What Do You Say We Start a New Space Race?

Yeah, I'm being facetious.  

An interesting little story surfaced this week that seems to confirm an idea that has recurred in the science fiction world many times.  Imagine some material is discovered in space that is precious and in limited quantities on Earth but is practically free for the taking on some planet, asteroid, or somewhere else in space. All one has to do is get to the supply and take control over it - suddenly, riches beyond imagination. First one to the supply to get ownership of it is "winner takes all."

The story is based on data from NASA's Mercury MESSENGER probe, the first probe ever sent to orbit the small planet. Briefly, the roughly 1.1 metric ton satellite was launched on August 3, 2004, and went into orbit of Mercury just over 6-1/2 years later, March 11, 2011. It orbited Mercury until April 30, 2015. 

Analysis of the data leads to the conclusion that Mercury seems to have a 10 mile thick layer of diamond beneath the crust of the tiny planet. 

Astronomers have long noted that Mercury is different from other rocky planets they've observed, like Earth or Venus. Differences include its very dark surface, and remarkably dense core. Additionally Mercury's volcanic era seems to have ended fairly quickly in the planet's life. 

Another difference noted is that patches of graphite, a two-dimensional or sheet form of pure carbon, appear to be common on the surface of the planet. These patches have led scientists to suggest that in Mercury's early history, the tiny planet had a carbon-rich magma ocean. This ocean would have floated to the surface, creating graphite patches and the dark-shaded hue of Mercury's surface. 

"True color" image of Mercury taken by MESSENGER - using various filters on the spacecraft's wide angle camera to balance the reflected colors. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie

The same process would have also led to the formation of a carbon-rich mantle beneath the surface. The team behind these findings thinks that this mantle isn't graphene, as previously suspected, but is composed of another much more precious allotrope of carbon: diamond. 

"We calculate that, given the new estimate of the pressure at the mantle-core boundary, and knowing that Mercury is a carbon-rich planet, the carbon-bearing mineral that would form at the interface between mantle and core is diamond and not graphite," team member Olivier Namur, an associate professor at KU Leuven, told Space.com. "Our study uses geophysical data collected by the NASA MESSENGER spacecraft."

Over the years, more than a couple of sci-fi stories have thought about an asteroid or planetoid that was considered insanely valuable; say solid gold or some unobtainium metal. In this case we're faced with a problem that has happened many times on Earth (although an extreme example): suddenly a prospector discovers a never before seen quantity of a valuable gem stone.  A pragmatic, practical answer to what happens in such a case is that price is really determined by "supply and demand" and if an unlimited supply were to suddenly appear, the price would collapse. It's not uncommon to try to keep such finds secret to keep from disturbing the price.

A gemstone is rather harder to SWAG a value on, compared to a pure metal. In the case of diamonds, there are well established standards - the "four Cs" based on the size of the stone (weight in carats - 5 carats to the gram) color and clarity of the stone along with how well it has been cut. While I could SWAG a calculation of how many kilograms of diamonds would be in a 10 mile thick shell the diameter of Mercury full of diamond crystals, think of thousands of cubic miles of diamonds, the real value would depend on things that would just be more cascaded "wild-ass guesses" and would essentially be meaningless. Bringing it to Earth would shift the supply so drastically that there would be no demand left once they got here.

ABL Space Loses Rocket at Static Fire Test

While it wasn't quite the kind of static fire accident as occurred in China about a month ago, but small satellite launch startup ABL Space lost their second RS-1 launch vehicle on Friday (July 19) after a static fire caused “irrecoverable” damage in a launch pad fire after a test firing. 

You may recall that ABL Space lost their first launch vehicle on its first flight in January of 2023 when all nine engines on the first stage shutdown 10 seconds after liftoff.  That led to the vehicle falling back to the ground, practically on the launch pad, with the resulting explosion damaging the launch pad area badly.

In a brief statement on social media July 22, ABL said its RS1 rocket, which was being prepared for a launch from Kodiak Island, Alaska, was damaged in a fire after a static-fire test on the pad there July 19.

“After a pre-flight static fire test on Friday, a residual pad fire caused irrecoverable damage to RS1. The team is investigating root cause and will provide updates as the investigation progresses,” the company stated. It did not disclose additional details about the incident.

The company had been keeping a relatively low profile as the second launch has been approaching. The company noted in March that it had begun “pre-launch operations” for the mission and had only put up a single blog post since then, that one in May, a blog post about engine testing. 

The second ABL Space RS1 launch vehicle on the pad on Kodiak Island, Alaska, in an undated picture. The vehicle is described as being in the one metric ton (2200 lbs) payload to Low Earth Orbit class, but has never attained orbit. 

Back after the January '23 launch failure, I remarked that it seemed to me they probably could keep going because their financial picture was pretty solid. That appears to still be the case, if not a little better.  From '23:

ABL is not likely to be in dire financial straits because of this.  In 2021 the company signed a deal with Lockheed Martin for up to 58 missions through 2029.  I can't imagine Lock-Mart would sign a deal without a way out if ABL can't make their system work, but I also can't imagine that a company that has been around and in aerospace as long as the various parts of Lock-Mart have been would cancel the contract over failure of one mission.  First attempts at orbit generally don't make it. 

SpaceNews' article on the effects of this setback also mentions that Lock-Mart contract for 58 missions. They add that Lockheed also plans to use the RS1 for its “U.K. Pathfinder” launch for the U.K. Space Agency under a contract awarded in 2018. That launch, from SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands, is expected to be later in 2025.  In addition,

In June, Scout Space announced it selected ABL Space Systems to launch a telescope for space domain awareness observations on the vehicle’s third launch, which at the time was scheduled for later this year. Scout said it chose ABL because it offered a quicker path to launch than flying on SpaceX Transporter missions that are booked for the next year.

Is Falcon 9 Ready to Fly Again? Already?

To refresh the date in everyone's mind, on Friday, July 12, a Falcon 9 flying a Starlink mission had an upper stage anomaly and lost the load of satellites aboard the upper stage when the stage's second ignition failed, resulting in a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. 

The FAA declared that they are "requiring an investigation" and would work with SpaceX on corrective actions. 

I've been of two minds on this; the first is the obvious, "old space" or "Space 1.0" way of doing things. Typically, after a launch failure, a rocket will be sidelined for months while engineers and technicians comb over the available data and debris to identify a cause, perform tests, and institute a fix. The second observation is this is SpaceX we're talking about here. I mean, if it takes the legacy space industry six months, what will they take to see what went wrong and fix it?  Six weeks seems way too long. How about twenty minutes? A half hour?  

