Tory Bruno Hypes Vulcan After Their Successful First Flight

Space News starts out this article by pointing out that rumors of an impending sale of United Launch Alliance are reaching a crescendo, so I think that's a good thing to keep in mind as you digest this story, based on a presentation CEO Tory Bruno made for ULA at a January 31 SpaceCom conference in Orlando.  In light of some of the things he talked about, it does come across as trying to capture some glory for the company.  And maybe goose the price up a little.

Speaking about the much delayed first test flight of the Vulcan Centaur, he said it went exceptionally well, with no issues reported during the countdown or after liftoff.

“That was a perfect mission,” he said of the launch, which placed Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander on a highly elliptical lunar transfer orbit. “Dead nominal flight throughout, and a bullseye insertion in the end.”

That was in contrast with the reputation first launches of new vehicles have, which historically have high failure rates. “I’ve done about three dozen first launches, and generally one of two things happen: either it blows up or it has significant anomalies in flight,” he said. “I have never seen as clean a first launch” as Vulcan.

One of the topics he seems to have spent some time on was their development process.  

“You can fly, fail, fix; nothing wrong with it,” he said. ULA instead took a “rigorous design process: have your failures in ground tests, have them in the computer, have them in the sim lab and have them on paper. That’s how this was done and my guys just did an outstanding job.”

While this can be taken as a mild shot at SpaceX, I think most would agree that it's undoubtedly cheaper to find an error in a simulation than to find it by blowing up a rocket. Experience shows, though, that simulation isn't always "plug and chug" straightforward.  It depends on not only exactly how good the model is that the engineers create to analyze, but how good the simulation programs are.  This is a complex thing to try to summarize, but simulations are not infallible.  Consider the explosion of the Centaur stage last year; that had passed all the simulations. 

It's easier to believe a test flight than a simulation, recognizing that a flight tests one set of conditions and a simulation can test more than one.  There are situations that are mathematically impossible to derive closed-form solutions for and situations where interactions between the huge number of things being simulated lead to unpredictable combinations. 

I suppose it's unavoidable that he also spent some time patting himself and the rest of leadership on their backs.

Another factor, he argued, was a transformation of the company he led after joining the company in 2014. He described the company then as one in crisis, having lost access to Russian-built RD-180 engines used by the Atlas 5 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea as well as competition from SpaceX, which sued the U.S. Air Force to gain access to national security launches that ULA then held a monopoly on.

“A business in that situation might go broke. In fact, most of them do,” Bruno said. He undertook several measures to turn the company around, from reducing costs and changing the company’s product line to more commercial approaches and accepting it will have to compete. “The plan was we were going to shrink and become competitive and then we’re going to grow.”

As we've talked about before, ULA was formed as a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin in 2006.  The reports are that both companies are considering selling it.  The two names that seem to be at the top of rumor pile are Blue Origin and the private equity fund Cerberus Capital Management.  Blue Origin, of course, is developing a competitor to Vulcan, the New Glenn, but they also sell their BE-4 engines to ULA.  Vulcan is shaping up to be a valuable platform, and their winning portion of National Security launches is an asset for potential buyers to consider.  Bruno stresses that Vulcan can achieve "high energy" orbits that no one else can - yet. 

“When Atlas flies out in about a year, this will be the only high-energy rocket left in the world,” he said, serving “the most critical and important missions, unique missions, for national security.”

That approach, he said, was proven with the NSSL Phase 2 contracts. “There’s a lot of high-energy missions in there and we designed for that,” he said, such as missions that involve direct injection of payloads into geostationary orbit, which he said will be a growing share of both Phase 2 and the upcoming Phase 3 contracts.

“We run about 34% cheaper on a high-energy mission than the other one, SpaceX, does,” he argued. “We put all our bets nine years ago in the right places.”

In addition to those NSSL Phase 2 launches for the government, they also have the Kuiper constellation launches for Amazon - 38 of the booked 70 Vulcan launches are for the private sector. 

ULA Chief Executive Tory Bruno discussed the transformation of his company in a Jan. 31 speech at SpaceCom. Credit: SpaceNews/Jeff Foust

Time For Our Annual Trip to Orlando

I guess I shouldn't call it an annual trip since we've missed two of the last four years.  On the other hand, everyone missed the first of those two (2021) because there was no hamfest due to the Covidiocy, like 99% of everything else cancelled that year.  Last year was because of my surgery, which was two weeks before the 'fest, but I was under orders not to sit in one place "too long" - like the 90 minute drive each way to where it's held and then home.  Put that way, we've missed making it once.

That's a very roundabout way of saying this weekend is the annual Orlando hamfest.  It was our 41st annual visit to the hamfest, and unlike most years since I retired, we went over today, Saturday, which is always the most crowded day.  It has been cool here, but warmed into the upper 70s and even low 80s as the day went by; I wore a short-sleeved polo shirt and was comfortable all day.  By the time the temperature got into that "the sun is not your friend" range, clouds came along and kept it comfortable.  

As I've said before the Orlando HamCation (real name) is now generally referred to as the second largest in the country behind only Dayton's Hamvention (which is only Dayton in name - it's held in Xenia, Ohio).  Dayton tends to be the one where major products are announced.  Absolutely not related to any of that is we unknowingly attended the last Dayton Hamvention in Dayton, Ohio, in 2016.  I mentioned being there, but that was before it was announced the arena where they held the Hamvention was being torn down.

Two years ago, we were late ordering our tickets and had to pick them up at the show.  This year, we ordered them in time to get the tickets in the mail - we ordered around Christmas.   We got out of the house at a less than optimum time from the standpoint of lines and crowds at the hamfest.  We parked close to as far from the entrance of the main building as it was possible to be and did quite a bit of walking.  Unsurprisingly, it turns out the preparing for last Saturday's 70 mile bike ride does, in fact, making walking a couple of miles over the course of a day rather more tolerable than not doing that bike ride prep. 

