It was a no news kind of day until I ran into an idea for a post too late to finish it. I'm only about 25% done, so, as usual, funnin around and I'll try to finish it tomorrow.
From 90 miles, a truism by Candace Owens: considering the last few years, why should anyone trust "a group of national security officials?"
And a comparison of being led by the star then and now:
Oooo - a stats joke!
It's a true statement. To be fair, though, everyone that doesn't confuse them also ends up dying.
In a not-so-subtle signal to regulators, Blue Origin is saying New Glenn is ready so what's holding up our approval to test and launch?
The company published a photo of the payload called Blue Ring for the first New Glenn test flight, a programmable upper stage that's intended to get payloads to different orbits than the one originally launched into, a fairly common concept these days.
"There is a growing demand to quickly move and position equipment and infrastructure in multiple orbits," the company's chief executive, Dave Limp, said on LinkedIn. "Blue Ring has advanced propulsion and communication capabilities for government and commercial customers to handle these maneuvers precisely and efficiently."
A small pathfinder for Blue Ring is seen set against one half of a payload fairing of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. Credit: Blue Origin
Blue is widely recognized as not being very public about their plans and goals. This public photo and announcement on LinkedIn are an exception to that. Speculation is that they're signalling to the regulatory agencies that they want to get this flight before the end of '24.
First of all, notice how small the payload is compared to the inside of the payload fairing. That's probably to give potential customers an idea of how big their payloads can be. This fairing is 7 meters in diameter, 23 feet. The available fairings vary with the launch platform, so it's a bit of a jump to assume they're comparing to a specific competitor's rocket, but it does give a good first impression, along the lines of "gee, that looks big."
Additionally, the company appears to be publicly signaling the Federal Aviation Administration and other regulatory agencies that it believes New Glenn is ready to fly, pending approval to conduct a hot fire test at Launch Complex-36, and then for a liftoff from Florida. This is a not-so-subtle message to regulators to please hurry up and complete the paperwork necessary for launch activities. It is not clear what is holding up the hot-fire and launch approval in this case, but it is often environmental issues or certification of a flight termination system.
Blue Origin's release on Tuesday was carefully worded. The headline said New Glenn was "on track" for a launch this year and stated that the Blue Ring payload is "ready" for a launch this year. As yet there is no notional or public launch date. The hot-fire test has been delayed multiple times since the company put the rocket on its launch pad on Nov. 23. It had been targeting November for the test, and more recently, this past weekend.
In addition, it could be personal. New Glenn was originally projected to launch in 2020, and after a few years of delays, Blue's founder, Jeff Bezos, fired the former CEO, replacing him with Dave Limp in September of '23. Limp was given a mandate to reform Blue Origin's corporate culture to make it faster and more responsive. He was also told to get New Glenn in space by the end of '24, we just don't know if there was an actual, "or else" with that mandate.
Let's be honest: it's a lot easier to put your expensive or valuable payload
(including yourself) on a rocket that has flown a lot of times than one that
has never flown. It's simply a case of the more you fly the more you can learn
about the vehicle. The fact that their BE-4 engines have flown a couple of
different launch vehicles on one mission is a bit of a comfort; after all,
engine problems are responsible for about half of launch vehicle failures...
However, a million things can go wrong during a launch debut, and it only takes one problem for a vehicle to be lost. With such a large rocket, integrating so many new components and software programs, there could well be hidden problems discovered only in flight.
Additionally, Blue Origin needs to fly its New Glenn rocket in order to identify where the vehicle has margin. Sources have indicated that the payload capacity of the current iteration of New Glenn is closer to 25 metric tons than its advertised mass of 45 tons. This is not uncommon for new launch vehicles, and the company will be able to use real-world performance data to refine the vehicle's hardware and software for future flights. Still, those improvements can only be made after a launch occurs, when data is collected and analyzed.
It turns out that due to changes in "the Big Picture" of NASA and the administration, getting this vehicle tested ASAP could be very important to Blue Origin. As in life or death important.
And there are other pressures on the rocket company to get moving. Officials with the incoming Trump administration are considering canceling NASA's Space Launch System rocket, a very large but expensive and inefficient-to-produce booster that is part of the agency's plan to return humans to the Moon. Therefore, they are interested to see whether Blue Origin can deliver a privately developed heavy lift rocket in New Glenn to increase the space agency's options for getting astronauts to the lunar surface. Sources have indicated that these officials very much would like to see Blue Origin play a major role in the lunar return, but before that happens the company needs to demonstrate that it can execute on its ambitious, but long-delayed, rocket.
A successful test flight could create a lot of very good Christmases; a loss of vehicle failure could create a lot of very bad Christmases.
Well, a preliminary "No Earlier Than" date, as they always are this far in advance.
SpaceX has not yet announced a launch date for Starship's seventh test flight, but the company appears to be eyeing Jan. 11; an email sent by NASA to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration identifies that date as the target. (According to that email, NASA plans to deploy a Gulfstream V jet to observe the upcoming flight.)
The date is just under eight weeks from FT 6 on November 18, which was closer to six weeks after FT 5 on October 13. I've seen claims that this will be the next generation Starship, and FT6 was said to be the last flight of the 1st generation. There is talk about new, heat shield tiles that aren't the sort of ceramic tiles that have been used since the Shuttle days as well as on Starship, but I've come across nothing with any detail. I'll be trying.
More importantly, work is progressing and today featured a static firing of the SuperHeavy booster. SpaceX documented the test on X today, posting three photos and a short video of the test.
Static firing of the booster for FT7. Image credit: SpaceX
While not an official channel, the SpaceX Launch Manifest site has always seemed to be doing their best to keep up with SpaceX, which is no small task. It shows that FT-7 is planned for Booster 14 and Ship 33.
It's the busy time of year and by the calendar, Jan. 11 is only five Saturdays away. It'll be here before we know it.
I spend my days working around things written in software, but I guess nothing unique about that. It may be a road you've been down, or it may be useful to someone else, so let me tell you a story.
The center of this story is a computer interface for battery testing from West Mountain Radio, the exact product I'm using apparently is obsolete, but they have a page full of what they call computerized battery analyzers here. The one I have, the CBA-IV has been replaced by the CBA-V on that page. I originally got this at the Orlando Hamcation from West Mountain on a Hamfest Special price, and judging by my saved pictures of plots, that must have been in February of 2017.