So while I've been keeping an eye on NextSpaceflight I haven't been so anal retentive that I check every few minutes, or even every day.  Nevertheless I have been checking. Sure enough, this afternoon, I found this, implying the return to flight will be two weeks to the day from the lost mission:

Screen capture from NextSpaceflight.com 

Unfortunately, this isn't quite the whole story, but a little poking reveals the SpaceX has said they're ready to go, so if the FAA wouldn't mind, would they be so kind as to let them get back to keeping the highest launch cadence in world going?  And, oh by the way, Tuesday night the 23rd would be really nice.

In a summary of the anomaly posted shortly afterward, SpaceX did not identify the cause of the failure beyond saying, "The Merlin Vacuum engine experienced an anomaly and was unable to complete its second burn."

Officially, the company has provided no additional information since then. However, the company's engineers were able to identify the cause of the failure almost immediately and, according to sources, the fix was straightforward.

Yeah... sounds like they understood what went wrong within twenty minutes. Certainly not twenty days. 

Now, internally, SpaceX was confident enough that they understood the issue and how to fix it to schedule a launch for July 15th. They just needed to be polite and respectful to the FAA. 

To that end, a week ago on July 15, SpaceX submitted a request to the FAA to resume launching its Falcon 9 rocket while this investigation into the anomaly continues. "The FAA is reviewing the request and will be guided by data and safety at every step of the process," the FAA said in a statement at the time.

In my mind, I see the FAA bureaucrats filling a tub o' coffee and getting ready to settle down and study reports for a few months. Then they get a message saying, "please sir, can we launch some more?  Say, Tuesday night?" 

The company plans to launch at least three Starlink missions in rapid succession from its two launch pads in Florida and one in California to determine the effectiveness of the fix. It would like to demonstrate the reliability of the Falcon 9 rocket, which had recorded more than 300 successful missions since its last failure during a pad accident in September 2016, before two upcoming crewed missions.

There is still a slight possibility that the Polaris Dawn mission, led by commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman, could launch in early August. This would be followed by the Crew-9 mission for NASA, which will carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.

Notably, neither of these crewed missions requires a second burn of the Merlin engine, which is where the failure occurred earlier this month during the Starlink mission.

There's a couple of things to note here.  First is that the FAA hasn't approved the two launches mentioned in the screen capture above.  Second is that neither of those two launches are tonight, July 23rd, but rather they're both Thursday night/Friday morning EDT. The first time I looked at NextSpacflight today, all three launches were Falcon 9s instead of two with one Atlas V. That was maybe two hours before I found the referenced article about SpaceX's attempts to get permission to launch, so earlier Tuesday afternoon, it showed the first of three launches as Tuesday night, EDT local.  

EDIT July 25, 2024 at 08:50 PM EDT to add: the FAA has cleared SpaceX to resume Falcon 9 flights.  In a statement posted Thursday evening, SpaceX explained the anomaly: "During the first burn of Falcon 9’s second stage engine, a liquid oxygen leak developed within the insulation around the upper stage engine. The cause of the leak was identified as a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s oxygen system. This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line." 

FAA says fly away ...

The next launch is currently shown to be Saturday morning EDT. Sat Jul 27, 2024 12:21 AM EDT - which to locals feels like Friday night after midnight. The launch is from LC-39A, on the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA

A Last Look at Apollo 11 and 55 Years Ago

Not exactly a look at Apollo 11 itself, but rather the Apollo program. 

One of the things I don't understand at all is the lunar landing deniers; it's such a stupid thing to wrap one's belief system up in.  I understand that with big conspiracy theories like this, there's simply no way to disprove them.  There's no piece of evidence we could show a true believer that would have them say, "Gosh! You're right!  We did go!" For the last 30 years, I believe it has polled consistently that 6% of the population believes we never went.  There's another group who just claims they're not sure. 

When I worked for Major Southeast Defense Contractor, there was a graybeard Mechanical Engineer whom I became friends with. His first job out of college was with Grumman Aerospace doing support for the Lunar Modules. He talked about being called into a Tiger Team to solve an issue on Apollo 14 because one of the astronauts had tripped over a cable, pulling it out of one of the science packages. For some of you, if I say Mil-38999 connectors, you'll get a visceral nausea at the thought of rewiring and crimping the pins on one of them. In 1/6 G wearing gloves with fingers as wide as small Caribbean islands. They told the 14 crew to abandon it. If you look up how many people worked on the program, sources will say over 400,000 people in 20,000 companies worked on the Apollo program. My friend was just one.

There's so much evidence that a landing denier has to make it a life goal to not see it and truly examine it. Fast Company magazine (of all places) ran a story back in July of 2019 with just a few of the reasons why it's such a silly idea. He starts out philosophically, a really good place to my way of thinking by asking how do we know anything? To borrow a few sentences: 

It’s a little like asking how we know there was a Revolutionary War. Where’s the evidence? Maybe it’s just made up by the current government to force us to think about America in a particular way.

How do we know there was a Titanic that sank?

And by the way, when I go to the battlefields at Gettysburg—or at Normandy, for that matter—they don’t look much like battlefields to me. Can you prove we fought a Civil War? World War II?

In my first iteration of college, I had to take a "mandatory elective" in the Philosophy of Science and questions like this were the entire class. Let's say you went to bed one night, and by the morning, everything in the universe had doubled in size. How would you know? People in class would inevitably talk about measuring things, but if the rulers and every length standard had doubled in size, too, the measurements would say the same things. How could you know? It's not possible to derive a way to prove the entire universe didn't spring into existence, just the way it is mere moments ago, with our memories and experiences fully formed the way they are.

This applies to everything. How do we know that things we observe in other galaxies are the way we say they are? We assume that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, but that's just an assumption because we can't get there to check. Without those assumptions there's precious little we can say about the things we observe, and we like to be able to think we really understand everything we see. 

The thing to remember about the space race was that it was a race.  Remember there was a Soviet Union, who entered the 60s well in front of the US space efforts, and who had the capability to monitor things on the moon as well as we could.  Don't forget they wanted to win that race. If they had any indications that the missions to the moon were faked, don't they think the Soviets would have made it known?  They would have pounced on and revealed any fraud in the blink of an eye, and not just without hesitation, but with great joy and satisfaction. 

In fact, the Russians did just the opposite. The Soviet Union was one of the few places on Earth (along with China, and North Korea) where ordinary people couldn’t watch the landing of Apollo 11 and the Moon walk in real time. It was real enough for the Russians that they didn’t let their own people see it.

Books could be written on why the Soviets didn't make it to the moon; the story I think has the most weight (and I haven't been able to find it lately) is that some of the brightest minds in their space program were killed in a pad disaster that took out the launch structures and those scientists/engineers.  They never recovered from that loss, but they continued the race.  Not everyone recalls that at the time 11's LM landed on the moon, there was a Soviet probe on the surface (Luna 15) - a mission that was supposed to show the world "we can return moon rocks to earth for study without sending humans".  The mission failed. 