Obligatory picture #1, inside the main building looking toward the west end.  Much of the main building is displays from major radio manufacturers like Icom, Kenwood, Yaesu, and Flex, as well as antenna manufacturers and others.  The west half of the building has a couple of larger businesses and some that maybe had "luck of the draw" that got them into that building. 

Obligatory picture #2, the biggest building, dedicated to individuals and smaller businesses that rent indoor tables to sell from.  This is from the west end looking east.  There were vendors selling old model digital cameras for $2 or $3 apiece, the same price as old calculators.  Lots of older model laptops, tablets and computers of all types, along with the obligatory older radios.  Like all of those Icom boxes on the tables closest to the camera.  

As always, a pleasant way to spend the day.  We only ran across a couple of friends and that was when we first walked into the place.  Didn't spend much, just picked up a couple of little things that have their price doubled when you buy them online, once shipping gets added.

Strongest X-Flare of Cycle 25 Erupted Today

It wasn't pointed at Earth, so all effects observed so far and all predicted are pretty mild, but sunspot group AR3575 burped out an X3.4 class solar flare and Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) this morning at 1314 UTC or 8:14 AM EST.  Group AR3575 had rotated around the sun's limb in the last 48 hours so it was pointed at over 90 degrees away from Earth.  NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:

While instruments in space don't all have this handicap, the instruments that measured the flare's strength could have had their readings reduced by its position over the limb of the sun so it's the realm of possibility that this flare was stronger than X3.4.  The previous strongest flare of cycle 25 was an X2.8 flare on Thursday, Dec. 14.  

This morning's flare triggered a warning of an S2 or Moderate Solar Radiation Storm.  NOAA lists these characteristics of an S2 storm. 

Biological: Passengers and crew in high-flying aircraft at high latitudes may be exposed to elevated radiation risk.
Satellite operations: Infrequent single-event upsets possible.
Other systems: Small effects on HF propagation through the polar regions and navigation at polar cap locations possibly affected.

Space.com has a video that shows the eruption in several parts of the spectrum, viewable here.  

As we move toward or through the peak of cycle 25, this sort of thing is more likely than a year ago.  This is the sun today as posted on SpaceWeather.com, and there's an obvious, big sunspot group in the southern hemisphere (3576) that has the magnetic configuration to produce more flares and CMEs. 

For my fellow hams, solar terrestrial indices have been good, with solar flux in the 180s and K index has remained low until the last 3 hour window of the 9th, when it popped up to K=3.  I've heard nothing even remotely like the conditions that brought in New Zealand and Australia on 6m (50 MHz) a couple of weeks ago.

OK, Who Had Central Florida Earthquake for 2024?

I thought I was coming up with a once in a lifetime story back in 2020 when I wrote a piece "Who Had Florida Earthquake On Their 2020 Card?"  Last night, we had another earthquake, only this time much closer to my home. 

When we got up this morning, Mrs. Graybeard opened up Firefox as she usually does to the USGS latest earthquakes website. We were stunned to see a report of magnitude 4.0 quake 163 km east of Cape Canaveral or just over 100 miles offshore.  The time is reported as 0348UTC on the 8th, or 10:48PM EST - approximately five to ten minutes after I fell asleep last night.  While the number of people responding to the USGS page's "Did you feel it?" query was in the low 30s before 8:00 AM this morning, this evening it shows 162 people reported feeling it, including people well inland.

The quake had no effect on SpaceX's launch of NASA's PACE satellite, which went off successfully at 1:33 AM EST, just under three hours later.  I've seen no references to anything done due to the quake.

The 2020 quake I talked about was in the extreme NW corner of Florida, pretty much on the Florida/Alabama state line and far closer to Mobile, Alabama than well-known panhandle cities like Panama City Beach.  That NW corner area had reported ten other earthquakes in the previous year.  A report I saw that went away quickly from a news source this afternoon said that the closest quake to last night's was off St. Augustine, about 100 miles north of last night's and about 20 years ago.

Florida is a big state, and is often thought of as three different states: the very southernmost part from the keys through around Lake Okeechobee, the central part from the Lake up to around where the Suwanee river meets the gulf coast, then the panhandle area that stretches 370 miles east to west.  The western part of the panhandle is on Central time; the dividing line is west of Tallahassee, close to the west side of the Apalachicola Forest. 

As with the 2020 quake, nobody was hurt and no damage was reported, but it still brought the same idea to mind:

Revised version of the meme in the 2020 post. 

India's Chandrayaan-2 Moon Orbiter Catalogs Solar Flares

Not just any solar flares, a new kind first described in the 1980s.  The kind of solar flares that we see the most pictures and video loops of are fast, dramatic events.  These occur when the magnetic field lines of the sun tangle, or cross, then snap and reconnect around sunspots. These outflows of radiation are the ones you hear talk of doom coming from; when strong enough, they can damage satellites and even affect the power and communication infrastructure on the ground.  

The new kind of solar flares don't release energy as quickly and then slowly dissipate.  Until Chandrayaan-2 began observing these flares, around 100 had been observed.  That's 100 since the 1980s.  Using Chandrayaan-2's lunar orbiter, a team of researchers detected 1,400 such slow-rising flares in three years.  

"There was a consensus in the solar physics community, since the early 2000s, that most solar flares are these rapidly rising intensities, followed by a slow decay," Aravind Bharathi Valluvan, team leader and an astrophysics graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, told Space.com. "However, what my research, along with my team, has shown is that not all solar flares follow that pattern."

Valluvan explained that the solar science community had overlooked slower-rising flares, or "hot thermal" flares because computer algorithms used to detect solar flares in observational data have focused on fast-rising, or "impulsive" flares. Impulsive flares are defined as covering the maximum area they possibly can in under half their lifespan. 

"We did not do that, and instead took a more general approach. What we saw is that there are a lot more slow-rising flares, and it's not an insignificant subset. In fact, they form a quarter of all flares," they continued. "So, we need to be studying hot thermal flares as a separate population. Currently, our understanding about these slower type flashes is quite limited."

