SpaceX and NASA Targeting Unmanned Lunar Launches in November

The unsurprising one here is that Artemis/SLS decided to forego attempting to launch in October's launch windows and target the last two weeks of November (the 14th to 27th).  That decision was on October 1st; on the 12th, NASA announced that the target date for rollout back to Pad 39B will be November 4th.

The new one to me is that SpaceX is launching a privately developed Japanese lunar mission sometime between November 9th and 15th.  With the next Artemis launch attempt currently set for when the November window opens on the 14th, those two date ranges overlap.  

On October 12th, NASA confirmed that it will roll its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket out to its Kennedy Space Center LC-39A pad for the fourth time as early as November 4th. Barring surprises, the rocket’s next launch attempt is scheduled no earlier than (NET) 12:07 am EDT (17:07 UTC), November 14th. SLS is tasked with launching an uncrewed prototype of NASA’s Orion crew capsule on its way to the Moon, where the spacecraft will attempt to enter lunar orbit and conduct tests before returning to Earth.

The same day, Japanese startup ispace confirmed that HAKUTO-R M1, its first commercial Moon lander, is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sometime between November 9th and 15th. While NASA has a $73M contract with ispace to develop a second-generation SERIES-2 Moon lander in the United States, the first-generation HAKUTO-R program has been an almost entirely private endeavor. The first M1 lander will attempt to deliver two rovers and several other commercial and government payloads to surface of the Moon.

While not taking as long to get to the desired lunar orbit as the CAPSTONE mission (which is still around 28 days from its desired orbit after launching June 28th). HAKUTO-R M1 isn't on a mid-'60s style, 3-day, direct flight either. 

According to ispace’s documentation [PDF], Falcon 9 will launch HAKUTO-R into a “supersynchronous” Earth orbit, where the lander will check out its systems before eventually using its own propulsion to thrust itself free of Earth’s gravity well and into the Moon’s. It expects a nominal transit from Earth orbit to the lunar surface to take at least 20 days. The lander is designed to survive up to 12 days on the Moon, during which it will attempt to operate its onboard experiments, deploy both of its tiny rovers, and transmit all the data gathered back to Earth.

Interestingly, HAKUTO-R is specified as weighing around 2300 lb at launch but will land ~66 lb of usable payload on the Moon. ispace has designed and built most of the lander’s structures but contracted with Europe’s ArianeGroup to provide the propulsion system and fully assemble, integrate, and test the lander in Germany. 

ispace’s first HAKUTO-R Moon lander. (ispace photo)  

If you want to emphasize that HAKUTO-R and Artemis/SLS will be on the adjacent launch complex pads, like Eric Ralph at Teslarati, go for it.  With SpaceX's launch cadence and a window that opens November 9th, I suspect that the Falcon 9 might wave at Artemis, but can't imagine that launch being delayed until November 15th and Artemis going on the 14th.  Even in a mission like last week's Galaxy 33/34 launch that was delayed twice, they still launched within 3 days of the initially stated date. 

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A couple of days ago, I mentioned that there were rumors that one of the often-delayed Falcon Heavy launches would go this month. The launch is currently set for October 28th, two weeks from today, but no time has been mentioned.  The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful rocket flying in the world, at least for another few weeks to months, so always worth watching. 

Looks Like Starbase is Getting Active Again

In the last 24 hours, SpaceX at Boca Chica stacked the full Starship combination of booster 7 and ship 24, the pair that has been leading speculation for the first pair to attempt orbit.  

Around sunset on October 11th, SpaceX had better luck on its third attempt and was able to move the arms into place under Ship 24. Weighing 100 tons or more (~220,000+ lb) and measuring nine meters (~30 ft) wide and ~50 meters (~165 ft) tall, the Starship was then slowly lifted about 80 meters (~250 ft) off the ground, translated over to Booster 7, and lowered on top of the 69-meter-tall (~225 ft) first stage. After about two more hours of robotically tweaking their positions, the two Starship stages were finally secured together. With the arms still attached to Ship 24, SpaceX workers were able to approach the rocket and prepare to connect the swing arm’s quick-disconnect umbilical to Starship. 

Not quite a month ago, September 19th, Booster 7 had the first seven engine static firing a booster has ever had.  In the followup to that test, Elon Musk tweeted this:

"In a few weeks?"  Seems to be right on schedule.  I never saw any testing of booster 8, though.

Ten days before that booster test, Ship 24 did a static firing of all six of its engines at once, a condition that I haven't seen referred to as something that will be a regular part of missions.  There are three Raptor Vacuum engines and three sea level Raptors.  The vacuum engines will be used during ascent after the booster stage drops away, and the sea level engines will be used for landing.  As I understand it.

A full 33 engine static firing is still probably weeks away, as a guess.  There was a road closure today and the expectations among watchers was that they'd do some overall cryogenic testing to ensure nothing was behaving badly, but no tests were done today.  Instead, what was done was ship 24 was lifted off the booster for some reason and then put back.  Since I started this paragraph with speculation, I'll continue that way.  Starship watchers seem to think they won't go from firing seven engines directly to 33.  Unless there's some hardware-specific reason to group certain engines together, they'll progress from seven to some intermediate number and then probably to 20, the outer ring of Raptors that don't need to gimbal (to steer the booster).  The remaining 13 engines are all of the engines that gimbal; perhaps they'll get one test by themselves.  There will undoubtedly be some days between tests, more if anything needs repairs.

The full stack wet dress rehearsal that Musk mentions has been done at various levels of the prototypes, but with the most powerful rocket ever built, the scale is mind boggling.  The prototypes will be simultaneously loaded with around 5000 tons (~11M lb) of liquid oxygen and methane propellant and then run through a launch countdown, stopping just short of igniting the engines.  Does that happen before the 33 engine static firing?  My guess is yes, and Eric Ralph at Teslarati says the same thing.  

If the wet dress rehearsal goes to plan, SpaceX will then attempt to simultaneously ignite all 33 of the Raptor engines installed on Super Heavy B7, almost certainly making it the most powerful liquid rocket ever tested. Even if all 33 engines never reach more than 60% of their maximum thrust of 230 tons (~510,000 lbf), they will likely break the Soviet N-1 rocket’s record of 4500 tons of thrust (~10M lbf) at sea level. It would also be the most rocket engines ever simultaneously ignited on one vehicle. SpaceX will be pushing the envelope by several measures, and success is far from guaranteed.

