The other 90% of my weekend

I did a deep dive into an area of ham radio that I've known about for as long as I can remember, but never tried to get into because the price of entry has been just too high (in time, money, and effort). The common name for this is moonbounce, but the more technical guys tend to call it EME - for Earth Moon Earth.  

There were two reasons for trying more this weekend.  First, this weekend was a major EME contest, put on the American Radio Relay League, and these contests tend to bring out a lot of activity.  More activity means more people to listen for. The second reason was some online chatting with a guy who does quite a lot of it. He doesn't know about this blog, and I didn't ask for permission to talk about him so I won't. But he asked me if I was going to try to listen in this weekend and after some chatting about my station by email he gave me some hints on setting things up to try to listen and contact some of the guys who have invested a lot in EME activity.

Let me just put the "Bottom Line Up Front" (BLUF): I didn't hear a single station in the couple of hours I thought my station might be able to turn the trick.  Neither Friday or Saturday around moonrise. 

So let's start at the beginning. For newbies, I did a post about trying to communicate with the two Voyager satellites. The concerns are identical but the numbers are vastly different.

This was all done at 50.2 MHz. The idea is simple: you point an antenna at the moon, 250,000 miles away (not exactly) and listen for signals coming from the moon. If you've got a really good station, you can hear your own signal after you wait for the echo from the moon.  The speed of light (which is radio) is 186,000 miles/second.  Remember, your signal has to go from your station to the moon and back or 500,000 miles. That means you'll hear the echo 2.69 seconds later.  

The next big concern is the same as every communications link everywhere else: the amount the signal attenuates - weakens - over that 500,000 miles. The term for this is path loss, and back in the Voyager article, I used a handy form that gets you within less than half a dB of the more theoretically-backed equation.  

Path loss in dB = 37 dB + 20log(f) + 20log(d)  where,f is the frequency in MHz and d is the distance in miles.

So PL = 37 + 20log(50) and 20log(500,000) or 185 dB. 

Wait.  There's a nasty assumption hidden in there, that the reflection from the moon is perfect. No signal loss, it just changes direction. That implies the signal reflected back has an angular diameter less than the moon - or some would be lost  around the edges.  The diameter of the moon is just over 0.5 degree, which is very tight for an antenna beam. OK, let's just keep a note on that. Maybe there's a useful approximation people have made. Maybe someone said just add (some number) of dBs to your path loss.

Where does this leave us?  Let's say we put 1000 W out of our antenna (it could be less power in the transmitter and more antenna gain, or a simpler antenna and more out of the transmitter).  That's +60 dBm (power compared to 1 milliwatt in 50 ohms) or one million milliwatts.

Signal coming back is  +60dBm -185dB path loss or -125 dBm at our receiver input. 

So what? It's a good time to say, "what does that mean?  Is that a useful signal?  Do I need more power, or more gain, to get more signal at the receiver? 

At this point, we have to dive into the improvements that have made EME more accessible to more hams than when we operated voice or CW (Morse code).  That's a topic for another day.

A graphic from a guy who's among the biggest names in EME, especially 6m EME. Lance Collister, from Montana. From there, he links to his main web page on EME.

Just a Little Thing to Share - Ham Radio Event

We are in the midst of a Special Event that caught my eye.  For people who think hams are too serious or have no sense of humor, I give you National Sasquatch Awareness Day. 

As you can see this is a week-long special event, and working various combinations and numbers of special stations listed in that first paragraph gets you a BIGFOOT Certificate! (Suitable for framing, I'm sure).  This is a screen grab from station W7B's page on QRZ.com.

While that Special Event Station screen capture follows the "click-it to embig-it" rules of thumb, this version gets Even Bigger when you click it:

The desire to collect certificates for special events or other contacts that are out-of-the ordinary in some way is almost universal in ham radio.  Pretty much every day, and especially on weekends, two of the most popular things to do are go to a nearby park or the top of a nearby hill and operate Parks On The Air (POTA) or Summits On The Air (SOTA).  The person going to ("activating") the park or hilltop gets their own points, and the people contacting ("working") those stations get a different credit.  Each and every one of those pieces of what's generally referred to as wallpaper is valuable only to the people who collect them. 

No - Just No, Space.com

Space.com posts a story I saw references to last night, that Sierra Space has a contract to produce a trash compactor for the International Space Station.  

An International Space Station (ISS) resupply mission in 2026 will send up the Sierra Space trash compactor for testing, company officials stated in a press release on Wednesday (Oct. 16). Like many other space station testbeds, this trash compactor will assess how to deal with the problem of garbage on eventual crewed moon or Mars missions, where disposal will be even more of an issue.

All well and good - but then they added:

and some media outlets say the machine looks like Wall-E.

No. I never saw the movie but I know what Wall-E looked like and I see no resemblance whatsoever.  Here's the two, side by side:

Unsurprisingly, a bunch of artists in a movie company that specializes (or did back then) in animation could produce a much more anthropogenic robot with much a more expressive "face" than a hardware company that's, well, producing what used to be called a trash masher.

Not that there's anything wrong with a trash masher (compactor), or what Sierra Space is doing here. It just doesn't look like the movie star robot.

Don't Count on Next Year's Artemis II Flight

Eric Berger at Ars Technica has gone through some Fed.gov General Accountability Office reports on preparations for next September's Artemis II launch, the first mission back to the moon since the end of the Apollo programs, and says they have pretty much used every bit of schedule slack they had reserved. His conclusion was, "It’s increasingly unlikely that humans will fly around the Moon next year."  

A new report from the US Government Accountability Office found that NASA's Exploration Ground Systems program—this is, essentially, the office at Kennedy Space Center in Florida responsible for building ground infrastructure to support the Space Launch System rocket and Orion—is in danger of missing its schedule for Artemis II.
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The new report, published Thursday, finds that the Exploration Ground Systems program had several months of schedule margin in its work toward a September 2025 launch date at the beginning of the year. But now, the program has allocated all of that margin to technical issues experienced during work on the rocket's mobile launcher and pad testing.

NASA has been reasonably cautious in following the step-by-step approach Apollo used in going with the unmanned Artemis I and then the lunar fly-by of this mission next September ('25) followed by the Artemis III lunar landing mission in September '26.  The Apollo program had more hardware and concepts to test, and did so after the Apollo I disaster before landing with Apollo XI. There were many more test missions than in the Artemis program. Still, Artemis I was almost two years ago (November of '22) and NASA still hasn't reached a decision on what seems to be the most critical thing: the Orion capsule's heat shield issues. 

The report continues:

"Earlier in 2024, the program was reserving that time for technical issues that may arise during testing of the integrated SLS and Orion vehicle or if weather interferes with planned activities, among other things," the report states. "Officials said it is likely that issues will arise because this is the first time testing many of these systems. Given the lack of margin, if further issues arise during testing or integration, there will likely be delays to the September 2025 Artemis II launch date."