As is often the case, the more these hot thermal flares are studied the more questions arise.  To begin with, the magnetic reconnection process that's believed to generate both impulsive flares and hot thermal flares is rapid, which should give rise to a rapid energy release as well. Which says that it might be the climb of the flare's ejected material through the suns photosphere that's different, instead of the way the flare is created.  

Rapid-rising impulse flares are associated with temperatures of around 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius). But slow-rising flares get their moniker "hot thermal flares" because they are associated with even greater temperatures of up to 54 million degrees Fahrenheit (30 million degrees Celsius).

Another significant conclusion of the the lunar orbiter's observations is that there are no "medium" speed flares between the faster impulse flares and the slower hot thermal flares.  Trying to understand that seems like an important step. 

There are more things to study.  A question researchers puzzle over is why the solar corona is hotter than the sun's "surface," or photosphere.  Not just "hotter" but hundreds of times hotter, despite being closer to the sun's fusion core.

"Why is the atmosphere hotter than the surface of the sun? That is something that solar flares have always been hypothesized as a solution for, but we never found evidence for this," Valluvan concluded. "These new types of flashes could be a potential resolution for this coronal heating mystery. And that is one of the things that I am most excited about."

"On July 2nd (2314 UT), giant sunspot AR3354 exploded, producing a long duration X1-class solar flare. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash."  From the July 3, 2023 post about that flare.

Small Space News Story Roundup 29

A couple of interesting launches coming up, but I'll start with an "already happened" item. 

Lucy's Engine Burn/Course Correction Went as Planned

Coincidentally, this was covered in Roundup 28 last Tuesday, but Space.com is reporting that Lucy is headed back to Earth for a Christmas of '24 flyby after a successful firing of its engines.  This was the first firing of those engines since the probe was launched.  

NASA's asteroid-hopping Lucy spacecraft is on its way back to Earth for a Christmas-time rendezvous this year, before continuing its mission to investigate space rocks left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

The long journey home for Lucy began when it performed the largest blast of its main engine planned for its entire 12-year mission. The spacecraft, which launched in October 2021, fired its main engines on Saturday (Feb. 3) for more than 36 minutes. The operation followed the first blast of Lucy's main engines on Jan. 31, which lasted for just 6 minutes.

The December flyby isn't just a visit, it's absolutely essential to the mission because it's a gravitational assist using the angular momentum picked up from the maneuver to help Lucy get to Jupiter's L4 Trojan asteroids by the summer of 2027.   

SpaceX to Launch NASA's PACE Science Mission

Thursday morning at 1:33 AM EST (06:25 UTC), SpaceX is set to launch NASA's Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) ocean science satellite from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's SLC-40. It's an instantaneous launch window, but into a polar orbit which is still unusual from CCSFS. 

It was only a few years ago, August of 2020, that we had the first launch into a polar orbit from Cape Canaveral since 1960.  It's an odd story, a cold war story, that comes down to Fidel Castro complaining that fragments of a booster hit a cow on Cuba, and since our guys couldn't prove with absolute certainty that we didn't hit that cow, despite all the progress in vehicles and infrastructure, it wasn't until that launch of an Argentine satellite by SpaceX that a flight out of CCSFS went into a polar orbit.  Like that launch, the path will be toward the south and a sun-synchronous orbit, meaning the satellite will see a given spot on Earth at the same time every day.

After stage separation, Falcon booster B1081-4 is to conduct a boostback burn with its Merlin engines, followed by a return-to-launch-site landing onto the concrete pad at Landing Zone 1, while the fairings will splash down in the ocean to be retrieved by SpaceX’s support ship Bob.

The second stage will take PACE to a circular orbit of 676.5 kilometers at a 98-degree orbital inclination, with spacecraft separation occurring roughly 13 minutes after launch.

Space Force weather squadron is predicting a 50/50 chance of good enough weather to launch. A backup launch window is 24 hours later at the same time. 

SpaceX Targeting Valentine's Day for Next Private Lunar Landing Mission

A mission that has gotten considerably more column space here than PACE is Intuitive Machines' IM-1 lunar landing mission, as we keep track of private company missions attempting to do a soft landing on the moon. This mission has been delayed a few times already, but has now reached a possible launch date on the rotation.

IM-1 is scheduled to lift off on a Falcon 9 rocket from CCSFS on Wednesday morning, Feb. 14, at 12:57 a.m. EST (0557 UTC), sending the robotic Nova-C lander "Odysseus" toward the moon.  There are three days in the launch window to reach the spot on the moon they plan to land, Feb 14, 15 & 16, but if they can't successfully launch, the next three day window is in March.  

With a week to go until launch, work continues and a major test is planned for tomorrow, Feb. 7.  

"We'll be performing essentially a tanking test, or wet dress rehearsal, for that spacecraft on February 7, and we're tracking well to a February 14 launch," Scheiman said on Monday during a briefing that focused on SpaceX's planned Feb. 7 launch of NASA's PACE Earth-observing spacecraft.  [Note: Scheiman refers to Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX's director of civil satellite missions.]

It's too far ahead of Next Tuesday night's/Wednesday morning's launch date to have a meaningful weather forecast. 

Computer rendering showing the Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander on the surface of the moon with Earth in the background. (Image credit: Intuitive Machines)

Having A Weird Winter? It's Not Climate Change

The biggest problem with the constant harping about the climate and all the restrictions and protests going on is that people seem to have forgotten that there's this thing called "weather" and weather changes for a winter or summer or even for a few years has little to do with climate.  Climate is a long term average, although pinning down the definition of "long term" can be dicey (to me it has to be more than 30 years, maybe 50 years).  There are places that alternate dry periods with wet periods, for example, so that no year ever actually matches the climate numbers.  Add to it the human tendency to remember unusual or extreme events and you get people saying "it snowed more when I was a kid and we haven't had snow in three years - it's the climate!"  In reality, it could be that they remember their childhood snowy days because they were exciting (no school!) and in any case weren't alive long enough to know if it snowed like that regularly.

Where am I going?  Why the lead in? 