The single most common question in any chat group I see about Starbase is often abbreviated to just "wenlaunch?"  I think it's a bit much to think that SpaceX won't have to repair anything or reiterate some aspect of the design, especially since that appears to be their primary method of development.  Still, if everything goes perfectly, we could see the first orbital attempt in November, even possibly before the Artemis/SLS window in mid-late November.  If they need to repair or change things, that date slides out.  It seems very likely Starship will launch before too far into '23. 

Fully stacked Ship 24 and booster 7, Tweeted by Elon Musk at 8:10 PM EDT Wednesday evening.

EDIT 10-13-22 0808 EDT:  Corrected typo (brain fart?) of "Starship will launch before too far into '24"  to say '23, as intended.

DART Impact Successfully Changed the Asteroid's Orbit

The results of the DART mission impact were released in a press conference this morning and the mission met it's objectives easily.  Hat Tip to Space.com for the coverage.  

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into a small asteroid called Dimorphos on Sept. 26. The mission was meant to test a potential planetary defense technique in case a large space rock ever threatens to collide with Earth, although NASA knows of no such threats in the foreseeable future. DART's goal was to shorten Dimorphos' orbit around a larger asteroid by at least 73 seconds, although scientists hoped the effect would be more like 10 minutes.

But the first calculations are in, and DART blew those milestones away, shortening Dimorphos' nearly 12-hour orbit by a whopping 32 minutes, NASA officials announced during a news conference on Monday (Oct. 11).

As Lori Glaze, head of NASA's planetary science division, said during the news conference; "let's all just kind of take a moment to soak this in.  For the first time ever, humanity has changed the orbit of a planetary body, of a planetary object. First time ever."  Dimorphos' orbital period dropped from 11 hours 55 minutes down to 11 hours 23 minutes.

While intercepting the orbit of the orbiting pair of asteroids isn't particularly new science or technology, there's a lot of assumptions that go into deciding what's going to happen when nobody had actually seen the two bodies until the probes arrived.  The things that can be measured from Earth are things like the brightness and the orbital period.  The makeup of the two, whether they're smaller, denser rocks or larger and less dense is inferred based on some assumptions, and those characteristics are going to greatly affect the asteroid's behavior when it gets hit.  The impact came from a probe weighing close to 800 pounds slamming into Dimorphos at 14,760 mph.  

As DART beamed photos back to Earth in the final few minutes, scientists got their first good look at Dimorphos, since from Earth, the moonlet and the larger Didymos appear as a single dot in a field of stars. Those images showed first an egg-like agglomeration of rocks, then finally a field of boulders, gravel and dust.

That alone was enough for Tom Statler, program scientist for DART, to be confident the mission had moved Dimorphos more than its goal.

"When I saw Dimorphos come into view and when I saw there was not a single crater on it and there were a lot of what appeared to be loose rocks — and this was a totally non-scientific, by-eye measurement — I looked at it and I said, 'This is not going to be 73 seconds.' And it wasn't,'' he said during the news conference.

Which leads us to the asteroid's tail mentioned last Thursday.  The tail is probably from Didymos being not a single large rock but an agglomeration of smaller rocks.  Those smaller rocks were apparently hit hard enough to escape the gravitational attraction of the system.  Nancy Chabot, coordination lead for DART at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said during the news conference that the orbital change, which represents a 4% difference from Dimorphos' previous orbit, may have been enhanced by the amount of debris in that tail. 

Last frame from DART before impacting Dimorphos.  (Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL) 

Well done to all involved. 

 

SpaceX Grabs Great Angle Photo of "Space Jellyfish"

Last week's final Falcon 9 launch, carrying Intelsat satellites Galaxy 33 and 34, was delayed from being the "third launch in 31 hours" by a "tiny helium leak."  Apparently delayed both Thursday and Friday because it didn't launch until Saturday evening, about five minutes after local sunset on Cape Canaveral.  To be fair on Friday, SpaceX Tweeted they were delaying another 24 hours for more troubleshooting, which might mean they hadn't found the leak at all by that time.  This was the 14th flight for this booster, and the first time a paying customer like Intelsat said they'd hire a booster that experienced.

We lucked out.  

Thanks to a coincidental alignment of orbital mechanics, Falcon 9’s third launch last week lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) at 7:05 pm EDT on Saturday, October 5th – five minutes after sunset. The rocket headed east, deeper into twilight, but gained altitude and quickly climbed back into direct sunlight as it ascended toward space. Against the dimming sky, the plumes of exhaust produced by Falcon 9’s booster and upper stage lit up like a neon sign, producing a view that – while rare – has become more and more common alongside SpaceX’s growing launch cadence.

We were treated to a view we've never had before.  The (say it slowly with reverb) Space... Jellyfish...  as seen from recovery ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas (ASOG). 

Four and a half minutes later, just after the booster landed, the cloud was still bright enough to be seen.

Both are screen captures from SpaceX's online video. 

Our next launch from the Cape will be Wednesday night, October 12th at 11:25 PM EDT with a window that extends through 1:24 AM on Thursday morning.  That's 0325-0524 UTC on the 13th.  The payload is a television broadcasting satellite for Eutelsat called Hotbird 13F.  No other Falcon 9 launches have a definite date.  There's an interesting rumor that a long delayed (by the payload) Falcon Heavy mission to launch USSF 44 for Space Force, will launch before the end of October from Pad 39A. Interesting in the sense that there seem to be corroborating reports agreeing with that. 

 

One Out of Two Isn't That Good

But thankfully it wasn't worse.  

As a quick followup to the post on repairing my antenna, I ran into a problem trying to complete the work today.  The bracket went up fine and appears to be secure.  I ran into a problem with the tower itself. 

I was too busy to grab a photo of the damage, but I found a six year old picture from when I installed my new counterpoise pipe that supports the weight of (and torque from) the tower as it gets cranked over.  This will help explain the problem.  

The tower, like most towers, is a triangular design; it has three main vertical members and those are connected by a matrix of smaller tubes.  The three vertical elements are the interface to the concrete pad.  The base is aligned with a factory installed hinge on the north end of the pad so the north side of the tower aligns with east/west.  On the south end, there's a single leg and it has hardware built on that attach it to fastener in the concrete pad. 

The vertical members are approximately 1-1/2" OD; the smaller tubes are approximately 1" OD.  Highlighted in red is the anchor to a bolt in the concrete pad.  The damage here is that as the tower blew in the winds with the house bracket broken, that south leg with the right angle aluminum piece bolted to it bent.  That round tube is now kind of oval in cross section, and points a little to the left.  As a result, the tower doesn't "want" to stand vertically on the mount.  It leans left in front of the house bracket.