With the latest generation of satellites prospecting the moon, we can see the landers and marks on the surface.  These are from later missions, but can we assume that if they faked 11 they would have faked them all?

Apollo 14's landing site.  The dark lines between the descent stage  and the ALSEP are footprints.  (ALSEP = Apollo Lunar Science Exploration Package) 

Apollo 17's site.

Of all the arguments that we regularly read from lunar landing deniers, one has an element of truth to it.  They say the Van Allen radiation belts would have fried the astronauts. Saying "fried" is wrong by orders of magnitude, but there is a measurable effect.  It turns out the astronauts who went through the belts to the moon had a significantly higher rate of cardiovascular disease than astronauts who never went to orbit or those who only went to low earth orbit.     

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether mortality rates due to cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, accidents and all other causes of death differ in (1) astronauts who never flew orbital missions in space, (2) astronauts who flew only in low Earth orbit (LEO), and (3) Apollo lunar astronauts, the only humans to have traveled beyond Earth’s magnetosphere. Results show there were no differences in CVD mortality rate between non-flight (9%) and LEO (11%) astronauts. However, the CVD mortality rate among Apollo lunar astronauts (43%) was 4–5 times higher than in non-flight and LEO astronauts.

The looming issue here is that they can't conclusively say it was the Van Allen belts, just that it was something to do with leaving Earth's protective magnetosphere, but they only left the magnetosphere briefly; Apollo 11 was four to five days (I'm guessing here) but other missions were longer.   That brings more concern to a Mars mission, as well as doing work on the moon.   

You'll note I haven't said a word about the frequent complaints I've seen from landing deniers, about the photography. Not seeing stars; seeing land that isn't as perfectly smooth and straight as they seem to expect it to be.  Anybody who learned photography in the film days knows how empty those arguments are the minute they hear them. If you think that the stars should be visible with the foreground as brightly lit as peak afternoon sun on a beach, you don't understand the first thing about the brightness ranges films can handle. I've honestly never seen a single argument about a photograph that has stood up to casual knowledge of film photography.

With current technology mission plans, called "boost and coast", a Martian trip is a long undertaking.  Mars and Earth reach opposition (closest point) roughly every two years (it varies).  Launched around then a trip to mars then takes about seven months.  After that, as Earth continues to advance ahead of Mars, the return trip takes longer.  A quick stay on Mars turns into seven months to get there and ten months to a year coming back.  If one is going to travel for 18 months, a year and a half, it makes a reasonable argument to stay longer.  Seven months to Mars, then explore 16 months until Earth is approaching for the return trip to get shorter?  

A potential solution is nuclear powered spacecraft.  I've been talking about this for years, but a nuclear powered engine can accelerate half the way there and decelerate half the way.  There are designs for engines that "burn" low yield atomic explosions - impulse power - for thrust.  Some designs that have been investigated would allow 60 day trips to Mars instead of seven months.  By now everyone has heard of the bone loss, edema and other problems astronauts on the ISS face.  Those can be solved by artificial gravity on the spacecraft, like the science fiction books used to say.  Yes, it will make the spacecraft heavier and the mission more expensive.   Nobody ever suggested there was anything remotely easy about it.  Judging by reading what Elon Musk seems to think an exploratory trip to Mars requires and the many Starship cargo loads he's talking about, I think Elon gets it. We're in good hands. 

55 Years Ago This Afternoon, Apollo 11 Was Leaving the Moon

After all the hype and excitement, Apollo 11 spent less than 24 hours on the moon.  They landed at 4:18 PM on the 20th and fired the LM ascent engine to leave the moon at 1:54 PM on the 21st (all times EDT, as has been the convention for these few posts).  Other missions would stay longer, and bring increasing sophistication, including color video cameras and electric vehicles to get the crews around on the surface.

I first posted this picture back in 2018, and it's good but incomplete: 

After "living or dead", I would change that statement to say, "the only human living or dead in all of history" for emphasis.  At 9:44 AM, when Mission Control sent their wake up call to Collins, someone in Mission Control noted,"Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins is experiencing during this 47 minutes of each lunar revolution when he's behind the Moon with no one to talk to except his tape recorder aboard Columbia."

The return flight depended on the performance of a system never tested in its intended use: the Lunar Module ascent engine. The prime contractor on the engine was Grumman Aerospace; the contractor for the engine was Bell Aerosystems. They delivered an engine that relied on hypergolic propellants - a system which doesn't require an igniter because the fuel and oxidizer explode on contact. It worked flawlessly on every Apollo mission that landed on the moon. It is said that the ascent stage was the one system that Neil Armstrong expressed concern about failing, because there was no backup. If it failed, they were going to die on the moon.

It wasn't the only such single point failure.  If the engine fired but a set of explosives called the guillotine failed - a system that blew apart all of the connections between the two halves of the lunar module - there was no way to fix or recover from that, either.  I'd be surprised if there weren't more possible single point failures. 

The liftoff was at 1:54 PM EDT and the LM docked with the CM at 5:35 PM.  The lunar module was jettisoned at 7:42 PM.   Apollo 11 didn't have the ability to record its departure from the moon, but later missions did.  This is a 30 second video of the LM launch during Apollo 17 - the last men to ever visit the moon.

The crew will start their engine burn for the three day return flight to Earth in the early hours of tomorrow morning, July 22nd; 12:56 AM (ET). Reentry, splashdown in the Pacific, and transfer of the crew to an isolation unit as a precaution against possible, unknown, lunar microorganisms will occur on July 24th.  Over the course of the last few days, I've read things I haven't read in years, if ever.  One the things that's noteworthy is this sentence from the NASA Apollo 11 log.

It is recognized as the most trouble-free mission to date, almost completely on schedule and successful in every respect.

This has been a fun little romp down through the historical notes from Apollo 11 over the last few posts. For many of us, if not all, it was one of the highlight moments of our lives we can recall. With the passing of Michael Collins back in 2021, only one of the three crew members is still with us: Dr. Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, now age 94. I've read that he has a home around here somewhere; I don't know if it's a place he just visits on occasion or just what. It would be a wild thing to run into Buzz in a store while shopping.

55 Years Ago Today - "The Eagle Has Landed"

This morning at 9:27 EDT, Buzz Aldrin crawled into the Lunar Module Eagle and began the lengthy process of powering things up for the short mission life of the module.  An hour later, Neil Armstrong joined Buzz in the LM.

A little over three hours after that, 1:47 PM, they released the latches and separated from the Command Module.  At 2:12, Michael Collins fired thrusters on the CM moving it two miles away from the LM.  Except for that small altitude difference, both vehicles remained in their initial orbit from yesterday's lunar orbit insertion until 3:08 PM when Armstrong fired the descent engine to lower the Eagle's orbit. 

