A SpaceX News Tripleheader

You miss a couple of days of the regular news beat and all kinds of stuff happens.  

 Big one first:

FAA Approves the SpaceX PEA

As expected, the Federal Aviation Administration completed the Programmatic Environmental Assessment on SpaceX Boca Chica on Monday, June 13th.  Rather than granting the higher-level approval called a FONSI - Finding Of No Significant Impact - the agency granted a Mitigated FONSI.  That's one with strings attached that SpaceX must respond to before they can launch.  The full document is accessible here.  The full document (pdfs) are in the vicinity of 70MB (some files are less than 1MB). 

It's probably good to think of this as the first of several approvals they'll need to obtain, but it's also arguably the most important.  SpaceX has been working toward having Boca Chica the primary site for the atmospheric testing of Starship/Super Heavy.  Ultimately, it plans to turn this into the main launch site for the pair of vehicles into orbit, and when the experimentation is done, it will potentially be a site for the launch of commercial cargo. The booster could either return to the site or land offshore and be ferried back. 

The FAA's final environmental assessment was made significantly easier because SpaceX amended its plans to delete three major components of the launch facility. The first of these would take commercially supplied methane and eliminate some impurities to generate a fuel compatible with the company's Raptor engines. But changes to those engines have made them capable of operating with commercial-grade methane, eliminating the need for this facility.

The other major eliminations were a desalination facility and a power plant that would be needed to operate it. The water produced by it would be used to limit the spread of flaming exhaust during launch. SpaceX removed these because it remains uncertain whether a water quench will be required during launches; if it is, it will be handled with water trucked to the site.

What seems to be a significant issue with the approval is the restriction of launches and tests SpaceX can do every year.  The final PEA contains this submission from SpaceX on their pace of operations. 

Limiting themselves to five launches per year doesn't seem like much for a company that's pushing better than weekly launch cadence for the Falcon 9.  At this phase of the Starship/SuperHeavy development, though, that's probably adequate.  Even at their pace of operations.  

More on the mitigations:

Of the dozens of mitigations SpaceX will have to implement to conduct Starship launches under its new Starbase PEA, a majority appear to be normal and reasonable. Most focus on specific aspects of things already discussed, like protecting turtles (lighting, beach cleanup, education, nest scouting and monitoring, etc.), safeguarding other protected species, respecting impacted areas of historical importance; ensuring that road closures avoid certain holidays and periods to limit Starbase’s impact on local use of public parks and beaches; and other common-sense extensions of existing rules and regulations. In a few cases, SpaceX has even agreed to deploy solar-powered Starlink internet terminals to enable “enhanced satellite monitoring” of wildlife for the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Peregrine Fund.
 
Others are oddly specific and read a bit more like local and state agencies taking advantage of their leverage to get SpaceX to manage and pay for basic infrastructure maintenance and improvement that any functional government should already be doing. The lengthy list of odd “mitigations” includes the following:

• Quarterly beach and highway cleanups
• Construct at least one highway wildlife crossing
• Construct a wildlife viewing platform along Highway 4
• Complete and maintain traffic control fencing demarcating the boundaries of TPWD land along said public highway
• $5,000 per year to “enhance” the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s (TPWD) fishing “Tackle Loaner Program”
• Prepare a history report on any events and activities of the Mexican War and Civil War that took place in all affected areas of historical importance
• Fund the development of five signs explaining the “history and significance” of those areas
• “[Replicate and install] the missing stars and wreaths on the Palmetto Pilings Historical Marker”

Those last four (at least) are pretty good examples of  “more like local and state agencies taking advantage of their leverage to get SpaceX” to do things “any functional government should already be doing.”

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Root Cause of Cargo Dragon Scrub Found

The other big story is that troubleshooting the Draco thruster problem that forced delays onto last week's CRS25 Cargo Dragon mission (cancelled and rescheduled a few times already) has revealed the source of the problems to be ... wait for it ... valves in the highly corrosive fuel and oxidizer lines.  I'm not going to say it's exactly what Boeing encountered in Starliner that led to the launch being delayed almost a full year, but it kind of rhymes with their issues.  

There is one big difference between the issue on Starliner and CRS25's.  SpaceX has launched the Cargo and Crew versions of the Dragon many times, and tested their systems far more times than that.  Literally hundreds of thrusters have been flown on dozens of different orbital Dragon missions.  Dragon's system is undoubtedly more flight proven than Starliner's system and more likely than not the valve issue is a minor thing that should be fixed quickly. 

On June 13th, NASA distributed an update on those issues, revealing that SpaceX had narrowed down the cause of the anomalous fuel vapor readings that delayed the launch to a single “Draco thruster valve inlet joint.” Dragon spacecraft have 16 Draco maneuvering thrusters, each of which has at least two “valve inlet joints” for fuel (monomethylhydrazine or MMH) and oxidizer (dinitrogen tetroxide or NTO).

Those valves look like this (circled) on a flight-proven Draco thruster:

Photo credit to Pauline Acalin for Teslarati.

The CRS25 mission is currently set for No Earlier Than July 11th.

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Finally, the smallest item in the tripleheader. According to the Launch Schedule at SpaceflightNow.com there will be three Falcon 9 launches in a roughly 36 hour period starting Friday the 17th at 12:08:50 PM EDT.  

As you can see the second launch is from Vandenberg SFB at 10:00 AM EDT Saturday and the final will be back at the Cape Canaveral SFB at 12:30 AM on Sunday the 19th.  While it's clearly Sunday morning, most people think of that as Saturday night.  From 12:09 PM on Friday until 12:09 Sunday morning is 36 hours.  Add another 20 minutes to get to 12:30 AM. 

Where I Was, What I Was Doing

Yesterday, I mentioned that it had been a six sigma day here, a statistics geek way of saying nowhere near the normal.  In fact, it was a once in a year event that brought several once in a lifetime events with it.  Allow me to backup and explain.  

From time to time, I've written on ham radio contests, and using a major contest for your entertainment and training.  An easy example is an article in my Ham Radio Series;  #22.  I believe learning is better if you get some fun out of it.  What is there you could possibly learn?  How about training your ears to dig out a station you need to communicate with while lots of interference is going on.  It's getting out of your comfort zone, which we all know is necessary.  

While I think the biggest contest activity of the year, the American Radio Relay League Field Day, is the weekend after next (June 25 and 26) this weekend was the one that I've been the most active in for about a decade, their VHF/UHF contest.  While I could make contacts on three bands until I replaced my old antenna last January, this weekend I was limited to the six meter band.  The old antenna worked fairly well on the two meter band (it was designed for and sold as a six meter antenna) and was at least as good as a wet noodle on 432 MHz.  Correction: as good as a good wet noodle.  I have worked people within about 30 miles on 432 MHz on that antenna. 

