FAA: You Want Launch Licenses Faster? Pay Our Expenses

In mid-October, starting on the 18th, a series of meetings began between the FAA and the space launch industry because the launch industry maintains that the FAA isn't getting their job done.  This week, one of the top officials at the Department of Transportation suggested that the space industry should help pay for the Federal Aviation Administration’s commercial space office.

Speaking at a virtual meeting of the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC) Nov. 8, Polly Trottenberg, deputy secretary of transportation, all but rejected calls from industry to sharply increase the budget of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, to deal with growing levels of launch activity. 

At the October 18th hearing, the industry experts testifying in the Senate Commerce Committee's meeting recommended a significant budget increase for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST,  Bill Gerstenmaier of SpaceX, specifically recommended doubling the office’s budget to hire more people to handle launch and reentry licensing.  In FY '23, the AST office received nearly $37.6 million in funding.  

Deputy Secretary Trottenberg, when asked about increasing AST's budget said the agency has "competing priorities" and noted aviation did not receive as much support in last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law as other modes of transportation.  

She proposed that it may be time for industry to contribute some portion of additional revenues needed for enhancing AST. “We’re an agency that has the ability to generate revenue and I think that’s going to be a question for this industry,” she said, adding that she was offering her own opinion and not that of the department itself.

While the FAA does generate revenue from user fees for aviation, it has not generally collected any such fees for launch licensing. She returned to it later in the meeting when another COMSTAC member noted the relatively small size of the AST budget relative to the overall FAA budget. The FAA requested $19.8 billion for fiscal year 2024, of which $42 million would go to AST.

Say what?  $42 million out of $19.8 Billion? That's 0.2%  Isn't that a rounding error?  A mistake in estimating costs?  I know that the various offices, like AST, in the FAA will be fighting over their pennies, but it just seems that if the AST is 0.2% of the budget of the FAA, doubling the AST to 0.4% of the $19.8 billion isn't going to take too much from any one other office or department or whatever they're called.  

To be blunt, in my experience in industry if expenses on a job came out to be off by 0.2% over a year, the manager would be legendary and talked about for years.

I don't believe that any part of the Fed.gov is so tightly managed that they'd even know a 0.2% change was going on.  The FAA sees a way to milk the industry for money.  That's all.  It's no different than that guy from ESA referring to "Rocket-by-billionaire."  In the FAA's case it's "if they want us to be responsive, they can grease our palms."  Do your best Goodfellas mafia-guy voice, "what's it worth to you?"

Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral SFS the night of October 17, 2023, the night before the meeting addressing launch licensing.  SpaceX photo.

Frank Borman, Apollo 8 Commander Led First Lunar Flyby Dies at 95

Collect Space reports today the Apollo 8 mission commander Frank Borman passed away Tuesday, November 7th at home in Billings, Montana.  His wife of 70 years, Susan, preceded him in 2021. 

If you're of a certain age group, and were not just alive during these missions but rabidly following them, you just might be feeling a little bit of a gut punch.  Apollo 8 was one of the defining moments of the era, the first human flyby of the the moon. Much like Apollo 11, and that other event 60 years ago this month, the assassination of President Kennedy, it's one of a handful of things I'll remember all my life; where I was, what I was doing.

A look through this blog's history looks like I've written about Apollo 8 every year, pretty much only on Christmas Eve.  Christmas Eve was the day they orbited the moon, the day that the crew spoke to us of the "stark and unappetizing" look of the lunar surface and read from the book of Genesis, the first book in the Christian bible.  Here on Earth, 1968 had been a tumultuous year. There had been riots in many places, assassinations and troubles all around the globe. On Christmas eve, in awe of what these men were doing, it seemed like the world held its breath and watched.  Like Apollo 11, seven months later, it seemed to uniquely unite the world and hold everyone's attention. 

Collect Space expands the story into a biography of Frank Borman, as is appropriate. As usual, I present a little of it to whet your appetite to go Read The Whole Thing. 

Launched on Dec. 21, 1968, Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders became the first astronauts to ride atop the Saturn V, which at the time was the United States' most powerful rocket. The booster's third stage accelerated the Apollo 8 crew from 17,000 to 24,000 miles per hour (27,000 to 39,000 kph), the fastest any astronauts had traveled up to that point in history.

"The Saturn V was a unique vehicle," said Borman in a 1999 NASA oral history interview. "It was powerful and noisy and vibrated, and the stagings were really kind of violent. But when you got on the third stage, the S-IVB, it was smooth and quiet."

Borman and his two crewmates arrived at the moon three days after leaving Earth. Apollo 8 entered an elliptical orbit that brought the crew as close as 115 miles (185 kilometers) of the lunar surface. On the first of their 10 revolutions, Borman, Lovell and Anders became the first people to see firsthand the far side of the moon and then, while coming out from behind the moon for the fourth time, the first to see in-person "Earthrise."

The famous Earthrise photo from Apollo 8 in 1968, something no one in the world had ever seen. 

Of course, Apollo 8 wasn't Frank Borman's first mission nor was it the first noteworthy thing he had ever accomplished.  

Borman's first spaceflight, which launched three years before Apollo 8, paired him with Lovell, who was also making his first trip into space. The Gemini 7 mission was designed to test and discover the difficulties with keeping a crew in space for as long as the Apollo landing missions were expected to extend.

For two weeks, Borman and Lovell lived together in the cramped confines of their two-seat capsule. The pair evaluated freeze-dried food options, collected medical data on each other and were the first NASA astronauts to doff their pressure suits in-flight, as later Apollo crews would on the way to and from the moon.

James Lovell would fly with Borman again on Apollo 8 - along with William Anders.  

Borman was offered the command of Apollo 11. He turned it down, having already decided that Apollo 8 was going to be his last flight.  In June of 1970, he retired from NASA and after completing Harvard Business School's advanced management program, he joined Eastern Air Lines as its senior vice president for operations. In May 1975, Borman was elected president and chief operating officer of the company.  In December of '75, he became CEO, became chairman of the board one year later, and stayed there for another 10 years.

Whenever I read stories of the NASA astronauts of that era, I think these were all remarkable giants of men.  Rest well, Colonel Borman.  Thanks for everything.

Frank Borman poses for a portrait with a model of the Gemini-Titan II launch vehicle in 1964. (Image credit: NASA)

Why Do So Many Stories Center on SpaceX?

Could it be they're doing far more than everyone else? 

