Not Perfect, But Success!!

This afternoon's static fire of booster B7 was deemed a success despite a couple of engine issues that might have mattered in an orbital launch (depending on the payload).  Elon Musk tweeted:  

There are good videos both at Musk's account - a view from a drone overhead - and SpaceX's official account, which has a long video from a different perspective.  I'll bet there are more, and probably more still as time goes by.

Note that if you go to the longer video, the action occurs well after the 7 minute mark in a 13:12 minute video.  Like this:

When the video starts, the first seven minutes are with their countdown clock at T-40 seconds and holding, until just before this screen capture image.  

What does it mean?

For starters, it appears the things that people were worrying over were fine.  Things like the Orbital Launch Mount surviving and the concrete under the engines not going flying.  Was this the most powerful rocket in human history?  Possibly, but we don't know.  There were 31 engines firing today, which set a new record, breaking the existing record of 30 from the old Soviet N1 from the late '60s early '70s.  The N1 never successfully made orbit, but it set the record for the most thrust produced by a single rocket, generating up to 4500 tons (9.9 million lbs) of thrust at liftoff. 

Could Starship have exceeded that 9.9 M lbs of thrust?  Absolutely.  Divide that by 31 engines to find each engine only had to produce a little over 319,300 lbs and the Raptor 2 is capable of producing over 500,000 lbs.  If the engines were set to 64% of throttle, they would have produced more thrust than the N1.  Seems pretty likely they did this, for at least some of the five or six seconds they burned.  We just haven't been given those numbers.  The engines can be set lower than 64%, though, as low as 40%, so we just don't know.  

Except for one unofficial tweet by Former SpaceX executive Tom Mueller, the so-called Father of  the Raptor, who congratulated the team for breaking the world record for the most thrust from a single booster.

So now what?  

During her talk at the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Conference mentioned yesterday, Gwynne Shotwell said the big picture is to analyze all of the results from today and proceed with the task of getting into orbit.  She said that it was reasonable to expect a launch by the end of March.  Since Shotwell doesn't seem as prone to giving overly optimistic lead times as Musk, that's probably very reasonable.  Not Elon Standard Time.  Not a NET (No Earlier Than) date and maybe not NLT (No Later Than), just a reasonable estimate.   

If You Have Time Thursday

Park a browser tab or window on your favorite Boca Chica monitoring cameras, NASA Spaceflight or Lab Padre - or whatever you choose.  We have word that SpaceX is aiming to do the 33 engine static firing we've been waiting for for a couple of years.  Road closure from 8AM to 8PM CST; I wouldn't bet hard on them doing it very early in the day but they've done it before.  In the 12 hours, they have a lot of time to work and overcome issues that might come up.

It started with this email a couple of hours ago:

A few comments into their poll this appeared:

I'm sure the comment is referring to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX COO, since she's in charge at Boca Chica, and the commenter just didn't know how her name.  On the Lab Padre live cams, they run a longer note explaining she announced that at the CST conference - presumably the Commercial Space Transportation Conference going on this week in Washington, DC. 

Boca Chica Mary, who photographs for NASA Spaceflight, posted a tweet showing the Overpressure Notice to the village residents there outside the Shipyard gates.  Another user tweeted the Marine Safety Information Bulletin (MSIB) for the testing.

It looks like all the indicators are as positive as we get. 

Relativity Space Stacks First Terran 1 On Launch Pad

Relativity Space announced on the 6th that their Terran 1 3D printed rocket had gone vertical at SLC-16 on Cape Canaveral SFS, and was undergoing final testing to ensure it's ready for its first orbital mission attempt.  While no launch date has been officially announced, they're apparently very close to being ready and the last time we heard much from them they said, “The next time Terran 1 is out on the pad, it will be stacked and vertical. Upcoming milestones to track: rollout, static fire, and launch.”  It seems possible they could launch before the end of February. 

Twitter screen capture. 

The ~110 foot tall Terran-1 is a said to be 85% 3D printed by mass, and they're looking to increase that to closer to 95% in following missions; in fact, it has been said that the company itself is probably best thought of as an additive manufacturing company rather than just a rocket manufacturer.  As of now, they describe Terran-1 as, "the largest 3D printed object to exist and to attempt orbital flight."  

I've mentioned Relativity in the past in the context of being a contender in the race for the first one-metric ton payload rocket to orbit.  Another race they're a contender in is to be the first liquid methane/liquid oxygen rocket to achieve orbit.  Methane-oxygen (or methalox) engines are widely considered to be The Next Big Thing in rocketry, but while a couple of the big names have methalox engines (Starship, Vulcan and New Glenn), nobody has flown one into orbit yet. 

It's important to note that Relativity Space is using Terran-1 to develop a larger, more powerful, more reusable version called Terran-R.  Oh, by the way: the first mission of the Terran-R is currently written in as totally private mission to Mars.  In the next launch window, which will be in the last quarter of 2024.  As in a couple of months less than two years from now.

In a comment to this photo from the previous Twitter post, a user noted that it was quite different to see the printer layer lines that those of us who use home-level 3D printers are used to seeing on our prints on something as high-tech as an orbital rocket.  Now that I've noticed them, I see them all the time.  Almost top to bottom.

 

As Close to a Promise as We Can Get

Space.com reports on a couple of tweets from Elon Musk over the weekend which strongly imply that the goal for the first orbital flight of Starship is in March.  That's not a surprise, but it's as close to a promise as we're able to get.  

"If remaining tests go well, we will attempt a Starship launch next month," Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (opens in new tab) (Feb. 4). "Success is far from certain, but excitement is guaranteed," he added in another tweet (opens in new tab), this one on Sunday (Feb. 5).

The design economics for Starship are so revolutionary that it simply changes everything.  It makes interplanetary travel much more feasible, for both cargo and people.  It literally could mark the beginning of mankind as an interplanetary species.  

None of this is news to people who have been following the tests and refinements going on at Boca Chica as long as we've been able to.  I'm pretty confident all regular readers here know the record of Starship suborbital hops - the most recent was May of '21, almost two years ago - and you'll know that both Booster 7 and Ship 24 have had a number of static firings.  The largest number of engines fired on Booster 7 was 14 engines fired back on November 14th, briefly making it the most powerful rocket on Earth.  Ship 24, meanwhile had static fired all six of its engines two months before. 

We all know that before the first attempt at orbit, a major milestone is to static fire all 33 boosters on B7, we just don't know when we'll get to see that.  Road closures are scheduled for the rest of this week, from 8AM to 8PM everyday, but that was true for today as well.