Six meters is interesting because it gets some amount of all of the propagation modes that show up on other bands.  In times of good solar activity, it can get F and F2 layer propagation.  At other times, it can get sporadic E.  While not terribly common, tropospheric ducting is possible on 6m, which is more common at higher frequencies, even microwaves.  Bouncing signals off meteor trails is a common mode,  auroras can affect it and so on.  I've probably written most about Sporadic E propagation but the truth is it can be very difficult to know exactly how a signal gets from point A to point B.  There are combination modes, where there can be an F layer hop that instead of returning to the ground gets reflected back up by the E layer.  E layer ducting is also possible.  Multiple hops reflected from the E layer back down to the ground then back up the E layer happen.  

It's a simple fact of life that even with more data and more computing power than ever before, propagation is extremely complex, and attempts at propagation forecasts have a lot in common with weather forecasts; in particular, the experts are wrong quite often.  Consider Sporadic E (usually written Es), and we're certainly in peak season now.  An interesting site I've recently learned about is the Es Probability Index, EPI, by G3YLA in the UK.  I just screen captured this map for 0000 (midnight) Universal Time Today.  The color contours show the probability, with hotter colors, going through reds to whites, being the highest EPI values.  At the bottom left is a slider than allows you to move the predicted time backwards and forwards 12 hours.

Those white rimmed silver areas are virtually assured of densities high enough for Es.  Even this level of calculation has uncertainties, but at the most fundamental level, this is fluid dynamics and that means nonlinear partial differential equations - chaotic systems.  What that means is that from moment to moment areas of higher or lower density can happen, where they're "not supposed to be" like waves in the ocean.  The only way to really know what's happening is what I call BIC time, for Butt In Chair. 

In my opening, I said this weekend "...brought several once in a lifetime events with it."  The biggest one, the one that actually shocked me, was that while I know other guys in my area have contacted Japan on 6m, and I've fairly often seen reports of contacts with Japan (usually the US end was northwest of me) I've never heard Japan.  On Saturday night, for the first time in my life, I heard a guy in Japan, JH4UYB, calling CQ ("calling anyone for a contact").  And he answered me after my first call.  Here's a screen capture of what could be a valid contact with Japan (meticulously edited to remove my Personally Identifying Information). 

There's a problem related to the nuances of the contest exchange.  The required exchange is just our locations (given as four character grid square names), but he sent me a standard non-contest reply; the -17 (the red row is his reply) was my signal to noise ratio (SNR) at his station.  I tried for four minutes to get him to respond one more time but since he started out with a -22 dB SNR, went down to -23 and was never heard again, a momentarily dense cloud in the ionosphere might have thinned back out.  (The lowest SNR you'll see in this software is -24 dB).  Technically, as a contest contact, I got his grid square when he called CQ, and he got mine when I first called him (yellow bars on the right panel), so it actually is a valid contest contact.  It's possible he may have received my reply, "R EL98" and sent a reply that went below the noise floor the computer can't copy, but I can't know that without asking him.

The other once in a lifetime events are more mundane.  I've got confirmed contact with all of the lower 48 states, and use my time to collect grid squares.  Ordinarily, it just gives me BIC time to stay and try to hear Alaska and Hawaii.  I got around 25 new grid squares, and made duplicate contacts with another bunch that I have record of having contacted but not confirmed.  Saturday's propagation was otherwise not very remarkable.  I have holes in the map I keep of grids I've worked through parts of Georgia, North Florida, N and S Carolina and other places that are too close, so that 6m generally skips over the area.  I filled in some of those Saturday afternoon.  

Sunday morning, on the other hand, was very unusual.  It surprised me by being open to California in the morning.  I've worked California and especially southern Cal several times, but always in the evenings.  I think it was even late evening here, but certainly more like 9PM than 9AM like Sunday.  I worked a few guys in the southern half of Cali, and a couple of new grids out west but all paths were close to straight west.  The farthest north I worked was into the grid square just north of San Fransicko Bay.  Yesterday in the early evening (here) the openings shifted into the NW.  I worked Vancouver, BC, a few grid squares right around Seattle, then Portland area, up into Calgary around Banff Park, and that general area.  Those paths shut down before 8, maybe 9PM.

The big name contests are generally two day affairs, starting at 0000 UTC Saturday (so Friday evening on the eastern time zone) and ending 2359 on Sunday night (Sunday evening here).  This contest starts at 1800 UTC (2PM) on Saturday and ends at 0300 UTC Monday, or 11PM Sunday night.  I wasn't in the chair the entire time, but I did spend most of the available time in it. 

An Interesting Graphic to Ponder

It has been a six sigma day here - in the sense of "nowhere near normal."  I'll post about it tomorrow, but for now, a graphic I found and keep handy.  

If Google is being nice, this should download as a 1200x1575 pixel graphic but still be legible if you look at it on your monitor.  As you can see in the bottom margin, it's from Visual Capitalist (dot com!) and it looks at the cost per kilogram to orbit through the history of modern space programs.  You'll notice the cost stayed in what appears to be a narrow range from 1960 until around 2010.  Now part of the reason for that looking narrow is that they used a logarithmic scale, which visually compresses it.  You'll note, for instance that Saturn V is under the $6,400/kg line while the Shuttle is above the $51,200 line.  $51,200 is eight times $6400, but the log scale doesn't make the Shuttle look eight times more expensive. 

This is a topic that I know I've written about before, and recently been joined by Borepatch. 

The interesting part of the graphic, of course, is the right side which emphasizes the differences SpaceX and their reusability have made.  That estimate for Starship of $200/kg (around $90/lb) is much smaller compared to the others on the chart because of that log scale again.  The cost for the first Falcon 1 was in the vicinity of $12,800/kg to orbit.  In the same neighborhood as Delta Heavy.  The planning cost for Starship of $200/kg is 1/64 of $12,800.

Reusability changes everything.  

 

 

SpaceX Keeps Preparing for First Flight

This isn't anally-retentive true, but this week SpaceX tested Starship 24 with the thrust simulators for its Raptor engines, then it swapped places with a section of booster to pressure test the new design for the tank domes.    

Ship 24 was installed on the modified mount on June 4th, just 12 hours after completing its first cryoproof. On June 6th and 7th, SpaceX then put the prototype through another pair of cryogenic proof tests, both of which appeared to be completed without issue on the first try. The first test even saw Ship 24 use its nose vents, suggesting that SpaceX may have filled and pressurized both its main tanks and a smaller pair of landing propellant or ‘header’ tanks.

At some point during either or both of the Pad A cryoproofs, it’s believed that the mount’s hydraulic rams were used to test Ship 24’s upgraded aft end by simulating the thrust of six Raptor engines. Like Ship 20, Ship 24 will eventually be outfitted with three smaller sea level-optimized Raptors and three larger vacuum-optimized Raptors. However, Ship 24 will be the first Starship to use new Raptor 2 engines, which are capable of generating almost 25% more thrust. At full throttle, Ship 24 could theoretically produce almost 1400 tons (~3.1M lbf) of thrust at sea level, just shy of twice the thrust of an entire Falcon 9 booster. Starship will be the most powerful orbital spacecraft in history.

In this photo from Mary, BocaChicaGal for NASASpaceflight.com, we see S24 being lifted off the test pad after the final test.  Those vertical elements sticking up, two on the left and one near the right hand of the guy on the right side of the stand, are the thrust simulators.  In reality, they're equally spaced at 120 degree intervals on a circle that represents the middle of the three sea level Raptors. 