So now what?  I'm not really sure.  All of this repair work has been a stretch for my skill set, and this is a bigger stretch.  I have some steel stock that I can put into that leg to try to restore more roundness and straighten it out, but I've never tried to do something like that.  I don't have an anvil or anything that can support the metal while I bang on it, so I'm still trying to figure out alternatives.  I could put something under that leg that keeps it from being bolted down but lines the tower up with the bracket better.  Extending that bolt in the slab, so that I could secure that point with the leg standing on something, doesn't seem feasible though. 

Post-Ian Antenna Repairs Are Done

On Thursday, September 29th, in the immediate aftermath of Ian, I posted about the damage done to my HF antenna and the Aluminum tower they’re mounted to.  This is a 20 foot tall Aluminum tower from Aluma, the big name in that market, mounted as a tilt-over tower to allow me to remove the antennas before a big storm.  One of the 6 dipoles in the Log Periodic Dipole Array (LPDA but usually just called a Log Periodic or LP) snapped off close to the boom tubes they were mounted to, rendering the antenna severely handicapped.  Instead of being usable on all amateur bands from 20 to 10m, (20, 17, 15, 12, 10), it potentially matched only on 20, 12 and 10.  

The issue, then was to repair the snapped off elements.  I talked about this more in my second post about things after the storm; a post that generated lots of conversations. 

As I say in that post, I had started out in the direction of putting a splicing tube over the two snapped-off ends on each side and fastening them through the splicing tube with self-tapping sheet metal screws.  Until a comment by Malatrope suggested a solid aluminum bar inside the two ends.  Since the Inside Diameter of the tubes was ½” and I had two pieces of ½” bar stock long enough to make the needed bars, and no real machining would be involved, I opted to go that way.  

I cut two pieces 6” long and after fussing with my selection of fasteners on hand, joined each end into the element with a 1” long 6-32 screw with a flat washer under the screw head and a lock washer under the nut. Before doing that I spent a long time scrubbing both the boom end and the broken off end of the elements.  I used shotgun cleaning brushes, both a wire brush and a cotton mop brush, until no more dust blew out of the tubes.

The fix looked like this.  I find it amusing that I can look at this photo and know it’s the right side of the dipole, which is the east side when the antenna is pointed north.

To demonstrate the fix, I have before and after antenna analyzer plots.  These plots are from my older antenna analyzer, the AIM4170, (see Ham Radio Series post 4 for more on antenna analyzers).  The reason I used this one and not my newer NanoVNA is that I have historical plots I can compare directly to with the AIM.    

The curves to mentally highlight are the red ones, the Voltage Standing Wave Ratio – the VSWR or simply SWR that tell you if your radio or tuner will match to the antenna.  For my purposes, anything above 3:1 is too high. First the before plot:

and the after plot

While the after plot has note at the bottom saying this was taken with the tower cranked over and the T6 pointed at the ground, they both were taken under those conditions.  Note the big hump in the before plot went as high as an 8:1 SWR.  The worst in the after plot is still over 3:1 in the 10m band.  Since the antenna was pointed into the ground, with the shortest element (probably most effected on 10m) mere inches above ground for both plots, this is only going to approximate the SWR with the tower vertical and the antenna interacting far less with ground. I feel comfortable saying the repair is valid.  

As I remarked several times in the comments to the second post about this set of problems, I see the antenna and tower issues as a short term and a long term problem.  Repairing the antenna and the house bracket attachment are short term problems while replacing the house bracket attachment with something better is a long term problem.  I have a tendency to start all thoughts about antenna projects as something to do “when it cools off” and I’d be happy if the house bracket fix lasted until January or February.  For that fix, I’ll be replacing the 3/8 by 2” long lag bolts with ½ by 3-1/2” long versions.  I don’t really know they will work but I also don’t really know they won’t work well enough to last until I come up with a better long-term fix. 

The house bracket has been modified and another coat of paint applied (because reasons).  I intend to do that short term fix tomorrow.

Small Space News Story Roundup

Last weekend, when I did a similar roundup of small stories, I mentioned that Firefly had joined the club of launch providers that have attained orbit.  This week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica mentions something I haven't run into anywhere else.  

A successful failure? ... The rocket was intended to place the small satellites on board into a circular orbit at an altitude of 300 km. However, independent observations later placed them considerably lower, at approximately 200 km. Due to this underperformance of the vehicle—it is not clear what the precise problem was—the tracking firm Seradata said it was now classifying the mission as a "launch failure," with a provisional capability loss of 90 percent due to the likely life loss for the seven satellites aboard. My less harsh judgment is that reaching orbit on a second flight is a success. Ars has reached out to Firefly for more information.

Ordinarily, if author Eric Berger has a reference he'll link to it.  I did a web search for the company he mentions, Seradata, and found an article where they provide more data. 

Subsequent to the launch, doubts grew about whether the launch truly was a “success” as the satellites, rather than being left in 300 km circular orbit as planned, were instead left in 270 x 210 km orbits inclined at 137 degrees.  The low perigee will mean that the satellites will re-enter much earlier than planned.

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Since this launch brings back thoughts of "The One-Ton-Class Orbital Rocket Race," Rocket Report also talks about another one of the companies in that race: ABL Space Systems.  ABL has updated information on the first attempt at achieving orbit with their RS1 rocket.  Launch is now targeted for no earlier than mid-October, as its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration remains pending.  The launch will not just be a test of their vehicle for their research and data gathering.  Instead, it will carry a commercial payload consisting of two OmniTeq satellites. The mission will seek to demonstrate the successful use of OmniTeq’s Equalizer CubeSat deployer and operation of its Varisat HF payload.

Years of work to reach this point ... After launching from Kodiak spaceport in Alaska, the RS1 rocket will deploy the two satellites near Hawaii and complete its mission over the southern region of the African continent. This week the company also released a four-minute video with behind-the-scenes footage of all the work that has gone into the RS1 vehicle over the last five years. It looks like a lot of hard work by some dedicated people. Certainly, we wish them well.

That video is worth the four minutes to watch.  Not the usual gung ho music and imagery companies put up.  To me, mid-October is from around the 10th to the 20th - so starting in a few days.

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On September 27th, SpinLaunch ran their 10th test Fling - um, test flight.  Remember, as we talked about in the last few weeks, their flings are harder on the payloads than a typical rocket launch.  The quote I can't forget is the one that went, “It’s a very gentle 10,000 gs.”   The purpose of this test was to test payloads that actual customers supplied for this test.  As their press release states,  the test “demonstrated that SpinLaunch partners’ standard satellite components are inherently compatible with the company’s launch environment and provided critical flight data, as all payloads were flown and recovered successfully.” 

