No Final Words on Both ABL and Virgin Orbit Failures

Last Monday and Tuesday were bad days in the space industry, as you'll remember.  On Monday, Virgin Orbit's attempt to be the first launch from Europe to reach orbit failed well into the mission.  On Tuesday, ABL Space's first launch ever failed seconds after liftoff from the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska.  The investigations began immediately, and while progress has been made, neither company has said they've completed investigations and are fixing any problems that turned up.

Last week, Virgin Orbit reported that the trouble began with a second stage malfunction well after the Launcher One booster was dropped.  

“Later in the mission, at an altitude of approximately 180 km, the upper stage experienced an anomaly. This anomaly prematurely ended the first burn of the upper stage,” the company stated. The company did not disclose additional details about the anomaly.

Observers had speculated that some sort of issue with the upper stage caused the failure, although issues with the telemetry displayed during the launch webcast, such as spurious data, made it difficult to narrow down the nature of the problem or its timing.

SpaceNews (previous link) brings up the fact that Virgin Orbit stated in their Twitter live feed that they had achieved orbit but then had to retract that. I don't see the point of that.  They corrected their mistake quickly, and since one of the issues they mention is difficulties with telemetry (that even I commented on), it's easy to think they had information that was misleading or completely wrong. 

Virgin has said that they believe the reason will be understood soon and have announced their Return to Flight launch would be from Mojave Air and Space Port in California, the site where all five previous missions began. The rocket for that mission is going through final integration and checkout.  

I don't really understand the organizational difference between Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic, their suborbital space tourism business, but they are apparently separate companies.  Virgin Galactic announced a reorganization with intent to resume their suborbital flights in the 2nd quarter of this year. 

---

ABL's launch failure occurred seconds into flight, but in an update today reported they have telemetry and other clues pointing toward a fire in the RS1 launcher's avionics. 

The RS1's first stage "suffered a complete loss of power" 10.87 seconds after liftoff, ABL explained in a Twitter update on Wednesday (Jan. 18). The rocket continued to ascend for another 2.63 seconds, reaching a maximum altitude of 761 feet (232 meters) but then fell back to Earth, impacting about 60 feet (18 m) east of its launch pad.

At only 10.87 seconds into the flight the vehicle was almost completely loaded with propellant and the resulting explosions and fires did a lot of damage. 

"Approximately 95% of the vehicle total propellant mass was still onboard, creating an energetic explosion and overpressure wave that caused damage to nearby equipment and facilities," the company wrote in the update. The damaged gear included communications equipment at the pad, as well as fuel and water storage tanks.

The crash scattered debris over an area with a radius of 0.25 miles (0.40 kilometers) and sparked a fire that destroyed an ABL fabric hangar and much of the "integration equipment" it harbored, ABL wrote in the update.

Thankfully, no one was injured.  Their report goes on to say that they noted “some visual evidence of fire or smoke near the vehicle QD and the engine bay after liftoff,” where QD seems to refer to the Quick Disconnect connectors that you regularly see dropping from many launch vehicles as they start moving.  They go on to say in the few seconds before the vehicle shut down that “we saw off-nominal pressure spikes and rises in temperature in the Stage 1 aft cavity a few seconds after liftoff.”

"Shortly before power loss, a handful of sensors began dropping out sequentially," the update continues. "This evidence suggests that an unwanted fire spread to our avionics system, causing a system-wide failure."

ABL teams have already begun work on the launch facility to get it ready for the next attempt at flight, and the next launch vehicle (serial no. 2) is reported "largely complete and commissioned" for the next attempt. They add it's too soon to speculate on when the next mission will fly. 

ABL RS1 SN1, November '22.

More Hardware Lining Up for Testing at Starbase Boca Chica

While the Booster 7 / Starship 24 stack has been in place on the Orbital Launch Mount since last week, and was cryo-tested last Friday, it's not the only thing going on at Starbase.  It appears that Starship 25 was rolled out to the launch area and placed on the Starship test stand on the 14th.

It's not the first time that S25 has been to the test area; that was back in October.  After a pressurization proof test, multiple cryogenic proof tests, and likely a few simulated thrust tests using six hydraulic rams, she was rolled back to the shipyard on November 8.   

An interesting second thing on Saturday was that when S25 went back to the test area Musk was asked how many Starships SpaceX is looking to build this year and he replied "about five full stacks."   

Full stacks, of course, means that S25 needs a booster, and B9 has been associated with B9 in the same way as B7 and S24; everyone seems to refer to them as a pair.  Like S25, B9 has also been to the test area and proof tested before, more recently than S25.  

About two months behind Ship 25, Booster 9 rolled out of its Starbase assembly bay and headed to the launch site on December 15th, 2022. The Super Heavy prototype ultimately completed two partial cryogenic proof tests on December 21st and 29th, during which it was likely loaded with around a thousand tons of liquid nitrogen to simulate explosive liquid oxygen and methane propellant. Booster 9 then returned to Starbase’s factory on January 10th, 2023.