S24 was rolled back to the Shipyard to have its Raptors installed.  

The domes have been around for a while, we talked about them back in March as part of an article on similar changes to the Starship nose cones, but apparently haven't been adequately tested.  Or haven't been tested at all.  Either way, a new test tank was rolled out to the pad area to test the new design. 

In this picture, also by BocaChicaGal for NASASpaceflight.com, we see the new dome on the right vs. the three level design previously used.  The new design is easier to assemble and leaves a few feet of room in the booster.  That either can be taken advantage of or removed to save a tiny bit of liftoff weight.  

Following the tank’s June 8th arrival at SpaceX’s Starbase launch and test facilities, it likely won’t be long before the tank kicks off its first (and probably only) test campaign. Like past test tanks, SpaceX may start with a pneumatic or water test to check for leaks and ensure basic structural integrity, or it will move directly into cryogenic pressure/stress testing with liquid nitrogen. While the main goal of any test tank is to learn about new hardware, the best-case outcome would either be the total survival of the tank (i.e. too sturdy to be destroyed with the available test equipment) or its destruction well past the maximum pressure it was designed to survive. As of 2020, Starship tanks were expected to operate around 6.5 bar (~95 psi) and designed to survive up to 8-8.5 bar (~115-125 psi).

So while they didn't exactly swap the ship for the tank on the same test stand, they swapped positions.  This tank is simply a test item.  When it's done, it will probably be sent to scrap out the stainless steel.  

My guess is that S24 will have its Raptors installed and be sent back to the launch complex by the end of the week. The FAA website still shows the PEA to be complete on Monday, but every other time they slipped the schedule they didn't update the website until the day it was due to be released.  

 

James Webb Space Telescope Dinged By Micrometeoroid

The best way to start this is probably by saying, "Webb is fine.  They expected and designed for micrometeoroid impacts, knowing that the instrument is likely to be hit several times over its lifetime in deep space."  Still, when the word got out that between May 23 and 25th, the telescope sustained an impact to one of its primary mirror segments, there was a bit of nervousness in the community of people who know the instrument is out there and are hoping for Big Things from the infrared space telescope.  

After initial assessments, the team found the telescope is still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements despite a marginally detectable effect in the data. Thorough analysis and measurements are ongoing. Impacts will continue to occur throughout the entirety of Webb’s lifetime in space; such events were anticipated when building and testing the mirror on the ground. After a successful launch, deployment, and telescope alignment, Webb’s beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve.

I need to remind everyone that the JWST isn't even fully certified as ready for operation, yet, and won't be certified until nearly mid-July.  

In the lead-up to the release of Webb’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data on July 12, the Webb team is now in the last phase of commissioning the science instruments. The first two instrument modes, NIRCam imaging and NIRISS imaging, have been declared ready for science; watch the “Where is Webb” page as the team works their way through the other 15 instrument modes. 

A little more on the design phase - designing for surviving micrometeorioid impacts  To begin with, Webb's primary mirrors are made from metallic beryllium because it is lightweight, stiff, strong and dimensionally stable at the telescope’s operating temperature.  Like most things, Beryllium changes dimensions with temperature, getting smaller as it gets colder, but it virtually stops shrinking once it goes below a temperature of 100 Kelvin (about minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit or minus 173 degrees Celsius).  Making the mirrors out metallic beryllium instead of the conventional approach of glass coated with a metal enabled performance improvements.

Webb’s mirror was engineered to withstand bombardment from the micrometeoroid environment at its orbit around Sun-Earth L2 of dust-sized particles flying at extreme velocities. While the telescope was being built, engineers used a mixture of simulations and actual test impacts on mirror samples to get a clearer idea of how to fortify the observatory for operation in orbit. This most recent impact was larger than was modeled, and beyond what the team could have tested on the ground.

“We always knew that Webb would have to weather the space environment, which includes harsh ultraviolet light and charged particles from the Sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy, and occasional strikes by micrometeoroids within our solar system,” said Paul Geithner, technical deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We designed and built Webb with performance margin – optical, thermal, electrical, mechanical – to ensure it can perform its ambitious science mission even after many years in space.”

There are interesting aspects to this.  Consider the recent potential for a meteor storm at the end of May.  There are regular, predictable meteor showers all year long, and if observations show there's an increased chance of meteoroid impacts, the telescope can be repositioned with respect to the meteor trail to survive better.  Webb has the ability to sense and adjust mirror positions to at least partially correct for impacts. By adjusting the position of the affected segment, engineers can cancel out a portion of the distortion. This minimizes the effect of any impact, although not every distortion from every kind of impact can be cancelled out this way.

They already did an adjustment like this for this recent impact to correct some of the degradation, and may do more.   

Last words to Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA Goddard, who said, 

“Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed. We will use this flight data to update our analysis of performance over time and also develop operational approaches to assure we maximize the imaging performance of Webb to the best extent possible for many years to come.”

 

 

A Little Update on SpaceX Starship at the KSC

I've been trying to keep up with progress at the Kennedy Space Center facilities that SpaceX is building and it's harder to keep track of than Texas.  I went over this is some detail back in April, pointing out with input from a friend who's a pilot and clips from the sectional air charts that while the KSC technically isn't completely a no-fly zone, it essentially is.  There's no such thing as flying over the bulk of the Kennedy Space Center without clearances to do so.  It's also harder for road traffic to get near the launch pads and there are no equivalents to the Lab Padre or NASA Spaceflight cameras fixed near the facilities and monitoring things. 

Consequently, we get by with what we can get.  There are people who photograph from small planes on carefully planned trips.  People like Greg Scott, Julia Bergeron, and Jack Beyer on Twitter, and NASA Spaceflight.com's flyovers, like this week's.  The first 6-1/2 minutes of that are the SpaceX facilities on Roberts Road and Pad 39A; the next 30 seconds or so is some goings on at Port Canaveral.  Most of the rest is video of Blue Origin's facilities. 

The headline that seems to be the news coming out of this video (released June 7) is that the beginnings of the crane expected to be used to build the Orbital Launch Integration Tower (OLIT) have been spotted near the base of the Orbital Launch Mount. 

Image credit to Jack Beyer although the video that contains this frame is credited to Julia Bergeron.  

A few miles from that crane at Pad 39A, the sections of the OLIT are being built up.  

Image credit to Greg Scott.

There are six OLIT tower sections built up to varying degrees and the places marked for the rest of it in the area to the right of the five sections.  While the sections were built individually and successively at Boca Chica, and undoubtedly being revised along the way, it appears the approach is to build all of them at this facility and transport them all to the pad area at once.  

While the video was shot on June 3rd, Teslarati photographer Richard Angle said four days later that, “More parts of this crane were brought in this morning, including the cabin for the operator.”  Speculation is that the crane is the same Liebherr LR 11350 crane as used at Boca Chica.  Eric Ralph at Teslarati speculates that given the small number of those cranes in the world, it might end up being the exact same crane.  He points out:

Assembly of that crane began around April 2021 and took a month and a half, at which point it was finally ready to lift an extended boom long enough to assemble a tower almost 500 feet (~150 meters) tall.