Back near the end of last July, I passed along a story that I'd read about the monstrous underwater volcano called Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai that erupted over a year and half before then, on January 15 of '22.  Within a week of the eruption it was being noted as one of the most violent eruptions ever seen, with this startling statement from a group that monitors nuclear explosions. 

Titled “A nuclear-test monitor calls Tonga volcano blast 'biggest thing that we've ever seen',” it reports that an international group that monitors for likely atomic detonations has reported that at every one of their sites around the world - 53 of them - the infrasonic wave from the Tongan volcano is the largest thing they've ever measured, even bigger than the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear detonation in history. [BOLD added - SiG]

The point of that article was that the volcano (which I've come to call just Hunga-Tonga - which is probably violating all sorts of protocols) injected three times more water into the upper stratosphere than was originally estimated.  It injected 150-million metric tons or almost 40 Trillion gallons of water vapor into the atmosphere.  The concern expressed then was that water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas and it was going to affect the weather for years.  How big an effect and for how long?  See the part about "most violent eruptions ever seen" - nobody had any real experience to base calculations on. How can anyone trust a model that has never been verified with this sort of situation?

The story has deepened yet again.  Watts Up With That published a story this morning linked to the NOAA Research hub saying that changes have been induced in the atmosphere unlike any ever measured before.  The eruption caused an enormous decrease in stratospheric ozone levels. 

“Our measurements showed that stratospheric ozone concentrations decreased rapidly – by as much as 30% in air with the highest water vapor concentrations – in the immediate wake of the eruption,” said Stephanie Evan, a scientist from the Laboratoire de l’Atmosphère et des Cyclones in France and lead author of the other recent study, published in the journal Science. Evan and colleagues continued to measure ozone concentrations depleted by around 5% across the Indian and Pacific oceans two weeks following the eruption.

This graphic depicts how the ejection of water vapor from Hunga-Tonga volcano accelerated ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Credit: Chelsea Thompson/Chemical Sciences Laboratory

Volcanic aerosols are profoundly important for global climate, as demonstrated by the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption that cooled the planet by 0.5°C (0.9°F) for nearly two years. They can also act as surfaces upon which rapid chemical reactions can take place, leading to the destruction of ozone.

By combining data from the balloon measurements with global satellite data, [Elizabeth] Asher and colleagues found that a large, dense layer of aerosol particles formed in the stratosphere faster than had ever been seen before. These findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The tremendous amount of water vapor that this volcano sent to the stratosphere led to a rapid production of sulfate aerosol particles that we were able to observe within days of the eruption,” explained Asher. Under normal atmospheric conditions, sulfate aerosols form from sulfur dioxide on a timescale of about a month. In this case, rapid measurements provided critical clues for determining the chemical and microphysical processes required to cause these effects – clues that would have vanished if the measurements had been taken a month later.

Just based on the 40 Trillion gallons of water vapor injected into the stratosphere, I think it's likely that temperatures around the globe will be higher than they normally would have been for another couple of years.  While I never heard anyone acknowledge this, during last year's hurricane season, I heard a lot of stories about about warmer sea surface temperatures than expected, and I assumed this was an effect of the Hunga-Tonga eruption.  

How - or even if - the Hunga-Tonga Ozone Hole will affect temperatures hasn't been addressed in the reference articles.  The important point is that all of the effects of the Hunga-Tonga eruption broke the models used to understand these things.  The scientific understanding of aerosol processes in the stratosphere remain one of the largest sources of uncertainty in climate predictions.  Anything you hear about climate, warming, and all that media hype needs to be considered in light of natural events like Hunga-Tonga. 

SpaceX Shows off the Next Three Starship Boosters

That's right, the next three boosters - alongside good portions of another.  Anybody want to say they'll stop producing them after these three?

In a post on X this past Friday (Feb. 2), SpaceX took a stride toward showing that when they talk about wanting to launch Starships often they're not just blowing hot air.  They posted photos of three stacked Super Heavy boosters with a fourth partially stacked alongside, all inside their Megabay building in Boca Chica, Texas, now adorned with the sign calling it Starbase.

You'll notice the grid fins at the top of the three fully-stacked boosters in the center.  On the left you can see a fourth booster that isn't full-sized without grid fins, and I don't know if the round section on the right gets stacked onto it or if that's for another one. 

Their post said, "Super Heavy boosters for the next three flights, with a fourth ready to stack, in the Starbase Megabay"

Starship consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable: Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft called Starship.

When fully stacked, Starship stands about 400 feet (122 meters) tall. It's the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, capable of launching up to 150 tons of payload to low Earth orbit, according to SpaceX's spec sheet.

Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines were rated to produce 16.7 Million pounds of thrust, or just over 506,000 pounds of thrust each.  Since then we've seen later versions of the Raptor claimed to producing more than that, but it's a good number for comparisons.  

The next flight test has been talked about as being this month, we just don't know when.  The usual waits and delays are playing out now: getting the FAA license and any other approvals they need.

A Most Unusual Day

Today is my birthday and I officially turned the page into the Septuagenarian phase of life.  That's right, I turned 70 today.  

Months ago, I started getting a wild hair idea.  As I mentioned back in 2019, in my right sidebar's About Me box, it has included the term "roadie cyclist" for as long as I can recall.  Cycling used to be one of the main activities Mrs. Graybeard and I engaged in; our main exercise/outdoor hobby.  After I started the blog, we went into a phase of riding less often, less distance, and eventually stopped riding altogether.  I'm not sure when we stopped but I made a reference to riding in late 2010 and some other posts into late 2011 make me think we were riding then.  I started riding by myself again in 2018.  

Back around late August, early September, I started getting a wild hair to do one of those things we did in the '90s and '00s.  For our birthdays, we'd ride our age.  While I was riding three days a week in the range of 13 to 14 miles/ride, I got the wild hair to ride 70 miles today. Because we had ridden the local (-ish) club's century ride every year for a decade (100 miles, not km), I had a pretty good idea of how to add miles, and the experience that told me that if you can ride your one day ride's mileage in a week, you'll probably be able to finish your goal ride.  Starting in September, I set a goal to increase my weekly mileage by 3% every week which would get me to 70/week by the first of the year. 