B7 & S24 on Monday, Jan. 23rd "full flight-like WDR."  SpaceX photo.

There are rumors that the launch site deluge hardware we talked about in the last couple of weeks is being worked into place before the full static fire, but I know of no hard data to back that.

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From the Just for Fun department.  Today is the fifth anniversary of the first Falcon Heavy launch  The launch that lifted Elon's personal Tesla into a Trans-Mars trajectory, where it now resides.  

Update on ULA's Vulcan First Flight

With United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan Centaur on the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for two weeks,  it's pretty easy to wonder when the first mission will take place.  The mission, called Certification-1, has been known for quite some time and the major pieces have been moving toward launch for years.  It's intended to deliver two demonstration satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper internet constellation into low Earth orbit.  It will also place the Astrobotic Peregrine commercial lunar lander in a highly elliptical orbit more than 225,000 miles (360,000 km) above Earth to intercept the Moon, and carry a Celestis Memorial Spaceflight Payload beyond the Earth-Moon system to orbit the Sun forever.  Ars Technica did an exploration into flight readiness this past Friday, and is rather more pessimistic than my "No Earlier Than mid-March" idea I've voiced a couple of times. 

One of the issues is the Peregrine commercial lunar lander.  

Last week, Astrobotic announced that its Peregrine lander had successfully completed its entire flight acceptance campaign. "Peregrine is now ready to be shipped to Cape Canaveral, Florida when Astrobotic’s rocket provider, United Launch Alliance, gives the green light to receive it," the company stated. This was important news—except it didn't quite tell the whole story.

This release made it sound like Astrobotic simply needed to ship the lander from Pittsburgh to the launch site, where it would be installed on the rocket. However, the lander's engines, which have been undergoing extensive testing in White Sands, New Mexico, are still not ready for flight and are not yet attached to the lander. The company plans to complete the integration of the engines onto the lander at the launch site in Florida.

Since those engines are pretty much "do or die" to a lander's mission, suffice it to say Peregrine isn't going anywhere until those engines are certified and installed on the lander.  

To add to that, the day before the Ars Technica article NASA changed Peregrine's landing site to one considered more scientifically interesting.  

NASA announced Feb. 2 the Astrobotic’s Peregrine mission, flying payloads for the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program and other customers, will now attempt a landing near a region called the Gruithuisen Domes on the northeast edge of Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, on the western part of the moon’s near side.

Let's assume that the change of destination only has either a minor impact or no impact on a probe this far along in design.  Other than any delay that change might introduce to choice of launch times, or changes to the payload processing, it should have no effect on the Vulcan Centaur itself.  That doesn't remove any other problems/obstacles to getting that mission accomplished. 

There are other timing constraints as well. United Launch Alliance has a very important upcoming launch for NASA and Boeing. About a week ago, NASA confirmed that the first crewed flight on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will launch on an Atlas V rocket in April. Because United Launch Alliance's Atlas V and Vulcan rockets will share a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Space Launch Complex-41, this critical human spaceflight will probably take place before Vulcan.

Vulcan's core stage is lifted into a processing facility at Cape Canaveral, Fla., in January.  Image credit United Launch Alliance.

With all of this put together, assuming the Boeing Starliner does get priority over Certification-1, it seems safe to assume that the Vulcan mission will be no earlier than mid to late April.  Eric Berger at Ars Technica says NET May.  The readiness of Peregrine, Starfire, the Vulcan itself, and everything else can push that farther than May.

ChatGPT Fastest to 100 Million Users Ever - Too Bad it Sucks So Bad

Word got around this week that OpenAI's Chatbot software ChatGPT is the fastest growing program in Internet history, reaching 100 million users in two months of existence.  In that respect, it has been an online sensation, potentially influencing millions of users.

In a way, it's too bad the software is such a piece of crap when it comes to figuring out things.  That ends up making all of us old codgers who are warning that there's too much fuss over AI come across as wise old codgers.  All the talk about AI coming and that it's going to make everything better and usher in a new era of progress is just over-the-top marketing hype.

The article comes from a research piece done by National Public Radio, NPR, of all places and referred to in Ars Technica's weekly Rocket Report.  In short, AI might be able to transform some industries, just don't ask it anything technical, where being right is everything.  NPR put ChatGPT to the test with the help of actual, real, human rocket scientists to judge the AI application. It failed spectacularly.  

[Tiera] Fletcher is a professional rocket scientist and co-founder of Rocket With The Fletchers, an outreach organization. She agreed to review text and images about rocketry generated by the latest AI technology, to see whether the computer programs could provide people with the basic concepts behind what makes rockets fly.

The results were far from stellar. In virtually every case, ChatGPT – the recently released chatbot from the company OpenAI – failed to accurately reproduce even the most basic equations of rocketry. Its written descriptions of some equations also contained errors. And it wasn't the only AI program to flunk the assignment. Others that generate images could turn out designs for rocket engines that looked impressive, but would fail catastrophically if anyone actually attempted to build them.

Here we come to one of the key, fundamental problems with the ways these AI systems are programmed.  They're given tons of input to read, but have no ability to decide if things are higher priority or can't be changed at will.  They can't determine facts.  

"There are some people that have a fantasy that we will solve the truth problem of these systems by just giving them more data," says Gary Marcus, an AI scientist and author of the book Rebooting AI.

But, Marcus says, "They're missing something more fundamental."

They're missing knowledge of which things they read are rock hard physical law and which are more like suggestions, or that can be made secondary.  A simple example was that in addition to flubbing up "The Rocket Equation," the name of which implies it comes close to a complete description of how a rocket works, it flubbed up simple things like thrust to weight ratio.   

The strange results reveal how the programming behind the new AI is a radical departure from the sorts of programs that have been used to aid rocketry for decades, according to Sasha Luccioni, a research scientist for the AI company Hugging Face. "The actual way that the computer works is very, very different," she says.

A traditional computer used to design or fly rockets comes loaded with all the requisite equations. Programmers explicitly tell it how to respond to different situations, and carefully test the computer programs to make sure they behave exactly as expected.

By contrast, these new systems develop rules of their own. They study a database filled with millions, or perhaps billions, of pages of text or images and pull out patterns. Then they turn those patterns into rules, and use the rules to produce new writing or images they think the viewer wants to see.