B9 returned to the shipyard to get its new Raptor engines installed and these are expected to be the latest version engines, not compatible with B7.  Instead of the hydraulic thrust vector control (gimballing the engines), the latest Raptors use electric TVC.  SpaceX has been testing the TVC design at their McGregor, Texas engine testing facility (that linked video has some interesting aspects to watch but only until about 1 minute 40 seconds).  The only question is if there are enough of them on hand to fully outfit B9, which probably depends on when they want to start testing B9 out at the pad.  There's only one pad out there big enough to handle B9 and that's occupied by the B7/S24 stack.  Which Elon says is likely to launch before the end of March.  I imagine that some delay between launching B7/S24 and testing B9 is inevitable.

There's a road closure from 8AM to 8PM (central time, of course) at Boca Chica, with Thursday as the backup (alternate) day, same hours.  They're getting close to the point where they could do a full Wet Dress Rehearsal - everything except firing the 33 engines. 

Solar Cycle 25 Progression Update - Jan '23

I've been posting solar cycle updates for a very long time - a casual look shows one in 2013 and that one refers to a post six months prior.  I usually try to keep them around six months apart, in attempt to keep them focused on the "big picture" rather than day to day events like minor flares or Coronal Mass Ejections.  The last one was last July, so this is as good a day as any to put one up.  

To begin with, I'll start with today's version of the same plot last July's post did, the Cycle 24/25 plot from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, and their Space Weather Prediction Center.  This plot shows the sunspot numbers and you can read numbers directly by hovering your mouse over one of the points on the chart - on the website linked there, not this graphic.  The smoothed red curve is the predicted values while the jagged points on the purple curve are measured data. 

I did a screen capture from the NOAA site showing the smoothed sunspot number for December '22 of 113.1  The smoothed Solar Flux Index (SFI - the plot directly below this one on that NOAA site) for December was 148.5.  Remember this is an average over the month; I recall days around Christmas when solar flux was in the 160s.  Furthermore, since the start of the year (notice how that sounds more impressive than "for the last two weeks?"), the SFI has been above 160.  It crossed 200 early in the month and is currently 234; today's sunspot number is 186. These values are well above the NOAA/NASA predictions.

The next plot is an update to the second plot in the July post, the one I jokingly refer to as my "ham radio autobiography" because these are smoothed sunspot plots of every solar cycle since 1976, the year I got my first ham license. 

I think a key takeaway from this graphic is that while cycle 25, the gray line at lower left ending at month 30, is somewhat better than cycle 24 (in pink) it's not what most people would call much better than the 24, and dramatically worse than 21 and 22 (a half to a third of the sunspot numbers).  It bears repeating that cycle 24 was the weakest cycle in 100 years (or more) so saying "better than cycle 24" isn't saying much. This plot is from Solen.info, linked from Space Weather News, which (I believe) is run by Suspicious0bservers from You Tube.

Finally, an update to another graphic that I posted in February of '22, the progression of this cycle vs the NOAA predictions.  This plot is from Helioforecast.space and is one that Dr. McIntosh uses.

These are busy plots but the first the key feature to note is the black zigzag line, which is the observed monthly mean sunspot number.  You'll note the peak to peak excursions of the black line don't go above the one in the middle of '22 until the last peak.  That black line is based on the the raw daily sunspot numbers shown as the light green very jiggly line and the same 'little change from last June' comment applies to those, too.  After that, note the light blue band with the dark blue line it; the band is the NOAA/NASA prediction for cycle 25.  The dark blue line is the median of the predictions in that light blue band shifted six months earlier in time.  The red lines/band are McIntosh's predictions.  The dark green line is the mean of every solar cycle since 1750.  It appears the observed cycle 25 sunspot numbers are looking to split the difference between the upper end of the NOAA/NASA predictions and the lower end of McIntosh's.  The last peak variation of the black curve looks like it's quite a bit higher than the blue band.  

Cycle 25 is looking better than the NOAA/NASA prediction but not quite as good as McIntosh's which have been lowered several times.  If you go back to that February post and compare its plot to this, you'll find this revision of McIntosh's prediction is quite a bit lower than a year ago.  Note that the solid green and red lines cross 2023 a bit under 125.  Last February's plot shows the intersection with 2023 closer to 145 for McIntosh's prediction while the average of all cycles seems the same (the scales are different enough to make it hard to tell). 

Scott McIntosh did his (quarterly? semi-annual?) visit to one of the ham radio groups, the Front Range 6 meter Group on groups.io (where he's also a member) and hosted a Zoom video talk that went about 45 minutes of new content and 20 minutes of Q&A. Scott said that he thinks signs that he looks for on the sun are pointing to the peak of this cycle coming a bit earlier than previous predictions, perhaps in late '24, and solar activity should be around what it is now for a couple of years.  So far, we've had two or three X-class solar flares out of this cycle, but none were strong or placed to cause harm.  There have been (as you'd expect) more M-class and even more C-class flares, but honestly, most of us could damage the power grid as much as a C-class flare by farting.

Most Spectacular Falcon Heavy Launch So Far

Yesterday's scheduled launch of the USSF-64 mission was delayed early in the day when preparations apparently got behind.  It was delayed 24 hours and one minute until tonight at 5:56PM EST, but the weather was prettier, the views remarkable, and those things combined with the time of day made this the most spectacular Falcon Heavy launch we've seen so far.  Local sunset was 5:49, so seven minutes before liftoff, and a liftoff into a darker sky, maybe 15 or 30 minutes later might have led to a more vivid "space jellyfish" type of display, but it was plenty beautiful as it was.  