This is not a charger; all it does is a controlled discharge of the battery, and handful of other tests. In the world of battery makers and their specifications, the rates at which you can discharge, as well as recharge, are important limits. For batteries that might run a power tool, they tend to be rated to the capacity in Amps*hours (Amp Hours or AH) while for something like a car starter, or the various jump starter batteries you can buy now, those are rated in "Cold Cranking Amps". In the first category, the Ryobi tools have batteries rated in Amp Hours, in different output voltages.
Judging by the number of Ryobi tools I see around, I'm guessing a fair
percentage of you have some. I have three 4AH 18V One+ batteries, along
with a 2 and a 1-1/2 AH. With these batteries, it's pretty easy to
decide on a discharge test. Consider the 4AH battery. That means, if you
were to draw a constant 4A, just the capacity C, it would discharge to "dead"
in a bit under one hour. If you discharge it 2A, that's half the
capacity or C/2, and the time to discharge goes to a bit under two
hours. To get closest to the 4AH rating, the convention has been that
the manufacturers pretty much rate them at the C/10 discharge or 0.4Amps. For
the 2AH battery, C/10 is 0.2A, and so on. As rule of thumb, the lower the
discharge current the longer the battery charge's life. That is, if you discharge a battery at C/20 and C/10, the C/20 discharge lasts longer
than exactly twice what C/10 lasts and so on.
I use the CBA-IV a couple of times a year, and doing the cycles on my various rechargeable batteries pretty much can take up a month. I started out in the middle last week and had some strange things happen. Let me start with an example of the output from the CBA.
The software popped up that screen and I just screen-captured the whole software window with the discharge curve and the measured results. Note it measured 3.78 AH, and the tab conveniently says 240625_Discharge. The numbers are the date of the test, 6-25-2024, so last June 25th. 3.78 AH out of a 4AH hour claim is pretty good - 94.5% - especially for a battery that's several years old.
When I went to test this same battery this week, I got a result closer to 1.2 or 1.3 AH, which is awful. So what's going on?
It's in plain sight on this plot. See that horizontal line two minor
divisions above the bottom of the plot? There's a green arrowhead on the
left end of the line. That line is the voltage it was discharging the battery
to in order to decide the test was complete there. That's 15.5 Volts.
While setting up the test to run this week, it said the test should end at
18.6V. If you eyeball the plot to see where the red curve looks to hit
18.6, it looks to me like about 1.5 hours. On the other hand, if you look at the right side of the curve, you can see that it goes into a dive downward toward fully discharged at just about 17V. Setting the discharge to 17 would get all but that last roughly 0.2AH of discharge time.
So today, after charging this battery fully, I set the discharge voltage to
17.0. The software immediately popped up a warning that it wasn't their
recommendation, "are you sure?" I said yes. The results came out at 2.96AH which is quite a bit degraded from this test which looks to be 3.6 at 17V. At the moment, I'm testing the other old 4AH battery to see how it compares to this one. Then I do the new battery.
What's up with the 18.6V vs 15.5 or the compromise 17V? The gotcha is that I updated the
software in the CBA at the start of the testing - call it Tuesday the 3rd.
They apparently changed the recommended voltage in the SW update.
When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
to butcher the poem, look at the software first.
EDIT at 0930 Monday Dec.9: It became clear this morning that I had remembered the results of that all important last test very incorrectly after I turned the computer on and compared reality to my memory. The last three paragraphs (before the last line) have been revised to reflect the real data from the shop computer.
The journey to tonight's (re-)post started with this wonderful piece of modern art on Bustednuckles on Friday the 6th.
Back when I was still working, Mrs. Graybeard and I would have lunch together on Fridays. There were always places to get chicken wings for lunch near where I worked, and having wings once a week became something we just did. After I retired, it transformed into watching a TV show or two we'd record during the week over wings on Friday nights. Ordinarily, we'd get over a dozen whole wings to cook for dinner and whatever we didn't have for dinner became my lunch on Saturday.
Around the time that COVID shutdowns started happening, wings started becoming scarce and hard to find at times and we had to do without. When they started being available again, I jokingly referred to having a "strategic reserve" of wings in our big freezer, but I don't think we ever had any more than two packages in the freezer.
If you'll recall, last year the problem was attributed to there being a large institutional demand for wings as opposed to the cuts that most people would buy for home use. The price of wings collapsed and many were thrown away when the college bassetball tournament they call "March Madness" didn't get held.
This year, the supply started out good but then tightened up quite a bit. The reasoning looked like it should be the same because there was no shortage of any other chicken parts. I could walk into the meat section of the local grocery store and find dozens of packages of drum sticks, thighs, and chicken breasts, either boneless/skinless or still on the ribs. Last week was the first week in a month when there was one small package of wings (about half of what we'd normally buy) and here's the strange part: a package of drumettes, the uppermost portion of a chicken wing.
This started to get on my nerves. After all, chickens have exactly the same number of drumsticks, thighs and breasts as they do wings; why should those be so commonly available that the store regularly does a BOGO (buy one, get one free) on those parts, but have no wings? Some research said that the wing restaurants were having problems getting their wings, too, and that wholesale prices for them have doubled. Small sports bars and other restaurants that sell wings are being pinched by the prices for wings and labor going through the roof - although I bet you only heard about the labor costs.
This led to some web wandering to find out why are wings so scarce. I was surprised that Tyson, the chicken processing giant, was saying it was that their roosters weren't living up to their "job responsibilities."
Could it be the 21st century soy boy problem has moved to the chickens? Are they feeding the roosters too much soy? Tyson says no; they simply bought a new breed of Rooster that's supposed to produce meatier offspring, but apparently bought a sales story instead. They promise things will be better Real Soon, Now.
While doing my research, I stumbled across a story that might solve the situation, if we can just make something happen. Some people in various places (cough - China) started rumors that KFC had bred chickens with spiders [now a dead link] to produce chickens with eight legs and six wings. Since drumsticks aren't in short supply, could it be possible to breed a chicken with more wings? Not necessarily six wings, although I don't see a problem with that. Clearly just doubling the number of wings to four would double the production of wings in the country while not oversupplying the parts there are already plenty of.