ChatGPT gets good reviews for things that it has done in areas where there are no right or wrong answers; things more like poems or songs, rather than areas where the wrong answers might kill a bunch of people and destroy a mission costing many millions of dollars.  The "AI" is mimicking the pile of physics textbooks that it's been exposed to," she says. It can't tell if the mashed-up text it's produced is factually correct. And that means anything it generates can contain an error.  Until the need to produce right answers is more important than just producing an answer. it can't be trusted.

AI researcher Gary Marcus worries that the public may be radically overestimating these new programs. "We're very easily pulled in by things that look a little bit human, into thinking that they're actually human," he says. But these systems, he adds, "are just autocomplete on steroids."

"We need an entirely different architecture that reasons over facts," he says. "That doesn't have to be the whole thing, but that has to be in there."

If you do a search for "ChatBot" you generally come up with way too anthropomorphic images, like this one from Gludy.com. It's really absurd but people seem to prefer the anthropomorphic art rather than a picture of a text interface on a computer - or simply headphones and a microphone.  A real AI chatbot doesn't need a body that's designed to look like anything in particular, such as human or dog.

Odds and Ends, Short Points and Pointless

SpaceX, or at least the fan base, is celebrating their 200th successful Falcon 9 launch.  Thursday morning at 2:58AM, their Falcon 9 rocket was successfully launched for the 200th time. 

Falcon 9 has only suffered two mission-related failures in flight: one partial failure in 2012 and a catastrophic failure in 2015. Falcon 9’s 2015 failure entirely destroyed the rocket and its cargo-carrying Dragon spacecraft before they reached orbit. Its 2012 failure only doomed a secondary Orbcomm satellite payload, while the primary mission – a Cargo Dragon supply delivery for NASA – was technically successful. 

Thursday morning's launch Starlink Group 5-3, SpaceX Photo.

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Over the last week or so, those of you who follow Tam (View From the Porch) will have noticed she referred to having Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and was watching the change in sunset times. She finally found a day to celebrate, saying, “Sunrise before eight AM and sunset after six PM is a huge mood lifter for me.”  When the latest sunrises of the year slip to seconds then a full minute earlier, one can be confident in the knowledge that the days will continue to get longer and sunnier until July.  

While I know that SAD is real and I sympathize with those who have it, I've noticed that, if anything, I have the opposite reaction.  When I realize the days are getting longer and there's no going back to shorter and cooler days, I get saddened while people with SAD feel better.  It's like how I have the opposite of Attention Deficit Disorder: Attention Surplus Syndrome or ASS.  

I especially get that "downer" reaction when I realize there are no cold temperatures in the forecast and we're running out of chances for cold weather.  Like this 10-day forecast just taken from Weather Underground.

The lowest temperature between today and practically mid-February is 51F a week from Sunday morning.  That's not even cold for here.  That's just barely below average.  That means it's practically time to start spring planting, weeding and all that PITA stuff.

NASA's (and Our) Worst Week in Spaceflight - An Annual Repost

It's an oddity of US Space travel that every mission that ended in loss of crew and vehicle occurred during one calendar week, although those accidents span 36 years. We've just concluded the end of that week, January 27th through February 1st; 1967 through 2003.  

January 27, 1967 was the hellish demise of Apollo 1 and her crew, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, during a pad test, not a flight.  In that article, Ars Technica interviews key men associated with the mission and provides, for the first time I've seen, the audio of the test (which I'm unable to listen to now - either gone or a problem with their link).  In the intervening years, I've heard speculation that we never would have made it to the moon without something to shake out a bit of the NASA management idiocy, but that may just be people logically justifying their opinions.  Like this quote from Chris Kraft, one of the giants of NASA in the '60s. 

There was plenty of blame to go around—for North American [built the Apollo capsule - SiG], for flight control in Houston, for technicians at Cape Canaveral, for Washington DC and its political pressure on the schedule and its increasingly bureaucratic approach to spaceflight. The reality is that the spacecraft was not flyable. It had too many faults. Had the Apollo 1 fire not occurred, it’s likely that additional problems would have delayed the launch.

“Unless the fire had happened, I think it’s very doubtful that we would have ever landed on the Moon,” Kraft said. “And I know damned well we wouldn’t have gotten there during the 1960s. There were just too many things wrong. Too many management problems, too many people problems, and too many hardware problems across the whole program.” 

The next big disaster was January 28, - the next day on the calendar, but in 1986, 19 years later.  Space Shuttle Challenger was lost a mere 73 seconds into mission 51-L as a flaw in the starboard solid rocket booster allowed a secondary flame to burn through supports and cause the external tank to explode.  It was the kind of cold day that we haven't had here in some years.  It has been reported that it was between 20 and 26 around the area on the morning of the launch and ice had been reported on the launch tower as well as the external tank.  O-rings that were used to seal the segments of the stackable solid rocket boosters were too cold to seal.  Launch wasn't until nearly noon and it had warmed somewhat, but the shuttle had never been launched at temperatures below 40 before that mission.  Richard Feynman famously demonstrated that cold was likely the cause during the televised Rogers Commission meetings, dropping a section of O ring compressed by a C-clamp into his iced water to demonstrate that it had lost its resilience at that temperature.  The vehicle would have been colder than that iced water.  

As important and memorable as that moment was, engineers such as Roger Boisjoly of Morton Thiokol, the makers of the boosters, fought managers for at least the full day before the launch, with managers eventually overruling the engineers.  Feynman had been told about the cold temperature issues with the O-rings by several people, and local rumors were that he would go to some of the bars just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center and talk with workers about what they saw.  The simple example with the O-ring and glass of iced water was vivid and brought the issue home to millions. 

There's plenty of evidence that the crew of Challenger survived the explosion.  The crew cabin was specifically designed to be used as an escape pod, but after most of the design work, NASA decided to drop the other requirements to save weight.  The recovered cabin had clear evidence of activity: oxygen bottles being turned on, switches that require a few steps to activate being flipped.  It's doubtful they survived the impact with the ocean and some believe they passed out due to hypoxia before that.  We'll honestly never know.