This video should be set up to start at 15 seconds before lift off, or 19:40 on the time scale at the bottom; the majority of the pretty stuff takes place after Booster Engine Cut Off (BECO) at T+2:29.  From here on the ground, the mission was eye candy the whole way. 

SpaceX posts this graphic describing the trajectories of the main payload and the two Falcon 9 boosters that landed back at the launch site; it's a bit distorted because it's impossible to do it to any sort of consistent scale, but it shows the main events. 

I know there's not enough room to do this, especially not to scale, but it shows the boosters flipping end over end to do their boostback burns, and it shows that burn going in the direction to slow the boosters and start them returning to the left.  Then, instead of showing them moving closer to the launch site, or even going straight down, it shows them continuing farther in direction of the payload's flight.  The landing zones should be closer to the launch pad.  And yes, I'm being too literal.

This sequence was easy to watch with our naked eyes and we could see the boostback burns.  The two boosters stopped their motion of clearly moving away from us and appeared to hang motionless in the sky.  Eventually they started to appear to be moving north from us, toward the Landing Zones on the Cape Canaveral SFS.   The entry burns were dramatic; very separated in time; the first booster to light may have burned about half of the length of its burn before the second one started, which continued after the first one shut down.  Which is how they stagger the landing time of the boosters which makes it look more dramatic - and probably has actual technical reasons, too. 

Richard Angle, whose photographs of these missions appear on Teslarati, has some excellent photos of the some of the highlights in their article.  I couldn't do them justice posting them here, so go read.  I've found that if click on one of the pictures that allows it, it will enlarge on screen.  Once they're enlarged, I can right click on the picture, select "save image as" and I get a bigger image than even the enlarged image I started with.

EDIT To Add Jan 15 @ 10:25PM EST: I've been trying to ensure when I embed a video like the one above that they play the way I intend.  I've tried it twice and it worked as I want once.  50% doesn't give me confidence.  - SiG

Junk Science Again: This Time, Gas Stoves

There was an attempt to run the news cycle that started early this week with an attack on gas stoves.  It didn't seem to go as well as they wanted, but it could just be the early stages.  The immediate reactions, including memes and bumper sticker sayings and so on may have been more counter than they expected and it may have been exactly what they wanted; not being insiders we can never know.  

What we can know is that this is the level of so-called science that makes "climate change" seem as well-established as knowing when we drop something it'll fall.  

To begin with, this is not a new idea or a new discovery.  The article it was based on may have been a recent publication but the idea has been floated around for a while and just isn't that good.  To begin with I'm going to copy the abstract from that published article and point out some things. 

Indoor gas stove use for cooking is associated with an increased risk of current asthma among children and is prevalent in 35% of households in the United States (US). The population-level implications of gas cooking are largely unrecognized. We quantified the population attributable fraction (PAF) for gas stove use and current childhood asthma in the US. Effect sizes previously reported by meta-analyses for current asthma (Odds Ratio = 1.34, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) = 1.12–1.57) were utilized in the PAF estimations. The proportion of children (<18 years old) exposed to gas stoves was obtained from the American Housing Survey for the US, and states with available data (n = 9). We found that 12.7% (95% CI = 6.3–19.3%) of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use. The proportion of childhood asthma that could be theoretically prevented if gas stove use was not present (e.g., state-specific PAFs) varied by state (Illinois = 21.1%; California = 20.1%; New York = 18.8%; Massachusetts = 15.4%; Pennsylvania = 13.5%).

As always, this is based on an observation and correlation study, not a study in which every possible variable was controlled for except the one being studied and people were assigned at random to the experimental or control groups who had no way of knowing which group they were in.  That sort of test is very hard and expensive to do, as well as potentially being illegal or immoral, since you're doing something to people that you think could hurt them.  

The yellow highlighted word is very important. A meta-analysis (singular) is when a group of studies are combined to enlarge the data set.  The way this is worded implies this is a meta-analysis of a group of existing meta-analyses (plural).  That means that without extraordinary effort to ensure the studies are as identical as possible; not just that they studied the same thing but that the populations being studied were as similar as possible.  In turn, that means an increase in the chance of having some outcome could have as much to do with variations in the populations, locations, or any other uncontrolled variable as the presence of the thing they're correlating to.  They conclude, for example, " We found that 12.7% of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use."  In a meta-analysis of meta-analyses that's pretty much meaningless.  

When I took statistics, we were taught that a meta-analysis was typically less reliable than any one of the studies it was based on because it’s generally all but impossible to determine how well those groups compare on the countless other confounding factors.  I consider what this story is based on to be insignificant findings, regardless of their P value. I ignore those studies until the relative risk gets into the "more than twice as likely" range, that is, instead of this 1.127 risk ratio, it should be over 2.00. 

But it's even worse than that.  

About a year ago, a similar attempt to get people to dump their gas stoves was run, and was written about on Watts Up With That.  There were things in the study that really stood out as bad ways to do a study like this. 