(Somebody's wonderful conceptual art of spider-chicken, from the previous link) ("Spider chicken, spider chicken. Does whatever a spider chicken does." (Source)) [same dead link]
Now you and I know that you can't crossbreed spiders and chickens. First off, there's the enormous genetic differences, and then there's the practical issue that they're too different in size to mate. With the exception of some of our Florida spiders who could probably do it while standing flat-footed on the ground. Why were there never any murder hornets in Florida? The mosquitoes raped them and left them for dead.
But what if you could isolate genes that determine the number of limbs, and
somehow get a healthy chicken with more wings? Like I said before, they
don't need to have six wings because four would double the national supply of
wings.
I know what you're thinking. Everything you buy in the store advertises it's not genetically modified and here I am proposing that we extract genes from a spider to modify the chicken genome and get more wing production. I have a theory for that, too. I think that GMO is a "Karen" word (sorry, Karen, I know you don't like being associated with that) and that the people who go to a sports bar to watch a game, drink a few beers and have a few wings are a completely different group from the people that live in fear of GMOs. I think that the two groups have virtually nothing in common. Like this is the Venn diagram of the intersection between the two:
Dammit! Now I want some wings.
"Not very dangerous?" I think pretty much any rock that hits Earth could be dangerous, if it happens to hit a person or something important, so why that and not use the comparison headline that calls it "Car-size?" Much like comparing it to size of a hippo, elephant, stalk full of bananas or whatever, I always say "what car?" Do they mean a subcompact or SUV?
They then say it's roughly 15 feet wide and officially called 2024 XS2.
[It] will make its closest approach to Earth for the next 10 years tonight at 9:47 p.m. EST, or 0247 GMT on Saturday, Dec. 7.
For many of you, by the time you read this it will have been "last night."
This is considered a close approach because it's close by astronomical standards - pretty much half the distance to the moon, 122,000 miles. In terms of Earth orbits, that's about five times the distance of the Geostationary orbit so it seems highly unlikely it will hit anything.
It should be a nothing. Unless you're really unlucky.
An artist's illustration of asteroids zooming near Earth. Not this asteroid. (Image credit: ESA - P.Carril)
NASA called a press conference today to announce that the next two Artemis missions have been pushed out in time. Are the dates as far out as watchers have been suggesting?
NASA announced today (Dec. 5) that it's delaying the planned launch of Artemis 2, a flight that will send four people around the moon and back, from September 2025 to April 2026. And Artemis 3, a crewed moon landing that had been targeted for late 2026, is now scheduled for mid-2027. The extra time is needed primarily to finish prepping the Orion capsule for its first-ever crewed flights, according to NASA officials.
This seems to be the resolution of details mentioned at the end of October, nearly six weeks ago, which said:
NASA says they have found the root cause of the Orion heat shield issues. But they're not telling us what it was. Maybe by the end of the year.
And those details were discussed.
Everything appeared to go well on Artemis 1. However, postflight analyses revealed that Orion's heat shield wore away more unevenly during its reentry to Earth's atmosphere than engineers had predicted. Temperatures inside Orion remained near room temperature, meaning that astronauts would have remained safe, had any been aboard. But engineers needed to figure out what happened — and they've now come to some conclusions, NASA officials announced in today's press conference.
The uneven ablation was a consequence of Orion's "skip" reentry trajectory, in which the capsule bounced off the atmosphere and then came back in again multiple times. This strategy is required to dissipate the tremendous energy associated with high-speed returns from the moon, NASA officials said, but it had an unexpected downside on Artemis 1.
"While the capsule was dipping in and out of the atmosphere as part of that planned skip entry, heat accumulated inside the heat shield outer layer, leading to gases forming and becoming trapped inside the heat shield," NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said today. "This caused internal pressure to build up and led to cracking and uneven shedding of that outer layer."
The solution suggested is what has been talked about since the start of studying the heat shield issues: they will change the trajectory during re-entry away from skipping up and down to a path with a lower, more constant temperature, to keep the pockets of heated gasses from forming and being trapped inside the heat shield.
As for how far out it has been pushed, back in November of '22, I noted that
I've seen a prediction by
a guy who has been scary accurate
in his predictions saying that Artemis 3 won't launch until '27 instead of
'25. Eric Berger at Ars Technica has better sources than I do and says, a more
realistic date "for Artemis 3 is probably 2028-ish." Today's announced
date was “mid-2027” which is roughly mid-way between the just-dropped “late
2026” and Berger's “2028-ish.”
After NASA’s Orion spacecraft was recovered at the conclusion of the Artemis 1 test flight and transported to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, its heat shield was removed from the crew module inside the Operations and Checkout (O & C) Building and rotated for inspection. (Image credit: NASA)
It's worth remembering that we're in a relatively low key "space race" to land
on the moon. For us it's to land on the moon again; for China it's to land for
the first time.
The newly revised Artemis 3 timeline still keeps the United States ahead of China, which has said it plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030. Both nations are targeting the lunar south pole, which is thought to be rich in water ice, a crucial resource for a settlement or research outpost.
Nelson has said repeatedly that the U.S. needs to establish its lunar toehold first, so China cannot establish norms and practices on the moon — which could include barring other nations from certain areas. And the NASA chief said today that he thinks the U.S. is in good shape to be the lunar leader.
A major hold up for Artemis 3 is that the Human Landing System (HLS) has to
be ready to fly by then. SpaceX has not progressed as far as they should have,
and while it's hard to not talk about the FAA delays the big picture is simply
that the HLS is a long way from ready. There are reports spreading that SpaceX
is trying for 25 Starship launches next year - one every other week. There are
many steps that must be proven out for Artemis 3 and refueling in space so that
the HLS can get to the moon is a very big one.
Regular readers will instantly recognize the name of Jared Isaacman, as the
tech company CEO who flew this September's Polaris Dawn mission and
the Inspiration4 mission in September of 2021. Today, Dec. 4, president elect
Trump
announced via social media
that he has picked Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of payment-processing
company Shift4 Payments,to lead NASA. Isaacman both
funded and commanded those two missions, flown on SpaceX hardware. (The pilot
was Scott “Kidd” Poteet, also from Shift4). The third Polaris program launch has been talked about as the first manned flight of Starship; that might be affected by this appointment.
"Jared will drive NASA's mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, the platform he launched in 2022.