Finally, at the end of this worst week, Shuttle Columbia, the oldest surviving shuttle flying as mission STS-107, broke up on re-entry 17 years later on February 1, 2003 scattering wreckage over the central southern tier of the country with most debris along the Texas/Louisiana line.  As details emerged about the flight, it turns out that Columbia and everyone on board had been sentenced to death at launch - they just didn't know it.  A chunk of foam had broken off the external tank during liftoff and hit the left wing's carbon composite leading edge, punching a hole in it.  There was no way a shuttle could reenter without exposing that wing to conditions that would destroy it.  They were either going to die on reentry or sit up there and run out of food, water and air.  During reentry, hot plasma worked its way into that hole, through the structure of the wing, burning through piece after piece, sensor after sensor, until the wing tore off the shuttle and tore the vehicle apart.  Local lore on this one is that the original foam recipe was changed due to environmental regulations, causing them to switch to a foam that didn't adhere to the tank or stand up to abuse as well. 

In 2014, Ars Technica did a deep dive article on possible ways that Columbia's crew could have been saved.  They republished that yesterday on the anniversary of the disaster.  It's interesting speculation, very detailed, compiled by a man who claims to have been a junior system administrator for Boeing in Houston, working in Mission Control that day.  

Like many of you, I remember them all.  I was a kid midway through 7th grade in Miami when Apollo 1 burned.  By the time of Challenger, I was a 32 year old working on commercial satellite TV receivers here near the KSC and watched Challenger live via the satellite TV, instead of going outside to watch it as I always did.  Mrs. Graybeard had just begun working on the unmanned side on the Cape, next door to the facility that refurbished the Shuttles SRBs between flights, and was outside watching the launch.  Columbia happened when it was feeling routine again.  Mom had fallen and was in the hospital; we were preparing to go down to South Florida to visit and I was watching the TV waiting to hear the double sonic booms shake the house as they always did. They never came.

The failure reports and investigations of all three of these disasters center on the same things: the problems with NASA's way of doing things.  They tended to rely on "well, it worked last time" when dealing with dangerous situations, or leaned too much toward, "schedule is king" all as a way of gambling that someone else would be the one blamed for delaying a mission.  Spaceflight is inherently very risky, so some risk taking is inevitable, but NASA had taken stupid risks too often.  People playing Russian Roulette can say, "well, it worked last time," but having worked doesn't change the odds of losing.

 

 

Focusing on the Non-Reusable Starship

I have one of those rare cases where I disagree with a professional's take on a space story enough that I think it simply shouldn't have been published as it is.  

The story is by Eric Ralph who heads the SpaceX writing for Teslarati, and the story is, “Elon Musk teases expendable version of SpaceX’s reusable Starship rocket.”  

The fact is, as Eric Ralph himself cites over and over, there will always be expendable versions of Starship so Musk wasn't teasing something unheard of.  Further, there has always been recognition of that fact because there will always be missions for which return to launch site (or even launch planet) isn't planned.  SpaceX’s multibillion dollar Human Landing System contract to use Starship to return NASA astronauts to the Moon features a tanker variant - a ship that will store propellant for refueling on-orbit that can't and won't return to Earth.  There are proposed missions to the outer planets where it would be waste of precious cargo capacity to include features for reuse on Earth.  

Three expendable variants of Starship anticipated for NASA's HLS. SpaceX image.

Even excluding missions like that, there will be several missions flown before reuse is even possible. That sort of operational reuse knowledge of Starship and the Super Heavy booster is going to be hard-won.  While we have every reason to expect that it will take fewer test flights to successfully recover Starships than it did to recover Falcon 9s, I think it wouldn't be unexpected at all to lose some test vehicles before recovery becomes routine, as it has for the workhorse F9.  As he notes:

Simply ensuring that Starship can reach orbit at all is a major challenge. Successfully recovering Starship and Super Heavy after the fact may be an even bigger challenge and cannot be fully demonstrated until the rocket can consistently reach orbit. SpaceX won’t be able to reuse Starship until it can consistently recover ships and boosters from orbital launches. And there’s no guarantee that early prototypes will be reusable even if they’re recovered.

Perhaps to hit that point with a bigger hammer: until full reusability is demonstrated, every Starship will be expendable no matter what anyone might want to call it.  

It therefore might not seem as controversial to point out that there have already been non-reusable Starships produced in Texas for various tests: 

Prototype Starships already built (note the date of 10-5-22).  Image from The Ring Watchers on Twitter.

Eric Ralph concludes with some mind-boggling numbers that reflect on just how much Starship changes everything, and here I'll just give him the floor. 

In early 2023, SpaceX updated the Starship section of its website, revealing that an expendable version of the rocket will be able to launch up to 250 metric tons (~550,000 lbs) to low Earth orbit in a single launch. Saturn V, the next most capable expendable rocket, could launch up to 118 tons (~260,000 lbs) to LEO and cost $1-2 billion per launch. SpaceX publicly advertising the expendable performance of Starship unsurprisingly confirms that the company is considering all of the capabilities its new launch system will offer.

And Starship’s expendable capabilities are significant. Constructed piece by piece over dozens of launches, the International Space Station weighs about 420 tons (~925,000 lbs). Two expendable Starships could launch more usable mass to LEO – truly revolutionary if SpaceX can make Starship launches frequent and routine.

Two expendable Starships could deliver more mass to orbit than the dozens of Shuttle flights it took to deliver all the pieces of the ISS to orbit.

Bob and Doug Given NASA's Congressional Space Medal of Honor

If you've been following Space 2.0, private space, or any other of the names used to describe the current new generation of the space exploration, you'll remember the names Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley as the two NASA astronauts who worked on the Commercial Crew Program at NASA as well as on location at SpaceX to develop the Crew Dragon capsule.  In May of '20 the two astronauts took the first ride to orbit in the Crew Dragon capsule and the first manned mission to fly from US Soil since 2011.  

This afternoon, NASA awarded the duo the Congressional Space Medal of Honor for their bravery in a ceremony run by US Vice President and Chair of the National Space Council, Kamala Harris. It's a rare award last bestowed in 2006 by former President George W. Bush to Robert L. Crippen, the first Space Shuttle pilot, in 2006. 

Since Congress authorized the Congressional Space Medal of Honor in 1969, it has been awarded just 28 times. Just 11 went to living astronauts, while the other 17 were awarded posthumously: to the three NASA astronauts killed in the 1967 Apollo 1 accident and the 14 astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle’s 1986 Challenger disaster and 2003 Columbia disaster.

While the award itself says that it's issued for "bravery" the award appears to be at the recommendation of the NASA administrator, indicating the Administrator Bill Nelson recommended Bob and Doug for the honor.  Further, while the award itself is called the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, Congress isn't involved in the award at all.  They delegated that to the President in 1969.  