Weather?  Like the Hurricane of the Month Club?    

This kind of boggles the mind. Yes, the ground systems program has had to complete some important work since the Artemis I mission in late 2022, including building an emergency egress system for astronauts in the event of a problem during the launch countdown. But by September of next year, the agency will have had the better part of three years to work on those and other accommodations. At this point, there is no longer any margin in the schedule.

Artemis I mission during one of its trips to the pad that didn't result in flying, August 2022.   NASA Photo.

Eric Berger's conclusion:

To prepare for the Artemis II launch next September, Artemis officials had previously said they planned to begin stacking operations of the rocket in September of this year. But so far, this activity remains on hold pending a decision on the heat shield issue. Asked when NASA now plans to start stacking operations, the space agency official said, "We are still tracking toward stacking beginning this fall."

The bottom line is that NASA is facing schedule challenges on multiple fronts for the Artemis II mission. Although a launch delay is unlikely to be announced soon, we can be fairly confident that it is eventually coming.

I saw a story today that Michael Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg News and a former US Presidential candidate, called for cancelling the SLS program. The only thing I'm sure cancelling the SLS would do is guarantee that the next boots on the moon will have launched from China, and that may happen regardless of what we do about the outrageously bad SLS program. China says they plan to land a crew on the moon in 2030, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did it sooner.

Axiom Reveals New Artemis Lunar EVA Suit

It's actually a little weirder than that.  It's a joint effort by Axiom Space, and Prada, the fashion company. Perhaps fittingly, the new space suit was revealed in one of the fashion capitals of the world, Milan, Italy. Not at a fashion show, but at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) held on Oct. 16 in Milan, six hours ahead of Eastern US time, and two hours ahead of UTC.

First, you might recall how the first look at these suits came across back in March of '23. If not, I have a picture (and links to others) here.  These suits look nothing like those, nor do they look like the SpaceX EVA suits we saw a few weeks ago during Polaris Dawn. Thankfully, they don't look much like Prada fashion, either. 

Axiom Space and Prada revealed the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit in a press conference held at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) here today (Oct. 16).

AxEMU will be used for NASA's Artemis 3 mission, which is currently scheduled to launch in late 2026. It has been specially designed for the lunar south pole, which will be a colder environment than astronauts experienced on the Apollo missions, which landed around the moon's equator.

The new spacesuit incorporates multiple redundant systems and an onboard diagnostic system to ensure safety for crewmembers, according to Axiom. It features lights and an HD camera on the helmet, 4G/LTE communication, a suit control interface, biometric monitoring, regenerable carbon dioxide scrubbing and portable life support to keep astronauts safe for up to eight hours. It can also accommodate a wide range of crewmembers, male or female.

The suit. 

White and not black like the ones we saw in March '23?  Matt Ondler, Axiom Space President, has said that during development, Axiom Space used a dark cover layer for display to conceal the suit’s proprietary technology. However, the spacesuit worn on the lunar surface will be made from a white material that reflects heat and protects astronauts from extreme high temperatures and lunar dust. 

If you're like me, you're probably wondering what a company like Prada would have to do with something that's more "industrial" than fashionable. It turned out it was a partnership between engineers and artisans that each have specialized knowledge of their own. 

The partnership with Prada was highlighted as a cross-industry collaboration success. "I'm very proud of the result we're showing today, which is just the first step in a long-term collaboration with Axiom Space," said Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada chief marketing officer, in a statement. "We've shared our expertise on high-performance materials, features, and sewing techniques, and we learned a lot."

Russell Ralston, Axiom's executive vice president of extravehicular activity, speaking at the unveiling, said the partnership was groundbreaking.

"This collaboration exemplifies the power to create better technology solutions together by merging Axiom Space's elite engineering experience with Prada's all-round craftsmanship. We've blended engineering, science and art to produce the ultimate garments, ensuring that astronauts can perform their tasks and missions in safety and comfort."

The collaboration doesn't stop there. Because the Artemis missions and therefore the suits are aimed at the lunar South Pole, that's going to mean the sun is lower in the sky and that means the astronauts are going to need more protection from the sun than the Apollo astronauts did landing much closer to the equator. "We've partnered with others like Oakley for optimal system design to enhance astronaut visibility," Ondler said.

Axiom's summary of their suits' features. It brings to mind the one in this post, but they're not conducive to point-by-point comparison. 

It's worth pointing out that this is still early in the AxEMU suit development and much testing lies ahead at this point. It's a safe bet that there will be changes. Axiom also intends to use the suits in places besides the lunar surface: there are discussions about using it in their planned space station work and other work in the low Earth orbit arena. "We also think there are commercial opportunities to work with commercial and private astronauts," Ondler said.

SpaceX Goes Over 100 Launches for the Year

It's kind of a slow news day. ULA is still trying to figure out why the nozzle broke off that Solid Rocket Booster on their Cert-2 flight.  To summarize that article, "yeah that nozzle broke off and screwed up a lot of stuff, but, boy howdy, that Vulcan sure did correct it out!  What a rocket!"

Another good one is that nuclear rockets could get us to Mars in like half the time, but getting those reactors designed right for space sure is hard!  Just like how they say space is hard? Designing pretty much anything for use in space is hard, and to be perfectly honest, designing anything that has never been done in human history is hard. I wonder what they'd think of designing the recovery system for SuperHeavy we just watched? 

Ah, well...

Elon Musk once said a sign of success for him as well as SpaceX is when launches get boring. You expect them to go smoothly and every step to work the way it's supposed to. In keeping  with that, SpaceX launched their missions #100 and 101 of 2024 this morning (Oct. 15).  Both were loads of Starlink satellites.

The first was from Cape Canaveral SFS at 2:10 AM EDT. As usual, the booster successfully landed about 8 minutes later, landing on the drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas" off the Florida coast.  This was the 11th flight for this booster, putting it in that odd position of being unimaginably old to the rest of the world, but just getting into its prime to SpaceX.

Two hours later, a second Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg SFB's SLC-4E, at 4:21AM EDT (1:21 AM PDT). This was the 19th flight for this booster, which also successfully landed - this time on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" off the California coast. This booster is respectably old to SpaceX, incomprehensibly old to the rest of the world. 

Time exposure of this morning's second launch, from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Image credit: SpaceX.