The customers were research groups at NASA, AirbusSpace, Outpost Space and Cornell University Engineering.  

As a general rule for these test flights, Spinlaunch doesn't provide much details about the altitude the flight made it to or the test duration, but this was the same suborbital centrifuge they've used on previous launches.  They show their vehicle in their two minute YouTube video of the test and it looks like nothing so much as a shell; not clam shell or conch shell, but artillery or something on the big side, except it has fins that appear fixed and there appears to be no spiraling.  When they fling it out of the centrifuge, it doesn't even look like it has good attitude control.  It wobbles.   

The SpinLaunch test vehicle.  It's hard to get a good scale from this video, but it appears to be on the order of 6' long - about the height of the men digging it out of the ground.  Screen capture from their video (obviously).

DART Mission Follow Up - The Asteroid Has a Tail

While lots of folks have covered the impact of NASA's Dual Asteroid Redirection Test probe with Dimorphos - the "moon" of asteroid Didymos - something showed up in the last couple of days that I haven't seen a tenth of that press about.  

The impact generated a comet-like tail of debris from Dimorphos that is huge.  The 525 foot wide Didymos has generated a tail that has been estimated to be 6,200 miles (10,000 kilometers) long by using the angular spread of the tail (from an instrument on the telescope) and the distance of the orbiting pair of asteroids from Earth.  This photo of the tail was taken two days after the impact and published at that link on October 3. 

The tail is sweeping to the upper right of this photo.  Photo credit to the 4.1 meter aperture Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope, at the National Science Foundation's (NSF’s) NOIRLab's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Photo by astronomers Teddy Kareta (Lowell Observatory) and Matthew Knight (US Naval Academy).

The photograph is the start of lots of followup measurements to come - both with the SOAR and other instruments elsewhere. 

These observations will allow scientists to gain knowledge about the nature of the surface of Dimorphos, how much material was ejected by the collision, how fast it was ejected, and the distribution of particle sizes in the expanding dust cloud — for example, whether the impact caused the moonlet to throw off big chunks of material or mostly fine dust. Analyzing this information will help scientists protect Earth and its inhabitants by better understanding the amount and nature of the ejecta resulting from an impact, and how that might modify an asteroid’s orbit.

SOAR will continue to observe the aftermath of the DART impact, collecting data that will help researchers assess how successful this attempt to modify the orbit of an asteroid has been. SOAR is a key member of the Astronomical Event Observatory Network (AEON) of telescopes, which is dedicated to nimbly following up on reports of new astronomical phenomena.  Other instruments around the world will be observing as well. 

 

The Silver vs. Dollar Meme

Have you seen this one going around?  I don't recall where I got it.  

It's approximately right, but where it's wrong is embedded right there in the text; it's just hard to see directly. Note that in the left panel, it says a dollar was four 5.7 gram quarters or 22.8 grams of silver. In the last column it compares what 22.8 grams of silver bought in 1964 to what 31.1 grams buys today which seems to imply the dollar was that 31.1 grams of silver.  It's not that it's a nonsensical comparison, it's just that the right column is 36% more silver than the 22.8 grams of silver in the left column, so it's like comparing a 1964 dollar to $1.36.  Note that the increased amount of stuff that 36% more silver buys isn't necessarily 36% more of every item, but none of the handful of things they track actually cost more in silver today than in 1964, so their real prices have gone down.

Some years ago, I weighed four pre-1964 quarters on a reloading powder scale and determined they weighed 25 grams.  90% of that was 22.5 grams -  it could be the scale was wrong and it could be the coins were worn a bit from being in circulation.  After all 3/10 of a gram isn't much, unless you're buying gemstones where it's 1-1/2 carats.  (There's a side trip here into Troy ounces - as silver is weighed in - versus common or avoirdupois ounces and I'm going to studiously avoid this.)  This went into a spreadsheet where I can tell you what today's value for $1 face value of silver works out to be.  With a spot price at the moment of $20.68 per ounce, four of those 90% silver quarters are worth $14.96.  Which, of course, means a 90% silver dime is worth $1.50 ($1.496). 

The point though is that the dollar has lost its value not that things are more expensive.  The dollar buys less because it's worth less - and well on the way to worthless.  If you bought things by weight in silver, most prices have gone down. 

For the life of this blog, I've been saying that the creation of more money, "monetary stimulation" is going to lead to economic collapse.  I've talked about returning to a gold standard many times and I've stressed that it doesn't have to be gold, or silver or the giant stones the people on Yap Island used, but money can't be based on fiat - literally "it's worth something because I say so."  Where "I" is the Federal Reserve.  There are times I think the entire Federal Government is owned and controlled by the Federal Reserve Banks and not the other way around.  

There's an old saying that value of paper money always - always - returns to its intrinsic value, the value of the paper it's printed on.  Pretty much zero.  Toilet paper?  The toilet paper is more valuable, but the fiat bucks will work.  The trap that the Fed finds itself in now is that since they've created trillions of dollars, every additional dollar they create is worth less than the one before it (called the marginal utility function).  That means they need to create even more trillions to really have an effect.  They can raise interest rates to try to crash the economy, but those are words nobody wants to hear.  Eventually - I can't tell you when - it has to collapse and the dollar return to the value of paper it's printed on.  Or the value of the memory cell in a DRAM module where it exists.  It's not actually zero, but it's in the same neighborhood. 

The US Private Launch Business Isn't Very Big

That isn't really what the source article for this piece is about.  The article, H/T to Ars Technica and Eric Berger, says, "SpaceX has been bidding against itself for NASA’s science missions for a while."  The story talks about NASA having just closed bids for the launch of an upcoming Earth science mission to measure changes in sea level, called Sentinel-6B.  Bids are treated as if they were classified and not shared with the media, which you'd most likely want if it was your business bidding.  

Then Berger says a couple of surprising things.  To begin with, it's a pretty safe bet that Sentinel-6B will ride the same rocket to orbit that its sibling rode, a Falcon 9.  

This is because, at present, there are no other bidders for NASA's medium and large science missions beyond SpaceX and its fleet of Falcon rockets.

The secrecy of the bidding process means NASA won't tell you this, but it doesn't mean the information isn't available for people looking for it.  Especially in the age of Twitter and using it to promote your business.

However, it seems likely that at least the last three awards under NASA's Launch Services II contract have all seen SpaceX bidding against itself. United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno confirmed this after NASA's announcement in September 2021 that the GOES-U satellite would launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket. Bruno said his company had "withdrawn" its bid after all of its Atlas V rockets were sold out.