Prior to the Dragon test flight they will be honored for, Behnken and Hurley had storied careers in the US military and at NASA. Bob Behnken earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from Caltech in 1997 and eventually became a lead flight test engineer in the US Air Force’s F-22 Raptor program. He was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in 2000 and flew two Space Shuttle missions in 2008 and 2010. In 2012, Behnken was chosen to lead NASA’s prestigious Astronaut Office, and did so for three years before he began training for the Commercial Crew Program.

Doug Hurley earned a Bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1988 and received a commission in the US Marine Corps upon graduating. He made three deployments as an F/A-18 pilot and later became a Navy Test Pilot in 1997. Hurley was “the first Marine pilot to fly the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet” and has experience flying more than 25 types of aircraft. He was also selected to become an astronaut in 2000 and flew on two Space Shuttle flights, including the Shuttle’s 135th and final mission in 2011.

 (L-R) Bob Behnken, Kamala Harris, and Doug Hurley late this afternoon.  NASA/Joel Kowsky photo.

After Losing a Launch Vehicle 4 Months Ago, Blue Origin Still Mum

While I barely mentioned this incident when it happened, last September marked an in-flight failure of one of Blue Origin's New Shepard rockets, the backbone of their space tourism business.  As a result, we're approaching five months since the mishap with no explanation from Blue of what happened, how they've addressed it, and when they plan to fly again.  The New Shepard as well the that sector of their business is in limbo with no end in sight. 

The rocket's single main engine failed about one minute into the flight, at an altitude of around 9 km, as it was throttling back up after passing through the period of maximum dynamic pressure. At that point a large fire erupted in the BE-3 engine, and the New Shepard capsule's solid rocket motor-powered escape system fired as intended, pulling the capsule away from the exploding rocket. The capsule experienced high G-forces during this return but appeared to make a safe landing.

A bit surprisingly to me, Blue Origin doesn't seem to have any spare hardware, booster or capsule.  According to the source article (2nd link), at the time of the loss of this mission Blue had exactly two boosters, called numbers three and four.  Only B4 had unspecified upgrades that made it "human-rated" for spaceflight.  The capsule they referred to as RSS H.G. Wells was flying science missions on Booster 3, and the newer RSS First Step was flying crewed missions on Booster 4.  Booster 3 is the one that was destroyed in the September mishap.   

Given the fact that it is approaching five months from the incident it's possible they have spares by now.

The New Shepard and booster on mission NSS-22, about a month before the loss of the NSS-23 mission.  Blue Origin photo.

I have to admit to being a bit spoiled by how how open SpaceX is with their operations.  We get to watch launches and booster landings from every site they use, onshore or off, and on days like today, when a mission is postponed or stood down from, they tweet out a short explanation like this one:  "Now targeting tomorrow at 8:15 a.m. PT for launch of Starlink and D-Orbit’s ION SCV009 Eclectic Elena to allow additional time for pre-launch checkouts; weather is looking good for liftoff."  It appears Blue Origin doesn't have that openness in their DNA, or we wouldn't be sitting around months after the inflight problem trying to read tea leaves; or simply trying to find the tea leaves to read. 

Well, Whaddya Know

About five weeks ago, Florida Governor DeSantis  made it clear he wanted to pass Constitutional Carry in the state.  He even went so far as to call on incoming House Speaker Paul Renner, publicly making him responsible.   

He laughs and says, “well, we’ve had a majority this whole time. I’ll let Paul answer that because I’m ready. [looking over to incoming House Speaker Paul Renner] Are you going to do it?”

Paul Renner responded with a “yes.”

Let’s break down the Governor’s statement quickly. He didn’t just say he supports Constitutional Carry, he politically called out the Republican-controlled legislature for its collective failure to pass during prior sessions.

This morning brought an email from Florida Carry.  

 

In one little meeting, DeSantis demonstrated to the state that he knows that the population wants this, Stupid Party members campaign on delivering it, and once in office, the Stupid Party is the one that kills it.  He says it's time to cut the crap and do what they've promised.  He told the truth in the motto he uses frequently, "clear, concise, unambiguous" and called on the incoming speaker to be better than his predecessor.  

The Fast Part is Over Quickly

Everything associated with my surgery went about as well as could be hoped for and I was discharged from the hospital about 2PM this afternoon.  I lucked into getting two very good, very helpful nurses for my 24 hours in the hospital; the kind of people who really are helpful, considerate, smart, and appreciate it when you've prepared for the procedure and what comes after it.  Add that to the luck of being minimally affected by the anesthesia they chose and procedures they followed and I quickly got through the handful of measures of progress I needed to meet.  The whole thing left me feeling very blessed.  

In no way am I out of the woods as this is just the start of the long adaptation phase.  Some complications are more likely at 6 to 12 weeks after the surgery than this week, but it's a great start. 

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All that said, it seems like it was and is kind of slow in space news.  On Thursday morning as I was preparing for that surgery, SpaceX launched the Group 5-2 Starlink satellites from SLC-40 on the Cape Canaveral SFS, and they're set to launch Group 2-6 on Sunday, Jan. 29, from Vandenberg SLC-4E at 8:47 AM PST, 11:47 EST. The East/West ping pong then returns to Florida for the Starlink Group 5-3 mission on Wednesday, February 1 at 3:02 AM EST. Three launches in one week, if the pace can be held, gets them well past 100 launches.

SpaceX has gotten to the point where if you see a Falcon 9 booster that has flown five or six times, you go, "wow - that's new one" and the oldest end of the fleet is more interesting. If you think a little more you realize they're the only company on Earth doing this now, and you know that's the future.  

Now think of what's apparently going on with Starship.  On Wednesday, Jan.25th,  Ship 24 was destacked off booster 7 and transported back to the ship yard (or "rocket garden") the next day for some minor modifications.  It's widely believed that the static firings of the B7 will be done without S24 stacked for the simple argument of "if we blow up the booster, why ruin S24?"  Once the static firings up to the full 33 engines have been done, barring damage to the Orbital Launch Mount or the surrounding infrastructure, what prevents the first Starship orbital test launch?

As always, the question is "when?"  All I can say is Cameron County notes possible road closures next Tuesday and Wednesday, Jan.31 and Feb 1.

Starship can literally change everything.  Nobody in history has had the technical chops, the drive and, frankly, the balls to go after something as world-changing as Starship.  Part of that is the convergence of the technologies, "standing on the shoulders of giants," but if Starship development goes as it looks to be going, I expect there will be memorial statues of Musk on Mars and Earth in another 50 years.  