The work on the tower sections isn't done by a long shot, so I wonder if the plan is to have the work on the tower and the crane completed at the same time.  

When the work at KSC began in December of  '21, someone said it would be at least a year before it was ready to use.  Considering that Starbase Boca Chica is regularly being updated, I wouldn't be surprised if that "at least a year" turned into "at least 18 months."  Whatever it works out to be, I'm looking forward to seeing a Starship and Super Heavy launch from here.

The Administration and Their Lies About Inflation

The word "lies" might be a bit harsh sounding because it implies they really know that what they're telling everyone is false and it's entirely possible that the whole lot of them are simply too stupid to know it's a lie.  Does, "... and Their Idiocy About Inflation" sound better?  Seems about the same to me. 

Today's post is a result of one from Ron Paul on the Mises Institute website: "Respect the Fed?  No, End the Fed."  The great Milton Friedman famously said, inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” and thus the responsibility of central banks. and in this case, it's primarily due to the insane monetary creation that has been going on under the Bidenistas and really since the early 2000s.  It accelerated due to the Quantitative Easing (QE) episodes and ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) under "Helicopter" Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve before Janet Yellen.  

Before I go to Ron Paul's argument, I want to remind everyone of a great quote from Thomas Sowell, one of America's most brilliant economic thinkers.  

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

That lesson, that politicians disregard the realities of economics, is visible everywhere.  You don't have to go to the extreme that the ruling class is systematically trying to destroy the country and everyone in it, although I sure won't argue it necessarily isn't that.  It's possible they're not so much malicious and evil as they are incompetent idiots, who are also drunk, stoned, or otherwise impaired.  I mean, have you ever actually listened to what people like AOC or Elizabeth Warren say? 

Within moments of taking office, Biden acted to destroy American energy independence and started spending trillions that was created by fiat - by declaring money to be there to spend.  Those two by themselves would kick off terrible inflation, especially in fuel prices (which add to everything else we buy), but they're just the start.  There are many more idiotic policies that have added to it.  Now they say they're creating policies to counteract inflation, which is to say to counteract their previous policies.  Feel better?

Biden announced a three part plan.  First, the plan has government agencies “fix” the supply chain problems that their policies created, such as shutting down the country for a year.  These have led to real shortages of many things, adding legitimate supply vs. demand pressures to the mix.  

The second point, is spoken of as deficit reduction, but (of course) they're going about it completely wrong.  They're not proposing cutting welfare or warfare spending, they're creating tax increases.  At this point, repeat the mantra that tax rates are not the same as tax revenues - it's called Hauser's Law.  Lots more at that link, but regardless of the tax rates, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 16.8% of GDP.  Yes, as a general rule tax rate cuts have increased tax revenues and tax rate increases have cut tax revenues.  Also, as Ron Paul points out, "History shows that tax increases unaccompanied by spending cuts end up increasing the deficit."

Finally, they're calling on the Fed to fix things, saying that the Federal Reserve “has the primary responsibility to control inflation.”  Riiiight.  Unless they do things to reign in monetary creation and cut deficit spending, nothing good will happen.   

I'll leave final words to Ron Paul.

Treasury Secretary and former Fed Chair Janet Yellen and Chairman Powell have both admitted they were wrong to publicly dismiss inflation as “transitory.” The fact that the two most recent Fed chairs made such a huge blunder (or purposely refused to admit what was clear to many people for over a year), shows the folly of relying on a secretive central bank to manage monetary policy. Instead of “respecting the Fed’s independence,” President Biden should work with Congress to audit, then end the Fed.

 

 

A Glimpse at SpaceX From the Inside

Thanks to a heads up from Teslarati, we can go look at a two minute slide show of a presentation Elon Musk did at an "All Hands" employees meeting recently.  It's two minutes of a "State of the Company" presentation.  The version on Twitter has no sound, just images (moving and still) with onscreen text making the points.  

I recommend watching the Twitter slideshow.  One of the highlights is the Starlink dispenser currently in design and test, to be mounted in a Starship.  This is the system referred to as the Pez dispenser, although the resemblance to one of those is pretty minimal.  The animation shows the dispenser pushing out pair after pair of satellites, and a view through the hull of the Starship so the feed can be seen.  Teslarati shows a recent picture from NASA Spaceflight.com of Starship 24, currently on a test stand at Boca Chica, on which the Pez dispenser can easily be seen. 

I added the red line pointing to the cover of the dispenser. Image credit to Boca Chica Mary at NASA Spaceflight.com.    

Note that:

Based on the renders, SpaceX appears to have more or less upscaled its existing rectangular Starlink V1.x satellite design by a factor of two, producing a spacecraft that will measure about 7 x 3 meters (23 x 10 ft). Curiously, the Starlink dispenser and tiny payload ‘slot’ shown only appear to allow Starship to carry around 60 satellites, suggesting that the company will need to develop a different deployment method to achieve its ultimate goal of launching 110-120 satellites at once.  

An interesting fact from the site Statista might add some perspective.  Within the next few months, fully half of all the operational satellites in the world will be owned by SpaceX.  The constellation currently has almost 2400 satellites in orbit and while there are no Starlink missions firmly on the calendar for June (so far), there will be one Starlink mission this month.  There will be at least one launch this week, Wednesday, a communications satellite for Egyptian provider Nilesat, and five total Falcon 9 launches scheduled for June.  One of the remaining four June launches is another batch of Starlinks, the others are for paying customers.  

The Falcon 9 has continued its blistering launch cadence of one per week.  The Cargo Dragon mission to the ISS, CRS25, originally scheduled for launch this Friday has some sort of delay going on.  When I looked last week, it said Friday but now says TBD.  

On June 1, NASA announced they've awarded SpaceX five additional Crew Dragon (manned) missions to the ISS before 2030.  That second link shows and links to a document from NASA declaring intent to issue a Sole Source contract modification to SpaceX.  After the apparently successful Starliner mission last month, I'm a bit surprised, but another way of looking at it is that NASA simply made some comparisons between its two Commercial Crew providers and moved to secure its astronauts’ access to the Space Station for the rest of this decade.  There are clearly more unknowns with Boeing than with SpaceX simply based on the number of successful missions they've had so far.  Boeing isn't yet certified for manned missions to the space station.  NASA made the decision based on the best available data they had. 

Got My Big "Other" Project Done

A few weeks ago, I noted that I had been splitting my time between my long term, 1 by 1 engine project and “a big project that I have to wait on someone else to do their part before I can work on it.”  The part that someone else had to do was the tree removal we had done last Wednesday.  The big project was to make some repairs to my ham radio tower and antennas.  The "Potential Tropical Cyclone" rain washed out doing it Friday and Saturday, so today was the day.  