My bike - a 2005 Airborne titanium bike.  There's a bit of a story behind it, at that link up at the top.

Things were going along pretty smoothly until the start of the cool months, when we started getting weeks of really unpleasant weather to ride in, alternating with better weather.  Not "cold" - we've been nowhere near any extreme cold - just either rainy, very windy, or both.  My mileage ridden in December was five miles less than October, and about 70 miles less than November. 

There's a ton of small stories in here, but I'll spare you.  The bottom line is today was the day, the weather was probably the best we've had since November, but I didn't make the 70.  On top of that, it was because of things I should have done automatically - without having to think or plan - and probably would have if it hadn't been nearly 20 years since the last time I did a long ride like this.  

I messed up my hydration and electrolyte balance.  The old rule of thumb about drinking was "drink before you're thirsty" and I didn't obey that.  On top of that, I had nothing like those sports drinks - you know, the ones that are horribly sugar-laden and they dump some table salt into them.  That's not fair.  They put in more than just table salt.  At around mile 62, as I was planning how to get the last 8 miles, I decided to stop for another drink at a gas station/convenience store and had to step off the bike.  I couldn't do it.  I got a horrible leg cramp as I went to pull my leg over the bike.  And then I couldn't pedal because of the cramp.  I eventually called Mrs. Graybeard to come drive me the last 2-1/2 miles home. (Yeah, getting the full eight miles I needed would have been a different route.) 

So that's how I spent my birthday.  As well as much of the last five months. 

Sierra Space's Dream Chaser Preparing for Launch

We haven't had much news about Sierra Space's mini, robotic Space Shuttle called Dream Chaser since early November when it was sent off to NASA's Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio for more testing.  Thursday, February 1, Sierra Space had an event at the facility to show the Dream Chaser off to reporters. 

Reporters were surprised to see Dream Chaser and its cargo module — the vehicles are named "Tenacity" and "Shooting Star," respectively — were stacked vertically, as they will be during launch. The two stood 55 feet tall, a bit under half the height of the Space Shuttle orbiters.

Tenacity?  

"In order to convert bold dreams into bold action, it requires an enormous amount of tenacity, perseverance, confidence, determination and passion. And so we name our products after these emotional characteristics that get you through the hard times," former NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, who's now Sierra Space's chief medical officer, said during Thursday's event. 

"Building Tenacity has been hard," he added. "There's been a lot of things that we've found collectively that didn't always work right the first time. And we learned a lot that Tenacity has gotten us through the last six years, so there was no other name."

Tenacity and Shooting Star will combine for their first mission later this year, and has been mentioned as being on the Cert-2 flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket (a Vulcan is depicted in that video). While the inspiration for the name Tenacity is clear, perhaps the inspiration for Shooting Star as the name for the cargo "trunk" isn't quite as clear.  Until you realize that portion isn't reusable and will be burned up on reentry. 

While Tenacity is designed for up to 15 missions at up to 11,500 pounds of cargo up, Shooting star is a "one and done" craft, like Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo ship. 

But that launch isn't happening until Dream Chaser has been proven to be able to survive the flights it will be making, and that's the primary reason they've moved to NASA's testing facility there in Sandusky, Ohio. The testing capabilities include being able to shake something the size and weight of the Tenacity and Shooting Star integrated into one big assembly at the vibration levels that the Vulcan Centaur will shake the stack.  There are thermal tests as well (just about everyone I've ever met calls them "shake 'n bake" tests) as well as shake 'n bake in a vacuum. 

Tenacity will carry more than 7,800 pounds (3,540 kilograms) of cargo on its first flight, though it could tote up to 11,500 pounds (5,215 kg) on future missions. The space plane is designed to bring home more than 3,500 pounds (1,590 kg) of cargo and experiment samples, while more than 8,700 pounds (3,950 kg) of garbage can be disposed of in the cargo module on reentry.

Goodnight SLIM, Goodnight LEV-1 and LEV-2

It's only fitting that since I did a good night post to India's lunar lander Vikram and rover Pragyan when they turned off for the lunar night (and actually turned off for good), I should do one for JAXA's SLIM lander and it's two miniature Lunar Excursion Vehicles.  (Again, with apologies to Margaret Wise Brown)

As predicted, SLIM shut down as the sun set on Mare Nectaris January 31, here on EST.

Japan's historic SLIM moon lander has powered down ahead of a likely mission-ending cold lunar nighttime — but not before grabbing some final images and loads of science data.  

JAXA's SLIM account on X, formerly Twitter, posted a final image taken by SLIM's navigation camera on Jan. 31 Japan time, while stating that the agency confirmed the spacecraft had entered a dormant state as expected.

There's no denying that SLIM's accomplishments were limited by landing upside down, apparently caused by the failure of one of the two engines that were used for landing.  It's reasonable to call it a partial success, but JAXA is talking bigger than that. 

But whether or not SLIM wakes up, the spacecraft has hit its full and extended mission goals by achieving a precision landing, deploying a pair of small rovers and demonstrating their interoperability, and obtaining a wealth of science data.
...
"Based on the large amount of data we have obtained, we are proceeding with analyses to identify rocks and estimate the chemical composition of minerals, which will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon," a Google machine translation of a Feb. 1 JAXA statement read. 
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"We will announce scientific results as soon as they are obtained," the statement added.

Much like India's Vikram and Pragyan, we can't confidently state the SLIM is done, but neither vehicle was designed to survive the brutally cold lunar night.  All we can say is that the probe will stay "asleep" until sunrise in just about another 14 or 15 days. 

As a tribute, the crew that kept monitoring and working to get what they could out of the lander. 

JAXA team from their X (Twitter) posts.

NASA's Europa Clipper Now Fully Assembled

As Europa Clipper has wound its way through the difficult processes of the design of the mission, design of the space probe itself, selection of the ride to space and so on, we've talked briefly about the mission at various steps along the way.  Today at Space.com, I find a link to an important update from NASA and the JPL  Europa Clipper has had all of its instruments integrated into the spacecraft.  