Booster 7 and Ship 24 as morning fog rolls in from the Gulf of Mexico.

And... the Days Off Begin

As mentioned on Sunday, Thursday is my surgery.  I have some prepping to do for an early morning trip up there.  I expect to spend Thursday night in the hospital and come home some time Friday.  It's hard to know exactly what to expect in terms of recovery.  Your support and prayers are deeply appreciated.

So a couple of things that struck me funny in the last month or so.

Starship Apparently Aces Full “Flight-like” WDR

Monday's full Wet Dress Rehearsal of the B7/S24 Starship stack was apparently fully successful.  It leaves me not quite sure why they did the overpressure notice, NOTAM and MIB, but perhaps mandatorily excessive safety worries.  SpaceX put up a tweet noting the success, including some flyover footage (about 20 seconds).

This is definitely an important step in their preparations to launch, but as of this evening, there are no road closures that might indicate a major test soon posted at the Cameron County website.  I interpret that to mean speculation is even less worthwhile than usual.  The only thing mentioned there is a "Temporary & Intermittent Road Delay of State Hwy 4; January 26, 2023 from 8:00 am to 10:00 am."  I've seen this when SpaceX might transport something from one end of the facility to the other.

The full stack is the tallest rocket in history, and when fully fueled it became the heaviest rocket ever built.  Starship is about 394 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter.  The Saturn V was about 30 feet shorter than Starship.

After hours of conditioning the Starbase, Texas orbital launch site’s giant tank farm, SpaceX opened the floodgates and loaded Ship 24 and Booster 7 with up to 4860 tons (~10.7M lbs) of cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant in about 90 minutes. Once fully loaded, the combined weight of the rocket and propellant likely exceeded 5000 tons (~11M lbs), making Starship the heaviest rocket in history. The next heaviest rockets ever built, Saturn V and N-1, weighed around 2800 tons (~6.2M lbs) fully loaded.

...

The company later confirmed that the test was a “full flight-like wet dress rehearsal,” as suspected, and noted that data gathered from it would “help verify a full launch countdown sequence, as well as the performance of Starship and the orbital pad for flight-like operations.” Parts of the test visible from unaffiliated webcasts like NASASpaceflight’s (10 minute highlight video) seemed to confirm as much. Shortly after Starship was fully loaded, for example, SpaceX activated the orbital launch mount’s fire extinguisher system, seemingly practicing the moments before the rocket would otherwise ignite its engines and take flight.

Note: the video linked in the source article (on Teslarati) was over eight hours long.  I replaced that link with the 10 minute highlight video.  

In the last year, SpaceX has slowed their pace of Starship development down from the heady days of 2020/21.  Between August of '20 and May of '21, SpaceX carried out five launches and attempted landings of prototype Starships, eventually succeeding on the fifth attempt (and not having the landed ship blow up minutes later) - and I think if the fifth attempt hadn't worked, they would have tried until they had a successful mission.  

On the fifth attempt, the Starship flew to around ~41,000 ft up, shut off its engines, flipped to horizontal for its controlled fall back to Earth, reignited its engines, flipped back to vertical, and landed in one piece.  Since then, for reasons I haven't seen discussed, they changed to a more cautious approach.  Whether that was due to nudging by the FAA, NASA or other Fed.gov pressure, or an internal realization along the lines of "Holy $%#*!!! This is over 16 million pounds of thrust!  It's the biggest rocket in history!  If this thing blows up in the worst possible way, we could lose lots of hardware and people," I have no way of knowing. 

Finally, just because it's pretty.

The title picture at Teslarati. I'm going to say SpaceX photo by one of the drones they fly around the base during tests.

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Oh, and for those keeping track, Rocket Lab's first launch from Wallops Island, Virginia this evening was successful, opening the possibility of more frequent launches from the USA. They mention expecting one launch per month from Wallops Island, in addition to their New Zealand home's launches.

Vulcan Arrives at Kennedy Space Center

About eight days ago, we ran a story that United Launch Alliance had shipped their first Vulcan Centaur to the Kennedy Space Center to prepare for its maiden launch.  The cargo ship carrying it all arrived at Port Canaveral on Saturday, Jan 21 and was unloaded Sunday.  The shipment, all intended for the first flight, includes the Vulcan first stage as well as the interstage adapter and Centaur V upper stage. These were carried by truck across the cape to ULA facilities on the Cape for inspections and the start of launch preparations.  

The first stage of the Vulcan rolls out of "Rocket Ship" in the background.  ULA photo.

The booster measures 109.2 feet (33.3 meters) in length and 17.7 feet (5.4 meters) in diameter. Made of internal orthogrid aluminum construction to create a structurally stable stage, it is equipped with two BE-4 main engines, each producing approximately 550,000 pounds (2.45 mega-Newtons) of thrust to lift Vulcan out of the atmosphere on the way to orbit.

Two BE-4 engines obviously only provide 1.1 million pounds of thrust, which isn't enough for its desired mission envelopes.  With its added solid rocket boosters, the number dependent on the mission profile, the liftoff thrust can reach 3.8 million pounds.  

The interstage adapter, at right, intended to go between the booster and the Centaur V upper stage leads the Centaur V toward the ULA complex.  On the left, a payload fairing is visible, while between the Centaur and fairing the first stage is visible.  Also ULA photo.

Centaur V, with its pressure-stabilized stainless-steel tanks, is 38.5 feet (11.7 meters) in length and 17.7 feet (5.4 meters) in diameter. The cryogenic stage features two RL10C-1-1A engines, each producing 23,825 pounds (106 kilo-Newtons) of thrust to deliver the inaugural flight payloads to three different orbits: low Earth orbit, a high-energy orbit at nearly lunar distance, and an Earth escape orbit into interplanetary space.

The vehicle is expected to be fully ready for the first launch, a mission called Certification-1, intended to deliver two demonstration satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper into low Earth orbit.  This is Amazon's approach to internet via space, like Starlink.  The mission will also place the Astrobotic Peregrine commercial lunar lander in a highly elliptical orbit more than 225,000 miles (360,000 km) above Earth to intercept the Moon, and carry a Celestis Memorial Spaceflight Payload beyond the Earth-Moon system to orbit the Sun forever.

As mentioned in the post last week, ULA doesn't guesstimate a No Earlier Than launch date, which is entirely reasonable given all the hurdles left to overcome.  Yes, Vulcan Centaur is a derivative of the Atlas V, but it's still a big collection of untested hardware.  NextSpaceflight continues to say NET February 25, and I continue to say Not Bloody Likely and stick with my reflexive call of mid-March at the earliest.  I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.  ULA has a pretty low launch cadence, but when they launch their vehicle performances have been solid.