So, let's see... Sunday we saw Starship Flight test 5, Monday we saw Falcon Heavy launch Europa Clipper, and Tuesday morning we saw two launches of a load of 23 Starlink Satellites - one from each coast.  NextSpaceflight says on Thursday at 3:55 PM EDT we'll see another Falcon 9 carrying a load of Starlink satellites from SLC-40 here at CCSFS, and Sunday morning at 1:09 (EDT again) a load of OneWeb satellites (a direct competitor to Starlink) from Vandenberg SLC-4E.  That will be six launches since Sunday 10/13. Kinda reinforces that idea that the world's space program is SpaceX and second place is too far back to bother naming

Europa Clipper Started its 5+ Year trip today

NASA's Europa Clipper satellite to explore the named moon of Jupiter lifted off today at 12:06 PM EDT from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.  The launch, originally set for Thursday the 10th, was delayed by Hurricane Milton and days of cleanup. 

The Falcon Heavy lifts off this morning (Oct. 14) from the Kennedy Space Center carrying NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft. Credit: Brandon Lindner

The skies were that clear and blue down here at "Castle Graybeard" as well, giving us good views through the two side boosters and the core booster being dropped sequentially.  All three Falcon 9 cores were expended due to the size of the satellite and the needed trajectory using up all available fuel. 

Europa Clipper is one of NASA’s most expensive science missions yet, with an estimated total lifecycle cost, including four years of operations after arriving at Jupiter in 2030, of $5.2 billion. It was one of the top priorities for flagship-class planetary science missions in decadal surveys by planetary scientists, building on proposals for Europa orbiters or flyby missions for at least two decades.
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The spacecraft weighed 5,700 kilograms fully fueled at launch (6.28 tons) and its solar arrays, when fully deployed, will make the spacecraft 30.5 meters (100 feet) long.

The solar arrays are a bit longer than an NBA basketball court, but recent experience with solar arrays like that have been easier to live with than nuclear power sources like the Radioisotope Thermal Generators that have powered the Voyager satellites for 47 years.

While you'll see many places describing the mission as searching for life on the frigid moon, NASA/JPL won't use those that term. 

The spacecraft will not search for life itself but rather see if the moon does have the right conditions to support life. “We continue to underscore that Europa Clipper is not actually a life-detection mission but a habitability investigation,” said Gina DiBraccio, acting director of NASA’s planetary science division, at an Oct. 13 briefing about the mission’s science.

“We want to understand whether Europa has the key ingredients to support life in its oceans,” said Robert Pappalardo, Europa Clipper project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at the briefing.

Europa Clipper is equipped with nine dedicated instruments ranging from cameras and spectrometers to magnetometers, as well as a gravity and radio science experiment. Much like the predecessor Juno satellite which has been orbiting Jupiter for well over eight years, Europa Clipper will enter an orbit that loops around Europa, currently said to orbit 49 times.  The flight to Europa is described as taking five years, but it's more like 5-1/2, with arrival expected in April 2030.  

You probably recall that the controversy a few years ago was that Europa Clipper had been set to fly on the SLS with its Exploration Upper Stage - which has never flown. I don't know an expected date, but would guess it won't fly until the probe is orbiting Europa  and well into its mission.  Then there's the issue that SLS missions are estimated to cost $4.4 billion (WITHOUT the EUS); today's Falcon Heavy launch cost $178 million.

They're not exactly the same missions.  SLS with the EUS could have gotten Europa Clipper to Europa faster - three years instead of 5-1/2 - if only it existed. And they could afford another $5 billion for the launch vehicle. The spacecraft will instead make a gravity assist flyby of Mars early next year and of Earth in late 2026 to arrive at Jupiter in April 2030.

Wow... Just Wow... Again!

Starship Flight Test 5. This went beyond Wow, all the way to "Holy Crap!"  It's beyond testing a couple of things, and as far as I can tell, it met every objective. I was here to watch this and watched the whole coverage that SpaceX linked to on X. Full screen, 1080p video for just about all of it.

The quote SpaceX uses all the time is, "the payload for this flight is data;" the whole purpose is to examine changes made since the last test with a handful of milestones in mind. They're fond of saying that no matter what they try, only excitement is guaranteed. That was easily exceeded in IFT-5.

After a flawless liftoff and the couple of minutes until stage separation, followed by the return to the pad at Starbase Boca Chica, we saw this:

We've known about the plans to return to the Orbital Launch Mount and desire to catch the Super Heavy booster for years.  We've seen videos created by various folks depicting what it would look like. It didn't prepare me. I caught myself watching the seconds before that screen capture shown above quietly saying, "Holy Crap!" Many of us watch them land the boosters after a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy launch and say it never gets old.  I think this is going to be the same way.

Bear in mind SpaceX made a video of all the failures on the way to their first successful Falcon 9 landing called "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" - a tribute both to their work and their sense of humor.  That video was made seven years ago. There are no scenes out of today's mission for a similar video on how to catch the world's most powerful rocket booster.  Around 500 tons worth of booster. 

As impressive as catching SuperHeavy in the air was, it was only half the mission. Starship was still flying a suborbital flight to the Indian Ocean, off the NW coast of Australia. Catching SuperHeavy was 6:55 into the mission, the splashdown into the ocean was almost exactly an hour later. The plasma and heating we'd seen on earlier missions was just as mind-boggling as before but the video didn't show the flap melting away as it did on IFT-4.  Don't forget that this is SpaceX.  They went to the spot in the ocean that they were aiming for and put some buoys with cameras on them to capture the splashdown.  This is just after the still extremely hot engine nozzles dumped into the ocean.

(Screen grab from Space.com VideoFromSpace)  Yes, it exploded. As one of the SpaceX announcers said, they didn't plan to recover any part of that Starship.  The video leading up to that moment is from a camera pointed down at the bottom of the Starship from the top.  The ocean surface becomes visible, then it apparently plunges into the ocean because the entire scene changes color. 

If you haven't seen the video of the whole mission, it's worth the time. A minute or three after Mechazilla catches the booster, they go about a half hour with no chatting or narration, starting up again at about T+40 minutes. Go pick a video presenter you like or go to SpaceX's video on their own servers. It's a historic mission.

A comment I read somewhere said that with this, mankind has become a space-faring civilization. That seems a bit of an overreach to me, but it certainly made the talk about flying unmanned Starships to Mars in 2026 and sending people by 2028 sound more likely.

Just About Done with Milton Repairs

As I mentioned in my first update Thursday afternoon, we had very little damage from Milton.  Power was out very little, if at all, and there were only a couple of things that needed repair. The big one seemed to be that an element broke off of my HF Log Periodic antenna (a Tennadyne T6) on one side of the boom, very much like what happened back during Ian two years ago.  The second was that our east side fence gate broke, throwing the metal piece that latches the gate closed about six to eight feet from the fence. 