Next CRS mission Go for Thursday night launch 

If you're within a couple of hundred miles of the Kennedy Space Center, cargo resupply mission CRS-29 (CRS stands for "Commercial Resupply Services") is set to liftoff Thursday night from launch complex 39A at the KSC.  The date/time is November 9th at 8:28 PM ET or Friday morning the 10th at 0128 UTC.  Weather is forecast to be excellent over the East Central Florida, with temperature at launch site of 74, winds ESE at 5 mph and a 5% chance of rain.  Melody Lovin, launch weather officer with Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's 45th Weather Squadron, said chances of acceptable weather are 95%.  My guess is that the mission will take off to the SE so should be visible from central and south Florida.

The Cargo Dragon will carry up more than 6,500 pounds of supplies and scientific hardware on this run, stay docked to the International Space Station for about a month, and then come back to Earth with about 3,800 pounds of cargo.  

Dragon is the only cargo vehicle with this return capability. The other two robotic freighters that are operational today — Northop Grumman's Cygnus craft and Russia's Progress vehicle — are designed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere when their orbital missions are over.

This is the second mission for both the Falcon 9 booster and the Cargo Dragon capsule.  The booster's first mission was the Crew 7 mission to the ISS.  Landing will be Return to Launch Site, landing at LZ-1.  The Cargo Dragon previously flew CRS-26 to the space station. 

The Air Force Spaceplane X-37B will ride a Falcon Heavy to orbit.

The launch is scheduled a month away, NET December 7th, so there's a bit of a wait for it, and no launch time is set - rather common for missions a month away.  The spaceplane is operated by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office and the U.S. Space Force. The upcoming mission will be Orbital Test Vehicle 7 and the mission is launching as USSF-52. 

This will be the first time SpaceX will launch the spaceplane.  Until now, the launches have been on Atlas V launch vehicles.  SpaceX was awarded the $130 million contract in June 2018 to launch USSF-52, but as has been the case with so many Falcon Heavy missions, was delayed by payload availability.  

The X-37B spaceplane is a derivative of the X-37A designed by NASA in the late 1990s to deploy from the Space Shuttle. The program later was transferred to the Defense Department. There are two X-37B spacecraft, which were originally designed for missions of 270 days, but have greatly exceeded that goal since the spaceplane’s first mission in 2010.

Starship Integrated Flight Test 2 Appears to be Imminent

The long awaited second Starship flight test appears to be imminent, possibly as early as next Monday, November 13.  The FAA signed off on the safety review of April's IFT1 on Halloween, October 31st leaving the ball solely in the US Fish and Wildlife Service's hands.  While they have a lot of time to complete the study, insider rumors are saying that could be completed as soon as this Friday.   

Once that review is complete, which could happen this week, SpaceX will receive its FAA launch license. Technicians will install pyrotechnic charges on the Starship rocket to complete the arming of its flight termination system, the destruct mechanism needed to blow up the vehicle if it veers off course.

Then SpaceX will stack the Starship upper stage on top of the Super Heavy booster to create the fully formed, nearly 400-foot-tall (120-meter) launch vehicle, the largest rocket ever built. On launch morning, SpaceX teams will load more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen into the two-stage rocket.

There are numerous changes to the ground infrastructure ("stage zero") as well as the vehicle, but it seems nothing draws as much attention as the introduction of "hot staging" in Starship.  Stephen Clark at Ars Technica goes so far as to say "If the next Starship makes it through staging, you can call that a win."  Personally, considering that SpaceX has been several steps ahead of the regulatory agencies since April, I think they need to make orbit and complete the "one and done" planned orbit.  That was nearly seven months ago!  Starship and Superheavy are extremely important to NASA and the Artemis lunar missions.  Another failure, especially if it's early in the flight bringing another seven months of delays, could very well kill off or at least severely wound NASA's lunar landing plans.  

Booster 9 and Ship 25, stacked recently.  Thanks to the new interstage ring for the hot staging, the vehicle is "a few" feet taller than the IFT1 stack.  Image credit: SpaceX

Has the European Space Agency Seen the Reality of Space 2.0?

At a meeting Monday, 22 European countries reached an agreement to change the way they operate.  Rockets will not be developed by the ESA itself, but they will move in the direction of a commercial paradigm, much as NASA and the private sector space companies have revolutionized how it's being done in the US. 

The agreement means the new Ariane 6 rocket, which is running four years late and still hasn't flown, should be the last launch vehicle developed by ESA. Europe's old way of developing rockets just isn't working anymore. The current model, Aschbacher said, has been in place for decades, producing new generations of Ariane rockets since 1979.
...
Josef Aschbacher, a scientist who took over as director general of ESA in 2021, has argued that Europe is in an "acute launcher crisis" now that the continent lacks independent launch capability for most of its space missions.

Does he mean like how the ESA hired SpaceX to put a couple of their Galileo navigation satellites up since they don't have a working vehicle?  

Sorry, ESA, that was harsh.  The truth is more nuanced than that.  We've covered Europe's fledgling launch industry before, and they're progressing, ignoring the ESA.  For example, Norway opened their Andøya spaceport in the arctic this past week.  

The field of startup launch companies in Europe includes German firms like HyImpulse, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Isar Aerospace; British companies such as Skyrora and Orbex; and Spain's PLD Space, which recently test-launched its first suborbital test vehicle. ArianeGroup has its own small launch startup called MaiaSpace in France, and the Italian company has plans to evolve its already-flying Vega launch vehicle. All these companies, and others across Europe, would be eligible for ESA's new launch challenge.

Andøya Spaceport's Launch Pad A, built to specifications from Germany's Isar Aerospace, and dedicated to their use. The launch complex includes the launch pad, payload integration facilities and a mission control center. Credit: Andøya Spaceport

Isar Aerospace, for example, is working on their two-stage Spectrum launch vehicle, designed to deliver up to 700 kilograms to sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) and up to one metric ton (1,000 kg) to low Earth orbit. It seems reasonable to project a first launch of the Spectrum in early 2025.

There are other European spaceports in the works and one other that has officially opened - Sweden's Esrange Spaceport - but has not hosted any missions. 

A graphic of the various rockets in process by EU companies, from the website European Spaceflight in July of '22. 

While I see this as positive step, we have to recognize that this doesn't get them out of the hole of having no launch capability.  It will be some time, more likely measured in years than months before the small companies create a way to space; realistically they either get the Ariane 6 flying or they have nothing.

The Ariane 6 rocket is more expensive than officials thought when they greenlit the program in 2014. The Ariane 6 will come closer than the recently retired Ariane 5 launcher to matching SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket on cost, but Europe runs the risk of falling even further behind as SpaceX brings its next-generation Starship rocket online.

Nevertheless, after nearly a decade of work, ESA, the European Union, and commercial customers—primarily Amazon—need the Ariane 6 soon to launch dozens of missions already on contract. It's a widely held view among many European officials that it is imperative to have a sovereign launch capability.