With less than nine months remaining in the countdown to launch, NASA’s Europa Clipper mission has passed a major milestone: Its science instruments have been added to the massive spacecraft, which is being assembled at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The mission was originally intended to be launched by the SLS, using its Exploration Upper Stage.  When you refer to a part of SLS, it's pretty much always true to add "has been delayed" and the EUS has never flown.  I'm not sure any hardware has actually been built.  By 2019 NASA had asked the White House to get congress to move Europa Clipper to a Falcon Heavy to save a lot of money - a special law had been passed by congress mandating the mission be flown by SLS so it had to be addressed that way.  The complete mission on a Falcon Heavy would cost NASA less than two of the four RS-25 first stage engines of the SLS.  

The White House points out that a private sector rocket, such as the Falcon Heavy, could get the Europa mission to the Jovian moon it's targeting although the mission would take longer.  The trade off is that the Falcon Heavy would save NASA $700 Million, which could be used on other priorities, and moving the mission off the SLS would save one of those rockets for the Artemis moon missions.  When you combine the savings of launch cost for the Europa probe with having an "extra" SLS booster available, the savings climb to $1.5 Billion. 

Next Spaceflight shows a currently scheduled launch date of October 10 at 11:51 AM EST for the Europa Clipper mission. 

[T]he spacecraft will head to Jupiter’s ice-encased moon Europa, where a salty ocean beneath the frozen surface may hold conditions suitable for life. Europa Clipper won’t be landing; rather, after arriving at the Jupiter system in 2030, the spacecraft will orbit Jupiter for four years, performing 49 flybys of Europa and using its powerful suite of nine science instruments to investigate the moon’s potential as a habitable environment.

It doesn't say what month in 2030 the Clipper arrives at Europa, but let's just say six years to get there.

NASA’s Europa Clipper, with all of its instruments installed, is visible in the clean room of High Bay 1 at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Jan. 19. The tent around the spacecraft was erected to support electromagnetic testing.  Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Both the Space.com article and the NASA Europa mission article  have lots of interesting overview-level descriptions of the instruments.  They're largely the same because the Space.com author largely excerpted the NASA article.

Small Space News Story Roundup 28

A couple of stories that caught my eye on an otherwise slow day

SpaceX Launches Cygnus Cargo Module to the ISS

I'm probably the only one alive who called this the Strange Bedfellows mission, or the Odd Couple, but the mission should be called "another routine SpaceX launch" so far.  

Just after noon, 12:07 PM EST, SpaceX launched the Cygnus CG-20 cargo mission to the ISS, carrying 4000 pounds of cargo.  All 19 prior launches of the Cygnus modules have been launched by Northrop Grumman atop their Antares 230 rocket.  Due to the Antares' use of parts from Russia and the Ukraine, NG had to accelerate their dropping of the Antares 230 and attempt to speed development of the replacement Antares 330.  In August of '22, Northrop Grumman signed a deal with SpaceX to launch three of their Cygnus cargo spacecraft.  They're hoping to have the Antares 330 ready to fly by the end of this year. 

The video is pretty routine until the reentry burn of the Falcon 9 heading back to the cape to land near the launch pad the flight originated from, just after the 8:00 mark in the red timer bar you can select.  After that engine burn ends, you'll get views of the booster you've probably never seen before and a beautiful view of the booster landing.

This was the 10th flight for this booster which previously launched Crew-5, GPS III Space Vehicle 06, Inmarsat I6-F2, CRS-28, Intelsat G-37, and four Starlink missions.  

The Cygnus module is scheduled to arrive at the ISS early Thursday morning (4:20 AM EST).  

Our view wasn't great, since the trajectory was toward the NE, which is away from us.  As a general rule winter is the best time to watch launches because all of the various neighbors' trees have lost, or most, of their leaves.  Launches to the SE, like Sunday night's Starlink 6-38 mission, or south for a polar orbit, are the most visible for us. 

NASA's Lucy Probe to Fire Its Main Engine 

The Lucy probe to the Trojan asteroids of Jupiter was launched in October of '21 on a 12 year mission to study the two groups of Trojan asteroids, one ahead of and the other trailing behind the planet in its orbit around the sun. 

On January 31st, Lucy will fire its main engines for the first time since it was launched. This will be followed by a second, larger maneuver, which NASA says is currently set for Saturday (Feb. 3).

The NASA blog page goes on to say:

Combined, these two maneuvers are designed to change the velocity of the spacecraft by around 2,000 mph (approximately 900 meters per second) and will consume roughly half of the spacecraft’s onboard fuel. Each of the prior spacecraft maneuvers have changed the spacecraft’s velocity by less than 10 mph (only a few meters per second) and were small enough to be carried out by the spacecraft’s less powerful thrusters.

This series of engine firings will change Lucy's trajectory to approach Earth for a flyby gravity assist, which will finally get Lucy to Jupiter's L4 Trojan asteroids.

In this image from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Southwest Research Institute, the broad red dashes show the trajectory to date.  It turns to solid red line at Wednesday's and Saturday's engine firings, loops down closer to the sun than Earth's orbit (in blue), and gets the gravity assist from Earth this coming December '24.  From there, a line of shorter red dashes show the path to the L4 Trojans.  With the first encounters in August and September of '27 and others out to November of '28.  

Judging by the complex flight path we've seen before, after Lucy leaves the L4 Trojans, it will fly by Earth for another gravity assist (based on three years to get to the L4 group, that'll be in 2031) and leave to arrive at the L5 Trojans in about another three years after that.  

Surprise! SLIM is Awake!!

Nine days after its topsy-turvy landing on the moon, Japan's SLIM probe suddenly woke up and started talking back to Earth yesterday.   

SLIM phoned home on Sunday (Jan. 28) and engineers quickly resumed operations, JAXA officials wrote in a statement on X...