The antenna fix ended up being different from the last one and while I thought I could just go find a piece of the 1/2" aluminum bar that I used to fix it last time, the unnoticed curve ball was that the tubing for this element is larger diameter than the one that snapped two years ago.  That one had an Inside Diameter of 1/2" while this one was 5/8".  I went looking for a piece of 3/4 or 1" bar I could reduce in diameter until it fit in the antenna tube, but didn't have one.  I absolutely didn't want to leave this one on the ground and order a piece of bar stock - that would take days to a week. That's when I found a piece I had originally bought to fix the antenna after Ian, a piece of metric-sized aluminum tube that was a bit oversized in Outside Diameter: 17mm OD, or about 0.670".  

My lathe has been obsoleted by Little Machine Shop, but it's SIEG SC4 type, 8-1/2 by 20", they sold as their model 3540. Yes, SIEG is the Chinese machine producer that makes the vast majority of the smaller home/"hobby" lathes in the 7x10, 8x12 and similar small sizes. This one is capable of doing automated cuts by using some controls on the carriage originally intended for threading, so to reduce this bar from that 0.670" OD down to 0.620 (or so) is a matter of setting up for repetitive cuts, put the cutter in position, throw a lever and just keep an eye on things. Pretty much. At the end of the cut, flip the lever, return the carriage to the starting point, move the cutting bit to the next cut's depth and repeat.

I turned it down to the point where the ends measured close to 0.625 and then pulled the tube out to check in the antenna element. It's not uncommon for a part to not come out to the same diameter over its entire length (at least not on my lathe ... or not on these "hobbyist" lathes), and while the ends fit well, I took off another .003" and it made a nice easy fit.  As with the last time I did this, I used a gun cleaning wire brush in my battery powered drill to scrub the insides of both parts of the element.  As with the last time, it was full of dirt that I believe was stuck in the tubes by mud dauber wasps.

Here's what it looked like put back together.  Before cranking the tower back up, I did a NanoVNA sweep of the antenna and it looked fine. Then I swept my other antenna on the tower, the VHF beam, and it looked unaffected, too.

The aluminum tube has a blue line drawn on it to mark the halfway point and you can see that in the gap where the two pieces meet. I smeared the (right) half of the tube with nail polish to glue the tube in place, then drilled a clearance hole for the 6-32 hardware: a screw, flat washer on the far side, lock washer on this side. Yes, that's a brass nut on a stainless screw. 

The other issue, the fence gate had much less progress. It looks to me like that gate needs to be rebuilt or replaced.  We have a "poly-something-or-other" fence and the gate latch was ripped apart.  I forgot to grab a photo of it, but it's this basic idea, except the highlighted part looks to be about twice the size of the highlighted one in this picture and holds twice as many screws on the side of the right angle closest to the camera. That's the part that ripped off the gate post and got thrown.

Where the screw holes are in this pic, ours has slots, 1/4" wide and 1/2" long.  Every screw was ripped out of the plastic post, ripping the screw holes in the door (4x4) wider.  I found the ripped off piece about 8 or 10 feet away from the gate.  The screws are self-drilling steel screws that are just under 1/4" major diameter (across the screw threads).  While a "standard fix" might be to go to larger diameter screws, the metal won't handle that and the slots would have to be widened, perhaps going to 5/16 or 3/8".  Not an outrageous job for the CNC mill, but not a one hour job either.  The issue is how much damage that the post this mounts to sustained.

The antenna is fixed and operating; the gate not so much. Our neighbors on two sides, backdoor and next-door, have trees in corners of their lots that overgrow our lot all the time. Where the three of our lots touch, I'm constantly pruning their trees and repairing next-door neighbor's fence. Milty brought more attention to that because excessive wind from the wrong direction could have put backdoor neighbor's tree through the roof of my shop. It turns out the tree came down in their yard. This time. Turns out I had trimmed those back between Helene and Milton.

FAA Lifts Falcon 9 Flight Restrictions

In a statement late in the day on Friday, Oct. 11, the FAA said it cleared launches of the Falcon 9 that, with one exception, had been on hold since a Falcon 9 upper stage suffered a problem with a final deorbit burn on the Sept. 28 launch of the Crew-9 mission for NASA.  The engine burn occurred and the upper stage re-entered as it should but not ended up not being disposed of in the Pacific where it was supposed to end up.

The launch of the European Hera mission on Monday was given a separate permission to launch. The agency said it was because the upper stage wasn't going to reenter but was to accelerate the Hera spacecraft to escape velocity.

Gee... the Falcon 9 was grounded from just after midnight, the morning of September 29 until October 11. Twelve days! The first time was 14 days. Like the first time, this one must have been a gut-wrenching few minutes of troubleshooting - maybe a whole half hour!  (I really need to figure out where I left that sarcasm font.) Neither the FAA nor SpaceX elaborated on the findings of that investigation or the corrective actions that resulted from it.

Lift off of this past Monday morning's Hera mission from SLC-40 on Cape Canaveral SFS. T +4 seconds.

Somewhat off-subject is that Starship Flight Test 5 is still penciled in for Sunday morning at 8:00 AM EDT, although I can't find evidence the FAA has approved this test. Since it wasn't related to this FAA hold, it's not covered by this lifting of it. The last thing heard from SpaceX is that they expected approval in time for the Sunday Flight Test. 

SpaceX Upgrades the Dragon Capsules for Propulsive Landing

It's not exactly a new feature, more like an ability that was put aside in the past and got renewed interest recently.  Back on September 27th, SpaceX announced a new capability for the Dragon spacecraft. Dragon now has built-in redundancy to propulsively land using its SuperDraco thrusters. In the unlikely event of a parachute failure, the propulsive landing could save the vehicle and potential crew from a rough landing or imminent danger. 

The concept of landing on the SuperDraco thrusters dates back to 2014, when the Commercial Crew Program was getting started.

SpaceX introduced the concept of a propulsive landing Dragon over ten years ago. When SpaceX revealed Dragon 2, it was marketed as capable of propulsively landing anywhere on Earth and was initially designed to land exclusively with the SuperDracos. However, SpaceX ultimately pursued the use of parachutes as the main form of recovery for Dragon 2 missions.

A Tweet from 2014 shows this:

The reasons come back to SpaceX's overarching goal of Rapid Reusability. 

Landing on a concrete landing pad on land rather than in the ocean has many advantages, particularly when it comes to the long-term reusability and refurbishment of Dragon capsules. When landing in the ocean, saltwater can corrode the aluminum body and carbon fiber bonds that Dragon is constructed of. Propulsively landing on Earth would have prevented invasive corrosion from occurring in the first place, making rapid reusability a much more achievable goal.

What’s more, landing Dragon propulsively would’ve also been safer for the crew when exiting the spacecraft. Getting astronauts out of a capsule is an extended process, especially when they have been exposed to microgravity for extended periods of time. The motion of ocean waves and the process of retrieving Dragon from the water has proven to be quite lengthy, and landing on a solid pad on land would have allowed recovery teams to approach and egress the crew inside Dragon substantially quicker.