If someone is following Tory Bruno for news from ULA, they saw immediately that they had withdrawn their bid to launch GOES-U despite NASA not revealing that SpaceX was the only bidder.

Since the middle of the 20-teens, NASA has been pursuing the Commercial Launch Services businesses.  When some program in NASA or NOAA wants to find a launch vehicle, they contact NASA's Launch Services Program (LSP), the office charged with providing "safe, reliable, cost-effective and on-schedule" launch services.  That need for a launch provider uses a list of the approved launch vehicles that they maintain.  It turns out it's a fairly small list. 

This graphic is taken from a brochure that the LSP provides.  The problem with this so-called fleet is that very little of it is real.  New Glenn and Vulcan have never flown and LSP rules state they must have one successful flight to be included.  Atlas V has sold out its launch manifest and is not available for new launches.  The problem extends to the left: the Antares rocket is unavailable for science missions because it relies on Russian engines and will soon be retired.  Of the other two, Northrop Grumman's Pegasus rocket has flown just one science mission in the last five years for NASA, a mission lifting such a small payload (281 kg) that Firefly could carry it if they were approved, and Northrop's Minotaur-C rocket has failed on its last two NASA launches, in 2009 and 2011.  With their last missions that long ago, they almost certainly will never be selected again.

The Launch Services Program does have an alternative contracting method—which, delightfully, appears to be named after Darth Vader. The Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated Rideshare, or VADR, contract has allowed NASA to procure launches from companies with smaller rockets, including Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit, Firefly Aerospace, and Astra. These contracts cost far less, usually about $10 million, and are for CubeSats or slightly larger spacecraft willing to accept higher launch risks.

This means that for the foreseeable future, SpaceX is the only game in town.  Coming NASA science missions will be flying Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, like the Europa Clipper and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are scheduled to now. 

NASA also has some big science missions that will need rockets soon, including a lander for its Mars Sample Return mission (launching in 2028), the Dragonfly mission to Titan (2027), and the NEO Surveyor to look for killer asteroids (2026). The agency has not said whether it will wait to award these missions until such time as competition is available.

Competition from SpaceX has been good for NASA. During the last decade, as SpaceX developed its Falcon 9 rocket and became eligible to compete in NASA's Launch Services II contract, there has been a downward trend in launch costs for NASA's science missions. Officials said there is no evidence that is changing, despite the lack of competition.

That last paragraph says it all.  Despite the single source for launches, there's no evidence that the agency is paying more for launches.

An Odds & Ends Night

A couple of things that have nothing to do with each other.  First something that just seemed funny - strange to me.  

Yes, it's real, and no I don't have one.  I don't end up caulking things often enough to justify it.  Mark 1 finger works well enough, and I've never gotten splinters. 

The hurricane cleanup was largely in a back corner of our property where my next door and back yard neighbor's trees had dumped on the workshop's roof.  The hazardous one is the back yard neighbors because they have an enormous tree that dropped a branch on the roof that was hard to get rid of, not just because it was 5' long and heavy but also because it was still attached to the rest of that tree.  I had to chainsaw a couple of chunks off it while standing on a ladder before I could drag it off the roof, then chainsaw that log into smaller pieces to carry to the curb.  The roof is cleared off, though, and there are no indications of roof damage.  It could have been much worse.

Next door neighbor has different trees, but the one that always causes hassle is her bougainvillea.  Pretty flowers but thorns big enough to kill a rhinoceros.  Mrs. Graybeard and I came in with matching scratches on our right arms from brushing against a branch.  You have to pick up branches very gingerly to drag them to the curb.  The surprise there is that I had four broken off thorns in my shoes after we finished and they didn't go through the soles of my running shoes and jab into my feet.

Cutting back the branches in that area took all day Friday.  Saturday I sat down to fix the antenna elements and ran into a supply issue - as in I don't have any metal I can machine into the parts I need to fix it.  I need to describe the situation and how I intend to fix it.

The antenna had one of its dipoles snapped off - the before picture is in Thursday's post.  The metal tubing that snapped was 5/8" outside diameter and the remaining broken-off parts sticking out of the antenna's boom are about 6" long.  Here's the after picture with the broken-off parts highlighted.  This was almost as soon as I cranked over the tower and it stopped raining. I've since sanded those broken tubes to shiny metal and sawed off their jagged ends.

Think of a broken pipe plumbing problem.  A standard fix for a copper pipe is to clean up the ends and then silver solder a sleeve over both ends (quick example).  Since every joint in the antenna's elements is two pipes slipped into each other and attached with a self-tapping screw, I thought I'd machine a sleeve made of aluminum around 6" long to 5/8" ID.  As for the OD, 3/4" seemed natural but only the ID matters.  I figured each of those ends on the antenna boom and the ends of rest of the broken off elements would get about 3" of sleeve and I'll use two screws on each side of the break. 

It turns out that 5/8" ID aluminum tubing isn't particularly easy to find. Another possibility would be to start with a 3/4" aluminum round bar, drill it on axis and then bore it to 5/8" ID on my lathe.  That's throwing out almost all of the bar, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.  Unfortunately, I don't have pieces of aluminum that could be turned down to 3/4" and 4 to 6" long.  A 12" long bar is on order and will be here tomorrow.  It's possible I'll get the elements repaired in the next day or two. 

As for mounting the tower and the house bracket, I will go to 1/2" x 3" long lag bolts for a short term fix just to get the tower up and out of the way.  The "real" long term fix (which hasn't been imagined yet) is going to be in a month or two; "when it cools off."

Remember the TROPICS Mission?

When we last talked about the TROPICS mission, its future didn't look particularly good. The problem was that TROPICS was to have been a constellation of six radar satellites and two of the six were lost in June when Astra's rocket failed to achieve orbit.  NASA predictably tried to assure everyone the mission could be done with 2/3 of the capability on orbit but that sounded optimistic.  The remaining four satellites were all to be launched by Astra and the company had achieved orbit twice out of nine tries.  That's just 22%.  

This past Thursday, Astra announced in a rather roundabout way that they will not launch those satellites, leaving the rest of the industry to wonder how those four small satellites will get to orbit.  By roundabout, I mean that Astra said, 

Astra and NASA have agreed to modify the terms of our existing launch services agreement for NASA’s TROPICS mission to allow for the future launch of comparable scientific payloads on version 4.0 of Astra’s rocket. We are delighted to maintain our strong partnership and to have NASA as a launch customer on the next version of Astra’s rocket. [Italics added: SiG]

"Future launch of comparable scientific payloads" doesn't describe what those payloads might be, nor precisely what the phrase means.  They're delighted to maintain their relationship with NASA, but the agency could simply say that any given satellite that might be asked about isn't comparable.  That could be defined as "practically identical."  