"Jared's passion for space, astronaut experience and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe and unlocking the new space economy make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new era."
For his part, Isaacman replied (also on X):
"I am honored to receive President Trump's nomination to serve as the next Administrator of NASA. Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,"
If you followed the two manned missions, you will have also seen that Isaacman has some ... let's just say unusual private jets; the kind only billionaires can have. Two are pictured at the top here, another is pictured at the top of the Ars Technica coverage of this story. He flies those, as well.
It's a very easy prediction that current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson would be highly likely to be let go from that job, and at 82 is not likely to run for office again; he was our State and Federal Representative, as well as our US Representative and Senator at various times. Coincidentally, Jared Isaacman is exactly half of Nelson's age: 41.
I think it's worth the minute or so to read Isaacman's reply to Trump, copied here from a screen capture:
SpaceX is going to fly for a new fleet record Wednesday morning, currently set for No Earlier Than 5:13 AM EST Wednesday morning from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Booster B1067 will fly for the 24th time, which will establish it as the sole Fleet Leader.
The mission can be watched live on SpaceX's channel on X, linked here, beginning five minutes before the launch. Alternatively, it can be watched on Spaceflight Now's channel on YouTube, beginning an hour earlier, 4:13 AM EST. NASASpaceflight's channel on YouTube will also cover the launch starting at 4:13. Following stage separation, B1067 will land on the A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) drone ship, which will be stationed SE of the cape in the Atlantic.
SpaceX says that in the event of problems, there are backup windows available until 7:11 AM Wednesday and starting at 5:37 on Thursday, 12/5.
This is the first of another group of three launches spread between the two Florida and one California launch pads. Following the Starlink 6-70 mission are the Starlink 9-14 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SLC-4E at 10:05 PM EST Wednesday night and the SiriusXM-9 satellites from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center, 11:10 AM EST Thursday morning.
The fourth mission of B1067, launching the Crew-4 flight to the ISS, April 27, 2022 and landing on ASOG as it will for this launch. Screen captures from the video stream.
I stumbled across the headline that “Falcon 9 reaches a flight rate 30 times higher than shuttle at 1/100th the cost” over on Ars Technica today. My first reaction is that flight rate probably isn't a fair comparison because while the Falcon 9 is approved for crewed missions ("man-rated") a tiny percentage of Falcon 9 flights are with a crew while all shuttle missions were manned. It's just the more I read, the more mind-blowing it gets.
Author Eric Berger starts out with some of the same numbers covered here in Saturday's post - things like the record fast booster turnaround of Booster 1080, the 400th mission on the night of Saturday Nov. 23rd from Vandenberg Space Force Base, and the two launches within 3 hours in the early morning of Saturday Nov. 30, all of which were in my post.
This brought the total number of launches in November to 16, a new company record over the old launch record of 14.
The company's vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, said on the social media site X that SpaceX plans to attempt 15 additional Falcon rocket launches in December.
While they clearly aren't a Falcon 9 launch, the two Falcon Heavy launches they had this year count as two launches, but it's really six Falcon 9 first stages.
So far this year, SpaceX has launched a total of 119 Falcon 9 rockets, for an average of a launch every 2.3 days. The company has already superseded its previous record total for annual Falcon 9 launches, 92, completed last year. If SpaceX achieves its goal of 15 additional Falcon 9 launches this month, it would bring the company's total this year to 134 flights. If you add two Falcon Heavy missions to that, it brings the total to 136 launches.
This probably started the comparisons because over the three decades it
flew, NASA's Space Shuttle flew 135 missions - right between just Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 +
Falcon Heavy launches for the year. SpaceX looks as though they will fly
as many Falcon 9 missions in one year as the Shuttle flew in its 31 year
career.
Is it a fair comparison? Here's where you get to really hard to answer
questions. The shuttle was undeniably more complex than the Falcon 9, and (as
mentioned already) every mission was crewed. It was a bigger ship that
carried bigger payloads, while the Falcon 9 was specifically designed under
the guide that "the best part is no part." It was designed with "better, faster, cheaper" computers and decades more experience at optimizing engine design.
The principal goal of the Falcon program was to demonstrate rapid, low-cost reusability. By one estimate, it cost NASA about $1.5 billion to fly a single space shuttle mission. (Like the Falcon 9, the shuttle was mostly but not completely reusable.) SpaceX's internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are estimated to be as low as $15 million. So SpaceX has achieved a flight rate about 30 times higher than the shuttle at one-hundredth the cost.
Space enthusiast Ryan Caton also crunched the numbers on the number of SpaceX launches this year compared to some of its competitors. So far this year, SpaceX has launched as many rockets as Roscosmos has since 2013, United Launch Alliance since 2010, and Arianespace since 2009. This year alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more times than the Ariane 4, Ariane 5, or Atlas V rockets each did during their entire careers.
Ryan Caton's Tweet
The weekend started out on a fun note. A couple of weeks ago, we heard from my nephew inviting us to Thanksgiving at his house as opposed to my brother's house in South Florida where we've been gathering for decades. It was shaping up to be a family get together like we haven't had, not just in years, but some of the group has never gotten together.
Nephew is around 5 months older than my son, but while I've known him since he was in diapers, there have been times when we saw each other more often. Suffice it to say that several years ago, we went through a stretch of hardly ever seeing each other due to the place he was working. He ended up in West Central Florida and around three years ago, got married. Last January, first child was born. We still hadn't met his wife or the "great niece" (I think that's the relationship).
The place where they live is one of those areas of Florida with no easy way to
get to. While it's about 65 miles between us "as the crow flies," every route
the mapping software came up with was around twice that mileage and a two hour
drive.
It was a very nice afternoon, getting to see folks that (in a couple of cases)
I hadn't talked to since the late '70s, or early '80s. Great niece is
adorable, and at 10 months, not walking much and not very vocal.
The slide into negative experiences started Saturday morning. I've written
many times about our "old man" cat, Mojo, or just plain Moe as we tend to call
him. A couple of years ago, he got started on some medication for some blood
cell count issues and he has responded very well to the meds he's on.
It'll be three years that he has been under treatment this February.
Saturday morning, I found some blood near one of his food bowls. It looked like he had coughed or sneezed because it was a lot of drops. As the day went by, we found more blood in more places, but with the exception of some blood very visible on his white fur, no evidence to show this hadn't all happened the previous night. He sneezed a few times, but never expelled any blood, so it was hard to figure.