My tower is small by most peoples standards: 20 feet with a mast that extends five feet above that.  It's an aluminum tower, so fairly lightweight, and from the first ideas of buying that tower back around 1990 (I've really lost track of exactly when), my goal was to have it tilt over at its base so that with nothing but a small ladder and hand tools, I could remove antennas for a storm.  I did a major update to it back in February and March of '16, replacing the original steel pole that acted as the counterpoise that holds a pulley to direct the cable from a boat trailer winch to the attachment point on the tower, the winch and more.  With the exception of that winch, everything was now either stainless steel or aluminum.  Like millions of people, I've had aluminum boats before and spent time working on them.  The two I had always used aluminum rivets or stainless steel fasteners.  

Within a couple of years, it was obvious the galvanized steel winch was rusting.  I had told myself to replace it, spent time finding a stainless winch that wouldn't break the bank and would support the load.  While I was putting the 2016 upgrade together, I had done another couple of things I wanted to change, but the thing that made it urgent was something I inadvertently did early this year while upgrading my six meter antenna.  I didn't tighten down something holding the cable for my HF antenna, and while rotating the antenna to the south, ripped the connection to the antenna apart.  That meant I didn't have an antenna for some of the best HF bands: 20 to 10 meters. 

I forgot to take a picture of the winch before I took it off the aluminum pipe, but it looked like this afterward: 

The replacement winch is Chinesium and a winch that at least looks like it is sold widely.  Changing that was literally removing two nuts, swapping the winches and putting back the two nuts.  

The original winch was a boat trailer winch.  In practice, that means that it only cranks in one direction: winding in the cable (pulling the boat up the trailer in use).  If I disengage the ratchet to lower the tower, my arm is the only thing keeping it from rotating out of control and crashing everything into the ground.  To make matters worse, the plastic handle became frozen in place (probably more corrosion on the handle locked it in place) so that holding the handle was more difficult.  The new winch is a brake winch, meaning it has a brake mechanism so that if I stop cranking up or down the brake engages and the tower stops moving.  Safer is good! 

I spent a couple of hours in the morning, from pretty much 9 to 11, upgrading the winch and the way the cable attaches to the tower.  I waited from 11AM to almost 2PM before I went out to fix the antenna connections.  That's straightforward work but requires cleaning up the waterproofing compound I used, then dragging a soldering iron over to the feedpoint on the antenna.  What I had been concerned about being a job that would go into two days ended up taking one, with a lot of getting out of the sun.

This evening, everything checked out, the antenna worked like it was supposed to, the rotator worked properly, and I'm back to having a fully functional station again.  Hopefully the almost-tropical storm is the only one we'll have to face and I won't have to take this down again.  It can't apply to repairs, but my saying for antenna upgrades and projects is those always begin with "when it cools off."  There's still a few things to do, but they're cleanup-type things. 

Update on the 1 by 1 - Part 28

Update on making the piston.  It's done except for one cut.  Possibly two, but I'll explain in a minute.  The engine plans call out a Vyton plastic piston ring, but when I look at sources online, I need to specify which blend of Vyton I want and that isn't called out in the drawings.  I emailed the designer two weeks ago and never heard back.  Since the last postings I saw from him was that he was taking a break, it's possible he's on a summer vacation trip somewhere.  

So I did the next best thing and went to Otto Gas Engine Works who makes many sizes of cast iron piston rings and ordered three of the recommended size, last weekend.  He shipped immediately, Tuesday after Memorial Day by USPS.  They said delivery by Friday but the rings now appear to either be lost, or somehow, somewhere they're still in the postal system, just not being picked up by any scanners.  Meanwhile the guy at Otto said to wait to cut the ring slot until I had them for best sizing results. 

Every feature is cut except for that.  I'm not 100% sure if I'm going to use two cast iron rings instead of the one Vyton, so that's the only real question.  The Webster I did last year had two cast iron rings with a smaller bore and stroke.  Sounds to me like two might be better.

Nothing to brag about, just to show the oval counterbore made by moving a 7/16" (0.4375") end mill back and forth 0.282" is cut, the circular counterbore is cut, the through hole for the wrist pin is visible as well as the threaded hole (#5-40) for a screw to grab the pin.  All of these things were done by moving the blank to the mill, finding where X and Y zero were and using the CNC (manual entry) to go to specific spots to cut.  

Before that, when I went to check the piston and cylinder for a sliding fit, I found that the cylinder had a narrow spot in it, closer to the top than the bottom, about .001" too narrow.  Hard to call being small by 1/1000 a wasp waist, but removing that gave the piston an easy sliding fit.

In this view, you can see a groove near the wider stock in the vise jaws.  That's where the piston gets cut off the rough stock.  If I make one ring slot positioned where the print says, it's 0.170 from the end of the piston to the closest edge of the ring slot.  If I cut slots for two rings, I don't know where they need to go just yet. 

The last time my package of piston rings was scanned was Thursday, June 2nd at 11:23 PM in Linthicum Heights, Maryland.  Since it's two days later and it hasn't shown up anywhere else, I suspect it fell off a bench, a truck, or something.  A year or two ago, I had  package shipped here from South Florida that instead of coming here from post office facility near Orlando, went to Pittsburgh,  PA.  That one never stopped being in updates; it was clearly still in the system.  This one isn't inspiring confidence.  

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Potential tropical cyclone one update.

Longtime readers will know my standard line about tropical storms, "it's a poopy day with a press agent." This one never even became a tropical storm.  I think every forecast since they started calling it "Potential Tropical Cyclone One" has predicted it would become a tropical storm by the next forecast.  So every three hours from Thursday until now, when the forecast was issued, they essentially were saying, "this time we're sure!  It will be a tropical storm in the next update!"  

We had rain all day - actually from mid-afternoon yesterday until mid-afternoon today.  Much of the time it was small droplets, kind of extra chunky humidity.  The wind wasn't noisy, didn't seem strong, and I'd be surprised if we saw a 25mph gust here.  It was simply a poopy day with a loud, trumpet-sounding, press agent

Space News Roundup

As usual, a roundup of smaller stories that don't justify more than a paragraph or two:

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NASA's Artemis/SLS is supposed to roll out from the VAB to pad 39B for the second round of attempts at a Wet Dress Rehearsal on Monday, June 6th.  I don't know what their weather requirements are, but Monday is looking to be clear of the (still) potential tropical storm one.  If current predictions work out, PTC1 should be close to Bermuda by Monday morning and their forecast looks like a typical summer day with a chance of isolated showers.  First motion is scheduled for 12:01 a.m. EDT on June 6, so what most people think of as Sunday night at midnight.  The trip to the pad takes from around eight to as many as 12 hours. 

Artemis/SLS on the way to the launch pad on March 17th, for the first attempts at the WDR.

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SpaceX is making good progress installing all 33 Raptor 2 engines on Super Heavy Booster B7.  It has been about 23 days since B7 was rolled back to their Shipyard area, specifically to their new Wide Bay, after being repaired and re-tested with cryogenic gases for a couple of days.  SpaceX hasn't, as best as I can determine, released any totals of what has already been installed.  On June 1st, however, Elon Musk Tweeted that,"All Raptor 2 engines needed for first orbital flight are complete & being installed."  We just don't know how many are installed and if anything worth watching is going to be happening soon.  There are "possible road closures" listed for Monday through Wednesday, from 10AM to 10PM on the County website for the purpose.  Could we see them roll B7 out to the launch area? 