Meanwhile, another expert told a different media outlet that the researchers had encased the kitchens in a Mylar tent to “trap and concentrate the emissions, and then measure the concentration.” No one cooks in a kitchen like that! He said it would “incorrect” to draw any health conclusions from the paper.

From Michael P. Ramirez.com 

As always when this sort of subject is talked about, there's no mention of the fact that if you have an electric stove it's very likely to be gas-powered, or even coal-powered. It's just that the gas isn't in your home, it's "far away" so it's different; they'll worry about that gas causing asthma next week. In reality, the truth is that they're just trying to get rid of natural gas power for anything anywhere.

First Vulcan Centaur Built and en Route to Florida

The first United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur has been loaded into the company's barge "RocketShip" (pictured here) and is en route to Cape Canaveral SFS.  

Short video here. 

The first two Blue Origin BE-4 engines to complete the first Vulcan booster stage were shipped on Halloween Monday, and the assembly has been in process in Decatur Alabama since the engines arrived.  Today's departure marks the start of a 2000 mile trip on rivers, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean before arriving at Port Canaveral.  The trip from this dock to the dock at CCSFS takes around a week.  

While the Vulcan was announced in 2015, it was in development since some time in 2014, driven by Russia's first invasion into the Ukraine in which they took Crimea.  That invasion prompted the sanctions that said US companies could no longer purchase the Russian RD-180 engines.  These are the engines ULA uses in their Atlas V launch vehicle and they were allowed to take a contract before a termination date for orders in that year.  All of the remaining Atlas Vs will use the remaining RD-180s they bought back then and the Vulcan Centaur will replace the Atlas V. 

ULA announced that it would work with Blue Origin to integrate the startup’s BE-4 engine into a new rocket booster to end its reliance on Russian engines.  More than eight years later, and more than five years after they were originally promised, the engines appear ready to go with the rest of the rocket behind it.  

It has been said that Vulcan Centaur will ultimately fully replace ULA’s existing Delta IV as well as the Atlas V rockets.  That seems like it would lead to smoother, more efficient operations at ULA, and perhaps allow them to compete more on prices against SpaceX.  

The Vulcan Centaur blog says:

Vulcan combines the best of today's Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy rockets with the latest technology advancements to produce a single launch system that provides higher performance and greater affordability while continuing to deliver ULA's unmatched reliability and precision.

Offering unprecedented flexibility, the single-core Vulcan can deliver payloads from low Earth orbit to Pluto and beyond while making access to space more cost-effective. Vulcan also meets the challenging requirements now demanded by an expanding spectrum of missions that are essential to the nation's defense.

Vulcan leverages existing infrastructure, including manufacturing and assembly at our sophisticated production facility in Decatur. ULA has invested heavily in the factory with new automated tooling solutions, welding equipment upgrades, robotic assembly lines for fabrication, and other upgrades for maximum efficiency.

The new rocket can be built in less than half the time as its predecessors and launched at a much higher tempo. More than 70 Vulcan launches are currently on the manifest, including 38 launches to deploy a majority of Amazon's Project Kuiper to provide fast, affordable broadband to unserved and underserved communities around the world; approximately 20 to 30 missions as the U.S. Space Force's No. 1 offeror in the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 procurement; and the orbital delivery of Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser reusable spaceplane on cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station.

This inaugural mission, known as Certification-1, will deliver two Kuiper prototype broadband satellites into low Earth orbit, send the Astrobotic Peregrine commercial lunar lander to reach the Moon, and carry a Celestis Memorial Spaceflight Payload into deep space.

They don't mention a NET (No Earlier Than) launch date, although NextSpaceflight declares it to be NET February 25.  That linked page is all ULA launches and it seems far too optimistic;  it has 15 Vulcan Centaur launches before the end of the year, and I've seen no indications they have the hardware to build that many.  FWIW, I think this first launch won't be until mid-March at the earliest and they'll be lucky to get four Vulcan launches this year.

Can't tell them apart without a scorecard? This should help.

Small Space News Roundup

An odd consequence of Virgin Orbit's failure to achieve orbit on Monday is that the mission was expected to be the first orbital launch from Europe.  There is sort of a race to achieve that milestone and other companies are approaching ready to claim that milestone.  

There are two companies that appear to be in the running to be first.  First, the German company Rocket Factory Augsburg or RFA, which announced an arrangement on Wednesday that its debut launch will take place from SaxaVord Spaceport, which is located on the Shetland Islands - the northernmost point in the United Kingdom. The press release summarizes:

The commercial Spaceport in Shetland is ideally located for RFA to launch payloads at high cadence into polar, sun-synchronous orbits. Existing logistics and infrastructure, launch readiness, as well as rapid implementation and matching mentality were key factors why RFA chose to partner with SaxaVord. With the multi-year partnership, which includes investments in the double-digit million pound range, RFA is securing its first flight launch site in order to be able to provide its services individually and flexibly to customer requirements.

The launch pad and launch stool were fully completed by the end of 2022. The RFA launch pad is therefore the first for vertical orbital rocket launches in the UK and mainland Europe. In the future, the launch pad will not only be used for orbital launches, but for testing and qualification of the RFA ONE core stages. These tests are expected to begin in mid-2023. The first launch will then be into a 500 km high sun-synchronous orbit.