The role of getting NASA approval for every aspect of the certification of the Dragon played a part in the decision to downplay the propulsive landing and emphasize using parachutes to splashdown in the ocean. 

With parachutes now serving as Dragon’s main landing system, propulsively landing Dragon was no longer a main focus of Dragon 2’s development. It was later revealed that NASA desired a higher “loss of crew” reliability rating for Dragon and felt more comfortable with a parachute landing system than a propulsive landing system. NASA also believed that the small openings in Dragon’s heat shield for the four extendable landing legs could lead to the quick formation of hotspots during reentry, potentially leading to the break up of the vehicle. 

Followers of SpaceX and the Crew Dragon may recall that in 2019, after a test mission of one capsule to the ISS, it was subjected to a test of its SuperDraco thrusters and exploded on the test stand less than one second before it was to have ignited its thrusters. It suffered an anomaly, NASA speak for "cratering explosion on the test stand".

Today, Crew Dragon is known to be an extremely reliable and well-tested vehicle — flying 15 successful crewed missions to the ISS and other low-Earth orbits and suffering little to no issues with its parachute landing system. During the Crew-9 pre-launch briefing, NASA announced that Dragon now had the capability to activate its SuperDraco engines and perform a propulsive landing if a failure of the parachutes were to occur. Should an anomaly with the parachutes occur, the four main parachutes would be cut and Dragon would ignite its eight SuperDraco engines to slowly perform a propulsive splashdown. NASA stated that such a landing would be “tolerable” for any crew inside Dragon.

SpaceX testing Dragon’s eight SuperDraco’s during a hover test in 2015. Image credit: SpaceX

Perhaps surprisingly, the propulsive landing system was available for the first time on Crew-7 in August 2023 and has been functional on all private SpaceX missions since then.  It's expected to be used for future NASA ISS crew missions.  Now I'm stoked to watch a returning Dragon spacecraft do a vertical propulsive landing at one of the poured concrete Landing Zones that returning Falcon 9 boosters have landed on.

A Milton Update

I don't have a personal weather station, but since I'm within a few miles of Melbourne International Airport, I tend to use their numbers for what we experienced.  Those haven't been posted so the best summary I can give is that we had minimal to no damage -  the metal part of one of my fence's gates was ripped out. Weather Underground showed we had max sustained winds of 68 mph in the early morning. Every other time I've looked wind gusts were 15 or more mph higher, so I'll guess it gusted to the mid 80s.

I was awakened at about 1AM and heard our backup generator running.  As I tried to force some sense into my head, the generator shut off. The rule of thumb on this generator is that when the power goes down, it waits 10 seconds before starting up to ensure the power isn't back, yet.  Once it has been running, if power returns, it keeps running for around 10 minutes in case the power coming back on is intermittent, or too low.  Basically, if power is out for 15 seconds, the generator turns on and will run for 10 minutes. 

That's just a long way of explaining that our power might have been off for all of about 15 seconds, although it could have been off longer. I woke up, heard the generator and moments later heard it go silent. 

Aside from that, the work is mostly to clean up leaves and broken branches on the yard, and take down the shutters.  Virtually all of the leaves and branches are from my neighbor's trees.  I had one element of my log periodic HF antenna snap off, just like happened with hurricane Ian a couple of years ago.  I believe I have the metal to fix it so that shouldn't be a big deal, either. 

Not losing power is the big deal.  Kudos to Florida Power and Light.

Someone else is dumping on SLS and NASA

It's not just me. If you want to find out about all of NASA's problems, all the things they just do wrong, there's simply no better place to start looking than the Space Launch System or SLS, the launch vehicle for the Artemis program. When you're looking at SLS, look at Artemis, too. The last time I did a dedicated post on this was about a key addition to SLS, the Exploration Upper Stage and how awful its development has been.  

It's not just me harping on SLS. Blogger Casey Handmer is back on more space-related topics from blogging about the business he started and has done a post entitled, "SLS is still a national disgrace" and he's back to doing good posts. But this isn't just about SLS; it's about so much more - virtually every NASA program in the last 20 years. 

As usual, some snippets to whet your appetite to go read more. 

Four years ago, I wrote that the SLS was a cripplingly embarrassing national failure and a tragedy waiting to happen. That remains true, of course, but now I will go further and underscore that by continuing to humor this monstrosity, NASA has squandered its technical integrity and credibility.
...
Four years ago, I wrote that the best time to cancel the SLS was 20 years before, and the second best time was then. Four years on, the program has consumed another $20b with nothing to show for it. $20b, bringing total development cost to over $100b. This program burns $12m per day!
...
NASA managers routinely complain of difficulties in hiring and retention – difficulties they never faced 20 years ago, before the SLS and before the private space companies that, unlike NASA, are able to offer some combination of market-rate compensation, a career track that rewards ambition and competence, and a workplace that swiftly departs underperformers.

Just imagine the mental agility required to actually want to work for an agency that continues to insist on technical doctrine no less absurd than “2+2=5” from top to bottom, from onboarding documentation all the way up to press releases, bilateral agreements and policy papers. Everyone at NASA knows the SLS is a looming catastrophe, but no-one can say it. Officially, it’s still the most powerful rocket ever built (except for Starship) and our official vehicle to the Moon and Mars! In reality, it’s insanely expensive, dangerous, and underpowered and can barely lift a reasonable payload to LEO.

Program by program, example by example, from Mars Sample Return to Space Suits for Artemis, or from the James Webb Space Telescope to the Orion (Artemis capsule) heat shield, there's a simply amazing compilation of facts.

Liftoff of Artemis I on the SLS in the early morning of November 16, 2022. Image credit: NASA

I think it was at the last Shuttle flight in 2011 that I first came to grips with NASA being as bad as every other agency in the Fed.gov hydra. If the budget problems are ever going to be resolved, the old mindset of "cut everyone's programs - except mine" has to go away. I was ready to see NASA cut to the core back then. This just reinforces that.

Updating

It's an odd week in that real space news seems hard to find, the stories are preliminary news about potential contracts or programs, so nothing we'll see for a while. So since the news I'm seeing is wrapped around the coming Hurricane Milton and the recovery operations ongoing after Hurricane Helene up in the SE stretching from Georgia and the Florida panhandle up to Tennessee and Virginia, that has sucked up a lot of my time and attention. 

A starting point is that I still swap emails from time to time with a former office mate I've known since we worked on hardware for the space station in the early 1990s. He's a fellow RF engineer who grew up in Tennessee and went to college there. As news started coming out of NC, he sent me this photograph from one of the local papers up there. In the distance, what I take to be flood waters can be seen.  It's a landmark sign about the Flood of 1916, apparently knocked down by something, presumably Hurricane Helene itself. 