You might recall that last August, Booster 4 had all 29 of its Raptor engines installed at the rate of about one per hour.  Teslarati columnist Eric Ralph reminds us that they then had to spend more time installing heat shielding between the engines.

For Super Heavy Booster 4, which was inexplicably never static-fired, installation of all 29 of its Raptor 1 engines took just a few days, but the installation of a heat shield around those engines took at least a few weeks.

They've also made progress on Starship SN24 since I posted on Tuesday that she wasn't going anywhere any time soon.  Yesterday, they started retesting SN24 after the repairs and Musk took the time to tweet that she passed.  I don't know how much more testing is in order, but they clearly fix things faster than I'm used to.

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Finally, from the business side, this story from this week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica raised my eyebrows a little.

The US Space Systems Command has identified which eight national security space launches were funded in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, Space News reports. Of the eight missions, five were assigned to United Launch Alliance and three to SpaceX, the two companies that in 2020 won the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 launch services procurement contract. As part of that agreement, overall, ULA was guaranteed 60 percent of launches over a five-year period, and SpaceX 40 percent.

Twice the money ... The five missions for ULA will all launch on the Vulcan rocket, which has yet to launch for the first time. The three SpaceX missions will all launch on the Falcon 9 rocket. Col. Douglas Pentecost, Space Systems Command deputy director of launch enterprise, told the publication that ULA’s task orders for the five missions are worth $566 million, and SpaceX’s orders for three missions are worth $280 million.

It's not fair to compare the cost per flight without knowing if the Falcon 9 could perform the missions that the Vulcan perform (and we don't actually know the Vulcan can fly), however... ULA's launches are $566/5 or $113.2 million per launch, while SpaceX's are $280/3 or $93.3 million per launch.  We don't know if those missions will fly on flight-proven boosters, but my guess is the National Security launch folks wouldn't do that just yet. 

And Just Like That, It's Summer

That's not surprising; after all, pretty much everyone refers to Memorial Day as the "unofficial" start of summer, which doesn't technically begin until the summer solstice on June 21st.  

The exact dates and times depend on exactly where you are, but the Sunrise/Sunset app on my phone (which appears to be abandoned now) says we are in the minute that has the earliest sunrise of the year, 6:25, and it tells me that time from today until June 18th.   The latest sunset of the year will be June 29th until July 5th.  

Much like blog brother Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man talked about a large home and property improvement project, we've had a big project going on in the background.  It first became an idea that we had to do the project last January when I was putting up my new six meter beam antenna.  The winch that I use to crank over the tower was rusting out and needed to be replaced, and I told myself to go find a stainless winch.  The complicating problem showed up when I cranked over the tower to swap in the new antenna, it became very apparent that our oak tree had continued its bad habit of growing into the way and needed to be trimmed.  That requires a serious effort because of the size of the tree.  

I don't have a "before" picture that captures the size of the tree because it's so big.  The best I can do is a picture of the antennas during January's antenna work and while it doesn't do the size of the tree justice, it's as good as I can get.  Close to 100' in the longest dimension of the canopy.  The trunk is about 4' across at its widest.

This turned into quite an ordeal because it got into April before we started calling tree service guys to do the work.  Which turned into getting estimates.  The first estimate, from guys we've used before, said the only reasonable thing to do was to take out the tree.  Which led to getting another estimate - and they're both "certified arborists" who agreed there really wasn't much that can be done besides take down the tree. Finally, it's rapidly turning into the tree services' busy season as people are realizing they should trim back their trees for hurricane season.

The tree was taken down yesterday.  I have the stainless winch, the stainless hardware I expect to need, and I'm ready to crank over the tower to do that work.  Without the shade the tree always gave.

The whole purpose of being able to crank over the tower is to remove those antennas in the event of a hurricane.  Guess what?  We're getting something this weekend, with the forecasts saying overnight tomorrow through Saturday morning.  Exactly what it will be isn't forecast.  It hasn't achieved tropical storm strength yet, but the National Hurricane Center has started calling it "Potential Tropical Cyclone 1" rather than the more realistic Invest 91L.  The hierarchy of names for these systems is the earliest stages are called Invest (area of investigation?) with a sequential number and a letter that denotes where it is.  Once winds exceed 25 mph and the system has a low pressure center and circulation, they're denoted as depression.  When winds get to 45 mph they're promoted to Tropical Storm and given a name.  Hurricanes are 75 mph and above.  This storm is around depression strength but they haven't found a circulation center. 

The one forecast product that I thought was worth saving was the prediction of this as a rain event.  

The colored bands representing the amount of rain expected change very quickly around the Cape Canaveral area, just north of me.  The local NWS forecast is predicting between two and three inches of rain Saturday, which is what this graphic seems to say.  Notice that they're talking 10 to 15 inches of rain down at the southern tip of Florida. 

The novel thing about this storm is that it's forming from the remnants of the first hurricane in the Pacific this year, Agatha, which came ashore in Mexico Monday.  If those remnants become the first named storm in the Atlantic basin, they'll be given the name Alex.  

It's peak 2022!  Born a woman, after some trying times and a "mid-life crisis", she transitions to being a man.  You can't make this stuff up!  

 

This Suits NASA

NASA today announced the selection of two companies to develop the next generations space suits they've been trying to develop since 2007.  

After more than a decade of work to develop a new spacesuit in-house, NASA said it would instead buy spacesuit services from two private companies, Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace.

Each of these companies will be able to use technology NASA has worked on but are responsible for the overall development of the spacesuits used on the International Space Station and activities on the lunar surface. Axiom and Collins said they intended to demonstrate their spacesuits for NASA—likely in the form of a spacewalk outside the space station—by 2025.

Axiom Space, of course, we've talked about several times here and most recently about their mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon to the ISS in April.  They're developing a private space station.  I don't know that spacesuits are in their areas of expertise; the only things I've read about them and EVA suits is that SpaceX has developed EVA suits for the forthcoming Axiom/SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission. 

Axiom Space is already building its own private space station, and its chief executive, Mike Suffredini, said Wednesday that the company's customers definitely want to do spacewalks. The contract award means that Axiom will be able to hire 300 additional employees to work on the spacesuit project, which now must also operate in the dusty environment on the surface of the Moon. Axiom's partners include KBR, Air-Lock, the David Clark Company, and Paragon Space Development Corporation.

Collins Aerospace is a bit less obvious a choice.  They're a descendant of an early radio company that hams will have heard of, Collins Radio (I have an early '60s vintage Collins KWM-2 on my shelf).  Over the years, they became a subsidiary of Rockwell International as Rockwell Collins and then were acquired in rapid succession by United Technologies Corporation and then Raytheon.  

The other winner was Collins Aerospace, which will lead a team that includes ILC Dover and Oceaneering. These three companies have experience building spacesuits, with Collins designing the Apollo spacesuits used during the first Moon landings. While Collins does not have a private space station, it plans to offer its suits to other companies planning to build them in low Earth orbit, said Dan Burbank, senior technical fellow for the company.