In addition to the stage testing starting by mid-year, the company says the debut launch of its RFA One vehicle could occur by the end of '23.

You've got to love the looks of the SaxaVord spaceport. 

---

The second big contender might be a surprise.  Norway is a contender with Isar Aerospace, which has an agreement to launch from the Andøya Spaceport in Norway, NRK reports.  Andøya , or the "Andøy municipality" is rougher-looking terrain than the SaxaVord spaceport but has been in development and claims they'll be able to support launches by the end of this year.  

---

Finally, moving across the globe to China, a company called CAS which is jointly owned by the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, released a proposed line of rocket designs they refer to as "Powered Arrow" which appeared on the Twitter feed of China 'N Asia Spaceflight.  CAS has successfully reached orbit with a solid-fueled rocket called ZK-1A, so they have more credibility than companies that have never made orbit, but the lineup was a bit jarring.

In a move reminiscent of another Chinese company earlier in the year, OrienSpace, it looks very derivative of American launchers.  Left to right, they look like (skip the first, which is their ZK-1A) a miniature versions of an Atlas V, an Antares, a Falcon 9, a Falcon Heavy, skip the second to last, and at the far right that looks like a New Shepard capsule.  A picture of solid models also Tweeted by China 'N Asia Spaceflight gives a better perspective on sizes and strong similarities for a few of those. 

Business As Usual

It's getting to be that.  A few days ago, Elon Musk tweeted that for the first time all four launch pads that SpaceX can use had vehicles on them: SLC-40 and LC-39A at Cape Canaveral SFS, LC-4E at Vandenberg SFS on the opposite coast of the US, and the Boca Chica's Orbital Launch Mount in Texas.  

But gosh: that's so old!  That's 1:36 AM on Wednesday!  (Central Time, I think - it's from Teslarati, not me) 

On LC-39A, the Falcon Heavy was being tested and readied for static fire later in the day; launch is set to be No Earlier Than Saturday, Jan. 14 at 5:55 PM EST.  SLC-40 was holding the One Web 16 batch of satellites and SLC-4E was preparing for the Starlink 2-4 mission - delayed by weather until Sunday, Jan. 15th at 8:18 AM PST (11:18 EST).  SLC-40's One Web 16 mission launched Jan. 9th at 11:50 PM, so "a few" hours before that tweet.  That meant all four pads were briefly not carrying rockets.  

That's OK, though, because now SLC-40 is being readied for its next mission, GPS III-6, next Wednesday, Jan. 18th at 7:00 AM EST, so now they're back to Business As Usual.  

The other thing he mentioned in that Tweet was the return to Earth of the Cargo Dragon launched in November, CRS-26; that also went without a hitch. 

Wednesday's static fire test of the full 27 engines on the Falcon 9 core and two side boosters.  SpaceX photo. 

Before I go, I have to show this Tweet from a local news service called Talk of Titusville.  This is kind of "life around here" in a nutshell.  "Oh, it's just a top secret payload.  Don't mind us." 

That blue circle with white arrow shows it actually is a video of this fairing containing the Top Secret payload for Saturday's USSF-67 launch.  You can watch it here (self-starting video that comes up a bit loud).  It just drives down that road for a minute.

ABL Fails on 1st Orbital Launch Attempt

Tuesday afternoon at 2:27 PM local time (6:27 PM EST), smallsat launcher ABL Space failed in its first attempt to put its RS1 rocket into orbit.  More than that, it was the first launch of their RS1.  In my "Top US Launch Companies" on Monday, Jan. 2nd, I rated them at #9 and said,

Back in August, I reported on speculation ABL would attempt to join the "one metric ton to orbit" club with a launch in early September.  Three months later they still haven't completed that launch and are now talking about a new launch window on January 9th.  Frankly, this launch is getting to the point where it needs to happen. 

I was able to start to watch their launch coverage on YouTube last night but just as coverage was about to start, they added a 75 minute delay, eventually canceling their attempt.  Space.com (first link above) said the launch was not livestreamed today.  

"After liftoff, RS1 experienced an anomaly and shut down prematurely. The team is working through our anomaly response procedures in coordination with PSCA and the FAA," ABL said via Twitter  23 minutes after liftoff. (The acronyms refer to the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.)

"This is not the outcome we were hoping for today, but one that we prepared for. We'll revert with additional information when available. Thanks to all for the support," the company added in another tweet.

I've written several times about the One (metric) Ton to orbit race, and ABL has always figured prominently as a contender.  (For clarity, one metric ton is 1000 kg, which works out to be about 2204 lb.s US) I always thought this was between Relativity, Firefly and ABL.  The race centers on the ability to launch small payloads on ridesharing missions at the lowest costs for the small colleges and companies that need to put something into orbit.  

Rocket Lab is currently the leader in small rocket launches, with over 30 successful missions of their Electron rocket; but the Electron's payload isn't in the one ton class; it can only launch about 300kg.  Their Neutron rocket, which can lift eight metric tons, is still primarily on the drawing boards.  ABL's RS1 should be capable of launching up to 1.35 metric tons, (1350 kg or 2,975 pounds) of payload to LEO.