One of the things I read about the ESA's reaction to reusability that got etched into my brain was that they laughed at it and openly said their reason to be there was make-work programs.  

Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much. This is one difference between rocket-by-government and rocket-by-billionaire programs. [Bold added - SiG]

Rocket-by-billionaire?  Is that Musk Derangement Syndrome?  Bezos Derangement Synderome?  Or just plain "projection?"

The old article is an interesting read, if nothing else for the arrogance displayed by the ESA folks like that last quote. It seems they've learned a lesson here.  Reusability changes everything. 

Tuesday is Prime Time for Euclid

Tuesday morning Eastern Time, we get to see through the European space telescope Euclid's "eyes" for the first time.

Euclid mission scientists are gathering in Darmstadt, Germany, to discuss the telescope's first five full-color images of the distant cosmos, and you can watch Tuesday's reveal live at 8:15 a.m. EST (1315 GMT) here on Space.com, courtesy of ESA. In addition to holding scientific value, the images are also expected to be great cosmic eye candy.

Euclid launched on July 1st at 11:11 AM EDT, enroute to the L2 Lagrange point nearly a million miles from Earth and coincidentally the home of NASA's (much) larger James Webb Space Telescope. Euclid teased us with its first alignment and commissioning test images one month later, and then caused at least a little concern just over one month after that when the satellite temporarily lost track of its guide stars.  Every indication is that the telescope is working fine and ready to download some fine examples of eye candy. 

Two images taken by Euclid's instruments from that August image release. The left was taken by VIS, the VIsible light Sensor and the right by NISP,  the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer.  (Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA) 

Euclid has been tasked with building an innovative 3D map of the dark universe by charting out shapes and distributions of billions of galaxies and star clusters up to 10 billion light-years away, primarily in search of clues about elusive dark matter and dark energy.

To achieve that goal, the telescope is primed to take enough sharp images of large swaths of the sky in visible and infrared wavelengths to fill a million DVDs. To investigate the dark universe, Euclid will observe weak gravitational lensing, a cosmic phenomena which occurs due to the chance alignment of galaxies or conglomerations of matter, which allows foreground galaxies to behave like a giant magnifying lens of objects behind them. Light from background sources is distorted, even multiplied on its way to Earth, such that we see their twisted, surreal illusions around lensing galaxies.

Since visible matter comprises just 10% or so of the total mass of most galaxy clusters, scientists suspect invisible dark matter particles are responsible for much of this lensing. So, studying galaxy clusters could shed light on the behavior and nature of dark matter — but those images need to be super-sharp to bring fuzzy lensed images around galaxies into focus.

Bear in mind that while that last paragraph sums up the conventional view of dark matter and dark energy, "just across the way" out at L2, the JWST is sending down images that are calling several details in the conventional model into question. That's a good thing because it means we're learning.

EDIT TO ADD, Nov. 7, 2023:  The link to Space.com has no video of the Euclid presentation.  Currently the ESA is streaming, ready to go live, HERE.

Are Tractor Beams on the verge of becoming real?

They keep saying these two words, but I don't think those words mean what they think they mean.  A messy sentence if ever there was one, but the phrase the authors keep tossing around is a "Tractor Beam" and the article is about real work being done in universities to develop one.  

Everyone who has watched sci-fi movies or TV shows is probably familiar with the term tractor beam.  They are energy beams that one ship uses to hold onto another ship and keep it from doing what the second ship's crew wants it to do.  Like here, where a Borg cube ship holds the Enterprise (from Star Trek:TNG) and keeps it from fleeing - or keeps it from doing what Captain Picard wants. 

There have been scenes in these shows where one ship tows another, as if connected by physical ropes and chains.  Same idea. 

Instead what the researchers are working on developing is an electrostatic field generator.  Their goal is to use this electrostatic field to pull (or push) satellites out of the Geostationary Orbit when they reach End of Life.  Space junk and getting rid of it is becoming a big name field, with the Senate recently working on bills telling NASA to manage it better. 

What's the difference?  Well, the tractor beam imagined in the picture above, holds the Enterprise motionless.  If the Enterprise tries to leave, the force gets stronger to keep it from leaving.  I've seen shows use a tractor beam as some sort of landing assistance to get a ship into a large space station or other dock. 

The system I see described is going to impart a charge on the satellite and on itself; if those charges are opposite (which they will be unless they have some fancy tricks) they will be attracted to each other.  If the charges are the same, they'll repel each other.  Slowly, barely perceptibly at first, but accelerating with time, unless those charges are bled off to reduce the attraction.  Further, they aren't going to do this with one satellite in low Earth orbit and the other in the GEO, the satellites will be close to each other.  

The electrostatic tractor would use a servicer spacecraft equipped with an electron gun that would fire negatively charged electrons at a dead target satellite, Champion told Live Science. The electrons would give the target a negative charge while leaving the servicer with a positive charge. The electrostatic attraction between the two would keep them locked together despite being separated by 65 to 100 feet (20 to 30 meters) of empty space, she said.

Once the servicer and target are "stuck together," the servicer would be able to pull the target out of orbit without touching it. Ideally, the defunct satellite would be pulled into a "graveyard orbit" more distant from Earth, where it could safely drift forever, Champion said. 

The person referred to by the name Champion is project researcher Kaylee Champion, a doctoral student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder).

I can't get past some gigantic holes I see in what they're saying.  Maybe they think they're keeping their ideas confidential, but I don't see how they keep the target satellite from closing the distance to the servicer.  They go on to say that the field would have to be weak and work over long periods of time, but eventually, there's nothing to stop the target from hitting the servicer.  This is zero gravity and zero friction, after all, and there's nothing to slow or stop that target once it's moving. If they suddenly reduced the charge differential between the two, the target may stop accelerating, but it doesn't slow or stop moving unless they change it to being repelled.  Perhaps they need to modulate the charge periodically back and forth between attraction and repulsion?  

The electrostatic attraction between the two spacecraft would be extremely weak, due to limitations in electron gun technology and the distance by which the two would need to be separated to prevent collisions, project researcher Julian Hammerl, a doctoral student at CU Boulder, told Live Science. So the servicer would have to move very slowly, and it could take more than a month to fully move a single satellite out of GEO, he added.

All Hail B1058!

Did you happen to hear about the Chinese rocket company that flew a test of booster that can land last week?  My YouTube feed suddenly erupted in stories that this was competition for SpaceX and China was going to be awesome.  So I watched the video.  The booster's flight reminded me most of the flights of the test article we called Hoppy (more properly called Starhopper).  It took off vertically but didn't really hover at height, just slowed down and then started descending.  It finally hovered briefly before landing.  