It's hard not to notice it's just over 100 years ago, and while most places keep track of "hundred year floods," it takes some determined research to find out lots about it. Was the catastrophic flood of 1916 worse than this year's flood?  Or was this year's worse?  Are they really spaced around a hundred years from each other? 

It's so common that it's a cliche' that every change in weather, every bad day, whether cold or hot, dry or flooded, gets blamed on "climate change."  It isn't surprising or unexpected, then, that Watts Up With That, one of the most authoritative counterpoints to blaming everything on anthropogenic climate change, would run an article on this 1916 Flood, which also happens to have been caused by a hurricane. Interestingly, every place named on that sign is named in that article linked to on WUWT.

The 1916 Major Hurricane Asheville culprit is Number 4 on the list at a time when names were not given to hurricanes and there were no satellites, hurricane hunter aircraft or long-range weather radar systems available to identify and track storms.  

There were 15 numbered Atlantic storms in 1916 even though there easily could have been many more that were never observed during this season because of observation inadequacies compared to today’s available technology.

The year of 1916 had more numbered storms at 15 than we've had named storms (Milton is number 13), and that big disclaimer saying there could have been more storms, or even many more storms than we have had is quite important, as hurricane season starts to wind down. Back in 1916, if a storm stayed out of shipping lanes, or wasn't active in them when ships were there, it's far more likely it could live out its life without being known about than today.  With our satellites and other ways of knowing they're out there, that's pretty much impossible today. 

A measure of the activity of a hurricane season is accumulated cyclone energy, ACE, a product of the strength of a storm and how long it exists.  The 1916 Atlantic season had a total ACE of 144 compared to the 2024 season total 115.6 as of October 7, 2024.  The Atlantic Season 30-year ACE average (1991 – 2020) is 122.5 so the year 1916 was an above average ACE hurricane year, and 2024 is still below average. Hurricane season runs until the end of November so there's close to two months left. While early predictions were for a very active season, it hasn't been. Even with Milton - so far.

The number of storms through the Atlantic hurricane season, showing the peak on September 10th, and a "You Are Here" box around October 10th, or so. Just to show that while we're well past the peak, we're nowhere near as inactive as through August 1st, or from mid-November until December 1. 

If you haven't seen it, yes, Helene and Milton both have been blamed on climate change.  It's a different subset of people than the ones blaming it on weather modification or malicious forces trying to buy up all the land so they can mine the shi..er.. mine the lithium out of it.  In both cases the basic idea seems to be, "it seems abnormal to me, so it must be this instead of just plain weather" - where "this" is climate change, cloud seeding, Black Rock, the military, or whatever.

SpaceX Returns to Flight, Launches Europe's Hera

I was shocked when I saw that SpaceX was listed as set to launch from Cape Canaveral this morning. I've been watching the reliable news sources to see if they've been given a reprieve by the FAA, which clamped down on the company after they announced they were voluntarily grounding the Falcon 9 while they troubleshot the problem encountered on the Crew-9 mission a week ago. I haven't seen any articles about what they've found or saying the FAA has completely cleared them to launch, though. Nevertheless, they launched this morning at 10:52 EDT from SLC-40 and the mission seemed as routine and successful as any we've ever observed.  With the local weather preventing seeing anything, we watched the launch on NASASpaceflight. 

Screen capture from the SpaceX video, with some stretching of levels since the original was darkened by the camera's auto exposure. 

Hera is an interesting mission, described using words I've never seen in a serious sentence before: it's a planetary defense mission. From SpaceX:

Hera is a planetary defense mission that will study the impact NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission spacecraft had on the Dimorphos asteroid, which Falcon 9 launched in November 2021. Hera will provide valuable data for future asteroid deflection missions and science to help humanity’s understanding of asteroid geophysics as well as solar system formation and evolutionary processes.

An interesting side note to this mission was that it flew booster B1061 on its 23rd mission. The required orbital performance of the mission consumed the fuel that would ordinarily be used to land, so B1061 was disposed of. More like, well, everybody else's launch vehicles, not a Falcon 9.

"Farewell, 1061, and we thank you," SpaceX's John Insprucker, principal integration engineer, said to the booster after stage separation.

As has been talked about before, SpaceX developed the booster recovery and refurbishment technologies on their own Starlink missions, and very experienced boosters like 1061 don't tend to get used on "paying customer's" flights - especially since 23 flights is currently what the fleet leaders have flown. This seems to indicate a growing confidence in and acceptance of these refurbished boosters among customers.

The $398 million (363 million Euro)  Hera spacecraft, accompanied by two smaller cubesats called named Milani and Juventas, is scheduled to arrive at Dimorphos in late 2026 to look at DART's work up close. On the way, Hera will swing by Mars in 2025 to nab a gravity assist for its asteroid trip.

The NASA mission shortened Dimorphos' orbit by 33 minutes and may have changed the shape of the little moon as well.

Hera will look at the depth and size of the crater that DART gouged out on Dimorphos and confirm the impact's changes on the moon, if any, against early simulations. 

The two cubesats, meanwhile, will examine the structure of Dimorphos along with its surface minerals and gravity, all of which will help to refine models.

An artist's impression of Hera, and two cubesats, named Jethro and Bodine, - no... just checking if you were really reading - named Juventas and Milani, which will assist Hera in its study of Didymos and Dimorphos. (Image credit: ESA/Science Office)

Space.com noted that SpaceX launched after receiving authorization from the FAA, "to resume flights after an anomaly last week." They didn't mention if this was a one-time approval, perhaps because of it being a European Space Agency mission, or if they're going to resume regular operations.  Checking NextSpaceflight, it appears they're resuming regular operations.

The Falcon Heavy launch of NASA's Europa Clipper had been scheduled for Thursday, October 10th. That's pretty much the worst day of Hurricane Milton over here on the Space Coast. The five day forecast plots have moved the point projected to be where the storm goes back offshore farther north, but it appears to be over Playalinda Beach just north of the KSC.  The vehicle and payload will have to be rolled back to their integration facility for safety.  The currently listed date and time is Saturday, October 12th at 12:19 PM EDT.

The real surprise is they list the Starship 5 Flight Test as this coming Sunday, Oct 13, at 8:00 AM EDT

Since There Will Be Lots of Antenna Related Work ...

My standard hurricane preps up to a few years ago included cranking my tower over, removing the antennas and leaving them on the ground, then cranking the tower back up.  We haven't had a direct hit in a while, and when tropical storm Ian (a really bad hurricane over in SW Florida) came through in late September of '22 I made the mistake of not doing what I'd always done. From the looks of Milton, I'm going to go ahead and do that. Most likely that'll be Tuesday morning - and hopefully be done quickly.  

