Stoke will ship this stage “pretty soon” to the company’s launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. After additional testing there, the vehicle will undergo a static fire test before being mated with the upper stage.

Nova Pathfinder upper stage flight article 1. (Image credit: Stoke Space)

The upper stage will soon be shipped to Stoke’s test site at Moses Lake, Washington, for its own set of structural tests, followed by a hot fire test. Then the upper stage will also be shipped to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

For the first time since Stoke was founded in 2020, Lapsa publicly put out a target launch date for Nova, saying the company is aiming for “early” 2027 to launch. Of course, he is fully aware that problems can, and often do, occur during stage testing and final integration of the vehicles.

“I feel good about that launch date,” he said. “I think that’s pretty realistic. But as you know, in our industry, we’ll go when we’re ready.” 

The Block 2 version of the Nova rocket will use their methane-liquid-oxygen-fueled Zenith engines although there will be more of them. The upper stage will similarly use hydrogen and liquid oxygen for propellant. Probably the biggest change in the Block 2 version is that it gets rid of that triangular shape for the upper stage and goes over to the much more prevalent cylindrical shapes

Stoke is targeting 2029 for the first launches of the Block 2 Nova rockets.

Alright hams, the next big VHF contest is next weekend

I've got to say I've never had much luck in it, but the ARRL September VHF Contest is next weekend. It runs from Saturday Sept. 12 at 1800Z, to 0300Z, on Monday Sept. 14. Here on the East Coast, that's Saturday at 2:00 PM until Sunday night at 11:00 PM. If you've read my ramblings about the other ARRL VHF contests, they all that time format. The first time I ever tried to do anything in that contest was back in early '80s, when I didn't have 6m station at all, and was operating with my HF transceiver driving a 2m transverter I designed and built. I heard absolutely nothing other than the couple of local guys on 2m sideband (voice).

I never tried the June version of this contest until I got on 6m in the early 2000s - I'm not sure what year it was but my first contacts on 6 were in the spring of 2002, so there's a chance that was the first time I worked the June VHF contest. It would have been both CW and phone. After retirement, I started paying more attention to contests like this and made it a point to try the three contests the ARRL puts on: January, June, September. It has always been the case that June is the best and September is the worst.  

Nowadays, I have a radio that has 2m and 70cm (144 and 432 MHz bands) built in, but I don't have an antenna for either of those two bands. (I still have that 2m transverter on a closet shelf, so it may even still work) 

The bigger problem in my eyes is that the Sporadic E season is over. I think my last couple of E skip contacts around the US were almost a month ago; around the 10th of August. While there can be sporadic openings around the winter equinox, and more broadly from around November into January, the northern hemisphere summer E season tends to be better. Back in late January of '24, I worked both New Zealand, and Australia over the course of a couple of days. That propagation, at least the longest hop of "a few" it takes to get there, is more likely to be F layer. A common explanation is that the first and/or last hops of propagation tend to be E layer skip, and after one or two E layer skips, the signal becomes F layer skip. It can be E skip at one or both ends, and move around in the ionosphere.  

Unlike E layer skip, F skip is easier to predict from the Solar Flux Index, sometimes referred to as the 10.7cm solar flux (2.80 GHz). In general, the more the merrier for VHF, and while today's SFI has been around 100 and "quiet sun" levels are in the 70s, F and F2 layer skip are better when it's much higher than 100. A year ago, values around 200 and higher happened a few times.   

An illustration of the ionosphere layers, called the D, E and F layers – in order of height. If solar energy is high enough, the F layer can split into two layers called (imaginatively enough) F1 and F2.

Odds & Ends

Looks like Isar got their batch of firsts today.

Their announced 4:00 PM liftoff got delayed a couple of times and it lifted off at 4:12, but this time they wrote their name in the record books. Not just Isar's first successful orbital launch, but the first rocket to reach orbit after being launched from Europe.

"This is right now making history — making history for Spectrum, making history for Isar, making history for Europe,” Nikolaos Perakis, Spectrum chief engineer at Isar, said during today's launch webcast, which the company produced in collaboration with NASASpaceflight. "I'm incredibly proud of this massive achievement."

I started looking for the expected coverage at 3:30 and quickly found it was being hosted by NASASpaceflight - and they provided a nice video summary later in the afternoon. The video isn't minute by minute coverage of the launch, but a summary or even like a highlight video. 

About that refrigerator repair post

Yeah, the one from this past Wednesday. There were a couple of comments essentially saying to be careful about the drain tube, such as: "Check the drain line from the drip area in the back of the freezer to the tray under the fridge." I wrote that post pretty badly because I didn't plainly say that I didn't have much confidence that the refrigerator was really fixed and the problem was gone for good, I just figured it would be a few days of "keep an eye on it" before the next failure was evident. Thursday morning the thing seemed fine, but Friday morning there was fresh ice on the bottom of the freezer section, which was the first big symptom of things being all wrong. There was a small additional amount of ice this morning. 