The RS1 on ABL's test stand on Kodiak Island, Alaska on Nov. 14, 2022.  ABL Space Photo.

ABL is not likely to be in dire financial straits because of this.  In 2021 the company signed a deal with Lockheed Martin for up to 58 missions through 2029.  I can't imagine Lock-Mart would sign a deal without a way out if ABL can't make their system work, but I also can't imagine that a company that has been around and in aerospace as long as the various parts of Lock-Mart have been would cancel the contract over failure of one mission.  First attempts at orbit generally don't make it. 

Virgin Orbit Didn't Make It

For a while this afternoon, a couple of hours actually, I had two YouTube live feeds playing; the LabPadre Rover 2 Camera and Virgin Orbit's coverage of "Start Me Up."   

The rollout of Virgin Orbit's Boeing 747, Cosmic Girl, seemed to go nominally through the release of Launcher One, and the mission clicked off milestones by the book through Main Engine Cut Off.  After MECO, though, I was watching their animations of the returning telemetry and saw some things that just made me say, "that doesn't look right" which they explained away (plausibly) by saying the telemetry was being lost. Since the mission had a short second stage burn to be followed by a long coast and another burn, I wandered away.  When I came back the chat had turned to people asking, "what happened?" and an anomaly was announced.  

No more detail or clarification has come out.

---

While I feel the need to stress that the activities at Starbase Boca Chica are not on the order of difficulty as achieving orbit, things there were rather more rewarding to watch. 

Yesterday, SpaceX rolled booster B7 back to the launch area from the shipyard area where these Starships are built.  It was Sunday afternoon, and while B7 was left on the transporter vehicle overnight, the chopsticks lifted and placed it on the orbital launch mount around sunrise.  Later today, Starship 24 was rolled over to the OLM area and S24 was lifted and stacked onto the booster.  This combination has been stacked and unstacked a few times, but I don't think I've seen it go this fast.

On the 7th, Elon Musk tweeted in response to another Twitter user's comment that a launch of the B7/S24 stack could be scheduled for January 31st, saying, "We have a real shot at late February. March launch attempt appears highly likely."  

Virgin Orbit is On The Clock for First Mission of '23

Virgin Orbit has announced that their first mission of '23, "Start Me Up" is scheduled for 2216 UTC on Monday, January 9. That's 5:16 EST to 2:16 PST as one heads West. The launch window extends for two hours to 0016 UTC on Tuesday the 10th.

Virgin Orbit’s Start Me Up mission will be a mission of many firsts: the first orbital launch from the United Kingdom; the first international launch for Virgin Orbit; and the first commercial launch from western Europe; launching the first Omani satellite; the first satellite built in Wales; and more. These firsts are exciting in and of themselves, but each of them is also the first of what we hope and expect to be many.

Enabled by funding from the UK Space Agency, the mission will meet a key ambition of the UK Government’s National Space Strategy, the first ever orbital launch from the UK. Virgin Orbit has worked closely with a number of partners to prepare for this historic launch including the United States Department of Defense, United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the United States’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

 Live coverage will begin on YouTube at approximately 4:15 PM EST to 1:15 PM PST.  

The mission is bound for an orbit at 555km or 345 miles (statute miles).  Press guide here with tons of information including what the payloads are.   

---

Since the topic was a Monday launch, for those watching and wondering, SpaceX bumped the Sunday night launch of OneWeb 16 until Monday night in the US at 11:50 PM EST, 8:50 PM PST, or 0450 UTC on Tuesday the 10th.  A live webcast of that mission will start about 15 minutes before liftoff.  

No specific reason was given for the one day schedule slip, just a Tweet that said, “To complete pre-launch processing” and “Vehicle and spacecraft are healthy, and weather is >90% favorable for liftoff.”

Why Doesn't Anybody Talk About This?

The Blaze newsletter, one of a few newsletters I get every day (more newsletters than are useful most of the time) had a story that hit a sore spot with me.  It talked about the Sinaloa area of Mexico being in open warfare as drug kingpin El Chapo's son was arrested and the city was turned into a war zone. 

A significant Mexican military force swooped into the city of Culiacan to take Ovidio Guzman into custody. The Mexican army ordered Blackhawk helicopter gunships to attack a convoy of 25 cartel vehicles – some sporting machine guns.

Mexican law enforcement was able to arrest Guzman. However, 10 Mexican military personnel and one Culiacan policeman were killed during the operation, according to Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval. There were 17 police officers and 35 military personnel injured during the firefight. Authorities believe 19 members of the Sinaloa drug cartel died during the mission.

I'm gonna say a few things that I think are so obvious I don't need to go find references for.  I ordinarily look for references, but today those are going to sound like "everybody knows."  

Everybody knows there's a handful of drug cartels in Mexico and they essentially control the government.  That implies this raid might well have been one cartel fighting the others.  I've heard the Mexican military has been bought and paid for by the cartels - or maybe one cartel and they're trying to eliminate competition.

But it goes farther than that.  Everybody has seen some version of this:

Everybody has heard of the horrific death toll from cheap Chinese fentanyl and carfentil smuggled into the US.  Everybody knows the cartels make money smuggling drugs and people into the US, including human trafficking children for pedophiles.  The allegation is children are raped until they "wear out" and then are killed off.  