What follows is a 20 minute video depicting the landing which is easily the best modern reconstruction of the landing that I've seen.  It combines video from the window as Armstrong would have seen it with the audio traffic from Mission Control.  The first three minutes gives a modern simulation and animation of how it all worked; after that, it goes to the view recorded on the LM with spacecraft communication on the left speaker and mission control intercom on the right.  Yes, I think it's worth the time. 

The LM touches down at 4:18PM EDT.

At 6:00 PM, Armstrong radios down to mission control that he recommends they start the EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) sooner than planned; at 9 PM.  Although they don't make the 9PM goal, the 10:39 beginning of the EVA is still five hours earlier than the mission plans.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, this was the last vacation I would ever take with my parents. July of 1969 was the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years of school, and I was 15 years old. Like millions of people around the world, I hung by the front of the black and white TV; this one in my uncle's house in New York City.  We watched intently but I don't recall exactly how much we saw or if we watched until 1:11 tomorrow morning when the EVA officially concluded. It's a sobering thought how many of the family members there on that historic day and night have passed away. Both of my parents, my uncle and aunt, and I'm simply not sure how many else. 

Over the years, this meme from Aesop at Raconteur Report has become my default way of thinking of the Apollo program itself. While he clearly means the landing of Apollo 11, I can see the entire Apollo program as a strong contender for the Peak of Western Civilization.

55 Years Ago - Apollo 11 Slips into Orbit of the Moon

At 17:21:50 Universal Time (or Greenwich Mean Time as it was more often called in 1969) the Service Module's 20,500-pound-thrust engine started firing to slow Apollo 11's velocity enough to go into lunar orbit. In Eastern Daylight Time that was 1:21:50 PM. The burn lasted just under six minutes (5:57). The burn placed the the three modules into an elliptical-lunar orbit of 69 by 190 miles. That was made more circular by a second, much shorter burn of 17 seconds.  This placed the docked vehicles into a lunar orbit of 62 by 70.5 miles. 

This took place on July 19, 1969; most of you will see this post on July 20. The burn necessarily took place with the spacecraft on the far side of the moon, so ground controllers - and the millions of us hanging on every word - wouldn't know if the burn was successful until the spacecraft came over the horizon and could re-establish radio contact with Earth.  Not that mission control or we could have done anything for the crew if there was constant communications.  It's a quarter million miles away; and light or radio takes over a second to go each way. Nobody could have done a thing for them. 

An artist's concept from the Apollo days:

It's just over 24 hours until the landing.  The crew is busy scouting their landing site, checking out the Lunar Module and preparing for tomorrow as they orbit the moon every two hours.  They do a couple of video transmissions for those keeping track of the mission.

NASA Cancels VIPER Lunar Lander Mission

Over the last few years, NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program has been featured here several times, because, well, it's a rare smart program that does good things. The purpose of the CLPS program is to use private companies to send small- and medium-size landers to the Moon's surface for primarily science-based missions. That particular article references both the CLPS program and the particular example, the VIPER mission that has been cancelled. 

The accepted 50/50 risk of throwing the money away, and small budget probes starts to look different if the probe is bigger budget, and more important.  Then VIPER, the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover came to the top of the list of missions NASA really wanted, and Zurbuchen oversaw rewarding a start-up company called Astrobotic a $200 million dollar contract to design, build, and launch the probe to the south pole by 2023.  In a lunar lander they still haven't flown.  

This is an important scientific mission tasked with searching for ice at the south pole and using a one-meter drill to prospect for subsurface samples. The total value of the mission is $660 million, and it matters to scientists and NASA's human exploration division, which hopes to send astronauts to the south pole in the 2020s.

Note the reference to "a lunar lander they still haven't flown" was in April of '22.  The lander was Astrobotic's Peregrine lander which suffered a mission ending accident back in January.

The decision to axe the VIPER mission was announced Wednesday, July 17 in a teleconference; cancelling the program is expected to save the agency an additional $84 million in development costs. NASA has spent about $450 million on the program so far.  The last mentioned launch date for Viper was "in 2025". It appears VIPER will be scrapped for parts or potentially sold to industry. 

Despite the cancellation, NASA leadership stressed that the program was successful thus far and that the termination was solely a budgetary concern.

"We were very confident in the VIPER team. This really gets down to cost and a very constrained budget environment in the United States," said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA headquarters in Washington, during today's teleconference.

Reading between the lines a little gives me the perspective that Artemis and SLS are sucking up all the money available. It was only a week ago, after all, that we ran Yet Another Story of Congress lecturing NASA on getting costs out of the SLS program. Some bright morons in congress think if they can just get "other customers" to adopt SLS the system will magically get cheaper instead of bankrupting other agencies. "Misery loves company!"

NASA's VIPER robotic moon rover stands taller than ever after engineers integrated its mast in a clean room at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston.  (Image credit: NASA/Helen Arase Vargas)

A Take on the Relevance of Apollo 11 55 Years Later

55 years ago yesterday, July 16, 1969, the world watched in great wonder as the massive, dragon-fire-spitting Saturn V rocket lifted off launchpad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. 

Of course, we know the rest of this grand and magnificent history and we still marvel at the extraordinary feat that was finally achieved on July 21^st when both Armstrong and Aldrin embossed human footprints in the lunar dust. That astounding achievement may have happened over a half-century ago but its imprint on culture, on scientific exploration, on human understanding, on America and indeed, on the world, is still strong and deep. A few additional perspectives on the legacy of Apollo are worth considering.

This is a relatively short and relentlessly optimistic piece about the early days of the Space Program, not just Apollo but also Gemini and Mercury. It's authored by Grant Anderson, the President and CEO of Paragon Space Development Corporation. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering from Stanford University. 

On a very broad and basic level, when I think of Apollo 11, I’m reminded of what Americans are capable of, particularly when we’re unified and focused on important shared goals. Americans make up a nation of great vision with citizens who are often willing to take a few calculated gambles in order to see that vision become reality. Despite periodic episodes where we hesitate to commit to grand endeavors, we excel when we are compelled to act, often demonstrating a capacity for greatness in a way that other nations and societies have a hard time matching. Apollo 11 — and indeed the entire early space program including projects Mercury and Gemini prior to Apollo — exemplify both the American spirit for boldness and the magic that can occur when our forces of industry, innovation and free thought are synched together for a noble purpose. The goal was ambitious and the timeline was tight, but the drive to demonstrate to the world that we could put a human on the moon allowed America to perform at her best.

In a very real sense, we've never equaled our accomplishments of the Apollo era. The silly "we never went to the moon" arguments are another symptom of that. It's singularly illogical to think because we haven't duplicated a prior mission that the prior mission didn't happen, but here we are. 

Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint. Image Credit: NASA

A short article worth your time to read. 