Until about 10PM last night. We have two chairs in the radio room, one at the operating position and the other at my workbench. He likes to come into the shack and be social - or just be near me while he takes a nap. I heard an odd, almost bubbling sound, turned around and he was bleeding from his left nostril. The chair was bloody, blood was dripping onto the floor from sneezing, and more. After a few minutes it stopped and we put aside our plans to go to a nearby veterinary emergency clinic that's open 24/7.
He came to bed with us, as always, and in the morning there were no signs of a repeat.
Until close to 2PM when we heard him sneezing again, this time in the living
room. Again, bleeding from his left nostril, and blood spraying when he
sneezed. Again, it didn't last long, and it wasn't what I'd think of as a lot
of blood. Maybe a tablespoon. Maybe.
So it has been a weekend that started with a fun get together and is ending with a couple of nerve-wracking days. His regular vet opens as usual tomorrow morning and we'll call to try to get in ASAP.
A positive side is that I finally fixed the gate issue caused by Tropical Storm Milton back in October. The gate now latches and stays latched. I'm not "Done done" - I still have some position tweaking and most of all, patching all the holes where the hardware ripped out. And cleaning the damned fence.
It took too long to figure out how to approach this, but after trying a bunch
of times to figure out how to replace the side that got ripped out, it
occurred to me that the height of the latch really isn't critical, so why
not lower both sides and install both in fresh PVC, around two inches lower
than they were?
The piece that was ripped out of the gate is in the red box, but both sides got
lowered about an inch.
It has been a 3 sigma, maybe 4 to 6, kind of day. By which I mean nowhere near normal. So a couple of little things that I thought were interesting/cool to pass on.
At least, I think it's novel.
Two Electron rockets took flight Sunday, one from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula and the other from Wallops Island, Virginia, making Rocket Lab the first commercial space company to launch from two different hemispheres in a 24-hour period, Payload reports.
I question whether it's a record because there's no mention of how many companies can launch in two different hemispheres. Maybe it's a record because nobody else can even try to do it. BTW, the Sunday being referred to was the 26th.
Less than 14 days after its previous flight, a Falcon 9 booster took off again from Florida's Space Coast early Monday to haul 23 more Starlink internet satellites into orbit, Spaceflight Now reports. The booster, numbered B1080 in SpaceX's fleet of reusable rockets, made its 13th trip to space before landing on SpaceX's floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The launch marked a turnaround of 13 days, 12 hours, and 44 minutes from this booster's previous launch November 11, also with a batch of Starlink satellites. The previous record turnaround time between flights of the same Falcon 9 booster was 21 days.
400 and still going ... SpaceX's launch prior to this one was on Saturday night, when a Falcon 9 carried a set of Starlinks aloft from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The flight Saturday night [the 23rd of November - SiG] was the 400th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket since 2010, and SpaceX's 100th launch from the West Coast.
This morning had two Falcon 9 launches within just over 3 hours of each other; the first was a Starlink mission for SLC-40 on Cape Canaveral SFS, at 12:00 AM on the 30th. The second was the NROL-126 mission which also carried 20 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, at 12:10 AM local (Pacific time) or 3:10 AM here on the East coast.
All told, there were four Falcon 9 launches since that number 400 launch described above, but I don't see a count of launches for 2024 alone. With just four weeks left in the year, that should give us a good feel for how many launches they'll get this year.
File photo of a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SLC-4E. Image credit: SpaceX
Back at the first of the month, we heard the story that two weeks earlier Voyager 1 had switched to its backup transmitter, down at S-Band - a transmitter that hadn't been used since 1981.
As predictable as anything can be,
the 47 year old Voyagers are doing two thing continually
as they age. First, they're going farther into interstellar space every
second.
Voyager 1, for example is 15.4 billion miles from the Sun; the distance from Earth varies more as our rotation around the sun adds and
subtracts miles over the course of a year - but that's in the next decimal
place after the "4."
Secondly, they're gradually losing power. Their Radioisotope Thermal Generators are slowly degrading, losing 4 watts per year. As predictable as the power loss is, over the years more and more of the instruments on the Voyagers have been shut off to reduce power drain. Only four of Voyager 1's instruments remain powered but they're all operating at lower temperatures than they were ever designed and tested for. When some concerns about those temperature excursions started being considered, it was thought that borrowing "a few" watts for some onboard heaters would be a good thing.
So, when engineers commanded Voyager 1 to switch on one of its heaters to give the instruments a gentle thermal massage, a safety feature was tripped because of low power levels. The spacecraft's fault protection system monitors how much energy Voyager 1 has left, and if it deems there to be too little energy for the probe to continue operating, it automatically switches off non-essential systems. It seems that the heater was using too much energy, but the problem was that all the non-essential systems had been switched off long ago to conserve what little power remained, so the fault protection system took it upon itself to switch off the main X-band transmitter and activate the lower-power S-band transmitter instead.
That description is a bit too anthropomorphic for me; this isn't AI, it's a simpler computer than anything the vast majority of us have ever seen; it was designed in the early 1970s. I'd prefer to say the conditions Voyager was seeing weren't thought of when the software was written and it merely executed code that had the same effect - shutting down the X-band transmitter.
The problem was understood early in November and the fix implemented. X-band communication resumed on Nov. 18, with the spacecraft once again returning data from its four remaining instruments: the Low-Energy Charged Particle Experiment, the Cosmic-Ray Telescope the Triaxial Fluxgate Magnetometer and the Plasma Waves Experiment.
Next summer will be the 48th anniversaries of the two Voyager satellites launches: Voyager 2 launched first on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, just over two weeks later. Everyone is hoping to see the two make their 50th anniversary in 2027.
Artist’s illustration of one of the Voyager spacecraft. Credit: Caltech/NASA-JPL
Much like last year, it was a busy day with little things to do that always either take longer than expected or just don't go as expected. Another thing like last year is we had a SpaceX launch last night that was originally slotted for 10:05 PM, and it kept getting delayed, until it finally went up after we'd given up on waiting up for the night, launching at 11:41 PM. Last year it was all later times: the first announced launch time was 11:01 PM local and when it actually went at 2:47 AM.