It didn't look like Hoppy; if anything, it resembles Blue Origin's New Shepard, except not quite as phallic looking.  Hoppy's flight was in August of 2019 and did more than this test article did in its test flight.  

The simple fact is that there is no competition now or coming in the next couple of years for the Falcon 9.  As I mentioned last night, we had the weather to allow a good look at the latest SpaceX Starlink satellite launch, called 6-26, so we got to watch booster B1058 step up in the record books to its 18th successful mission.  Stephen Clark, the recent addition to space reporting at Ars Technica, did an article on the mission and B1058 itself.  

...For its maiden launch on May 30, 2020, the rocket propelled NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into the history books on SpaceX's first mission to send people into orbit.

This ended a nine-year gap in America's capability to launch astronauts into low-Earth orbit and was the first time a commercial spacecraft achieved this feat. At that time, the rocket was fresh from SpaceX's factory in Southern California, glistening white in color, with a bright red NASA "worm" logo emblazoned on the side.

Over the course of its flights to space and back, that white paint has darkened to a charcoal color. Soot from the rocket's exhaust has accumulated, bit by bit, on the 15-story-tall cylinder-shaped booster. The red NASA worm logo is now barely visible.

In its 18 flights, B1058 has lifted far more than just that first manned flight, officially called the Demo 2 mission of the Crew Dragon capsule.  Clark mentions specifically that B1058 has put 846 satellites into orbit, most of which have been Starlinks. SpaceX's few words on the mission include that B1058, "previously launched Crew Demo-2, ANASIS-11, CRS-21, Transporter-1, Transporter-3, and now 13 Starlink missions."  (Transporter missions are SpaceX's ride sharing missions to orbit, each carrying many satellites).

B1058 before her first flight, the Demo 2 mission in May of 2020.  Brand new, gleaming white.  Image credit: SpaceX.

SpaceX engineers emphasize that even with 278 launches of Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rockets, they still learn something with every flight.  It helps that they recover most of the vehicle; the whole booster and the payload fairings. That gives them a lot to study.  They have the evidence they're doing things right in the 249 consecutive successful missions since the 2016 pre-flight explosion of a Falcon 9 on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral.

"I see the fight rate can only occur if I can increase reliability, so that they're not competing entities," a SpaceX official recently told Ars. The official also said SpaceX might extend the limit on Falcon 9 booster flights beyond 20, the number at which Falcon 9s are currently certified for Starlink missions. The limits are lower for flights with customer payloads.

All that said, SpaceX eventually plans to discontinue the Falcon 9 in favor of the completely reusable Starship.  That's just not happening until Starship is completely proven out, taking both satellites and astronauts up.  I read that as No Earlier Than the end of the decade.  

There are 8 weeks or 56 days left in the year as of Sunday.  This was the 79th Falcon launch of the year, or 1.8 (79/44) launches per week.  That looks to be about 15 launches left this year, for a total of 94.  Next year's goal is 144 launches. 

 

Small Space News Story Roundup 24

Astrobotic's Peregrine Lunar Lander Arrives in Florida

With last week's notice that Intuitive Machines has slipped the launch date for their Nova-C lunar lander from November until January, the focus on the "private moon race" switched to Astrobotic's Peregrine lander, scheduled to fly on Christmas Eve's first launch of the Vulcan Centaur.  On Tuesday, Halloween, Astrobotic announced the lander had arrived at Cape Canaveral for final testing and integrating with the Vulcan launch vehicle.  

“It’s incredible to realize that we are just a short time away from our Peregrine spacecraft beginning its journey to the Moon,” says John Thornton, Astrobotic CEO, “After years of dedication and hard work, we are so close to having our moonshot. We invite you to follow along as Peregrine, with seven countries represented aboard, launches to the Moon and attempts one of the first successful landings of an American spacecraft since Apollo.”   

Peregrine is carrying 21 payloads from governments, companies, universities, and NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Peregrine’s full manifest can be found at www.astrobotic.com/lunar-delivery/manifest/.

Photo credit: United Launch Alliance 

Speaking of ULA and Vulcan 

This week, US Space Force awarded a round of contracts to two companies to carry its national security satellites and other payloads into orbit over the next several years - so says the lead-in to the story.   In the first two launch contract phases, the selected launch companies were ULA and SpaceX.  It started out as ULA 60% to SpaceX 40%, but as Vulcan continued to slip out, that morphed into a 50/50 split.  In the launches awarded today, 10 were to SpaceX with 11 to ULA  or 52/48 ULA to SpaceX.  All 11 of ULA's launches are to be on the Vulcan Centaur, which has never flown and isn't likely to be certified for those missions for about another year. 

That naturally led to talk among industry watchers centered on how badly this was hurting ULA.  

When satellites are ready to fly, they need to fly ... And based on the latest data, this appears to have happened, Ars reports. Instead of receiving an anticipated 60 percent of launch orders from 2019 to 2023, ULA has only received 54 percent from the military. This amounts to three fewer launches, or a lost value of about $350 million. "It is imperative to rapidly deliver critical space capabilities to the Joint Warfighter as soon as they are ready to be launched—we cannot leave capability sitting on the ground," Col. Doug Pentecost, of Space Systems Command, said.

Over a year ago, there was report that USSF was looking to announce a Phase 3 of national security launches, covering launches in the late 2020s and early 2030s. Those contracts haven't been announced yet.

We got to watch another SpaceX Record Tonight

We just came back inside from watching tonight's SpaceX Starlink launch 6-26.  This was the 18th flight of fleet leader, booster B1058 earning the designation -18.  B1058-18 regains its position as the sole fleet leader, as the run to 20 flights continues. There have been other boosters holding the fleet leader position alongside B1058, but it has been at the top the longest.

Lucy's Flyby of Asteroid "Dinky" Already Showing Surprises

Asteroid mission Lucy successfully flew by asteroid Dinkinesh yesterday, as detailed Tuesday, and I posted a late edit to Tuesday's post last night quoting the NASA blog for Lucy. 

The word from NASA's Lucy mission blog is that "Lucy spacecraft has phoned home after its encounter with the small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh. Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter."  They estimate it will take "up to a week" to download all the data.

The data on the small asteroid, now becoming affectionately known as Dinky,  has started pouring down and showing up on various news sources.  Here you can still be among the first in the world to see the first image of Dinky.   

Image credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOAO

That also means you're among the first in the world to see that Dinky is part of a binary system.  

Yes, binary system means the smaller body, looking for all the world like a small fish with its mouth open in the small image above, is an entirely separate little body as this smaller, lower-res, animated .gif shows. 