"We immediately started scientific observations with MBC, and have successfully obtained first light," read the JAXA statement, with "first light" referring to the first use of an instrument to take images. MBC, the Multi-Band Camera, is designed to scour the lunar surface for the composition of olivine through analyzing the light signatures, or spectra, of reflected sunlight, according to the Planetary Society. 

Olivine could be a clue to early solar system formation of rocky worlds like our own. The mineral is one of the main parts of the Earth's mantle, and also tends to be concentrated in lunar locations "where the crust is relatively thin," states a 2010 paper in the journal Nature that includes JAXA participation. One of those zones is the moon's south pole, where NASA, Japan and a coalition of other nations under the U.S.-led Artemis Accords plan to send astronauts later in the 2020s.

SLIM's landed in Shioli Crater, a zone filled with old impact rubble within the Mare Nectaris or Sea of Nectar.  The crater is roughly 200 miles south of Mare Tranquillitatis or the Sea of Tranquility - which is where the Apollo 11's first human landing took place in 1969

SLIM sent back photos of its landing zone on Sunday and JAXA is now "sorting out rocks of interest, assigning a nickname to each of them, with intent of communicating their relative sizes smoothly by the names," officials added in an English-language press release.

For reasons known only to the mission planners, they've chosen to name these rocks after dog breeds they estimate as being similar in size to that rock. 

Even better science might be possible soon: "Preparation is underway to promptly conduct 10-band high-resolution spectroscopic observations, once the solar illumination condition improves and SLIM recovers by the power generated by the solar array," the press release added.

JAXA doesn't know how long SLIM will continue to work.  Suddenly waking up must mean that the sun has started to shine on SLIM's solar panels, somehow.  It's not clear to me how much is being illuminated in the pictures of SLIM upside down on the moon, but I wasn't really expecting it to wake up at all.  All we know is that it can't work if the sun can't hit those solar panels.  

How many days until sunset?  Poking around with a NASA interactive photo display of the moon, it looks to me like SLIM can't have more than two more days of sunshine; by January 31 the sun will set.  Recall from earlier stories that SLIM was not designed to survive the two week long, brutally cold, lunar night, much like India's Chandrayaan 3.  They held out hope Chandrayaan would survive the night and start working when the sun rose.  We can hope the same for SLIM.

Comment Bleg or Reader Poll

A couple of days ago, I added a replacement for the silver spot price widget that had gone inactive, this one from different precious metals dealer, Apmex.  Right below my "note on comments," 2nd item down in the right column.

I've since noticed that while it always stays visible on this computer, where I pretty much stay logged into Gmail and the blog all the time, it isn't always visible on my wife's computer but is visible sometimes.  Unpredictably.  

I'd like to ask if other people are seeing the spot prices or not, to decide if it stays or if I look for a new one.  If it's more than a few folks that can't see it, I guess it needs to be replaced.  If she's the only one that can't see it, maybe it stays.  I think she has privacy set as high as she can on Duck Duck Go, so maybe that's the reason.  I suppose that means if you're likewise configured for as much security as you can get and don't see or can see it, I'd like to know that.

If you don't know, which means you've never seen it, it's not supposed to be an empty white screen in a blue frame.  It's supposed to look like this:

I'd swear that at some point in the past I saw a way to do polls on the blog but don't see it now.  Just leave a comment and I'll keep an eye on it for a few days.  

 

EDIT 01/29/24 0705 PM to Add:  the first 13 remarks were 12:1 not working properly vs. working properly.  I'll save you the effort to comment: the box is now gone and I'm looking for another way. 

 

 

About Last Sunday

A week ago,  I left the cryptic message about being blindsided by the day.  About it being a “busy day that got the better of me.  It didn't help that something I was hoping would happen showed up much later than would have been convenient.  I promise I'll get to that story.”  

I didn’t end that with “I'll get to that story someday,” but I should have.  Today is that someday.  This is all ham radio related, and in the narrow specialty of contacting (working) distant places on VHF frequencies.  In particular, the 6 meter ham band.  If you’re not interested, I expect to be back at regular topics tomorrow.

Last weekend was the third ARRL VHF contest: (June, September and January). My overall impression is that's the order from the best to worst of the three in terms of what I've heard, but I went ahead and started operating when the contest started at 2PM EST.  It wasn't open for long periods, and it was mostly to a very small area in New England, but it wasn't completely dead.  I worked a few stations in the locator grid squares called FN42, 43 and 44.  As the day went on, it shifted to the west like FN10 or 20 and EM19.  I worked a couple of grids that I worked before but haven't confirmed.  And then the band shut down and I heard nothing/nobody except for a handful north and south of us.  Basically from the Florida/Georgia line down to Miami.

Compared to Saturday, Sunday was very slow and there were many times I was honestly concerned my radio or station was seriously substandard.  Until it wasn't.  I went in to play on the radio around 1:30, after church and lunch, and for hours heard nothing but that same handful of guys spread north and south of me.  I'd get one 15 second interval where it would show someone somewhere north along the eastern seaboard; maybe Pennsylvania or Delaware, nearer or farther, but not long enough to identify whom to call let alone have a contact, yet I'd regularly hear one of the locals calling or working someone else out of state.  Suddenly, in the evening, it opened to Texas then Mexico and finally New Zealand. 

I started hearing the Florida side of the Florida to New Zealand exchanges, which has happened a few times before, and I suddenly started hearing the guys in New Zealand.  It was 0045 UTC or 7:45 PM EST when I started calling one of the New Zealand stations.  It took a minute of calling before he answered me, but after that, it was as close to ideal as contacts get.  I sent a signal report (15 seconds transmit), he sent my signal report (15 second listening) then another 15 seconds each to thank each other and my first New Zealand contact on 50.313 MHz FT8 was complete.  