As usual, we'll be joining my brother's extended family for the holiday with one big exception. Bro's son, my only nephew, got married before Thanksgiving last year, and will be hosting us tomorrow. We have never met his wife and their first child. While my brother lives a pretty easy 2-1/2-ish hour drive south of us with interstate virtually the whole way, nephew lives on the west side of the state; not as far as the coast, but there's no direct, easy way to get there. As the crow flies, it's around 70 miles, but any route the map programs give me are in the vicinity of 110 to 120 miles. So two hours driving instead of one, each way.
A happy and blessed Thanksgiving to all. May all of you enjoy a
wonderful day with your families and friends. Or by yourself, if that's
your day. However you spend your Thanksgiving, I wish you the
best. Take some time to be deliberately thankful - even for the troubles
of life. Yeah, being grateful for troubles sounds odd, but it sure seems
in retrospect that growth occurs in response to trouble, not in response to
idyllic wonderfulness.
Thanks to the EMTs, Nurses, Doctors, LEOs, Firefighters and others who work Thanksgiving so we can have the day off. Thanks to the military men and women who keep the barbarians from the gates and give us the chance to relax. For now, eat, drink, and be merry. While there are positive signs in the changes going around since the election, we've got to know the bad actors are mostly still in place. So who knows what the next year brings?
And remember your shopping cart for Black Friday. Number 127 in a series. No, not 127 years worth. That means I've been getting emails for black Friday sales since July and I estimate 127 days.
Something SpaceX has never done? That can't be a very long list. It's got to be easier to list the things they haven't done than what they have.
That's the opening to an article on Ars Technica by Stephen Clark that "NASA awards SpaceX a contract for one of the few things it hasn’t done yet." So what is it? Launch a nuclear powered payload to the outer planets; in particular the Dragonfly rotorcraft mission to the alien environment of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. We had a fairly deep introductory post about Dragonfly just over a year ago and as the mission is getting closer, it became time to choose the launch vehicle and how it would all be done. At the end of that post, I pulled a SWAG that the mission wouldn't be until the 2030s. It's looking more like 2028. NASA awarded the $256.6 million contract Monday, Nov. 25.
The nuclear power source is a Radioisotope Thermal Generator, RTG, powered by the decay of Plutonium-238, and most folks will know these are
nothing new. RTGs have flown on many previous space missions, including
NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on Mars, the New Horizons spacecraft
that beamed back the first up-close views of Pluto, and the long-lived Voyager
probes exploring interstellar space. All of these were launched on
vehicles that are either retired, like the Titans or Space Shuttles, or on the
verge of retirement like the Atlas V.
That means it's getting to be time to certify some new vehicles. The process has started on ULA's Vulcan and the next vehicle will be the Falcon Heavy. The Heavy has been completely successful; it has flown a relatively small number of flights, only 11, but they have all been successful. An important consideration is that the FH is based on the Falcon 9, which is rated to ferry people into orbit - a very high level of confidence - and the most launched vehicle in the world. NASA already certified Falcon Heavy to launch its most expensive robotic missions, such as the Europa Clipper mission, which launched last month.
That said, there's another level of certification that needs to be done for the RTGs. This includes a review of the rocket's explosive Flight Termination System (the FTS mentioned during every launch) to ensure it won't damage the payload and cause a release of radioactive plutonium.
Personally, I wasn't aware that RTGs were still an option. I thought the
anti-nuclear power people had somehow gotten NASA to forbid their usage, but
it's more the case that missions have gotten away with not using them.
Consider Europa Clipper, mentioned just above. That mission is going to
Jupiter, where the solar power is a small fraction of the 1200 Watts/square
meter near Earth. Europa Clipper just designed and implemented enormous solar
panels (picture of one side
at the bottom here). Dragonfly introduces complications that rule the bigger panels
out. First off, it's going to Saturn where there's less power per square
meter than Jupiter and Europa. Saturn and Titan are 10 times farther from the Sun than
the Earth is. More importantly, though, is that Dragonfly is going into
the atmosphere of Titan and that will reduce the available power even more.
Dragonfly artist's concept on the surface of Titan. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Steve Gribben
For a bit more background on the Dragonfly mission itself, I'll hand it over to Stephen Clark.
The Dragonfly rotorcraft will launch cocooned inside a transit module and entry capsule, then descend under parachute through Titan's atmosphere, which is four times denser than Earth's. Finally, Dragonfly will detach from its descent module and activate its eight rotors to reach a safe landing.
Once on Titan, Dragonfly is designed to hop from place to place on numerous flights, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life. This is one of NASA's most exciting, and daring, robotic missions of all time.
After launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in July 2028, it will take Dragonfly about six years to reach Titan.
It was kind of difficult to pick this story for tonight. You see, the various news sources are all carrying a story that just sorta hits our inner 10-year old's spot for fart jokes. It's just that after everyone does their Beavis and Butthead "heh, heh" impression, there's not much left.
So onto a story that has a more coolness factor. Firefly Aerospace has completed testing of its Blue Ghost lunar lander, in preparation for launch in January, a few weeks away.
The company announced its Blue Ghost lunar lander completed environmental testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in mid-October and is now ready to be shipped to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA and SpaceX plan to launch the lander from Launch Complex 39A atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during a six-day window that opens no earlier than mid-January 2025. The mission is known as "Ghost Riders in the Sky."
Blue Ghost will carry a variety of payloads to the moon, some of which are in support of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. CLPS pairs scientific payloads developed by NASA with commercial lunar landers headed for the moon on private missions.
This was thermal/vacuum testing, temperature excursions done in a vacuum chamber. While I don't have a lot of specifics of what was tested and under what conditions, these tests are typically done by setting the satellite on a stand in the vacuum chamber and heating or cooling the hardware to the expected high and low temperature limits. The performance of the equipment can be measured continuously or only at the desired temperatures, depending on the program requirements.
Blue Ghost will carry 10 payloads to the moon. One of the more novel and
interesting-sounding experiments will be to
test a new electrostatic system
to repel harmful moon dust. Like some of the other recent lander missions, it
will not take a short, direct flight. It will take 45 days to travel to the
moon, where it will land in Mare Crisium - the Sea of Crises. Again, like other lunar missions in the last year, Blue Ghost is expected to operate for one lunar day (about 14 Earth days - if they land close to sunrise). Naturally, I expect there will be efforts to determine if it wakes up the next morning as we saw with JAXA's SLIM lander back last Spring (first story in that roundup).