Last Week's Ariane 6 Carried a Neat Little Cubesat

Tuesday (July 9)'s First Flight of the Ariane 6 carried an interesting little scientific payload, especially to those of us who follow the solar activity, solar flaring, Coronal Mass Ejections and more.  Called CURIE, for CubeSat Radio Interferometry Experiment, it was really a pair of cubesats launched as one, which will then be spread apart a known distance and used to attempt determine the sources on the sun of low frequency signals from the sun that are emitted during these events.

According to NASA, scientists first detected these radio signals decades ago. While they know that they occur during solar storms, they don’t know exactly where they come from. Do they come from the spread out part of a solar CME, like this one, or do they come from well under the sun's surface?

CURIE will investigate where solar radio waves originate in coronal mass ejections, like this one seen in 304- and 171-angstrom wavelengths by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

CURIE is made up of two spacecraft that launched bolted together as one, later separating into two in orbit. From their separate vantage points, the satellites CURIE A and B will make it possible to measure the same radio waves from two locations at the same time. Using the technique of radio ‘interferometric analysis,’ the origin of detected radio waves can be reconstructed. 

The CURIE mission aims to advance our understanding using a technique called low frequency radio interferometry, which has never been used in space before. This technique relies on CURIE’s two independent spacecraft — together no bigger than a shoebox — that will orbit Earth about two miles apart. This separation allows CURIE’s instruments to measure tiny differences in the arrival time of radio waves, which enables them to determine exactly where the radio waves came from.

Don't let the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths of the dramatic photo influence your thinking. The two CURIE Cubes will measure from 0.1 to 19 MHz, which corresponds to a wavelength of 3000 meters (at 0.1 MHz (100 kHz)) to 15.79 meters at 19.0 MHz. 304 and 171 angstroms are enormously higher in frequency than these Cubesats can measure: 9.8 and 17.5 GHz. The baseline of the interferometer - how far about the two satellites will be - affects what it can measure, and with a separation of two miles, I'd say they're expecting the answers to be in the bottom part of that 0.1 to 19 MHz range (2.0 miles is 3218 meters). I'd guess more like 1 MHz than 10 MHz.

Still, it's a pretty neat sounding experiment. I haven't designed interferometers before but have been around them - optical and radio. Here's hoping they get some nifty results.  

And don't forget - sometimes the most important answer in science isn't that you found what you expected it's that what you found that makes no sense whatsoever. Not, "Eureka! I've found it!"; it's "That's weird." 

My Favorite Headline from the Weekend

My favorite story is from ZeroHedge, and is only tangentially related to the big story of the weekend, the attempt to murder President Trump. This story focuses on Elon Musk who says, "I have had two cases in the last six months where two people, unfortunately very mentally ill, came to try to kill me in Austin with guns." The lead-in is that people on X were telling Musk that if they'll come for Trump, they'll come for him, too, so double and triple your security.

The headline that got my attention, though, was, "Elon Musk Reveals Multiple Assassination Attempts, Says Time "To Build Flying Metal Suit Of Armor". An Iron Man suit? For real?  

This is a dream story. See, when actor Robert Downey Jr. was trying to find someone to pattern Tony Stark after, someone suggested Elon Musk and stories I've read are that he spent hours daily observing Musk in the earlier, crazier days of SpaceX at their facility in Hawthorne, California. Scenes in Iron Man 2 in 2010 were shot in Hawthorne.  Musk was given a speaking cameo role in the movie and they asked if they could use the facility as a set for the movie. He said, "sure!" - presumably after getting things out of camera range they didn't want everyone to see. 

(I'm not sure who the actor on the left is. Second to right is Mickey Rourke as Vanko and then Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer - the two main anti Iron Man characters in the movie) Those are Falcon parts. 

This patterning of Tony Stark after Elon Musk tells me that in a sense, Tony Stark is Elon Musk. Besides, if you were going to bet that some solitary genius was going to come up with a flying suit of armor, who would you bet real money on to do it besides Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Please.

On The Attempted Assassination of President Trump

The news was breaking around the time I sat down to work on yesterday's post and my first reaction was that first reports are always wrong and so it didn't make much sense to write a long post on it. Combined with my second reaction, which is what do I have to say that's more authoritative and a better reference than the dozens of posts that are out there already. 

That's still the case. 

I have the same concerns everyone talks about. How did this clown get to climb on a building that close to the president without being shot first? Why wasn't the building sealed off with guards on the roof or monitoring it such that as soon as a person with rifle was noted on the building, his head would have left his body right then and there - unlike after he shot Trump as happened. 

Like many of those who wrote about this, in this case Bayou Renaissance Man, I think that the FBI isn't to be trusted running an investigation of this. Peter Grant (BRM) also ran this:

Then there's this allegation.  It may be a complete fabrication - we don't know yet, and I've seen nothing to confirm it - but I'd love to know whether the shooter was observed by President Trump's security detail before he pulled the trigger, and if so, why none of them stopped him before he could do so.  Was permission to shoot denied?  If so, by whom?  And why?  And who told the leader(s) of his security team what to do under such circumstances?

Then there's this that I've seen several places - but I grabbed this copy from Daily Timewaster:

While I don't know Dan Bongino any more or less than any of these people, I've sure heard more sense out of him in the last few years than anybody working in the DOJ, or any of the law enforcement agencies. I'm with Bongino and Elon Musk, the head of the secret service needs to be unemployed, especially if the stories of the SS being all wrapped up in DEI are real. 

The real questions, of course, center on "what's next?" There's a famous meme of the right wing attitude to violence as a switch, that's either do nothing or kill everything. Has that switch been thrown? I suppose we shall see.

A distant second, third or 90th place to these goings on is that since Wednesday (the 10th) I've had a nasty cold. Lost my voice from all the coughing and sore throat. For most of the day, I thought I was getting over it, but as evening arrived, it started back up with a vengeance. I'll do my best to stay in the chair and blogging, but the old saying about colds is true. If you take all the magical vitamins and potions different people push, you'll get over it in a week. If you just fight it off with something like ibuprofen and Mucinex, you'll have it a whole seven days.

Yeah, Ham Radio has Some Psychopaths/Sociopaths, Too

Like any other activity or grouping of people bigger than a small room size, there are psychopaths or sociopaths (or both) in ham radio. Unlike some of the groups demanding to be recognized as special, we tend to ignore ours and not give them the attention they're demanding, but I've never heard of anyone trying to track them down and run them out of the hobby or some other sort of punishment. 

It turns out that 10 days ago, last Wednesday evening, July 3rd, I was witness to one. I thought it might be a little interesting for some of you who have never heard of this. 

Let me start by saying I don't know which characterization fits the people who do this: psycho- or socio-. I've come across them in my nearly half century as a ham, and have heard some types of bad behavior thousands of times. The type of behavior I ran across 10 days ago is known by two common names: the most common is "pirate" and I think I've heard the term "slim" used for them. 