Just about two months after the loss of the mission carrying the first two TROPICS satellites, Astra announced they were pivoting away from their business model up to that point and going into development of that Rocket 4.0.  Until that point, Astra's approach was to assume customers would be willing to sacrifice a bit of reliability to save on launch costs.  As I said at the time, potential customers probably envision something like dropping from 99% reliability to 90%, not 22% like this.  The question, of course, is whether Astra can pull this development off.  Not just the funding (which is easier to get information on) but the talent pool. We know they say they've tripled the size of their workforce; we don't know if the people hired can accomplish what Astra needs.

It's long been said that some sort of shakeout in the small satellite launch business seems to be inevitable.  There's a lot of competition worldwide; the size of the rising European launch industry surprised me in July, and that's just Europe.  On top of that, there's not much money to be made carrying the small payloads that colleges and small companies can afford.  

The Astra vehicle that failed in the previous TROPICS mission was Rocket 3.3, pictured here.

Small Space News Roundup

A few small stories - as we do from time to time. 

The Orbital Club Grows  

Back in August we did a couple of pieces on "The One-Ton-Class Orbital Rocket Race."  In that piece we talked about a few companies who seemed to be nearing the point where they could try to launch for orbit in early September.  ABL Space Systems was the leader at that date, having filed preliminary papers to launch from Alaska's Pacific Spaceport Complex. The dates that appeared in documents from the Spaceport indicated potential launch dates of August 29 to 31, followed by September 6 - 10.  

I see nothing saying that ABL made a launch attempt in that window.  

We also talked about two others: Firefly Aerospace and Relativity Space.  Firefly joined the small, select group that can launch to orbit last night at Midnight PDT from Vandenberg Space Force Base.  Everyday Astronaut was chosen to cover the launch live, and Scott Manley did a  followup video later.  Scott Manleys' video is under 9 minutes long, Everyday Astronaut's video is over 3-1/2 hours.  The live action coverage of the launch starts at about 1:53:00 into the longer video, and in the comments, Tim says "Replay of liftoff cameras here- 3:16:49 / 13:17:48 ."  Rest assured that should be 3:17:48 - the video isn't over 13 hours long.

Congratulations are in order to Firefly and everyone there involved in making it to orbit. To invoke the saying that, "Space is hard; Orbit is harder."

Three Launches in Three Days  

With the Space Center cleaning up and recovering from Tropical Storm Ian (as it was when it hit there) we're looking at a busy few days of launches that were postponed by the storm.

• The United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 Mission carrying satellites SES 20 and SES 21 for the company SES of Luxembourg has been rescheduled to Tuesday, October 4. The mission will be from Space Launch Complex-41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with liftoff currently set for 5:36 pm EST (21:36 UTC). 
• NASA/SpaceX's Crew-5 mission has been bumped another day to Wednesday, October 5th, from Launch Complex 39A.  Liftoff is set for 12:00 noon (1600 UTC).  The crew: NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina flew into the Kennedy Space Center today.  Touchdown was approximately 12:15 PM.  
• Over at SLC-40, SpaceX's other launch pad, a Falcon 9 rocket will deliver Intelsat's Galaxy 33 and 34 telecommunications satellites into a geostationary transfer orbit. The launch is set for 7:07 pm EST (23:07 UTC) on Thursday, October 6th.  With Local sunset on the order of five minutes before launch, it doesn't sound like chances are good for a Space Jellyfish, but I'll be watching.

An interesting side note for the Intelsat mission is that this Falcon 9 first-stage booster will be making its 14th launch, only the second Falcon 9 to reach that reuse milestone. This marks the first time a SpaceX rocket has flown a purely commercial payload on its 10th flight or later; until now, all of these "fleet leader" missions have been exclusively SpaceX business - Starlink. This strongly suggests that the commercial satellite market is becoming increasingly comfortable with SpaceX's refurbishment process for even well-used rockets.

Artemis Shooting for November

NASA announced on Friday that Artemis has decided to forego an attempt to launch in October and will instead aim for the launch window that opens in mid-November.  As I mentioned at some point about this mission, the preferred launches have always been in the dark green-coded days, which are longer missions than the light green-coded days.  There is only one dark green day in November, the last Sunday of the month.  

This can only mean one of two things: either the only date they'll prepare for is November 27th, or they'll settle for a shorter duration mission. 

It's worthwhile bearing in mind that the Artemis/SLS and Orion capsule have been stacked for 11 months, and it's prudent to start going through any limited-life items like those Flight Termination System batteries, and perhaps stored fuels for the Orion capsule's thrusters to ensure they're still usable. 

In the coming days, engineers and technicians will extend access platforms around the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft inside the Vehicle Assembly Building to conduct inspections, and start preparing for the next launch attempt, including retesting the flight termination system.

 

SpaceX Keeps Making Headlines

I tell ya, take a couple of days away from watching SpaceX news to clean up some stupid tree branches and suddenly they break a couple of big stories.  

Bigger Cool Story  

NASA and SpaceX have signed an Agreement to study the feasibility of a SpaceX and Polaris Program idea to boost the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit with the Dragon spacecraft, at no cost to the government. 

Did you catch that reference to SpaceX and the Polaris Program?  As in the Polaris Dawn mission by Jared Isaacman's company, which is preparing for the first privately conducted spacewalk mission?  Yup.  Isaacman was directly involved in the September 29th press conference.

NASA and SpaceX will spend the next six or so months discussing whether it’s possible to use Dragon to boost the telescope’s orbit back to a nominal 600 kilometers (~372 mi). Both parties say that the agreement will also investigate the possibility of Dragon servicing missions, which could be even more significant for Hubble. While a boost that large would likely keep it in orbit for decades to come, there’s no guarantee the telescope would remain functional to take full advantage of the extra time it would have.

During the fifth and final Space Shuttle servicing mission, NASA astronauts installed a docking adapter (Soft Capture Mechanism) on the Hubble Telescope. Although no concrete plans existed for any additional servicing missions, the forward-facing installation of that adapter has made this feasibility study possible.

The docking adapter on Hubble presents a natural handle for the Cargo Dragons to use to manipulate the giant satellite.  The Shuttles could grab the HST with its remote manipulator arm, but the Dragons don't have anything quite like that.  