The refrigerator is an LG dated 2008, and I got the owner's manual as a pdf from LG this week. It has nothing on even where the water from the defrost and just general use drains to. It has a pan in the base that water supposedly evaporates from but nothing on exactly where it is or how to get to it. I did a search on YouTube with the model number and a couple of descriptions of the problem and there's a large collection of such videos. I looked at a couple, one at 15 minutes long and a short one at around 3 minutes. It looks like it's going to have to be done sitting on the floor and reaching forward to the back wall of the freezer. As Ren and Stimpy used to say, "joy!" 

My mobility and flexibility is probably above average for a 72 year old dude, and I do work on keeping them, but it looks uncomfortable at best and complicated by not having any spare parts around. Which is mostly due to not knowing what I'm most likely to need. We do have an appliance guy we've relied on before, so it's just largely a question of saving cost by doing it versus the convenience of getting it resolved once and for all. Most likely. It's not like pros don't make mistakes that require coming out again.

Awkward confession time about AI 

I really have paid just about zero attention to the various models that are out there and available for use, so while I don't know for sure this is available, I'm looking for a model to help me do a search and I hear they're good at that. In particular, I went to see my primary care doctor last week and was handed a letter saying he was leaving his practice and not going to see patients by the end of the year. The practice closes on December 1. 

A primary care MD or DO (as this one is) shouldn't be that hard to find, but this guy is going to be harder to replace than his predecessor. I want to get a few names together and see if I can interview them, at least spend a few minutes and ask a few questions. It would be handy if a really good search engine could find a few for me to interview and choose from. Even better would be if the search finds the questions I want to ask have been answered already.

Anybody familiar enough with them to say which of the AI engines would be good for this? 

Small Space News Story Roundup 85

It surprised me how long it has been since I did #84. These short items are primarily from Ars Technica's Rocket Report. 

Isar Aerospace to try for Flight Test 2  

Isar Aerospace is in a unique place for a private space corporation in Europe. They've actually launched a rocket once, back on March 30 of '25 but their Spectrum rocket didn't make orbit, and honestly didn't get much higher than a few launch towers. You may remember seeing it lose control less than one minute after launch as engines either couldn't or wouldn't run, then it crashed in to the water around Andøya spaceport in Norway and exploded. 

They've been working toward a second launch since then and are in the books to try again tomorrow at 4:00 PM EDT (Eastern US Daylight Time) from the same spaceport. It sounds like it's a bit more ambitious than just a test of whether or not they can make it to orbit.

This launch will carry 5 cubesats and 1 non-separable experiment as part of European Space Agency (ESA)'s “Boost!” program: 

• CyBEEsat (TU Berlin) 
• TriSat-S (University of Maribor)
• Platform 6 (EnduroSat)
• FramSat-1 (NTNU)
• SpaceTeamSat1 (TU Wien Space Team)
• Let It Go (Dcubed, non-separable experiment) .

The March of '25 Isar Aerospace Spectrum Rocket's launch at nearly it's maximum height. I don't know how high that little mesa is on the left, but it's not even a piece of gravel compared to even the lowest orbits. (The whole video this is from) 

Starship Flight 14 has a date

They just don't have a specified launch time, yet. Just No Earlier Than September 15. That's a week from Tuesday, or 10 days from Saturday.

The scuttlebutt I'm seeing is that they're not going to try to catch the ship with the giant chopsticks, the only goal for this one is to have an orbital flight - and deploy some of the new Starlink satellites that are too big for a Falcon 9 to carry the numbers they deployed of the earlier generation sats. I consider that as a rumor. Completely unofficial. 

The rocket’s enormous first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, lit its 33 engines on the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, on August 28. The static fire on Super Heavy followed a test-firing of the six-engine Starship upper stage earlier in August. This is the rocket that will power Flight 14 of Starship, scheduled for launch later this month. Flight 14 is expected to be the first Starship flight to low-Earth orbit after the previous 13 test flights targeted suborbital trajectories.

Unleashing Starlink V3… The orbital flight will allow SpaceX to deploy operational payloads. A batch of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink “Version 3” satellites will launch on Flight 14. The new Starlink V3s are too large to fit on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and they offer significant performance upgrades over the Starlink V2s that currently populate the network. SpaceX has not said how many Starlink V3s will launch on Flight 14. The company deployed 20 Starlink V3s on the previous Starship flight in July, but those satellites did not enter orbit. They reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, as intended, as Starship headed for a controlled splashdown northwest of Australia.