Catchup On Some Things

This is going to be a sketchy week around here so let me clear a couple of things I've meant to report on and then get into The Sketchy.   

1. Monday, Jan 23, is looking like we could see the long awaited first static firing of the stacked Booster/Ship24 at SpaceX Boca Chica.  The likely road closure for the day has been accompanied by a warning about overpressure to Boca Chica Village and a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) filed by the FAA to avoid the area below 14,000 feet above the test area.  The NOTAM starts Jan. 23 at 0601 UTC (2:01 AM Local) and runs 24 hours.  Likewise a Marine Safety Information Bulletin (MSIB) has been issued (pdf warning) for the day, mostly affecting boats offshore Starbase. 
   
   It sounds real.  Things could always go wrong that cancel it or it could be a more prolonged Wet Dress Rehearsal that doesn't end in firing engines.  You never know. 
   
   
2. Tuesday, Jan 24, Rocket Lab is expecting to launch their first orbital launch from the Wallops Island, Virginia launch facility at 6:00 PM local (EST).  The mission, in keeping with their practice of coming up with clever/cutesy names for missions is Virginia is for Launch Lovers.

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The Sketchy

I mentioned back at the start of the month that I have surgery coming up for a hiatal hernia repair that will include a thing called a LINX device that will be implanted.  That's scheduled for this Thursday.  I anticipate being grounded and unable to do much for at least Thursday and Friday. It's possible that can extend longer, but I'm scheduled to only spend Thursday night in the hospital.  Of course, while the chances of Bad Things are as small as can reasonably be assessed, and depending on after-surgery pains, consider this very preliminary. 

The adventures have been building for a while, and tomorrow will have an increase with a pre-surgical evaluation and probably at least a blood draw.  Probably half the day with the doctor and others.

Which brings me to the next big adventure I'm working on.  Regular readers will know I posted a lot about problems I had after Tropical Storm Ian (TS here, hurricane on the SW coast).  The storm broke elements off one antenna that I had to repair, it damaged my tower and the house bracket that helped reinforce it.  Then, when I thought it was done, I found the other antenna on the tower also got broken.  I only got my station fully operational at the start of December.  

Knowing the surgery was coming and that I'd be restricted by that in my ability to work for the heart of the best time of year to work on towers and such hardware, I came up with a workaround: a short term and a long term fix.  The short term fix is up there now, but I need to improve that a bit and that should be done before the mandatory time off.  The long term fix is to change my whole method of cranking the tower over.  

The company I bought the tower from has a solution they offer called a mounting pole, or MP-2.  This is the drawing of it they post online.  

The MP-2 is rated to crank over fully loaded towers many times bigger than.  Mine is a light duty 20' tower; this is rated to crank over fully loaded, heavy duty, 75' towers.  I have surprisingly few pictures that show the pole I use but there are two big differences between this pole and mine.  First, their pole is 13 feet long, 7-1/2' feet above ground, of 4" schedule 40 galvanized steel pipe while mine is 10 feet long, 7 feet above ground of schedule 40 aluminum pipe.  Second, their pole is designed to be mounted without concrete and instead held by four plates extending the cross sectional area of the part in the ground, digging that 13" diameter hole and filling it with wet sand, while mine is mounted in poured concrete, 2 feet square by 3' deep. 

I think my pole will work. 

Unfortunately, converting my pole to take the place of theirs is going to be quite the exercise.  There are things in the drawings they give away that I didn't understand properly, and I only know that because I asked around for opinions of how people like the MP2, pictures of the way the tower attaches and as many details as guys cared to give.  Hams, being generally helpful, voluntarily sent me pictures of the way the MP-2 works.  Both my tower and my pipe will have to be modified.  This is the essence of what I'll have to duplicate. 

The job will entail first taking down my tower and taking off all the antennas for relatively long term storage (weeks at best).  After that, I'll need to add the plate on top of the pole, the aluminum channel (if the pipe is 4" OD, that looks to be well under half, so maybe 1-1/2" channel).  Clearly, my pole can't be removed from the concrete block to work on so someone will need to attach the plate and channel while up on a ladder.  The there needs to be another piece of channel added to the tower at the right height at both top and bottom, and all that hardware you can see.  Did I mention I can't weld?  

Once the tower and pole are modified the tower will need to be lifted into place and mounted to the mounting pole.  After cranking it up and down a few times for tests, I'll need to mount the antennas and crank it up for good.  Hopefully the story will have a happy ending then.

Ariane Subsidiary Says Reusability is Too Expensive

I've been saying for years that reusability changes everything but an article focused on a subsidiary of Ariane Group called MaiaSpace on European Spaceflight brings up the reality that all hard scientists know.  As Robert A Heinlein put it TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.  

MaiaSpace CEO Yohann Leroy described the challenges of implementing reusability in a small launch vehicle. Specifically, Leroy explained that while the company was looking at a two-thirds drop in performance when the launcher was recovered, the model would not reduce the cost of the launcher by a similar amount.

From the stories about the Falcon 9 we know that re-use is not possible on every mission and if they're pushing for every last pound they can carry to a particular orbit, they have to use the fuel that could have been used to land the booster.  For the first several missions where they were trying to recover the booster, the announcers always said the first priority of the mission was delivering the payload and recovering the booster was a bonus.  The last two Falcon Heavy missions used and discarded their core boosters, which are essentially the same as their Falcon 9 side boosters, while early development missions of the FH tried to recover the cores.  

It seems to me the essence of what Leroy is saying is that with a substantially smaller rocket, there's much less fuel margin to play with.  If you want to reuse the rocket, you need to make it bigger and devote that space to the fuel to recover it.  That, in turn, drives the cost up because TANSTAAFL.  

Despite the statement in the first quote above that they have 1/3 of the payload of the same vehicle if it's considered disposable, he goes on to say that the model would still be economically viable and even advantageous due to the flexibility that a launch vehicle which be used either as reused or expendable. Gee... just like the vehicle their rocket resembles. 

MaiaSpace Image

“By developing a reusable launcher we have two launchers for the price of one or in other words we have a launcher with two optimized operating points. The operating point of the launcher when we recover the first stage and the operating point of the launcher when we consume the first stage and that changes everything. With this double launcher, we can attack a segment of the market that is wider than if we had a single consumable launcher optimized for a single operating point. That changes everything because all other things being equal no one will be able to address a wider market, have a higher rate, and therefore lower costs more quickly because we will cover the experience curve more quickly and ultimately have a business plan much more attractive for investors.”