Wednesday's flyby was an important test for the mission, verifying Lucy's terminal tracking system designed to allow the probe to autonomously track an asteroid during a high-speed flyby. (Lucy zoomed past Dinkinesh at a relative speed of about 10,000 mph on Wednesday.) 

"This is an awesome series of images. They indicate that the terminal tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we expected," Tom Kennedy, a mission guidance and navigation engineer at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado, said in the same statement. "It's one thing to simulate, test and practice. It's another thing entirely to see it actually happen."

Though the encounter was primarily a test, Lucy did gather some interesting data about Dinkinesh. For example, the probe helped nail down the size of the two asteroids. The larger rock is likely about 0.5 miles (790 meters) across at its widest point, for example, while the smaller one is about 0.15 miles (220 m) wide, NASA officials said.

Consider those sizes to be preliminary estimates, likely to change as the data processing continues. Remember, they said they'd be downlinking data from Lucy for about a week. I honestly didn't expect any images yet. Expect more data to be coming for perhaps a couple of weeks; one to download and one to process a bit better.  

In the mean time, Lucy continues on a looping trajectory that now has the satellite heading back toward Earth for another gravity assist and loop back out toward the asteroid belt.  The next target is a main belt space rock named 52246 Donaldjohanson . (Donald Johanson is the co-discoverer of the famous human-ancestor fossil Lucy, after which the NASA mission is named.)  Tuesday's flyby was just over two years after Lucy's launch. The next flyby is expected in 2025, two years from now, after which Lucy will fly on to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. That's expected in another two years, 2027.

Sierra Space's Dream Chaser Checks off a Major Milestone

The first Dream Chaser spacecraft slated to go into orbit has completed its assembly and is being readied for shipment to NASA in Ohio for a series of tests.   

Within a few weeks, the Dream Chaser spaceplane, named "Tenacity" and carrying the serial number DC-101, will be out the door on the way to a NASA facility in Ohio for a battery of tests to prove it can survive the rigors of spaceflight.

When I say "completed" you might want to consider that it doesn't necessarily mean "flight ready."  For the series of tests it's going to go through, access to some points that are covered for flight is necessary, so some covers and tiles are missing 

A collage of four photos of Tenacity in Sierra Space's Colorado factory.  Image credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

“We’re almost done with everything," said Angie Wise, Sierra Space's chief safety officer. "We’re finishing all the closeout panels. We’re essentially getting it ready for shipping. We’ve checked out the landing gear. We’re going to put everything back in, stow it, and then move it onto the (transport) fixture and get it out of here.”

While very reminiscent of the Space Shuttles, it isn't a copy of the STS platform.

Dream Chaser is about a quarter of the size of a space shuttle orbiter, with roughly half of the shuttle's habitable volume. It's about 30 feet (9 meters) long, with a wingspan of 23 feet (7 meters). Those wings fold up, like the wings of a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, to fit inside the payload envelope of its rocket. The first Dream Chaser missions will lift off on United Launch Alliance Vulcan rockets from Cape Canaveral, Florida, but Sierra Space says its spaceplane can fly on different launch vehicles.

At this point, with Vulcan's first flight scheduled for this Christmas Eve, it seems the launch of Tenacity might be in the December of '24 time frame. 

Sierra Space's vision is to change the way we go to orbit and especially how we come back.  Like the Shuttles, Dream Chasers will land on a runway.  A design feature is that reentry should be easy on the people or payloads taking the ride.  The flight plan is to limit deceleration to no more than 1.5 Gs.  

Unlike the shuttles, SpaceX's Cargo Dragon or Northrup Grumman's Cygnus, Dream Chasers are neither fully reusable or fully disposable. The Dream Chaser itself is designed for 15 flights, but they will fly with a detachable cargo module that's disposable. 

This pressurized cargo pod, named "Shooting Star," has solar arrays that will unfurl in orbit to generate power. It's attached to the rear of Dream Chaser and will be the connecting point between the spaceplane and the International Space Station.

With the Shooting Star attached, Tenacity can carry 12,000 pounds to the space station; giving up Shooting Star for the return drops the payload that can be brought back down to about 4,000 pounds.  The Shooting Star will be used to dispose of garbage from the ISS, incinerating during reentry.  

Originally intended to fly in 2019, Sierra Space is very late.  The problem started out due to "supply chain" issues, which gave Sierra a strong incentive to do as much of their own parts manufacturing as possible.  One of the interesting impacts of that is that Dream Chaser has a unique propulsion system. 

The spacecraft has 26 small rocket engines, each capable of operating at three discrete levels of thrust for fine control or more significant orbit adjustments. Uniquely in the space industry, these thrusters consume a mix of kerosene and hydrogen peroxide propellants rather than toxic hypergolic propellants that ignite on contact with one another.

"We wanted to have a fuel system that was green instead of using hypergolics, so we could land it on a runway and we could walk up to the vehicle without being in hazmat suits," Vice said. "That was hard, I have to say."

On October 24, Sierra Space moved the Shooting Star cargo module into position behind the Dream Chaser spaceplane for checkouts before shipment to Ohio for environmental testing. Image credit: Shay Saldana/Sierra Space.

Dream Chaser's next stop after leaving Sierra Space's factory will be NASA's Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio, formerly known as Plum Brook Station. The spacecraft will travel by road from Colorado, but Sierra Space is keeping its route and shipment date secret for security reasons. Wise said the spacecraft will stay at the Ohio test facility for one to three months, depending on how the testing goes.

The disposable cargo module for the first Dream Chaser flight to the space station has already departed Sierra Space's factory for Ohio. Once the Tenacity spaceplane arrives there, ground teams will connect the two segments of the Dream Chaser cargo freighter and run them through integrated tests. Those will include vibration and acoustic tests to check that the spacecraft can withstand the shaking and sound of a rocket launch. Sierra Space will also place the spacecraft inside a giant thermal vacuum chamber.

Thermal testing will be part of the process with the vibration and acoustic tests, too - what we used to call, "shake and bake" back in my days doing that. 

This summary just barely touches on a lot of the interesting details in the piece on Ars Technica.  Worth a read if you find the Dream Chaser interesting. 

First Big Test for NASA's Lucy Satellite Wednesday Afternoon ET

Just over two years ago, October 16 of 2021, NASA's Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter launched on its 12 year mission to the main asteroid belt before traveling to the L4 and L5 points; those gravitationally stable Lagrange points behind and ahead of Jupiter in its orbit where the Trojan asteroids are found. 