The companies beat out a lot of other bidders for this opportunity. More than 40 firms were listed as "interested parties" when NASA first announced the private spacesuit program, formally known as the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contract. Blue Origin, Honeywell Aerospace, Leidos, Sierra Space, and SpaceX were among the other interested parties.

The Collins Aerospace corporate website doesn't claim that the Apollo suits were actually designed by a predecessor of today's company.  Instead they point out that Collins "provided the communications equipment used by every American astronaut traveling through space (including the footage of the first step on the moon)."  It's possible that was North American Rockwell before they acquired Collins Radio, but I'm by no means an expert at that history.  I just recall reading about North American Rockwell in the Apollo program around that time.

Perhaps it's obvious but one of the side effects of NASA having been trying to get replacement suits since 2007 is that the current suits are a pretty old design. "The previous suit has been the workhorse for 40 years," said the director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, during a news conference.  The agency elected to go with an approach copied from the very successful Commercial Crew program.  

"We never intended a government to be a production house," she said. "So we knew there was always a transition to industry in our future. The question was when that transition should occur. We decided with the amount of knowledge we had gained from xEMU that we could hand to these guys, and that would get them kick-started. And the sooner we got them on the path to actually delivering flight suits, the higher probability we were actually going to make our schedule."  [The source material doesn't explain what xEMU means.  A little research shows it to be Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit - SiG]

xEMU conceptual artwork  NASA illustration.

 

And... FAA Approval for SpaceX Slips Another Two Weeks

The FAA  was scheduled to complete the Environmental Assessment for SpaceX today, 5/31, but like all of the other deadlines missed so far, was unable to do their job by the date that they said they'd have it done.  I don't about you but the date itself doesn't bother me half as much as the fact that they can't estimate how long the task will take, create a schedule, and stick to it. 

Unlike all the other deadlines so far, this one wasn't put off by a whole number of months; not two or even one month.  The deadline has been moved out only two weeks.  Maybe they're making progress?

June 13 is two weeks from yesterday, when the FAA was almost certainly closed for the holiday.  Teslarati's Eric Ralph is taking the view that this might be a positive sign.  

Even though there were attempts to spin the new information into something negative, a document acquired through the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) by Bloomberg revealed that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had decided to approve its portion of the Starbase environmental review. Their only condition: that SpaceX implement a few small mitigation measures, “including contracting with a qualified biologist to conduct monitoring of vegetation and birds, operating an employee shuttle between the launch facility site and nearby town of Brownsville, reducing vehicle traffic, and adjusting lights to minimize the impact on sea turtles.” Bloomberg chose not to publish the documents it received through the FOIA process.

Any Floridian who lives near a beach knows the sea turtles dominate life during the nesting and especially hatching season.  Lights must be turned off to keep from distracting the hatchlings.  Hatching apparently happens when the full moon (or nearly full) is rising over the ocean and turtles are born programmed to move toward that light.  I've seen dead sea turtles across the street from the beach, apparently somehow catching some light from somewhere and going west instead of east toward the moon and into the ocean.  Luckily, Texas doesn't seem to have a resident manatee population; they're the other native animal that dominates every activity in Florida's brackish water.  Texas has a summer manatee population that migrates from Florida and the east (not counting "governor" Stacy Abrams from Georgia) but they aren't documented as far south as the Boca Chica area.

There are some other interesting sides in the Teslarati story.  Did you know that SpaceX had included plans for a natural gas production and liquefaction plant, along with a natural gas power plant at or near Starbase Boca Chica?  Those were removed from the data package for the PEA, which seems likely to have helped speed the process.  Still the bottom line is this excerpt from the FAA statement.

“The FAA now plans to release the Final PEA on June 13, 2022 to account for ongoing interagency consultations concerning Section 4(f) of the Department of Transportation Act. All other consultations and analysis have been completed at this time.” 

It's actually sounding like they might get approval to do "a few" launches from Boca Chica.  In the long term, it looks like the anti-launch forces will probably force the bulk of Starship activity to launches from offshore platforms, as has been talked about, or from the Kennedy Space Center, where progress is grinding along. 

Starship 24 isn't going anywhere for a while, since the first cryo testing apparently broke something and she lost some tiles, but an approval in two weeks could open the door to some impressive testing through the rest of June and well into July.  Something will try for orbit and Musk proved back in the Starship test days that he'll do a test launch if it gets to about a 50/50 chance it'll work.

Memorial Day 2022

There are times I wonder how many more of any holiday our republic will survive to see, but this one is the hardest to come to grips with.  Memorial Day is the day to honor those who fell fighting to preserve the republic and if it falls, that's dishonoring every one of them.  Every one of them gave themselves, their lives, their futures, for something bigger than themselves.  

It's not just the generation that saved the west in the all out war of WWII; it's all of them, from those we know of fighting in the first battles of the Revolution on April 19, 1775, (commemorated as Patriots' Day but some states shift the date to get a Monday Holiday) to those who were lost in Bumbling Biden's disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan, including those lost since then.  We include losses from training accidents as well as actual enemy action. 

For most people, Memorial Day is the semi-official Start of Summer.  It's marked by barbecues, trips out on the boat, or other outdoors activities.  Let me join the chorus of folks saying that while you're enjoying your day, take a moment to remember or think of and thank those who gave their all in service to us. The ones who don't get to mark the holiday with us.

I say that in the belief that those who made that sacrifice wouldn't hold it against us to have a little fun on their day.

Credit to Al Goodwyn at Creators Syndicate. 

 

Absurd Headline of the Week

From Accuweather:

Asteroid the size of 350 giraffes to fly past Earth this week

I'm so out of touch that I've never even seen anything measured in numbers of giraffes.  What does "the size of 350 giraffes" size mean?  If you had 350 giraffes milling around in a field, feeding, fighting, fleeing and doing whatever else giraffes do, 350 would only be the height of the tallest one and the width or length of 250 giraffes would depend on how close to each other they stand.  Unless you had them stand on each other's backs, which would work until the ones on the bottoms started collapsing from broken limbs. It would work better if you had them stand shoulder to shoulder, then the width of 350 giraffes would depend on how wide they are.  To use the term from electronics, is that 350 giraffes in series our parallel?

In the actual text of the article, they use a more familiar unit, saying the asteroid is "1.1 miles across."  I'm going to assume that's the long dimension and that it's probably an irregular shape.  Probably not 1.1 by 1.0 mile but 1.1 by 1.0 is still probably more likely than being 1.1 miles long and 100 feet wide.  

Asteroids fly past the Earth on a regular basis, but Asteroid 7335 (1989 JA) is bigger than many of them, measuring 1.1 miles (5,900 feet) across. For comparison, it is four times larger than the Empire State Building and more than twice as large as the Burj Khalifa, located in Dubai, UAE, and the tallest building on the planet. It is also about as tall as 350 giraffes.

I hate it when magazines and other places try to be cute by using absurd units like that.  "As tall as 350 giraffes" is completely meaningless to anyone other than the person that came up with it.