While MaiaSpace is a subsidiary of the ArianeGroup and says, “our objective is the objective of our parent company,” they apparently are in the process of preparing to issue or are already issuing stock for sale.  Much more detail on the business side at the European Spaceflight article.

Is SpaceX Shipping Starship Launch Pad Hardware from Florida to Texas?

In a somewhat surprising report on Teslarati, SpaceX specialist Eric Ralph reports that the company appears to be preparing to ship a huge collection of hardware – including parts of a possible launch deluge system – from Florida to Texas.  Considering that the operations at the KSC appear to be constructing a second Orbital Launch Integration Tower and preparing to expand their Starship capabilities, it's a bit surprising. 

Captured live by NASASpaceflight’s 24/7 Space Coast Live webcam, [that's the live feed whenever you go there - SiG] hardware began accumulating at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Turning Basin on January 12th. Within a few days, four midsize storage tanks, two or three large storage tanks, five high-pressure gas tanks, multiple sections of an apparent launch deluge system, and an unfinished Starship booster transport stand were all staged and ready for shipment. Save for implicit statements from reliable sources, there wasn’t an obvious guarantee that the hardware was all SpaceX’s or headed to the company’s Starbase, Texas factory and launch site.

But combined with the sheer volume of hardware and its privileged presence on NASA KSC property, the last part to arrive – the base of an unmistakable Starship (booster) transport stand – all but confirmed that the destination is Starbase. SpaceX has already shipped hardware from Florida to Starbase multiple times, including a trio of tanks sent in October 2022, which further increases the odds that everything visible is destined for Starbase.

Yesterday, Jan 19th, a barge arrived at Port Canaveral which was assumed to be preparing to load up and leave for Boca Chica.  

Screen capture of NASA Space Coast Live channel done by Gav Cornwell on Twitter.

I have to admit that I'm anxious for Starships to launch from the Kennedy Space Center for the 100% selfish reason that I want to watch them from my yard.  Especially if they achieve the kind of mission cadence that gets talked about.  Still, I'm more anxious to see them fly from anywhere and as soon as possible. If this can speed up operations at Boca Chica, I'm all for it.  

Musk famously said back in 2020 that they were trying to design a launch system that didn't require a water deluge and part of the efforts at the Orbital launch Mount have been to add some water deluge capabilities, but it's not clear to me that their system is as good as or worse than other systems.  Let's face it; as you'll know if you've watched the static fires of Starships,which are an upper stage with less than 20% of the thrust of 33 Raptor 2 engines on a booster, even that has shattered the concrete under the launch mount.  Eric Ralph goes into a little depth on this, pointing out that the system that has been installed in Florida is already far bigger than what has been done in Boca Chica.  

The design of Starship’s first Florida launch pad has already been upgraded to include a giant deluge ring embedded in the ground at the base of the mount. Unusual design aside, the structure is sized such that it’s almost certainly a high-flow deluge system capable of spraying thousands of gallons of water per second.

Twitter user @Alexphysics13 posted this picture of what he said is the water deluge system they believe is being shipped to Texas.  

If something that size, with pipe sections that look to be several feet in diameter, and that's just one part of a system, is going to be installed under the current Orbital Launch Mount, I don't think B7/S24 could fly for six months or more.   We already know their goal is to fly No Later Than March.

Could this all have more to do with Musk's references to buying additional land in the Boca Chica area, the area that was Massey's gun range, for another test facility than to modifying the existing OLM at Starbase? 

SpaceX Quietly Announces New Business

I only found out today via SpaceNews that SpaceX quietly launched a new venture some time last month.  

Now that SpaceX has established itself as a leading provider of U.S. national security launches, it is seeking a bigger share of the defense market with a new product line called Starshield. SpaceX quietly unveiled Starshield last month offering defense and intelligence agencies custom-built spacecraft, sensors, and secure communications services leveraging SpaceX’s investment in its Starlink network of broadband satellites.

I also somehow hadn't heard that last October, the Pentagon released a national defense strategy document that talked about the challenges of the current "world order" and especially the role of China.  The pentagon calls China a “pacing challenge” that threatens to surpass the United States in defense and space technologies. To win this race, DoD intends to tap commercial innovation.

“We have in the United States by far the most resilient commercial space enterprise anywhere in the world. The Chinese know that, and we’re going to lean into that,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said Dec. 8 at an Aspen Security Forum in Washington. “We’re going to make sure we’re working closely with the commercial sector and leveraging all that commercial space capability.”

Who better to tap than the most innovative company in the launch business, the company using that launch capability to build out its Starlink constellation of internet access satellites?  Which isn't to say that there won't be competitive selection processes involved or that there aren't innovative "smart fellers" in the other companies; it's just that SpaceX has a head start.  They're at the center of the what  prompted the DoD to start this project.  It appears to be based on one important example (you guessed it): Ukraine and the role that modern technologies have played, especially the 20,000 + Starlink terminals SpaceX donated to Ukraine.

Russia’s war in Ukraine cast a powerful spotlight on the space industry, notably on the value of imaging satellites and on SpaceX’s satellite broadband service Starlink. The system — with well over 3,000 satellites in orbit and thousands more to come — demonstrated resilience against jamming and showed the strength of this kind of proliferated architecture.

“This wasn’t available before,” John Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said Dec. 14 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ukraine is the first major conflict, he noted, where commercial space technology has come into play in a significant way.

The Starlink constellations and their resilience to jamming as a commercial product, not a military system impressed assistant secretary Plumb and Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering enough to commit to the initiative aimed at private space.  “Because of the rapidly improving commercial space capabilities, a comprehensive plan for using commercial space systems in the context of classified U.S. space capabilities is needed.”

The Starshield initiative hasn't been talked about much by SpaceX which is why none of us have heard of it before.  SpaceNews reported that SpaceX’s website has coverage of Starshield so I went looking for it and it turned up at the first search I tried: https://www.spacex.com/starshield.  

Screen capture from a portion of their Starshield page.

The source article on SpaceNews is an interesting read. SpaceX isn't the only company they mention and the market is big enough that more than one will be involved.  The realization that commercial space is the future and government money is going to flow toward it is spreading.  What the DoD wants is defense technologies at the innovation rate of commercial technologies.