Blue Origin breaks ground on a satellite hangar

The reconstruction of Launch Complex 36 isn't the only big construction job Blue Origin is doing. 

... it is also moving forward with new construction of an adjacent facility that will help the US Space Force, the Orlando Sentinel reports. Jeff Bezos’ company was awarded a $78 million contract last year by Space Systems Command to construct a space vehicle processing facility on Florida’s Space Coast by 2028. The hangar won’t be just for Blue Origin, though, but will support any launch provider flying national security payloads. 

Thinking big… The Payload Processing Facility (PPF) will cover 120,000 square feet and will be large enough to accommodate Blue Origin’s planned 25.5-foot-diameter (8.7-meter) payload fairing for the company’s upgraded New Glenn rocket. Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, said the facility will house four payload processing bays, two encapsulation bays, and a multi‑manifest area supporting National Security Space Launch, civil, and commercial missions.

Blue is on a construction spree up on the Cape. In addition to LC36 and this PPF, they're adding a second launch pad for New Glenn rockets - the bigger 9x4 version of the rocket. 

With the new companies moving into central Florida to take advantage of the facilities on Cape Canaveral, we have the potential of being a rather busy place for watching launches. 

The 8 year mission to Mercury of BepiColombo began a new phase

The program called BepiColombo is a joint mission between the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) that was first launched on its convoluted and difficult journey to Mercury in October of 2018. Today, the spacecraft, consisting of three separate modules, began preparing for its final arrival at Mercury today, at around 8AM EDT. This diagram shows the major events and their dates over the next seven months. 

UPDATE for Sept. 3: BepiColombo mission to Mercury successfully began its arrival sequence at the innermost planet with two spacecraft, one from Europe and the other from Japan, separating from its Mercury Transport Module. 

The confirmation that the first (leftmost) step in this series of major steps succeeded wasn't communicated back by BepiColombo until closer to 10:00AM EDT - two hours after the maneuver was scheduled. 

Mercury holds the dubious honor of being the least explored planet of the solar system inside the orbit of Saturn. Only Uranus, Neptune and Pluto have had fewer satellites monitoring them (one visit to each planet). Mercury had Mariner 10 making a three flybys between 1974 and 1975, and vastly increasing our knowledge of the smallest planet in the solar system. The next visitor was almost 40 years later when NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft arrived in 2011. Both the Mariner and MESSENGER missions dramatically improved our knowledge of the little planet, but they also had strong points and weak points - meaning there were gaps in this knowledge, too.

As you can tell in the mission plan or schedule above, by March, the two BepiColombo modules will be orbiting Mercury and getting ready to start gathering data.

Europe's Mercury Planetary Orbiter, or MPO, will focus on the planet proper. It's packed with 11 science instruments that will map the terrain, minerals in the crust, and the gravity field, investigate the hollows and volcanic deposits, and observe how the barrage of charged particles from the sun affects this innermost planet.

Japan's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, or Mio, meanwhile, will focus on the planet's surroundings — its magnetosphere and wispy atmosphere, as well as the dust cluttering up its neighborhood. 

After eight years to get to this point, the researchers are excited about being this close to actually getting the data they've been working toward getting. Space.com has several articles on this mission and the milestone they accomplished today. The articles seem to overlap, and quite a bit in some places. If this is your kind of stuff, you might find it worthwhile to go read. 

• https://www.space.com/astronomy/mercury/2-spacecraft-will-soon-reach-mercury-after-8-years-in-space-heres-what-bepicolombo-can-do  
• https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/a-new-mission-starting-today-8-years-after-launch-bepicolombo-begins-mercury-arrival 
• https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/bepicolombo-mission-begins-mercury-arrival-phase-esa-jaxa 

Flying over Mercury's north pole gave BepiColombo's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) a unique opportunity to peer down into the shadowy polar craters on Jan. 8, 2025. (Image credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM)

I beg your pardon, but...

Not much of a post today. Been working on a problem with our refrigerator for about a full, eight hour day. 

We've been having a recurring problem with our refrigerator's freezer section dripping water which ends up on the floor below the freezer door. It has been happening intermittently and only small amounts we can see. I haven't kept a log, but it started out over a week ago, then has been a mix of sometime it's obviously bad while other days it can go all day without leaking. For most of the time, there has been a deposit of ice on the freezer's floor (inside), and I've tried to troubleshoot it to determine if it's the system auto-defrosting circuit, or just what's going on.