Blue Ghost will operate for a few hours once night sets in, taking images of the lunar sunset and collecting data on how the surface of the moon behaves during lunar dusk.
Blue Ghost's payloads include a lunar retroreflector that will be used to take precise Earth-moon distance measurements, the Lunar PlanetVac vacuum developed by Honeybee Robotics that will sample moon dust, and the Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS), a tiny camera that will capture detailed images of how the lunar surface reacts with the lander's exhaust plumes during landing.
Blue Ghost on the moon. Image credit: Firefly Aerospace
Looks like an interesting couple of weeks if we get to read about what it's doing in real time - or close to real time.
EDIT 11/26 8:00 AM: to correct the title - I used a wrong word and called it a lunar rover instead of lander
Let me reframe that situation. Lunar Outpost, one of the three companies chosen by NASA for the first phase of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) program, announced Nov. 21 that it signed an agreement for SpaceX to use Starship to transport the company’s Lunar Outpost Eagle rover to the moon. The companies did not disclose a schedule for the launch or other terms of the deal.
One look at the rendering of the Eagle rover and I thought, "who else could do it?"
Lunar Outpost has revised the design of the Lunar Dawn rover it is developing for NASA after Lockheed Martin left the team working on it. Credit: Lunar Outpost
The design they were working to when Lockheed Martin left the program is at the top of this page. It looks bigger, but it's also kinda cooler looking.
The Lunar Terrain Vehicle program is an extension of the Artemis program to return the US to the moon.
Each company received a one-year contract to mature the design of their rovers through a preliminary design review (PDR), and the agency will later select at least one of the companies to develop the rover.
The LTV program is structured as a services contract, with the companies responsible for delivering the rover to the moon. Those companies will then be free to use those rovers commercially when not needed by NASA.
Although he didn't name other companies that were invited to propose how they'd get Lunar Dawn to the moon, Justin Cyrus, chief executive of Lunar Outpost, said in an interview that the company selected SpaceX after getting “great responses” from several companies.
“The reason we chose Starship is their technological maturation, the pace at which they move and the quality of that organization. It’s a vehicle that we think will be able to provide reliable landing on the lunar surface, and we know that they can get it done on the timelines we need.”
As the first quoted (indented) paragraph notes, at this point, no company has been chosen as sole provider of the rover. The three companies (Lunar Outpost, Intuitive Machines and Venturi Astrolab) were given one year contracts through the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) around June of next year. At that point NASA will either narrow down their options to one or two of the three or ask them all to submit proposals to develop the vehicle and services.
I find it mildly surprising that CEO Cyrus says no matter what NASA does they will continue development of the Rover.
The company, he added, plans to continue work on the rover even if not selected for the next phase of NASA’s LTV program, citing commercial interest from potential customers. “This allows us to accelerate those plans pretty drastically,” he said of the funding. “So, no matter what we’re going to be flying this vehicle on Starship.”
There's a recent startup in the EU that's making some good headlines and good progress toward goals that make sense. The company is called The Exploration Company and it was founded by an economist, Hélène Huby, and of all the possible backgrounds for someone who starts a space transport company, that could be the least expected.
An economist by training, Huby joined the European aerospace firm Airbus in 2013, working various jobs, including space strategy, before becoming the company's vice president for the Orion spacecraft's service module. As part of NASA's Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon, Europe is building the service module that provides power and propulsion to the Orion capsule.
I think it's a good sign that she thought the program was frustrating.
Why? Because the service module was essentially based on 20-year-old technology, and it wouldn't be reused. In some sense, working on the service module felt like looking into the past rather than working toward the future.
She found herself wanting to build something more modern. Looking across the Atlantic, she drew inspiration from what SpaceX was doing with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. She watched humans launch into space aboard Crew Dragon and saw that same vehicle fly again and again. "I have a huge admiration for what SpaceX has done," she said.
Huby recognizes that SpaceX is the only company in the Western World that's providing human spaceflight. With that, she realizes that it seems entirely possible that Starliner will never be good enough to be certified or could simply be dropped by Boeing. The only other space program working on manned spaceflight is India's, which is farther behind than Boeing, but it's unclear whether the Indian government will allow the Gaganyaan vehicle to provide launch services for non-Indian customers.
The opportunity she saw was to provide an alternative to SpaceX based in Europe. This would yield 100 percent of the market in Europe and offer an option to countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and other nations interested in going to space.
"I know it's super hard, and I know it was crazy," Huby said. "But I wanted to try."
The story of The Exploration Company is rather remarkable. Huby founded the company in August 2021 with $50,000 in the bank and a team of four people. Three years later, the company has 200 employees and recently announced that it had raised $160 million in Series B funding. All told they have raised $230 million and have already had a prototype capsule launched.
Her company has already flown a mission, the "Bikini" reentry demonstrator, on the debut flight of the Ariane 6 rocket this last summer. The small capsule was intended to demonstrate the company's reentry technology. Unfortunately, the rocket's upper stage failed on its deorbit burn, so the Bikini capsule remains stuck in space.
Undeterred by that Ariane failure ruining their mission, they've already built a second demonstration vehicle named Mission Possible that will carry payloads for a good sized crowd ("over a dozen") of customers. Mission Possible will launch on SpaceX's Transporter 14 mission, currently estimated to launch next July.
Hélène Huby, chief executive officer of The Exploration Co., during an interview in London, UK, on Friday, March 8, 2024. Credit: Betty Laura Zapata/Bloomberg via Getty Images
In addition to this, the company is working on development of a Cargo craft
called Nyx, essentially compatible with the Cargo Dragon and the others that
dock at the ISS. It's planned to be the same size as Cargo Dragon and reusable
as well. Unfortunately they don't expect to be ready to fly until 2028,
by which time there won't be many more flights to the ISS, but it's expected
that newer Space Stations will use the same docking port design. Further down
the calendar is a manned version of the Nyx (Crew Nyx?).
I was hoping for more information but...