The most common time or place to find them is when a group goes to some remote or unoccupied place that's recognized as a ham radio country but essentially has no resident population of hams (or no residents at all!) Someone for reasons I don't have much understanding of pretends that they're the station the big crowd is calling and starts making contacts using their call sign. The person pretending to be the remote station gets no reward; nobody is going to send them money or anything like that. The only thing they get (as I see it) is some satisfaction in ruining someone else's happiness with having made the contact with the rare station; or ruining someone else's enjoyment of the hobby.

Perhaps a real example that happened to me in the last few years might explain it better? A small expedition was made to the Crozet Islands a sub-antarctic group of islands off the SE coast of Africa and a French possession. For various reasons related to radio propagation, my best chance of contacting the station (FT8WW) was in our local evenings on the small 10.1 MHz allocation we have.  One night, after calling the station quite a while, I managed to "work" them. Because they were near a place where they could get internet connectivity, I could check their logs. A couple of days later, the log didn't show my call. I clearly contacted someone else, but who was it? A pirate. Someone who got on the same band at the same times but was only pretending to be who I was trying to contact. 

So I went back to work and contacted them in another day or two, and verified I was in their log.

Doing this is illegal here in the US and could get your licenses suspended (assuming they have a license in the first place). I would be surprised if any country that licensed amateur radio didn't punish this. 

The one that happened July 3rd was a bit more surprising in some ways. On an otherwise quiet evening on the VHF band I'm working on the most lately (6m), a friend here in town worked Alaska.  Like most evenings, my station was on and I was out of the room when it happened. This is a plot like ones I've shown before, of every station my station copied. It's a dramatic example of "one of these things is not like the others." The locations plotted are from what the stations are transmitting. In this computer-mode, the standard calling messages are your call sign and four character grid square.

Now it's not breaking any laws of physics to contact Alaska from Florida, and ISTRC having spoken with guys who have done it. It's just exceptionally unusual. More like once or twice in a lifetime than once a year. Does that prove that the station shown in Alaska wasn't really there? Not at all, I just expect the rest of the plot to be different. That sorta fan-shaped group of contacts on the right very much looks like any old day. For the propagation to be "once in a lifetime", I'd expect those trails to be covering much more of the USA and into more of western Canada. The way this looks is a bit ... funny. A bit suspicious.

I happen to know that this friend and I both have every other state confirmed in the US except Alaska. We just tend to work at it differently. In my early days of ham radio, I learned the lesson to listen much more than you talk. My friend is more inclined to call "CQ Alaska" (calling anyone in Alaska) for long periods while I rarely do that. Actually I don't think I've ever done that.

The day after this (it was evening, local time, right around 8:30 PM EDT, or 0030UTC), the guy from Alaska whose call sign was used (and his grid square used to pinpoint his location on plots like this) said, "sorry not me; I wasn't home when this was reported and I wasn't on." Another pirate.

Finding out who did something like that is probably unrealistic. I can think of ways to do it but they'd all be beyond the budget of a single ham or small-sized club. It would be the exclusive domain of those with "more money than sense." Which is probably why pirates still exist.

SpaceX Has a Falcon 9 Fail

For the first time in a long time, SpaceX had an upper stage anomaly on last night's Starlink launch from Vandenberg SFB in California. Ars Technica reports that was the first Falcon 9 launch failure after 344 successful launches. It's probably important to note this was not the booster, the reused portion of the Falcon 9, but rather the upper stage, which flies once and then is directed to reenter where it will splash into the ocean.

If you've watched the videos on any of these missions, you know the typical progression is they burn the first stage, drop that and ignite the second stage for a relatively short period and then shut it down for a half hour to an hour. Then they relight the second stage to finalize the orbit for the satellites by raising the lowest point in the orbit, the perigee. That's the point where the second stage engine self-destructed; a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly or RUD.  The first stage landed successfully, which we've come to expect.

There are reports that observers felt they were seeing too much ice on the vacuum Merlin engine, typically called an M-Vac, during the first burn and that more ice than typical was falling off the engine. Some of that is evident in this photo:

Numerous pieces of ice fell off the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket during its climb into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Image credit: SpaceX.

The FAA has declared that they are "requiring an investigation" and would work with SpaceX on corrective actions. 

“The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX Starlink Group 9-3 mission that launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 11. The incident involved the failure of the upper stage rocket while it was in space. No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation.

An investigation is designed to further enhance public safety, determine the root cause of the event, and identify corrective actions to avoid it from happening again.

The FAA will be involved in every step of the investigation process and must approve SpaceX’s final report, including any corrective actions.

A return flight is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety. In addition, SpaceX may need to request and receive approval from the FAA to modify its license that incorporates any corrective actions and meet all other licensing requirements.”

Chances are the loss of the 20 Starlink satellites - if they actually lose all 20 - isn't a big deal to SpaceX, but let's assume they lose all 20. At the rate they launch satellites, I'd guess that's a week of production for SpaceX, if that much. They launch two or three of these 20 satellite missions every week. 

The issue is going to be Falcon 9s are grounded until the FAA says they can fly again. That means Crew 9 is on hold in mid-August, as well as the Polaris Dawn mission set for NET July 31. Then there are the one or two other missions for everyone on Earth that they've been launching every week. 

Going into Thursday's mission, the current version of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, known as the Falcon 9 Block 5, was indisputably the most reliable launch vehicle in history. Since debuting in May 2018, the Falcon 9 Block 5, which NASA has certified for astronaut flights, never had a mission failure in all of its 297 launches before the ill-fated Starlink 9-3 mission.

Let's see - 1 failure on the 298th launch is a failure rate of 0.34%, or a success rate of 99.66%. It's easy to laugh at the FAA anomaly investigation, but as long as they don't muck up the schedule too much, if there's a way to knock that up to "five nines" or 99.999%, it would be interesting to see it.

Small Space News Story Roundup 39

Just because:

Poland Launches First Rocket to Reach Space

According to European Spaceflight (.com!) the Łukasiewicz Institute of Aviation has made history with the launch of its ILR-33 Amber 2K rocket from the Andøya Space Centre in Norway. It's the first time a rocket designed and built in Poland has made it to space, but it's still a work in progress. Perhaps that's better said as "technically made it to space."

The ILR-33 Amber 2k rocket was launched on its first space shot on 3 July from the Norwegian launch facility. Powered by a hybrid core stage and two solid-fuel boosters, the rocket reached an altitude of 101 kilometers, which is above the generally accepted boundary separating Earth’s atmosphere from outer space, known as the Kármán Line.

“The crossing of the space barrier by the ILR-33 AMBER 2K rocket developed at the Łukasiewicz – Institute of Aviation is a historic moment,” said Dr. Michał Wierciński, Vice President of the Polish Space Agency. “Never in our history has a Polish rocket reached such a level. This is a historic day for the Łukasiewicz – Institute of Aviation, but also a historic moment for the entire Polish rocket community.”