The close approach of Asteroid 1989 JA was yesterday, and at its closest, it was 2-1/2 million miles from Earth, or around 10 times the distance of the moon from us.  While tracked as a "potentially hazardous" asteroid, this is the closest approach to earth calculated so far.  The calculations are through 2187, and the next closest approach to us is about 4 times the distance from Earth in May of 2114.  The "potentially hazardous" identifier is to keep an eye on it and make sure its orbit doesn't get bumped by another planet or something. 

There.  Now you know a bit more about the size of a giraffe.  Not enough, but 350 giraffes makes more sense.  Image search says this was from a blog that now returns a "blog not found" message.

Something's Up With Voyager 1

Voyager 1 remains (and will remain for the foreseeable future) the single man-made object that is farthest from Earth at nearly 14-1/2 billion miles away.  To put a little perspective on that, the nearest stars are 4.2 to 4.3 light years away - it takes radio signals that long to go one way.  Voyager 1 is 20.5 light hours away a tiny fraction of one light year; .00239 light year to be precise.  Assuming it's even going in the right direction, it'll take Voyager 1 almost 77,000 years to get to the Alpha/Proxima star system.  The probes are expected to last another three years until 2025, but there's hope they'll make it to the Golden (50th) Anniversary of their launch in 2027. 

A couple of weeks ago, I started noticing videos in my YouTube feed that mentioned something wrong with Voyager 1.  I didn't pay much attention because there are so many deceptively labeled videos that are just screaming to get clicks that I was reluctant to believe anything was really going on.  For example, at least once a week I get videos claiming that the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered some incredible new thing, even months ago when the telescope wasn't even remotely close to being operational.  Plus, let's be honest: Voyager 1 is just about at its 45th year of a four year mission, so something like parts dying due their old age is almost overdue.  It's old hardware that has been exposed to all kinds of radiation from deep space (not to mention from Jupiter, Saturn and the sun) and the power supply is slowly running out.  

Back around the middle of the month, I went to the JPL Voyager page and didn't see anything that suggested anything was terribly wrong, but eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I watched this video.  

The video talks about strange errors in the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) and say they don’t reflect what’s actually happening. They base that on the probe being properly pointed at Earth and maintaining radio contact, which is a reasonable conclusion.  The AACS maintains the probe's position and it if it were out of position the radio link wouldn't be received on Earth.  Voyager wouldn't be heard sending funny data, it wouldn't be heard at all.

Today I went back to the JPL Voyager site and found they put up a post about this nine days ago.  As the article puts is:

“A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and 2 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The spacecraft are both almost 45 years old, which is far beyond what the mission planners anticipated. We’re also in interstellar space – a high-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before. So there are some big challenges for the engineering team. But I think if there’s a way to solve this issue with the AACS, our team will find it.”

It’s possible the team may not find the source of the anomaly and will instead adapt to it, Dodd said. If they do find the source, they may be able to solve the issue through software changes or potentially by using one of the spacecraft’s redundant hardware systems.

The post includes a fact that I've never seen before.  Every year, the Radioisotope Thermal Generators that power the Voyagers produce 4 Watts less power.  To enlarge on what I mentioned above, planning numbers are that the pair should last until at least 2025, and possibly until the 50th anniversary of their launches, in August and September of 2027.  The engineering team has shut down some subsystems to save power for others.  No science instruments have been turned off, yet.  

As I said a decade ago, if we're lucky, some day, perhaps hundreds of years from now a ship from Earth may find Voyager 1 and bring her back to whatever serves as the equivalent of the Smithsonian in those days. 

In all probability, she will simply follow the Newtonian laws of motion, cool to a couple of degrees Kelvin and glide away forever, all alone in the night.  

 

Starliner Down, Transporter 5 Up

Boeing's Starliner Orbital Flight Test (OFT-2) completed successfully this afternoon touching down at White Sands Missile Range on schedule of 4:49 PM Mountain Time, 6:49 PM Eastern. 

The day seemed to go smoothly; I was able to watch some of the video of the capsule leaving the ISS, and much of the recovery video.  I didn't see anything that seemed wrong, but that doesn't mean much.

Hopefully, we'll get a thorough summary within the next few weeks.  

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Over here at "America's Gateway to Space," it wasn't quite a routine SpaceX launch, but only because the mission wasn't a typical Starlink mission.  It was the fifth rideshare mission into Sun Synchronous orbit, Transporter 5.  The launches into that orbit tend to be ideal to watch from my location as they launch south, almost directly overhead.  Plus, the booster on these missions tends to return to the launch site and land on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  We've been able to see the booster's first burn, but are too far from the landing site to see the landing burn or landing.  On the other hand, we get an awesome sonic boom that shakes the entire house. 

The Fun Facts are this was launch number 22 in '22, but in the 21st week of the year, not the 22nd.  It was booster B1061's eighth launch and landing (Twitter video of the landing here), the 115th recovery of a Falcon 9 booster, and the 100th flight of a Block 5 Falcon 9.  The mission carried 59 satellites into orbit, and some of them are pretty interesting.  

Spaceflight’s ‘Sherpa-AC1’ won’t have significant propulsion but it will carry several hosted payloads (‘hosted’ in the sense that the payload is not a free-flying satellite of its own) after deploying from Falcon 9.

The other two or three are true orbital transfer vehicles (OTVs), meaning that they have some kind of propulsion and are designed to deploy smaller satellites in customized orbits. The ultimate goal of the many startups trying to develop high-performance OTVs is to extract the best of both worlds from large rideshare missions and small rockets, combining ultra-cheap prices and orbits that are heavily optimized for each payload. Transporter-5 may carry Exolaunch’s “Reliant” OTV (unconfirmed) but is definitively scheduled to launch with D-Orbit’s “ION SCV-006” OTV and startup Momentus Space’s first ‘Vigoride’ OTV. Vigoride carries the unique distinction of being propelled by a first-of-its-kind “microwave electrothermal thruster” that turns water into a superheated plasma propellant.

NASA has also manifested its small Terabyte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) technology demonstrater satellite on Transporter-5 and will attempt to prove that it’s possible to use small, high-power lasers as extremely high-bandwidth downlinks. NASA hopes the tiny satellite will be able to transmit at up to 200 gigabits per second (Gbps), allowing it to downlink terabytes of data during a single pass over an Earth-based ground station.

An experiment that caught my eye is doing something that has never been done in space before.  The satellite will only operate for one hour but companies Nanoracks and Maxar are scheduled to launch the first of multiple planned demonstrations and technology maturation missions for in-space manufacturing and construction technologies. The experiment aims to demonstrate the first structural metal cutting in space, with a technique that doesn't produce debris - what machinists often call swarf or chips.  Nobody wants to hit metal chips while going thousands of miles per hour.

Nanoracks designed a self-contained hosted payload platform to demonstrate on-orbit, debris-free, robotic metal cutting. Our partner in this demonstration, Maxar Technologies, developed a new robotic arm with a friction milling end-effector. Friction milling uses a cutting tool operating at high rotations per minute to melt the metal in such a way that a cut is made, and no debris is generated.