Everybody knows the border is wide open thanks to the bungling leadership of Biden and his pegboy, Mayorkas.  Everybody knows it's not incompetence, it's deliberate.  By design and intention.

Yeah, Brandon says the border is secure.  And pretty much everybody who lives in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the southern tip of California will laugh at him.  If the border really being secure was even in the top 100 things the administration cared about they wouldn't have done this:

Everybody also knows that Biden is corrupt as hell.  Just do a web search for the term "10% for the big guy" for cripes sake, if this is news.  Go do a web search for him getting his drug-addled son onto the board of Burisma in Ukraine.  

In light of all of these things, and more, it also seems highly likely that agencies on our side of the border are also being paid off by the cartels.  That people in our government are owned by the cartels too; profiting off this drug and human trafficking.  

How come we haven't heard one word about such an investigation?  Oh, yeah.  That's right.  The DOJ is just as corrupt as those four clowns in the above meme and the rest of the regime.  They probably make tons of money off the cartels as well.  Nobody would survive looking into this.  You can bet any body part you'd like that the propaganda media sure won't look into it.

You may heard the story earlier in the week that Trump says if he's president again, he'll go against the cartels with the full military might of the US.  

"When I am president, it will be the policy of the United States to take down the cartels, just as we took down ISIS and the ISIS caliphate – and just as, unlike the situation we are in today, we had a very, very strong border,"

His mistake in his first go-'round was underestimating just how total the deep state corruption was.  Sounds like the same thing despite being subject to it continuously since 2015.   

 

January 6th - Political Prisoners' Day

It's one of those things that makes my blood boil.  People in prison, some beaten regularly, all for far more time in prison than serious criminals get in any of the big, blue cities - where slashing someone or shoving them on the tracks in front of a subway might get you an overnight stay.  Some of these people have been in solitary for a year and some prison terms started right after the protest. 

Since artistic work isn't my strong point, I include one from a real artist via Bayou Renaissance Man:

And link to a fine collection on 90 Miles From Tyranny:

It Could Be a Good Year for Falcon Heavy Launches

At the risk of being too optimistic, it's looking like 2023 could be a good year for Falcon Heavy launches.  Let me rush to acknowledge the same thing was said in November of 2021 predicting '22 would be a good year.  Needless to say, we had one FH launch in '22, November's USSF-44 mission, so the prediction was a bust. 

As I reported on Tuesday, the next Falcon Heavy launch is penciled in for No Earlier Than Thursday, January 12th at 5:39 PM EST and will also be for the US Space Force, USSF-67.  At 72 days since the November mission, this will be the shortest gap between FH missions ever, although only three days less than the gap between the first two test missions in 2019.  There's clearly a possibility a hold or two could leave the record in '19.

According to the US Space Systems Command (SSC), USSF-67 – like USSF-44 – will carry an Aerojet Rocketdyne Long Duration Propulsive EELV (LPDE) spacecraft as a main payload. Aboard LPDE-3A, which is essentially a satellite without a payload, various stakeholders will install an unknown number of experiments, instruments, and smaller satellites that can be activated or deployed once in orbit. The SSC says [PDF] that “LDPE provides critical data to inform future Space Force programs” and that “the unique experiments and prototype payloads hosted on LDPE-3A [will] advance warfighting capabilities in the areas of on-orbit threat assessment, space hazard detection, and space domain awareness.”

The backlog on payloads may be resolving, or it may just be that details on availability haven't been updated in a while, but Nextspaceflight.com shows five Falcon Heavy launches this year.   

Let me point out that the first four of those missions are NET than May, meaning there's still six full months left in the year if some of the payloads suffer further delays. The last one, the Psyche asteroid probe, was delayed last June by a major software SNAFU discovered during launch preparations.  That software has been fixed and that payload should be in good shape.

I don't have an equivalent graphic for November of '21, but it would be interesting to see.  

When SpaceX talks about 100 launches for this year, I think that these are considered single launches.  The side boosters are counted as separate Falcon 9 booster recoveries - at least one or two of the commentators doing the coverage for their Falcon 9 launches have said so.  Next Thursday's USSF-67 launch will reuse both side boosters that lifted November's USSF-44 launch, and like USSF-44, the center core stage will be expended for the gain in performance they get. 

November's USSF-44 mission on the way to LC-39A.  Richard Angle photo for Teslarati.

Interesting Payload on Yesterday's Transporter 6 Mission

Among the satellites on the Transporter 6 mission yesterday, an interesting payload stood out to me.  CalTech launched a satellite to test out some ideas related to placing solar panels in space and beaming the energy back down to the power grid.  

I'm not sure when I first ran across this idea, but I'll SWAG in the late 1990s.  My reference point is that I was at a conference around '05 or '06 for Radio Frequency and Microwave design engineers that had a presentation on it and it was well known by then.  We referred to it as “The Microwave Engineer's Full-Employment Act.”  The questions swirl around how to implement such an idea.  All that said, this article points out there are known possible ways to attempt it but no hard data on the best ways to proceed.  Caltech is doing the experiments to try out different things. 