This plot, from the Southwest Research Institute shows a rather complicated looking mission trajectory for Lucy, but it oversimplifies the real path. Notice the text at the top that says, "Frame rotating with Jupiter?"  That means they created this view by fixing Jupiter's position, but during the 12 years of the mission, Jupiter and both groups of Trojan asteroids will complete a little more than one full orbit around the sun.  Assuming this is all rotating clockwise around a point near the sun (if not in the sun), in a fraction of those years, the L4 Trojans will be where the L5 are shown, the L5 Trojans will be in lower left hand side of the orbit, Earth will have completed a few complete orbits and everything else will also have rotated around that center point.

Not to get too distracted by the orbital mechanics, but on October 16 of '22, the one year anniversary of Lucy's launch, it completed a gravity assist maneuver, gaining speed in a flyby of Earth.  For just over a year, Lucy has been making a beeline for an intermediate target, and will be there Wednesday at 12:54 PM EDT, or 1654 UTC.  The mission will come to within 265 miles (425 km) of the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh.

About an hour before the encounter, the spacecraft will begin attempting to lock on to the small asteroid so that its instruments are oriented toward it. This will allow for the best possible position to take data from Dinkinesh as Lucy speeds by at 10,000 mph (4,470 meters per second).

During this maneuver, Lucy's main antenna will be pointed away from Earth, so it will not be in communication with its operators at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After the flyby, Lucy will reorient itself to reestablish communications with Earth through the Deep Space Network. Imagery and other data will be relayed back to Earth for several subsequent days.

On Oct. 28, the team sent the spacecraft what is known as the final knowledge update, a package of data with the most up to date information about the relative positions of the spacecraft and asteroid. This dataset is precise enough to guide the spacecraft for nearly all the half a million miles (800,000 km) that separated Lucy and Dinkinesh on Saturday the 28th

The ground team is quick to point out that when Lucy first tries to lock its terminal tracking system on the diminutive asteroid it may not be able to because of the asteroid's small size.  The system is not expected to “lock-on” to the asteroid until just a few minutes before closest approach. This system will autonomously reorient the spacecraft to keep the small asteroid within the field of view of the science instruments as the spacecraft zooms by at around 10,000 mph (4.5 m/s). This will be the first use of this terminal tracking system, and this flyby was designed to test the system in real spaceflight conditions.

Dinkinesh, which is nearly a kilometer across at its widest point, was discovered in 1999. It was unnamed when the Lucy mission targeted it for its first flyby as a test of the tracking system, en route to the Jovian trojan asteroids later this decade. So, Lucy mission scientists proposed the name Dinkinesh, the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossils.

The name was approved earlier this year by the International Astronomical Union.

Before Lucy gets to either of the two swarms of Trojan asteroids, it will fly by another main belt asteroid in 2025 called Donaldjohanson for additional in-flight tests of the spacecraft systems and procedures.

Artist's concept rendering of Lucy flying by an asteroid.  Image credit NASA. 

You may recall that shortly after the mission began, they experienced a failure of those solar panels to deploy and latch open properly.  I had mentally filed away that the problem was solved, the arrays were properly deployed, latched and all that.  That's wrong.  The array they were having problems with never fully deployed properly, but was operating at about 90% of the planned power output.  While catching up on the mission to prepare this, I found that this January they said:

NASA’s Lucy mission team has decided to suspend further solar array deployment activities. The team determined that operating the mission with the solar array in the current unlatched state carries an acceptable level of risk and further deployment activities are unlikely to be beneficial at this time. The spacecraft continues to make progress along its planned trajectory.

UPDATE 11/1/2023 2145 EDT:  The word from NASA's Lucy mission blog is that "Lucy spacecraft has phoned home after its encounter with the small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh. Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter."  They estimate it will take "up to a week" to download all the data.

Your Halloween Photo from Jupiter

NASA's Juno spacecraft snapped a wonderful picture from the high northern latitudes of Jupiter back on September 7th, a region called Jet N7.  

The photo was taken during Juno's 54th close flyby of Jupiter, from an altitude of about 4,800 miles (7,700 kilometers) and a latitude around 69 degrees north. The area photographed lies along Jupiter's terminator — the dividing line between the day and night sides of the planet — which is why the planet appears to fade into the dark background of space, NASA officials wrote in an image description.   

NASA released the spooky photo on Oct. 25, just in time to celebrate Halloween. The space agency compared the haunted view to a Cubist portrait, honoring the painter Pablo Picasso in the process.

"We present the @NASASolarSystem image to you on Oct. 25 — what would have been Picasso's 142nd birthday," NASA said in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter).

Obviously looks like some sort of face, but like lying on your back in the grass and watching clouds overhead, if any intelligence is involved in creating the face, it's in the viewer, not the clouds.  Much like the "Face on Mars" or the claims of evidence for life discovered on the red planet that fills my YouTube feed.   

Blue Origin Shows Off Moon Lander Mock-up

Blue Origin has unveiled a full-sized mock-up of the Blue Moon lander that will be a test platform for the lander it says will be ready to fly to the Moon within the next three years.  

In social media posts Oct. 27, the company showed images of the Blue Moon Mark 1 mockup, located at an engine manufacturing facility in Huntsville, Alabama. The lander is designed to deliver three tons of cargo to the lunar surface.

The first flight of Blue Moon Mark 1 will be what the company calls the “Pathfinder Mission,” designated MK1-SN001. “MK1-SN001 proves out critical systems, including the BE-7 engine, cryogenic fluid power and propulsions systems, avionics, continuous downlink communications, and precision landing,” the company stated on its website.

The first Blue Moon Mark 1 will be an uncrewed cargo designed for a single mission.  It's designed to deliver up to 3 metric tons of cargo anywhere on the lunar surface.  3000 kg is roughly 6600 pounds, here on the heavy end of a trip to the moon.  The company is developing the Mark 1 as a predecessor to the larger Mark 2 lander, which will ferry astronauts to and from the lunar surface under contract to NASA. The agency selected Blue Origin as its second human-rated lunar lander contractor in May, alongside SpaceX.

“We’re building our landers, both our Mark 1 and our Mark 2, to enable global landing capability on the Moon, day or night," said John Couluris, senior vice president of lunar transportation at Blue Origin.

Under their $3.4 billion Human Landing System (HLS) contract with NASA, Blue's lunar lander will transport astronauts between the Gateway in lunar orbit and the surface of the Moon, and then back to the Gateway on the Artemis V mission. Their first mission is officially scheduled for no sooner than 2029, but is likely to slip into the 2030s.  

The first lunar landing mission, Artemis III, no sooner than 2025, and the second lunar landing, no sooner than 2026 are well before the Blue Moon Mark 2.  Those two will be using SpaceX's Human Landing System (HLS) version of the Starship. If HLS is ahead of Blue Origin's lunar lander, it's arguably not by much.  Starship has yet to make orbit, although its one failed Integrated Flight Test is one more than Blue Origin's New Glenn has attempted. Before HLS can fly to the moon, "penciled in" for NEXT YEAR, SpaceX will have to get refueling on orbit working reliably.