A complication popped up today and it stopped me for at least an hour. This refrigerator has a built-in icemaker and while it's a longer story than this, three years ago last month I moved its input hose from the input of a water filter we use on the kitchen sink, to that filter's output, so that our ice was made with filtered water, not "just" city water. Today, with everything off and cleaning behind the refrigerator, I heard a quiet little hissing sound. It turned out to be that hose was leaking - spraying a very fine mist of the filtered water out behind the refrigerator. I had to turn off the cold water under the sink to stop that spraying.

My fix was to disconnect the icemaker from that water filter, which means there is no connection to water for the icemaker at all. I had to go up to the corner hardware store to buy an adapter to not hook that hose back to the filtered water. The hose is just hanging there, not attached to anything. I think from now on we're just going to live without an icemaker. It's not like we use a lot of ice and neither one of us thinks it's an essential appliance. Since the water in the bottom of the freezer had to come from somewhere it was either the water going to the icemaker, or the refrigerator's defrosting system not working properly, and everything else in freezer looks normal, not too much frost. I think what comes next is I'm going to go buy some ice cube trays and we'll just fill 'em up in the kitchen sink and freeze them on a shelf in the freezer. Just like we used to do 60 years ago.

Anyway, that's why it's an odd day. Back to normal tomorrow.  

The first report on Artemis II's heat shield is out

Going into the Artemis II mission last spring, probably the biggest concern we'd hear about was the heat shield issues that were seen on the unmanned Artemis I mission back in late 2022. Probably the best set of pictures I've got were posted in January of this year. The heat shield on an Orion capsule uses the ablative technique that has been used since the early days of spaceflight; the base of the capsule is coated with an ablative material called Avcoat that's supposed to essentially disintegrate slowly and in a controlled way. Instead, large chunks were missing. Lots of chunks. Back when the capsule was recovered, a single picture taken by a recovery diver was released. The heat shield was obviously much, much better than Artemis I's shield.

The Artemis 2 Orion heat shield underwater after splashdown on April 10, 2026. (Image credit: U.S. Navy) Some image processing by me to bring up the overall brightness of the image and get more of the shield to show up.

A report on the detailed examination performed on the Artemis II heat shield was released and reported on today. 

After the Artemis I mission in 2022, there were more than 100 char loss sites observed across the dish-shaped heat shield at the base of Orion, some of which were more than an inch deep. On the Artemis II heat shield, he said, there were approximately nine char loss sites observed. “So it was a big improvement,” said Hill, former director of Mission Operations at NASA.
...
At the base of Orion are 186 blocks of a material called Avcoat; they are individually attached to provide a protective layer that allows the spacecraft to survive the heating of atmospheric reentry. Analysis after the Artemis I mission found that this Avcoat material was “impermeable,” essentially meaning it could not breathe. During reentry, gases became trapped in the heat shield, leading to cracking.

After considering several options, including swapping the heat shield out for a newer one with more permeable Avcoat, NASA decided instead to change Orion’s reentry profile. For Artemis II, it would return through Earth’s atmosphere at a steeper angle, spending fewer minutes in the environment where this outgassing occurred during Artemis I.

A quote about engineering I was told while I was still in school, and that I've stated here before, is that "engineering is the art of compromise" - it's practically always the case that when you improve the performance of something that you're struggling to improve, you make something else worse. The final design you end with is better at the one characteristic that you worked to change but something you weren't trying to improve got worse. In this case, the performance of the heat shield was remarkably better but "the new reentry profile reduced the vehicle’s “downrange” capability from 4,800 nautical miles to 1,775 miles. Downrange capability is the distance a spacecraft can travel, relative to the Earth’s surface, from the point of atmospheric reentry." 

Does reducing the downrange capability to less than 40% of what it started out as matter? It's not as good as it was, so that has to be considered differently for every mission. The trade is that reduction in downrange capability reduced the number of missing chunks from 100 to 9.

An interesting side note here is that this was talked about at a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel and let's just say they haven't exactly always been fanboys of NASA management.  

Toward the end of the safety panel’s meeting on Monday, a few members made some striking comments about their experiences working with NASA this year. For long-time listeners to meetings of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which is distinctly independent from NASA and tasked with identifying safety issues, these were eye-opening statements.

In describing the panel’s deliberations during its quarterly meeting, Hill said, “Words like impressive, stunning, and shocking were all brought up about the progress that the agency has made in the last year, and even more rapidly just in the last four months.”

The bottom line here is that Panel's members and the other people they interviewed seem convinced the improvement is all due to Jared Isaacman, and they praise him for it. 

“In an empowering or enabling way, the changes that we are hearing in the leadership voice at the very top of the agency, and then down into the agency, are aligning the team on a coherent strategy and then taking the steps to execute on that strategy,” Hill said. “Again, it’s nothing short of impressive, and it’s directly related to recommendations we’ve had open for a number of years.”