The lurking, unnamed obvious alternative in this story is Starship.  Only Starship is big enough to potentially put the HST in a cargo hold and bring it back to Earth, or lift it to a higher orbit.  Polaris has three more SpaceX missions planned.  The first is the Polaris Dawn, EVA mission already mentioned.  The second mission hasn't been described yet. The third mission, however, aims to be the first crewed launch of Starship.  Interesting coincidence, isn't it?  

Polaris Dawn crew during an EVA training mission.  From top right, clockwise, Jared “Rook” Isaacman, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Sarah Gillis, Anna Menon. Note that Isaccman and Poteet are both executives at Shift4 as well as extremely qualified pilots; Gillis and Menon are both engineers with SpaceX on the manned spaceflight side, so probably not cool enough to have nicknames like Rook or Kidd.  (Inside joke for other engineer geeks).

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Slightly Smaller Cool Story 

SpaceX and NASA have confirmed that they are moving forward with plans to modify the company’s second Florida launch pad, SLC-40, to support Crew and Cargo Dragon missions.

This story has been in the background since June, after some concerns arose that if the (still experimental) Starship vehicle should have a serious mishap on the new launch pad being built within yards of pad 39A, it could conceivably eliminate the ability of SpaceX to launch crew rotation missions to the ISS, like Tuesday's coming Crew-5 mission.  The Starship pad is 1000 feet from pad 39A, and we all have to admit SpaceX does have a history of building prototypes that occasionally explode.  

Naturally, these are high stakes, and while nobody doubts that SpaceX could repair and rebuild pad 39A, NASA doesn't want to risk not being able to launch astronauts from the US again, potentially for months. 

Then there's Boeing's Starliner.  Starliner would launch from farther away (on an Atlas V for now), but isn't certified for service.  Their next test flight, the first crewed test flight (CTF), is currently penciled in as no sooner than February 2023. Assuming that goes perfectly, the first operational flight of a Starliner wouldn't be likely until very late '23 to early '24.  Assuming it would go perfectly seems to be a bit of reach; both of Starliner’s uncrewed test flights have uncovered significant issues that required months of additional work to rectify, although the second was clearly better than the first. 

It doesn’t matter if Starship probably won’t explode or if Starliner will probably be ready to take over. The risk is always there.  With no backup to for both Cargo and Crew Dragon, it's no wonder NASA wants an alternate launch site. 

Nothing is known about the nature of the modifications that LC-40 will require. But more likely than not, NASA will require SpaceX to develop something similar to Pad 39A’s facilities. That would involve building a new crew access tower, crew access arm, escape system (39A uses baskets and ziplines), and an on-site bunker for astronauts.

Since the DOD and the Three Letter Agencies are looking more to SpaceX these days, there might be more in the way of the ability to hide payloads.  

Minimal Damage from Ian - Mostly PITA

Let me start out with the good stuff.  The weather predictions I talked about were very accurate.  I don't think we had even a gust to cat 1 hurricane level (75 mph) and "gusts don't count;" that definition of hurricane is one solid minute of straight line winds at that level.  We never lost power for a second.  While it was a windy, rainy 24 hours or so, there was little damage.  In fact, the only damage pretty much came from my believing the forecasts a bit too much and preparing too little, but more of that later. 

A widely known but rarely stated reality about tropical storms and hurricanes is what a pain in the ass they are.  Prep time (even if you don't have to get within a mile of store parking lot, like us), figuring out what level to prep to (cat 3 or 4 gets more attention than lower categories) and the inevitable PITA cleanup after the storm.  With losing our palm trees after our August of '19 lightning strike, and having our oak removed this June, you'd think I wouldn't have as much cleanup.  Not that I can tell.  I have half of my backyard neighbor's trees in my yard and and almost as much junk from my next door neighbor's trees.  And I only have those two neighbors, not three like many people do. 

The long story.  Since much earlier in the week, it was apparent we would not get Ian - at least, not as a hurricane.  Every prediction had it as a hurricane somewhere over on the west coast, initially (and finally!) coming ashore around Port Charlotte, then various places farther north on the west coast and at one point, coming ashore south of Tallahassee (the state capital) - followed by retracing those steps toward the south and back onshore the west coast of the state.  We were always looking at tropical storm winds.  

You might have gathered that I don't pay much attention to tropical storms.  (WARNING: Gross simplifications ahead)  Aside from a longer duration, they're really not terribly different from a thunderstorm.  A typical thunderstorm has winds from 30 to 50 mph, and a severe thunderstorm has winds over 55 mph.  A summer thunderstorm actually lasts about 20 minutes but as the thunderhead collapses, it can push air up and build another storm so that they seem longer but even then rarely last an hour.  A tropical storm has winds of 45 to 74 mph and can last hours upon hours.  

Since we have something like 80 to 100 hours of thunderstorm time every year (my guess) I have the opinion that my house and everything around here can handle tropical storm level threats.  I don't even notice when we get one.  So when the forecasts said a tropical storm was coming, I treated it like a thunderstorm.  I essentially said, "so what?" and did very little.  

Everything was going along just peachy until the NWS suddenly upped our tropical storm warning to a hurricane warning around 11 AM on Wednesday.  Even though our local forecasts were saying winds would reach 40 sustained to maybe 60 on gusts and the probability plots showed the chances of hurricane winds were about 35%, we decided to put up the shutters.  Unlike any other storm we've prepared for, we only did the north and east windows because that's the direction that other storms hit us the hardest from.  

Since much of that work was being done in the rain with more forecast, I thought the ham antennas would be fine and didn't plan to do my usual hurricane prep, which is to crank over the tower, pull the antennas and crank the tower back up.  When I walked around the house to the east side, I saw something that made my blood run cold. 

Back in the late '80s/early '90s, when I put up the tower, I did a DIY house bracket.  An electronics tech I was working with at the time did the welding for me of a couple pieces of angle iron.  In '16, when I did the replacement of the steel pole with aluminum, I drew up this view of the house bracket minus the house. 

The white parts are the angle iron, and the face on the right is up against the house.  It's bolted into the house's roof trusses with two 5/16" x 2" long lag bolts and the little red circle on the right is a rough idea of where one is.  The other is off the left end of this picture.

What terrified me was that I saw that bracket was pulled out of the roof trusses and the tower was just standing there, rocking slightly in the wind.  There were only two things I could think to do; either crank it over and leave it over through the worst of the storm (top end leaning on a ladder) or try to find bigger lag bolts to reattach it to the house.  I thought I had a couple of long - like maybe 6" - lag bolts but they've teleported themselves into another part of the multiverse. I had some slight larger lag bolts - 3/8 instead of 5/16 and much to my relief, they worked.   I thought everything was peachy.  