But the night wasn’t over.  About a half hour later, 0113 UTC, I copied another guy from NZ calling CQ (“calling anyone”) and called him back.  Got him on my first call, and again, a minute later he was in my logbook.  This guy belongs to a 6m group I follow on groups.io and we’ve actually swapped emails.  That means he’s as close to being someone I actually know as there is in New Zealand.  Within 24 hours, he had confirmed the contact, using the American Radio Relay League’s online electronic QSL system called Logbook of The World.  (QSL is the ham Q-signal for confirmation of contact) 

That was around the time I came out to put up the blog post, but the fun continued on Monday (local time).  In a similar way, the band was dead virtually all day, until almost the exact same times.  Since I already had two NZ contacts, I was looking for other countries in the south Pacific showing up on 6m.  Monday night, I worked Australia.  Twice.  

Solar-terrestrial conditions were similar both days.  The 10.7cm solar flux was in the 180s and 190s, and the geomagnetic field K index was almost at minor storm levels and decreasing.  I’ve had good luck under those conditions.   

The conditions degraded over the next couple of days, so there were no more encounters like that.  There’s a line about flying an airplane that goes something like, “hours of boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.”  Substitute “excitement” for terror, and that’s hunting for those rare contacts on the radio.  After something like this, it might be possible to explain how the signals got from here to there but predicting it is another story.  I try to keep myself ready to go back to the radio room when the solar flux is above 170 and preferably when the K index is coming down from levels we ordinarily tend to avoid.  This is still the quiet time for 6m.  It will become more active as we get into spring.  This time of year in the southern hemisphere is like mid July here when conditions are better.

The Strange Bedfellows Cargo Mission to Fly Tuesday

Tuesday, January 30, will be the first ever flight of a Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo capsule on a SpaceX Falcon 9.  The mission, called NG-20 is set for NET Tuesday, January 30, at 12:07 PM EST.

You'll probably remember that we've talked about this before, and the earliest post appears to be August of '22, so almost 1-1/2 years, saying Northrop Grumman contracted with SpaceX for three launches.  The issue was that the Antares rocket normally used to launch Cygnus was becoming non-procurable and the successor version of Antares wouldn't be available in time.  I won't repeat all the details in that article, but it explains the details of what forced them to rely on SpaceX while they wait for the next version of the Antares rocket being built for Northrop Grumman by yet another competitor, Firefly Aerospace.  

As we've talked about before, it didn't seem that this would be seamless and a Cygnus would just mount on top of a Falcon 9 like the Cargo Dragon capsule does.  Modifications were required. 

During a pre-flight teleconference on Friday (Jan. 26), William Gerstenmaier, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX, said that the Falcon 9's payload fairing, the shell that surrounds and protects a spacecraft during ascent while atop a rocket, had to be modified to add a hatch measuring 5 feet by 4 feet (1.5m by 1.2m). The hatch gives ground crews the ability to add extra "late-load" cargo before launch including special treats like ice cream for the astronauts aboard the space station, Gerstenmaier said.

Gerstenmaier added that the complication of addition of the hatch contributed to the decision to delay the launch one day to Jan. 30. That's because the area inside that hatch must be environmentally controlled, since any contamination on Cygnus's docking hardware could affect how well it berths at the ISS.

"So that's a pretty intense activity," Gerstenmaier said. "This will be the first time we've done that. It's taken a lot of modifications on our part to get this hardware ready to go fly."

Gee, it was so complicated it delayed the launch ONE day?  All so the ISS crew could get "special treats like ice cream."  I'm kidding.  I suspect changing upper end of the F9's upper stage was more involved and Gerstenmaier is talking about a minor part of the changes.  

A Northrop Grumman Cygnus freighter spacecraft in between two halves of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket payload fairing. (Image credit: NASA/Kennedy Space Center) 

Our weather is looking pretty close to perfect for a launch at noon on Tuesday.   Booster 1077 will be flying for the 10th time and will return to the Cape to land.  Those Return To Launch Site (RTLS) landings usually add some neat sights and sometimes even neat sounds.  

America's 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. That week is January 27th through February 1st; while the years run from 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.  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 on February 1, 2023, 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 13 year-old 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.

 

 

It's Official - Mars Ingenuity's Mission is Over

It has been officially announced that Ingenuity helicopter will not fly again.  The money quote to start with seems like it should go to Eric Berger at Ars Technica, since he led with the story before NASA said anything.

Something has gone wrong with NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars. Although the US space agency has not made any public announcements yet, a source told Ars that the plucky flying vehicle had an accident on its last flight and broke one of its blades. It will not fly anymore. (Shortly after this article was published, NASA confirmed the end of Ingenuity's mission).

To quote from that link to NASA JPL, 

NASA’s history-making Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has ended its mission at the Red Planet after surpassing expectations and making dozens more flights than planned. While the helicopter remains upright and in communication with ground controllers, imagery of its Jan. 18 flight sent to Earth this week indicates one or more of its rotor blades sustained damage during landing and it is no longer capable of flight.

We all commented that the vehicle intended for five flights was on its 72nd flight when this mishap took place, but we may have all glossed over the reality that Mars is a hostile environment and that applies to composite rotor blades as much as to everything else.  Temperatures run from frigid to sorta-almost warm and those are coupled with higher levels of radiation than here on Earth, and dust storms. 

[Ingenuity] has spent more than two hours—128.3 minutes, to be precise—flying through the thin Martian air. Over that time, it flew 11 miles, or 17 km, performing invaluable scouting and scientific investigations. It has been a huge win for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the greatest spaceflight stories of this decade.

It's a tribute to the Ingenuity team that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson thought it was appropriate to release a statement. 

“The historic journey of Ingenuity, the first aircraft on another planet, has come to end,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “That remarkable helicopter flew higher and farther than we ever imagined and helped NASA do what we do best – make the impossible, possible. Through missions like Ingenuity, NASA is paving the way for future flight in our solar system and smarter, safer human exploration to Mars and beyond.”

After its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter captured this color image showing the shadow of one of its rotor blades, which was damaged during touchdown. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech 

NASA has put together a couple of videos, one saying Thanks Ingenuity, and the second (which started after that one) about the legacy of the program. If you remember the video documentary on the 2007 Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, "Good Night Oppy" (mentioned in the second story here) it reminds me of that concept.