I know I've said before that my antenna projects all tend to start with the words, "when it cools down."  This year, I've been playing with the idea of automating something I do manually, selecting the antenna the radio will connect to automatically when I change the band I'm operating on. 

Right now I use two switches, and here's a diagram I posted in June of '23 to illustrate things. 

All of this is indoors on the radio desk. The top switch selects which of the three antennas I have (or a dummy load) connects to the next switch, which then selects which of four radios to connect to. Since I don't have an antenna for that VHF/UHF port on my backup radio (IC-7000), the last label on the right, I just leave a short coaxial cable jumper (RG-58) to use with either the QRP IC-703 or test equipment like the NanoVNA H4. 

In general, I only need to change the top (antenna) selector when I'm operating. Right now, I'm looking into ways to automate that and whether or not there are advantages to doing that - besides a little convenience.  There's one advantage that shows up immediately: it replaces three cables coming in through the wall with one - the output of a remote switch.  Since the pipe through the wall for the bunch of cables is already there, that really doesn't buy me much. Each of those three cables would be shortened, go to a lightning protector, and then to the switch outside (possible examples of lightning protector and switch). The lightning protectors could be mounted to a separate ground rod for each antenna; I've also seen a larger chassis that more than one protector could be mounted to and that chassis mounted to a separate ground rod. 

Remember, when it comes to getting rid of a lightning strike, the more ground the better.  As we used to say to newbies trying to layout a printed circuit board: "groundliness is next to Godliness." 

My main station radio is the IC-7610, and it has enough memories for frequency and mode that I can press a front panel button and immediately change frequency. The radio will remember how its antenna tuner is set, but it has no way of selecting the antenna that it "knows" how to tune.  It would be convenient to press that button and have it select the antenna for me at the same time. Failing that, the various pieces of software I'm running all the time might be able to generate a command to switch the antenna.

The research aspect of this has been the most time consuming, so far.  And, yes, since I have my small machine shop, I have thought about making a cute little robot that stands on top of the shelf where my switch is located and just rotates the antenna switch knob for me.

Marvin the Paranoid Android - from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Image credit: Blenderartists (.org)

Looks like our turn this time

The messy area in the Gulf of Mexico that has been actively tracked for weeks has spun up yet another tropical storm.  The current predictions show it going virtually overhead Wednesday evening through Thursday morning.  

Meet tropical storm Milton.

This storm has developed fast. The first chart like this was posted at 2PM ET as a depression; this one was 5PM ET as a tropical storm. Since the Time of Arrival of first tropical storm winds here looks to be Wednesday morning, it looks like Tuesday will be the last day to get everything done.  Our local forecast for Sunday Oct. 5th through the next Friday (11th) has been calling for rain every day this coming week for as long as those days have been in the 10 day forecast, so it will most likely be raining as we do all that. 

So... here we go again! 

Vulcan Centaur Cert-2 Flight Had "an Anomaly"

I have to confess to not getting up to watch the scheduled 6:00 AM Vulcan launch this morning. It has been a few days with things going on that have been a bit more tiring than usual and sleeping in sounded better.  Not so much storm cleanup but what could be prep for the inevitable next one.  Sleeping in made it impossible to know that the launch was aborted in the last minute, and after various precautions they recycled to launch at 7:25 AM (1125 UTC) this morning.

A friend of mine sent a quickie email saying, "looked OK from the front yard" but he's a bit farther from the Cape than I am and I don't think what happened would have been visible without a powerful, guided telescope from here. What happened? Essentially a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) of one of the two solid rocket boosters strapped onto the core stage of the Vulcan. The (composite, not metal) exhaust nozzle of one those boosters broke apart in flight. The booster didn't blow up, the Vulcan Centaur continued on its mission with one of the boosters putting out significantly less thrust than the other. 

As the rocket arced east from Cape Canaveral, a shower of sparks suddenly appeared at the base of the Vulcan rocket around 37 seconds into the mission. The exhaust plume from one of the strap-on boosters, made by Northrop Grumman, changed significantly, and the rocket slightly tilted on its axis before the guidance system and main engines made a steering correction.

Videos from the launch show the booster's nozzle, the bell-shaped exhaust exit cone at the bottom of the booster, fall away from the rocket.

"It looks dramatic, like all things on a rocket," Bruno wrote on X. "But it’s just the release of the nozzle. No explosions occurred."

As is often the case in situations like this, a good guy to check out is Scott Manley, and he posted a good video on this early today.  This is a screen grab of Scott's screen grab from another source (D Wise at NASA Spaceflight).  The broken off section of the nozzle is in the red circle. It was tumbling and the moment I grabbed the picture was when you can look through the nozzle - still glowing hot - and see the sky behind it.

Remarkably, the solid rocket didn't explode, the Vulcan's control systems saw that the thrust was lower than expected and the rocket wasn't on the planned trajectory, so it adjusted what it could to regain a nominal flight.  The main stage with it's Blue Origin-supplied BE-4 methane/oxygen engines burned seconds longer than the normal, expected flight, and then shut down and fell away, as it should have. The Centaur V upper stage started and burned, with the onscreen video's timer showing the Centaur's RL-10 engines burned approximately 20 seconds longer than planned, apparently also to compensate for the lower thrust from the damaged booster during the first phase of the flight. The Centaur upper stage completed a second burn about a half-hour into the mission.

ULA CEO Tory Bruno considered the mission a success, saying "Orbital insertion was perfect" on X. The US Space Force hailed the test flight as a "certification milestone" in a press release after the launch. Clearly, both ULA and Space Force have a vested interest in certifying the Vulcan for the National Security missions it will carry; equally clearly, US Space Force would face more criticism for approving the Vulcan if this should recur. Or get worse.  

A photo taken a few seconds after liftoff shows the BE-4 Main engines with their light blue Mach Diamonds, accompanied on both sides by the solid rocket boosters. Both appear to be "normal and healthy" in this photo. Image credit: United Launch Alliance

Voyager 2 Has Another Instrument Turned Off

Space.com reports that NASA engineers have turned off one of the few remaining scientific instruments that was running on Voyager 2, as the power available on the space probe continues to fall with age.  

Voyager 2 launched back in August of 1977 on a trip to Jupiter and a "Grand Tour" of the outer solar system. That mission was completed decades ago, and the probe left the solar system on Nov. 5, 2018.  Yeah, you can say the two Voyagers are in the 47th year of a 4 year mission. 

...It is currently 12.8 billion miles (20.5 billion kilometers) from Earth and is using four science instruments to study space beyond the heliosphere, the sun's bubble of influence around the solar system. NASA thinks that Voyager 2 has enough power to keep running one science instrument into the 2030s, but doing that requires selecting which of its other instruments need to be turned off. 