The development of the ILR-33 rocket has been going on for a decade - since 2014 - and they've launched three times so far. The last flight in 2019 made it to 23 km, and they developed an upgraded variant with larger, more powerful strap-on boosters. 

To this observer, they still have a long way to go, but I'm glad to see it. They didn't claim to have made orbit, just that they made it to the generally accepted definition of space at 100 km. They can enjoy the accomplishment and begin work on a version that can put small payloads in orbit, like under a metric ton. Sort of a Polish version of the Rocket Lab Electron.

The ILR-33 Amber 2K rocket. Image credit: Łukasiewicz Institute of Aviation 

Congress to NASA: find more customers for SLS

And I can't resist the subtitle to the source article: “Because I'm tall enough, I'm orange enough, and doggone it, Senators like me.”  Shades of Stuart Smalley from back when Saturday Day Night Live was funny more often.

There's a strange little section stuck into NASA's new reauthorization bill making its way out of the committees and into the budget - should they actually pass one. 

The section is titled "Reaffirmation of the Space Launch System," and in it Congress asserts its commitment to a flight rate of twice per year for the rocket. The reauthorization legislation, which cleared a House committee on Wednesday, also said NASA should identify other customers for the rocket.

"The Administrator shall assess the demand for the Space Launch System by entities other than NASA and shall break out such demand according to the relevant Federal agency or nongovernment sector," the legislation states.

Twice a year is about 4x the actual SLS launch rate of once every two years - and that's being generous. Congress further requires NASA respond within 180 days, explaining how they can achieve the twice a year rate for SLS and Artemis. 

Additionally, Congress is asking for NASA to study demand for the SLS rocket and estimate "cost and schedule savings for reduced transit times" for deep space missions due to the "unique capabilities" of the rocket. The space agency also must identify any "barriers or challenges" that could impede use of the rocket by other entities other than NASA, and estimate the cost of overcoming those barriers.

How do they achieve that? Let me 'splain it to you. NFW. No way. 

For newbies who don't know the back story, the SLS program was created at the end of the Space Shuttle program to keep the gravy train flowing to the contractors - so they could keep skimming the congress critters' share of that gravy back to them. There might be something new about the details of the SLS, but it's virtually entirely recycled hardware from the Shuttle era. It reuses engines that actually flew on Shuttles over 15 years ago, for God's sake.

Congress created the SLS rocket 14 years ago with the NASA Authorization Act of 2010. The large rocket kept a river of contracts flowing to large aerospace companies, including Boeing and Northrop Grumman, who had been operating the Space Shuttle. Congress then lavished tens of billions of dollars on the contractors over the years for development, often authorizing more money than NASA said it needed. Congressional support was unwavering, at least in part because the SLS program boasts that it has jobs in every state.

Under the original law, the SLS rocket was supposed to achieve "full operational capability" by the end of 2016. The first launch of the SLS vehicle did not take place until late 2022, six years later. It was entirely successful. However, due to various reasons, the rocket will not fly again until September 2025 at the earliest.

As for the "unique capabilities" of the SLS, more bullcrap. It costs over $2.5 billion to launch an SLS. When the Europa Clipper program was told to use the SLS, they (somehow) got their mission moved to a Falcon Heavy. A single recycled Space Shuttle Main Engine on the SLS costs $146 million. That's per engine and there are four of them on the SLS core stage. Compare that to NASA's entire cost for the Falcon Heavy: the total for the Falcon Heavy launch services is approximately $178 million.

If you think NASA is nothing but government waste, you're not exactly right. It's not 100% waste but think of the old Ivory soap commercials: it's 99 and 44/100% waste.

Today's NASA Conference About Starliner

In a word, I'd have to say, "meh." I didn't get much new out of it, if anything. 

The video conference was at 11 AM EDT, a telecast from the International Space Station. A summary is online at Blogs.NASA.gov which includes a link to a 22 minute video of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams answering questions.  Following the crew news conference, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich and Boeing Commercial Crew Program Manager and Vice President Mark Nappi spoke extensively about the mission and testing plans ahead of the Crew Flight Test (CFT) return. This wasn't a video, but rather a roughly 70 minute meeting that was broadcast. You can listen to a replay of the leadership briefing on YouTube; not moving video, just audio. 

The bottom line, though is that the ground testing of the thrusters at White Sands, New Mexico hasn't repeated the issues seen in space as Starliner was approaching the ISS. 

“The temperatures we have been able to achieve are not quite what we would have hoped for based on the flight data,” said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager. He said engineers used heaters to try to replicate the thermal conditions experienced by the thrusters from the firing itself as well as exposure to the sun.

The thrusters in Starliner's Service Module are housed in “doghouses” and the idea being investigated is that those little housings might retain more heat than previously modeled. During reentry, the Reaction Control Thrusters used for rendezvous and docking aren't used as much as bigger thrusters in the Service Module. 

Mark Nappi, Boeing vice president and commercial crew program manager, said engineers are working on a “little bit over 30” actions linked to both the thruster problems and helium leaks, of which more than half have been completed. All of them are scheduled to be wrapped up by the end of next week.

While there was talk around the web today saying Starliner might be coming home by the end of July, the audio conference doesn't seem to support that. The next obvious date for the Starliner to depart the ISS is the next crew rotation mission, Crew 9, penciled in for mid-August. The usual protocol is for the new Crew to dock at the ISS and overlap with the the departing crew (Crew 8) for around a week. For both Crew 8 and 9's capsules to be docked to the ISS would ordinarily mean Starliner would leave before Crew 9 got there. There is such a thing as an “indirect handover,” though, where the Crew-8 Crew Dragon departs before the Crew-9 mission launches, rather than the preferred approach of having the two crews overlap on the station for several days. 

All of which combines to make me think the whole thing is still “up in the air,” so to speak. (No, it's above the air. Sorry.) There is no particular news here about when the Starliner CFT is going to be declared done. Could be the end of July; could be the end of August or any date before or after. There are no indications that ground-based testing has been successful or that any good information has come out of it. SSDD. Same Situation Different Day.

Starliner docked to the ISS earlier in June. Image credit: NASA

Ariane 6 First Flight "Nominal"

Today's lift off from Guiana. Image credit: ESA with some contrast enhancement by me

The first headline I saw said the mission was flawless but as time went by, that was revised to say, “Ariane 6 reaches orbit with long-awaited first flight.” In fact, the story that link takes you to has URL that says, "performs-flawlessly-on-long-awaited-first-flight" and the title has been changed on the article it links to. 

The Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Kourou launch site in French Guiana at 3:01 p.m. Eastern (1901 UTC) July 9. Launch followed a short delay due to a data acquisition system issue.
...
The first separation command, seeing the deployment of the OOV-Cube, Curium One and Robusta-3A, took place one hour five minutes into flight with the Ariane 6 upper stage in a circular, 577-kilometer-altitude orbit. Experiments YPSat and Peregrinus, attached to the upper stage, were also initiated.
...
Three further separations were due to follow at time of first reporting. The European Space Agency official stream later reported an issue with the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) which allows the upper stage Vinci engine to reignite*.

The issue is only expected to affect the end of the mission, according to ESA. A first passivation maneuver of the upper stage was planned for two hours 40 minutes into the flight. The agency announced a press conference to follow at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. The final release was intended to see capsules reenter the atmosphere and fall into the Pacific Ocean as part of the deorbit maneuver.

Despite the snag/SNAFU with the APU, the ESA seems pretty happy with the mission, coming as it does years later than originally planned. Its debut was originally envisioned to take place in 2020, the slippage was due to both factors under their control and others (COVID-19). The important part is that it's flying now, and with some more work on the APU, it may be ready to start getting Europe back into space. Arianespace already has a log of 30 launches on backorder. 

“This is just the first step,” Josef Aschbacher, director general of ESA, said on X ahead of launch. “We have lots of work to do yet, but we are laser-focused on changing the future of the European space transportation ecosystem.”

Japan's H3 Has Its First Successful Flight

In a piece of news I have to admit got by me with last week's atypical schedule is that Japan launched the first successful mission of their new H3 rocket on July 1. The mission was the third flight of the H3 and the first that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) declared to be a success. The H3 rocket launched the Daichi 4 satellite, also known as ALOS-4, with a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for all-weather observations of Earth's surface. 

“It was truly a perfect launch, a perfect 100 out of 100,” said Makoto Arita, the JAXA H3 project team manager.

You might remember that the first test flight of the H3 in March of '23 failed when the second stage malfunctioned and a $200 million Earth observation satellite was lost on the doomed rocket. A second test flight of the H3 rocket this past February was successful, and this time the launcher only carried small test payloads. 

H3 is expected to become the workhorse for the Japanese space agency for the next decade. Despite no mention of reusability, JAXA is targeting flying six times per year, up from the cadence of three flights per year achieved by the H-IIA rocket, the vehicle the H3 will replace. There are two more H-IIA flights left to fly this year - the fiscal year in Japan runs through March 2025. 

Japan views a stable and commercially competitive space transport capacity as essential not only for its space program but also for its national security needs.

Japan's new flagship H3 rocket is launched from Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture on Monday. Image Credit JIJI

SpaceX Teases Flight Test 5

In a short video released Thursday, possibly to celebrate Independence Day with the world's biggest rocket's red glare, SpaceX provided a highlight video of the most recent test of Starship, Flight Test 4. 

During the flight, the first stage of the rocket performed well during ascent and, after separating from the upper stage, made a controlled reentry into the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship upper stage appeared to make a nominal flight through space before making a controlled—if fiery—landing in the Indian Ocean.

The new video focuses mostly on the "Super Heavy" booster stage and its entry into the Gulf. There is new footage from a camera on top of the 71-meter-tall first stage as well as a nearby buoy at water level. The video from the buoy, in particular, shows the first stage making an upright landing into the ocean.

Then the video switches to the mind-blowing video snippets of Starship reentering, with the flaps being melted and breaking apart as it descends, molten metal or other debris obstructing the camera's view until we hear the call out that Starship has shut off its engines after its own splashdown. 

The tease comes after all that. The video goes from the splashdown to cheering people at headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The screen goes black for three seconds and then switches to an image looking up into the sky, through Starship's monstrous launch tower at Starbase Boca Chica. Then we notice the two "chopsticks," are spread a bit. The perspective turns to looking at the tower from the distance and it becomes an animation, where we see the booster moving toward the chopsticks. With Starship's first stage descending back toward the launch tower and slowing the title "Flight 5" appears and the video goes black before the booster is caught. 

Is it real? Are they going to try to catch the booster in IFT-5? In the talk after IFT-4, Musk had said they'd try to catch the booster next flight. That was repeated recently with the phrase "in the next month." 

In a talk last week with local residents in south Texas, Starbase General Manager Kathy Lueders said this attempt might not occur on Flight 5.

The video being released after GM Lueders made the statement sure makes it seem like the attempt is back in consideration.  

NASA Hires SpaceX to Launch Another New Space Telescope

NASA announced on Tuesday the 2nd they've awarded a contract to SpaceX to launch a small research satellite designed to study the violent processes behind the creation and destruction of chemical elements. The telescope's launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is expected in 2027, although no more specific date was given. Added to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and Europa Clipper (not simply a telescope) both of which will ride Falcon Heavy to space is why I said "Another."

The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission features a gamma-ray telescope that will scan the sky to study gamma-rays emitted by the explosions of massive stars and the end of their lives. These supernova explosions generate reactions that fuse new atomic nuclei, a process called nucleosynthesis, of heavier elements.

Using data from COSI, scientists will map where these elements are forming in the Milky Way galaxy. COSI's observations will also yield new insights into the annihilation of positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons, which appear to be originating from the center of the galaxy. Another goal for COSI will be to rapidly report the location of short gamma-ray bursts, unimaginably violent explosions that flash and then fade in just a couple of seconds. These bursts are likely caused by merging neutron stars.

The COSI mission will be sensitive to so-called soft gamma rays, a relatively unexplored segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. The telescope is based on a design scientists have flown on research balloon flights.

COSI is relatively small satellite, less than a ton, and built by Northrop Grumman. It will ride alone on a Falcon 9 because of the peculiar orbit it requires takes as much energy as delivering a much larger satellite to geosynchronous orbit.  COSI will operate in an unusual orbit about 340 miles over the equator, an orbit chosen to avoid interference from radiation over the South Atlantic Anomaly, the region where the inner Van Allen radiation belt comes closest to Earth’s surface.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 will deliver COSI directly into its operational orbit after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, then will fire its upper stage in a sideways maneuver to make a turn at the equator. This type of maneuver, called a plane change, takes a lot of energy, or delta-V, on par with the delta-V required to put a heavier satellite into a much higher orbit.

The contract is what appears to be SpaceX's preferred type, "firm-fixed price," like they bid to design the Deorbit Vehicle for the Space Station, for $69 million. In 2019 NASA paid SpaceX about $43 million for the launch of the similarly sized IXPE X-ray telescope into a similar orbit as COSI. The 37% higher price seems pretty close to the damage done by inflation. What else that you buy isn't up in price since 2019? 

Artist's concept rendering of COSI with some cool gamma ray colors that are quite invisible in real life. Image credit: Northrop Grumman/European Southern Observatory (background image)