We've known since October that Blue has been anxious to get their New Glenn into space. The first launch of a New Glenn was originally supposed to be the ESCAPADE mission to Mars, which required launching during a narrow window between October 13 and 21; but after assessing how much work was left to be done, NASA scrubbed that mission on September 6th. Since then, Blue has been pushing for the flight by the end of this year.
The first New Glenn has been stacked at launch complex 36 on the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The company simply Tweeted "Gone vertical," Thursday (Nov. 21) on X, with this photo of the rocket.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket stands stacked on the launch pad in November 2024. (Image credit: Blue Origin)
What I had been hoping to learn is which version of the New Glenn this is and
more about the likely first flight mission.
The New Glenn launch is slated to carry one of the company's new Blue Ring spacecraft on a National Security Space Launch certification flight called DarkSky-1 . The U.S. Defense Innovation Unit is sponsoring the effort.
New Glenn comes in two- or three-stage variants with a fully reusable first-stage booster. The two-stage version is 270 feet (82 meters) tall, while the three-stage variant is 313 feet (95 m) tall. For comparison: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is between 209 feet (63.7 m) and 230 feet (70 m) tall, depending on its payload.
My guess is this is the two stage variant, which seems like a prudent first
mission. Certify the first and second stages before you add the third
stage. The Blue Ring spacecraft sounds like a dedicated upper stage
similar to what other providers offer that can move a payload into different
orbits than it was originally delivered to (for example,
these from RocketLab).
The European Space Agency has announced that it will commission a study to detail the development of a reusable rocket capable of delivering 60 tons to low-Earth orbit, European Spaceflight reports. The agency believes this kind of capability is necessary to to fulfill "critical European space exploration needs beyond LEO, while providing wider space exploitation potentials to answer the growing market opportunities (e.g. mega constellations)."
Studies of studies ... The agency launched its PROTEIN (Preparatory Activities for European Heavy Lift Launcher) initiative in June 2022, aiming to explore the feasibility of developing a European super heavy-lift rocket with a focus on reducing launch costs. ArianeGroup and Rocket Factory Augsburg were selected to lead studies. The European 60T LEO Reusable Launch System Pathfinder initiative seems to build upon the agency’s PROTEIN studies, even though this link is not explicitly stated.
I imagine that PROTEIN and the study name of "Preparatory Activities for
European Heavy Lift Launcher" must be related in some European language that I
know nothing about.
NASA reports that ground teams inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center lifted the aft assembly of the rocket's left booster onto the mobile launch platform, marking the beginning of stacking the booster for the Artemis II mission. For those who don't remember or are new, the next Artemis mission (II) is to do a lunar flyby but not land on the moon. The target date has been September of '25, but that's looking rather unlikely at this time. Simply assembling the Space Launch System rocket with its Orion capsule is going to take around four months, meaning the end of March.
On the other hand, the implication of starting now is that they've determined
that to fix
the Orion heat shield issue
isn't going to be a major problem and they may even believe that it won't
delay the mission at all. If not, there will probably be an announcement of a
new target launch date by around that end of March time frame.
NASA Astronaut Don Pettit captured this photo of the Flight Test 6 launch from the International Space Station on Tuesday. Credit: Don Pettit/NASA
If the image doesn't make sense to you, Starship on its booster are both out of the picture. The curved, mostly-horizontal, light band is the beach and in the middle of the picture the bottom of the contrail and billowing launch cloud are a small dark "cloud" with a small white cloud at its top. Nothing is visible as the booster track goes clear until it shows up again as the white lumpy (twisted) looking cloud. That ends in band of thin clouds which I assume is where staging occurred and the booster was dropped.
The day after SpaceX launched Flight Test 6, they received a long awaited approval from the Federal Aviation
Administration.
In a draft version of what is known as an "Environmental Assessment," the FAA indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. Additionally, the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage.
"FAA has concluded that the modification of SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, consistent with the data contained in the 2022 PEA, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action," the federal agency stated in its conclusion.
This isn't final. As always, the FAA is required to open this up for public comment, a period which will end on January 17th, eight weeks from now. In addition to that, the agency will hold five public meetings to solicit feedback from the local community and other stakeholders to get input on expected impacts of the increased launch cadence.
And there will be significant impacts. For example, the number of large trucks that deliver water, liquid oxygen, methane, and other commodities will increase substantially. According to the FAA document, the vehicle presence will grow from an estimated 6,000 trucks a year to 23,771 trucks annually. This number could be reduced by running a water line along State Highway 4 to supply the launch site's water deluge system.
SpaceX has reduced the duration of closures of State Road 4 through the area by 85%, by moving launch preparations that could be moved to the "Massey's Test Site," a former gun range they added in 2023. SpaceX is now expected to need less than 20 hours of access restrictions per launch campaign, including landings.
Contrast the approval for 25 launches per year, pretty much one every other week, with Gwynne Shotwell's statement that she expects them to do 400 Starship launches in the next four years and you see the pretty obvious problem. Doing 25 in the first year turns the next three years to 375 launches and so on. At some point, there are too many launches at the end of the four years to be realistic. SpaceX has a pad on the Kennedy Space Center that has never actually held a vehicle or done any of the things they need the ground infrastructure to do; it's part of Launch complex 39. Plus, there has been talk about building a second launch pad on the KSC to handle Starship launches, Launch Complex 49 (last story of three), but there's talk about the impact of so many launches on the KSC, too.
All that aside, notice that in the first paragraph quoted above the FAA said, "the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage."
... SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said the company intends to move to a larger and more powerful version of the Starship and Super Heavy rocket about a year from now. This version, dubbed Starship 3, would double the thrust of the upper stage and increase the thrust of the booster stage from about 74 meganewtons to about 100 meganewtons. If that number seems a little abstract, another way to think about it is that Starship would have a thrust at liftoff three times as powerful as NASA's Saturn V rocket that launched humans to the Moon decades ago. The draft environmental assessment permits this as well.
...
For the time being, SpaceX will still need to receive a launch license from the FAA for individual flights and landings.
Will this quiet the groups trying to kick SpaceX off of South Padre Island, and restore it to being the pretty, unspoiled place they want it to be (but probably never was)? I seriously doubt it. I expect them to hit back with more and even less likely arguments.
Integrated Flight Test 6, seconds after launch. Image credit: SpaceX
Now imagine looking at this and saying, "400 feet tall and twice the thrust of the Saturn V? I remember when Starships were that small."