Today, everything got worse.  At about 8AM as I was doing a morning inspection, I found 1/2 of one element of my HF antenna, a log periodic beam, had broken off.  The break looked ragged, not clean, so it fractured.  I was alarmed but couldn't do anything other than note it.  Around lunch time, I went outside to look things over when there was a break in the rain, and everything was worse.  

The other half of that T6 element had broken off.  When I went around the side of the house I could see the house bracket had ripped out the new lag bolts and the tower was just swaying in the wind like yesterday.  Winds were in the vicinity of 40 gusting 65 at the airport, less than 3 miles from us.

So I cranked the tower over and it's now resting on the wooden ladder with the end of the T6 antenna about a foot above ground.  I didn't get a picture, but this is one originally from last winter when I replaced the top antenna - except I put red marks around the two halves of the element that broke off. The position of the tower and the ladder is almost exactly the same.  The oak tree in the background is long gone.

The antenna can probably be fixed by trimming back the very end of the broken off halves and reattaching them to the pieces of the element still in place.  That could change the element length slightly, but it shouldn't be significant.  The house bracket concerns me simply because I don't know why the lag bolts pulled out in the first place.  My gut feeling is to increase the size of the lag bolts again; either to 7/16 or 1/2" and make them longer so they go into (hopefully) virgin wood in the roof trusses.  

All that said, we're clearly in much better shape than the folks over where they got the Cat 4 Ian.  There's a world of difference between the storm they got and what hit us.  We never lost power, we didn't lose any roof shingles, and the only damage at all is this antenna and tower.  The only unknown I have is that my backyard neighbor's tree grew over the roof of the shop and I was concerned the branches rubbing on the shingles would damage the roof.  It turns out that those branches broke off and are lying between the fence and the back of that part of the house.  I can't see the shingles to make sure they're good and can't get a ladder up in that area until I cut down the branches. 

Crew-5 Moved to October 4

As expected, NASA and SpaceX have decided to delay the next manned flight to the International Space Station, Crew-5, at least a day until Tuesday October 4th No Earlier Than 12:23pm EDT, with backup date of Wednesday the 5th. 

The latest forecasts are showing Ian crossing over the north end of the Cape (or around there) as a tropical storm around 3PM tomorrow, and then curving harder to the north, making a second landfall in South Carolina late in the day on Friday.  While the KSC is under Hurricane Warnings, as we are farther south, the chances of hurricane force winds appear to be in the 50/50 range, perhaps a little lower.  The usual source I check for the compass heading of the flights doesn't have an update for Crew-5 so I can't tell if the recovery barge for the booster is in the North/South Carolina waters or not.

The mission will ferry NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japanese (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Russian astronaut Anna Kikina to the International Space Station, where they will spend about five months maintaining the orbital outpost and conducting science. Upon arriving at the ISS, they will take over from astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, Samantha Cristoforetti, and Jessica Watkins, who will board their own Crew Dragon and depart the station five days later.

Attached to a new, expendable ‘trunk,’ the Crew Dragon spacecraft arrived at SpaceX’s Pad 39A processing hangar on September 23rd and was fully integrated with Falcon 9 (an expendable second stage and reusable booster) by September 26th. Falcon 9 booster B1077 will debut on the mission alongside Dragon capsule C210 (Endurance). Dragon C210 splashed down with four astronauts after its first mission, Crew-3, on May 6th, 2022, and will head to orbit a second time 155 days later. Dragon’s turnaround record is 137 days.

Our storm warnings here in southern Brevard county were upped from Tropical Storm warnings to Hurricane Warnings this morning at 11.  That prompted me to take it more seriously than a Tropical Storm, which I've long called a poopy day with a press agent.  We put up the shutters on the sides of the house most likely to get direct winds but didn't do the "full Monty" prep.  My antennas are still up.  Our local NWS office detailed forecast calls for winds peaking at around 40mph with gusts to around 60. 

Ian Landfall Comparison

In my previous post, I mentioned that Ian's predicted landfall from last Friday matches the current prediction better than anything since then - around an area called Port Charlotte, south of Tampa Bay.  I took this morning's plot and the one I posted then to compare the two.  Because they always center the plots differently, if you're not familiar with Florida you might have to study this.

The winds in the left panel are in the upper limits of category four, so my prediction about it not being likely able to hit 140 was clearly wrong.  I'll follow that wrong prediction with another.  The winds will come down from that peak.

Artemis Back in VAB - and Ian Messes with Everything

The Artemis/SLS stack arrived safely at the Vehicle Assembly Building this morning after starting its return trip last night around 11PM EDT.  The four mile trip began at 11:21 PM and Artemis was declared secured at 9:15 AM.  The trip was entirely due to Hurricane Ian, but it nevertheless will be used to install a fresh set of batteries for the Flight Termination System, alleviating concerns about how long they've been installed for at least a few weeks.  

NASA’s crawler transporter moves into position near pad 39B on Saturday to prepare for the rollback of the Artemis 1 moon rocket to the Vehicle Assembly Building. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

As can be seen from the launch window calendar, the current launch window ends next Tuesday, October 4th and the next window doesn't begin until the 17th.  All things considered, I don't think they could roll back to the pad and be ready by then.  Their preference for launch dates so far has been for the "dark green" dates on that calendar and the first one of those in the next window is the 27th, which is surrounded by red "don't launch" dates on both sides and then three dark green days before another couple of weeks delay until mid-November.  There is only one "preferred" (dark green) day in November: Sunday the 27th.  

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If it's not obvious, Ian is messing with everything.  There's a launch currently set for September 30th; an Atlas 5 Mission, satellites called SES 20 and SES 21 for the company SES of Luxembourg, and October 3rd is still scheduled for the Crew-5 mission to the ISS.  I have to consider those as being at risk as this storm plays out. 

Where I live, we're currently under tropical storm warnings.  The highest wind forecast I can document from the National Weather Service is for sustained winds of 31 mph and gusts to 50 as of Tuesday evening, between the 8 and 11 PM updates.  Those winds will be overnight Wednesday and into Thursday.  As has happened frequently in the years I've been watching these things, the point of landfall has moved back closer to the one predicted last Friday than any of the predicted points since then - around an area called Port Charlotte, south of Tampa Bay.  The storm hasn't hit the wind speeds that made the headlines; saying 140 mph or more.  Given it has less than 18 hours before landfall and interaction with land will cut that time down, it would take an explosive drop in central pressure to get to 140.  I don't know enough to know if the environment can support that.  With the wind speeds I can see forecasts for, I haven't done our full up hurricane preps that I would do if it was coming from the east.