Mission specialists have tried to delay the instrument shutdown until now because Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 are the only two active probes humanity has in interstellar space, making any data they gather unique. Thus far, six of the spacecraft's initial 10 instruments have been deactivated. Now, losing the seventh has become unavoidable, and the spacecraft's plasma science instrument drew the short straw. On Sept. 26, engineers gave the command to turn off the instrument.

The plasma science instrument is an interesting concept.  It consists of four "cups" - detectors - to sense the amount of plasma flowing around the spacecraft.  Three of those are pointed toward the sun to measure the charged particles in the solar wind while the fourth is pointed forward, to look for charged particles coming from interstellar space.  To be honest, the instrument really hasn't done much since the probe left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. Ironically, though, it was that instrument that verified it had left the heliosphere.  

This NASA graphic shows the locations of NASA's Voyager spacecraft in interstellar space. NASA announced the arrival of Voyager 2 in interstellar space on Dec. 10, 2018. Voyager 1 reached the milestone in 2012. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The situation was that the three detectors pointed back where it came from didn't detect anything because there's no solar wind after it crossed the heliopause, and the other detector only provided useful data once every three months when the spacecraft made a 360-degree turn on its axis. It was a very practical choice of an instrument to shut down.

Both Voyagers are in the same condition, losing about 4 Watts every year.  In the 1980s, after their primary mission to the outer planets was complete, several instruments were shut down; things that were never expected to be used again. Voyager 1's plasma experiment equivalent to this one failed back in 2007 and has been off since then.   

It's a common thing among human beings to look for "big round numbers" and the race that both of the Voyagers are in is to see if they make their 50th anniversaries in space. They've both recently crossed into their 47th year, having launched in August and September of 1977.  

Reality, though, is that the Voyagers don't have much time left.  Both probes are powered by Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs) and those are expected to keep the few instruments that need to run alive until 2025, but that could change with the random failure of any one of thousands of components.  The RTGs might operate longer than 2025 although probably not much longer.  Either way, eventually the RTGs will no long be able to power enough of the instruments to get data and transmit it back.  Eventually, first one Voyager then the sister spacecraft will go silent.  Even though they won't generate enough heat to power the instruments, the RTGs might keep the Voyagers a little warmer, but eventually they'll cool to almost absolute zero.  

As I said over a decade ago, if we're lucky some day a ship from Earth may find one and bring her back to whatever serves as the equivalent of the Smithsonian in those days.  In all probability, they will simply follow the Newtonian laws of motion, cool to a couple of degrees Kelvin and glide away forever, all alone in the night.

About that Spruce Pine (NC) Quartz Mine Story

One of the stories that immediately caught my attention as soon as the reports from the Hurricane Helene disaster started coming in was the one about how a small quartz provider in Spruce Pine being shut down had the potential to shut down all semiconductor manufacturing and seriously impact the modern world.  

Let me repost the first story I ever saw on this, from Virtual Mirage on October 1st one of my daily (or more) reads:

In March, a Wharton professor who studies artificial intelligence and start-ups claimed on X, “The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.” Ethan Mollick noted at the time, “There are no alternative sources known” if supply disruptions were seen in Spruce Pines. It looks like rail and road in the area are gone, along with a chunk of Spruce Pines. [NOTE: that statement that there are no alternative sources known is contradicted by another reference I've found that says there are two large sources in India and Brazil. - SiG]

This was forwarded to Larry at VM by a friend and he noted some immediate questions about it in the comments, in particular that quartz is a "simple compound, SiO₂ with a (relatively) low melting point so that it can be made in an autoclave or similar industrial oven. Silica is the second most common mineral on the planet, so there is no shortage. I think that the industrial application finds it less expensive to mine." All of that is exactly correct. Further, every part of "modern electronics" you have, be it computer, tablet, iPad, Kindle, your phone, everything, already relies on a quartz crystal.  

As a radio designer, I couldn't tell you the number of quartz crystals, as just components I've built into oscillators (sources of radio frequency on specific frequencies) or purchased as already-built components. This goes back to the early 1980s. While in the never-ending search for ways to take costs out of computers and other consumer items, there has been a move toward less accurate ways to create a master clock for everything in the computer (or whatever), crystals still have their place where frequency accuracy is important.  It's not unusual to buy a crystal specified as some frequency even in the "several hundred" MHz range and specified to within a small number of Hertz. An off the shelf clock oscillator may be specified to within 25 parts per million (25 ppm), a temperature compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) may be specified to 1/2 ppm or less. (For example, a 10.000000 MHz crystal to 1/2 ppm will be within + 5 Hz of that at all times.) The most tightly controlled oscillators are Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillators (OCXO) and they are more stringently specified. (TCXOs run at the ambient temperature but have their frequency drift controlled with some clever circuit design; OCXOs run at a high (higher than the ambient temp rating) temperature and reduce variation by locking the temperature, and using quartz cuts optimized for that temperature - as well as some clever circuit design).  

I can't give a precise date but I don't believe a quartz crystal resonator or oscillator has been made with slices of quartz crystals out of the ground since the 1970s.

The article that many have referred to appears be this one on Wired by Vince Beiser. There's a vast misunderstanding or failure to communicate. This is what the source article is referring to as coming from Spruce Pine's deposit of high purity quartz (HPQ):

Rocks like these high-grade silica samples mined near Charlotte, North Carolina, are the basis for the quartz crucibles being discussed.  Image credit: Charles O'Rear/Getty Images

This lab-grown quartz crystal is what the crystals used in oscillators, crystal filters and other circuits are cut from. Millions of these have been made to cut crystal blanks from. This is a sample of an early effort to grow crystals at Bell Labs in 1956. Image credit Weinrich Minerals.  The rusted steel on both ends (more visible on the right) held a "seed" crystal for the new crystals to grow on.

Yes, the wired article referred to quartz crucibles used for purifying Silicon, not creating oscillators and other resonators. The crucibles look more like the rocks in the first picture - not a crystal structure like that. I interpret that to mean the crucibles are made from polycrystalline quartz and not a single big crystal like the one above. 

Notice the white rim (most prominent at the bottom front and top back) surrounding the silvery chunks of silicon? That's the crucible.  

The point is that the crystals grown for those other uses have been purified. Everything that reduced the purity of the crystals they started with has been removed.  If it can be done for that use, it can be done for crucibles or any other use. 

What's going on here is strictly economic. The silicon wafer makers would rather take the high purity quartz (HPQ) or ultra-pure quartz mined in Spruce Pine (or a few other places in the world) to make the crucibles from than purify lower grade quartz. How big those cost trades are, including going to "slightly lower quality quartz" or importing from the other couple of places on earth, is never talked about.