Blue Origin's HLS architecture is similar to that of SpaceX in that it also requires refueling in space. But Blue Moon uses liquid hydrogen as a fuel, while SpaceX's Starship burns liquid methane. Blue Origin will also launch its landers aboard the company's New Glenn rocket, which is not expected to launch until late next year at the earliest. For each human-rated lander mission, Blue Origin needs three New Glenn launches—one to send the lander to an orbit around the Moon, then two more launches to carry parts for a Lockheed Martin-built refueling tug to fill the lander's tanks in lunar orbit.

I believe it takes two Starship launches full of fuel, to fill the Starship refueling station that stays on orbit and will be used to fuel HLS.  Two trips to fuel one because some fuel is needed to get the Starship to orbit.

There's much that needs to be done to get to the moon with the indirect system being used.  Blue Origin's use of liquid hydrogen brings with it several problems.  Hydrogen has been known as a good fuel for decades, but no one has solved how to keep it cryogenic for long periods.  Its shelf life in space has historically been measured in hours, not days, weeks, or months. Blue Origin has agreements with NASA to develop cryogenic fluid management and fluid transfer technology.  That strikes me as inventing the wheel as a step to saying you'll be making cars in a few years. 

Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pose in front of the mock-up of Blue Moon Mark 1.  Image credit: NASA. 

NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems development Jim Free said the focus for Artemis 3 should not be on SpaceX's HLS alone, citing work needed on Orion, which will fly with a docking ring for the first time on that mission, the Artemis/SLS system itself, and the new spacesuits being developed by Axiom Space.

How to Become a Famous Scientist - Just Use This One Simple Trick

I write about junk science fairly often.  There seem to be two main reasons for that.  First, it's one of my favorite topics, but behind that is the fact that there would be far less to write about if it weren't for the fact that we appear to be in the Golden Age of Junk Science.  There is far more junk science than at any point in my lifetime - or maybe I just notice it more, but don't think about that.  

Examples?  A recent example that leapt off the page at me and gathered a lot of attention is Harvard researchers have announced that eating red meat just twice a week causes diabetes.  But SiG, I hear you thinking, that's not what that headline says.  It says "may."  Yes, but junk science always uses those "hedge your bets words" like could, might, may, should and so on.  That way they never can be held accountable for misleading the world.  "We never said it would cause diabetes, we said it may.  We didn't say what the percentage chance was because we need more funding to find that out.  (Ooo! They win twice in that disclaimer!) 

Like virtually all of the food correlations you read about, they depend on Food Frequency Questionnaires (FFQs) which are notoriously unreliable.  Legendarily unreliable in fact.  FFQs have survey questions like, "list what you had for lunch in March of '22" (usually multiple choice) 

But that's not all. An honest assessor of papers like this, Dr. Zoë Harcombe, Ph.D. in Public Nutrition, did a must-read analysis of the study, but we don't always get that.  A few money quotes:

• This makes no sense. Diabetes is essentially the inability to handle glucose. Meat contains no glucose. Carbohydrates contain glucose. My immediate thought was – don’t blame the burger for what the bun, fries and fizzy drink did. 
• The definition of red meat included sandwiches and lasagna.  Lasagna is red meat?  It's only red from the tomato sauce covering it.  You just can't see that because of noodles covering it.
• As if FFQs aren't bad enough, the serving sizes have changed since the original Food Frequency Questionnaires
• Total red meat was claimed to have a higher risk than both processed red meat and unprocessed red meat. Total red meat is the sum of the other two. It can’t be worse than both.
• The relative risk numbers grabbed the headlines; the absolute risk differences were a fraction of one per cent.

Since we don't get a column like Zoë's for every study, the takeaway message about studies like this is that "correlation doesn't mean causation."  All they can possibly find is correlation.  Second to that is to know that the lobbying group with largest impact on society has got to be the vegan lobby.  It’s good to realize that it's just the latest paper from the Harvard correlation study factory.  All their papers promote plants and condemn animal foods.  And all of it, every one I've ever seen, is junk.

The easiest place to find correlations is in climate research.  Have you seen a story about climate change doing something or other and thought, "climate change; is there nothing it can't do?"  Think correlations, not causation.  For example, Watts Up With That published a story this week that says climate change is causing more allergies.  

Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) ran a segment during its local morning edition titled, “Climate change is contributing to an extended allergy season.”

The author's point is that it could be true, might even be a cause and effect relationship, but it's a negative consequence to something that's good for the world in general.  Some people will need to get more treatments, but that's not everyone (I'm one - I've had allergies since my teenage years).  By and large, allergies are treatable. 

Since correlation sells, I want to drop a simple idea that I haven't seen anywhere else.  Let's believe for the moment that global temperatures are increasing, and ignore the big questions that raises.  That means that anything else that can be found to be increasing in the time period in which temperatures are rising will be found to be directly correlated to climate change.  Conversely, anything that was found to be decreasing in time is inversely correlated to climate change.  Perhaps you could say climate change was endangering species.  Never mind.  That's been done.

In the first piece, instead of saying eating red meat causes diabetes, you can just as accurately say climate change causes diabetes.  The two things have increased in the world in the same time period.  Climate change causes microplastics in the Pacific ocean.  Without doing the research, I bet if you went back to the 1950s, let alone the late 1800s temperature reference period, you wouldn't find the word microplastics or even the concept.  Today, it's hard to go a week without seeing a microplastics story. 

Think of it!  No more need to waste time compiling fake data; if they're both increasing, one caused the other.  Food Frequency Questionnaires? Fuggedaboutit. Just ask the AI to fill it out or make it up completely.  You know people have been getting bigger and more obese in America.  It's going up, it may not go up exactly at the same slope as temperature (pictured below and far from constant) but it correlates with global temperatures so just say that climate change is causing people to get bigger and more obese.  Or red meat consumption. Your choice. If you find data that says vegetable consumption has gone up - ever notice "fruits and vegetables" has become one word, fruitsanvegetables? - you can conclude climate change caused it. You could conclude fruitsanvegetables consumption caused Americans to get bigger and fatter, but that'll get you cancelled.

University of Alabama Huntsville measure of the lower atmosphere temperature from 1979 to last month.  From Watts Up With That

Intuitive Machines Delays their Lunar Lander Mission

Intuitive Machines' IM-1 lunar lander mission has slipped from NET (No Earlier Than) November 16 until NET January 12.  A mission slipping out a couple of months is hardly news, especially a first mission from a startup.  The reason, though, is a bit unusual.  But let me start at the beginning, at an announcement from this past Tuesday, Oct 24. 

In a statement issued after the markets closed, the company said its IM-1 mission is now scheduled to launch on a Falcon 9 in a “multi-day” window that opens Jan. 12 from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A. The mission had been scheduled to launch in a six-day window that opened Nov. 16.  [Note: more detailed description of the mission at that link, or the article here based on it. - SiG]

The issue has nothing to do with the lander itself.  It's due to how busy the launch facilities are.  The mission is flying on a Falcon 9, and they're almost as frequent and dependable as the municipal bus lines around here.  

The company did not elaborate on the reasons for the delay. However, executives warned at a media event Oct. 3 that “pad congestion” at LC-39A could delay their launch. The mission has to launch from that pad, rather than nearby Space Launch Complex 40, because only LC-39A is equipped to fuel the lander with methane and liquid oxygen propellants on the pad shortly before liftoff.

That pad is used for Falcon 9 crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station as well as Falcon Heavy launches. The pad is scheduled to host the Falcon 9 launch of the CRS-29 cargo mission Nov. 5 followed by a Falcon Heavy mission for the Space Force in late November. Converting the pad between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches can take up to three weeks.

Most of you are aware that SpaceX has been duplicating facilities from LC-39A that are necessary for Dragon launches (both crew and cargo variants) at SLC-40.  While they seem to work faster than anyone else in the business, they're also interrupted more than anyone else in the business with their aggressive launch schedules and that project isn't done just yet.  To be complete, I'm not certain the ability to load propellants like they need is going to be available at SLC-40 either.  

There has been an undercurrent showing up in various news sources that the pace of launches all across the US is stretching launch capabilities everywhere: Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg, Virginia, all of it.  Last Saturday, Oct. 21, a SpaceX launch broke last year's all time record number of launches in one calendar year from the Cape, with 10 Saturdays left in the year (1/1/24 is on a Monday).

The Nova-C lander built by Intuitive Machines seen during a media day Oct. 3 for the upcoming IM-1 mission. Credit: SpaceNews/Jeff Foust

ULA Announces Christmas Eve target for Vulcan Centaur first launch 

While SpaceX has targeted approximately 20 more launches just from Cape Canaveral for calendar '23, dates aren't sure enough for us to say that's it for the year and we're looking at well over 90 launches for the year.  If everything listed at NextSpaceflight.com were to launch, I think they'd get more like 110 launches.

 ULA announced this week that the first Vulcan Centaur launch has been set for Christmas Eve.  

In an interview with CNBC used to announce the launch date, Tory Bruno, chief executive of ULA, said the date is driven by the requirements of Peregrine. “We’re going to a part of the moon where they need very carefully controlled lighting conditions and they also have to stay in radio communication with the Deep Space Network,” he said. “When you put the two together, we get just a few days every month.”

It "just so happens" the first days they feel they can try for are December 24, 25 & 26.  There are more days in January, and judging by the phase of the moon probably around January 22, 23 & 24.  (The last day of both three day sets is the day before the full moon.)  The "Peregrine" that Bruno refers to is that this first Vulcan mission will be carrying Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander to the moon.  There has been a race to be the first NASA CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) mission to land on the moon and Intuitive Machines moving from November to January appears to hand that opportunity back to Astrobotic's Peregrine.

EDIT 2202 EDT 10/27:  Thanks to first comment from Beans pointing out that I opened with a nonsense sentence that moved it from January 16 to January 12, not November 16 to Jan. 12.  That was a couple of sentences later. 

NASA's Next Flying Instrument in Space Might Be Very Different

I've written quite a bit about the Ingenuity helicopter now on Mars, including how the success of the little flying drone was impacting future missions.  Thanks to Space.com, I've come across a "next generation" flying drone, called Dragonfly, being worked on for a future mission to Saturn's moon Titan that might be flying in the not too distant future.  It's very different from Ingenuity.

One of the big problems in the design of Ingenuity was that Mars' atmosphere is very thin.  One source I've seen said flying on Mars is equivalent to flying at 100,000 feet here on Earth.  Ingenuity has never flown above 66 feet on Mars. By contrast, Titan, while smaller than Mars, has an atmosphere that's denser than ours, with a surface pressure 50 percent higher.  The combination of having lower surface gravity and denser atmosphere seems to make the task of flying on Mars easier.    

A section from a Space.com infographic on Titan.  Like many infographics, it's too "tall" to reproduce here. 

Dragonfly is going to differ from Ingenuity in an important way.  While the article doesn't describe it in any detail, it refers to the drone being a nuclear-powered, car-sized, eight propeller drone and provides this conceptual rendering of it. 

(Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

Testing is now underway on NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft, a nuclear-powered, car-sized aerial drone that will look for potential precursors to life on Saturn's moon, Titan. But before Dragonfly can take to the sky, NASA has to make sure it can withstand the moon's unique environment.

...

The lander will traverse Titan's nitrogen-rich atmosphere using four dual-coaxial rotors, but to ensure that these rotors can perform under such conditions, the Dragonfly team has conducted numerous tests at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, including operating the drone's rotors in an wind tunnel that can simulate the atmospheric conditions on Saturn's largest moon.

Dragonfly's main goal is to study the complex chemistry on Titan, the only moon or even planet known to have liquid on its surface.  Not water, but liquid ethane and methane falls like rain, forming lakes.  Equipped with cameras, sensors, and samplers, Dragonfly will investigate areas of Titan known to contain organic materials like those two and possible others.  Special interest is on regions where organic chemicals might have encountered liquid water beneath the moon's icy surface in the past.

Four Dragonfly test campaigns have [been] conducted: Two in a 14-by-22 foot subsonic tunnel, and another two at a 16-foot Transonic Dynamics Tunnel (TDT). The subsonic tunnel is used to validate fluid dynamic models developed by mission scientists, while the variable-density heavy gas capability of the TDT is used to validate computer models in simulated atmospheric conditions Dragonfly will likely encounter on Titan.

The most recent testing, held in June, involved a half-scale Dragonfly model with hundreds of test runs, said Bernadine Juliano, APL's test lead for the project. 

"We tested conditions across the expected flight envelope at a variety of wind speeds, rotor speeds, and flight angles to assess the aerodynamic performance of the vehicle," Juliano said. "We completed more than 700 total runs, encompassing over 4,000 individual data points. All test objectives were successfully accomplished and the data will help increase confidence in our simulation models on Earth before extrapolating to Titan conditions."

Sounds like encouraging news. There was no mention of a mission name or date, and the few searches I tried didn't turn up anything. Since there's a long lead time for deep space missions like this, I'll SWAG that it will be in the 2030s.