Maybe we should start with why and a rough overview of these systems.  Everyone that has used or experimented with solar panels knows their dirty little secret; as in they get dirty and their energy conversion drops.  Not just dirt and dust, but bird droppings, insect droppings, insect nests or anything else that can coat them (around here: salt mist from the Atlantic).  Clouds are no secret, I'd imagine everyone knows that on cloudy, rainy (or snowy) days, efficiency just goes into the toilet.  Space has two significant advantages as a place to put panels: first off, there's loss of some power in the atmosphere; so the same size panel could harvest more energy in space than in a desert somewhere.  Second, there's no dirt in space to degrade the panels.  There's space junk that could damage panels, but that hasn't been a big problem with satellites so probably won't be with solar panels. 

All the energy panels could capture in space won't do the power grid any good without being transmitted down to earth.  Much thought has been given to this and it seems the likely method would be beaming it down by radio.  Most likely would be by microwaves; the antennas will need to be specialized to have narrow beamwidth with (ideally) no power outside the antenna arrays themselves will receive the power, so that's considerably easier with microwaves than VHF or lower frequencies.  The problem will be all about getting every last bit of efficiency out of the transmitter and microwaves up to around 30 GHz are pretty mature in terms of this sort of tech.  

All of that out of the way, Caltech's approach is based on the simple economics that, at least for now (Starship has the potential to change this), the cost per pound to put stuff in orbit will be the hardest constraint. 

The design limits weight partly by minimizing the support structure for the functional hardware, including the wiring. It does so by making its "panels" self-contained, having their own structural support and power transmitter. These individual panels will be assembled like tiles to form a larger surface but will operate independently.

That design dictates what the Caltech team needs to test: a lightweight power transmitter, a thin membrane that can be deployed in space, and different photovoltaic materials that can be placed on the flexible membrane. And that's exactly what's now in space on their test hardware.

The hardware includes a unit called MAPLE (Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment), a set of lightweight, flexible microwave transmitters that are capable of the precise phasing relationships needed to form the transmit antenna beam.  In addition, MAPLE has two different test receivers on board so that the ability to beam the transmission in specific direction can be tested.  

The photovoltaic array being carried will be four square meters, and something that big has to be folded up to fit in pretty much any launch vehicle.  Their penchant for cute names for things for this mission calls this DOLCE. 

DOLCE is the Deployable on-Orbit ultraLight Composite Experiment, and it will extend once in orbit to cover a surface area of roughly four square meters. It's meant to test the framework used to extend and support the solar array in space.

The DOLCE hardware in its compact, flight-ready form. Caltech/Momentus photo.

There's yet another module on the mission called ALBA, but Caltech didn't say what that stands for.  It's important, though.  It will be a collection of 22 different photovoltaic materials and will be used to determine which of these holds up well to being in space.  

The commonly quoted value of solar power at the top of the atmosphere is 1367 W/m² (watts per square meter) and I believe this will be the case at whatever altitude the satellite is flying, so if that's really a four square meter solar array, it'll be getting 5468 Watts.  Of those 22 different photovoltaic materials they're testing we have to assume that the efficiency will vary. 

Tests of DOLCE, which largely consist of determining whether it successfully unfolds, should happen relatively quickly, with the results captured by onboard video cameras and streamed back to Earth. By contrast, they expect that tests of the photovoltaic materials will require about six months in orbit to produce clear results.

For the microwave bands that they expect to use, the current regulatory limits for exposure to radio radiation in the microwave bands we're talking about is 10 milliwatts per square cm; there are 10,000 sq.cm in one sq. meter, so 10 mW/cm² times 10,000 converts to 100 W/m².  A common design factor when putting up solar power is that 30% of that incoming 1367 W/m² is lost in the atmosphere, leaving 957 W/m² at the surface. I feel pretty certain that any designer putting together a system downloading millions or billions of watts to the surface will constrain their power density (W/m²) to meet whatever limit is allowed.  It strikes me as noteworthy that the radio power density at the surface will be close to 1/10 of the power of sunlight.  I'd be willing to bet you know more people afraid of being exposed to radio signals than sunlight.

 

 

The US Launch Year Began Today

As mentioned in Friday night's post, SpaceX started 2023 off this morning at 9:56 AM EST with the new year’s first orbital launch, and the second-largest rideshare mission in company history.  Carrying 114 payloads for dozens of paying customers, the payloads were distributed into parking orbits within a few hours after liftoff.  

A highlight of the mission is that Transporter-6 carried a handful of ‘space tugs’ developed by five separate companies.  These are being developed specifically to take small satellites launched into the same orbit on this sort of ride share mission and lift them to the desired orbit.  

At a minimum, Transporter-6’s expansive payload roster included Launcher’s first Orbiter space tug, Epic Aerospace’s first CHIMERA space tug, Momentus Space’s second Vigoride space tug, and two D-Orbit ION space tugs. While their capabilities vary significantly, all of the space tags or transfer vehicles manifested on the mission have a similar purpose: transporting satellites launched as rideshare payloads from their rocket’s one-size-fits-all parking orbit to an orbit more optimized for each spacecraft’s mission.

Three tweets copied from the Teslarati story and pasted into a new graphic. 

The space tug concept is how Rocket Lab's Photon got CAPSTONE to its lunar Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit and it's a concept that could create a whole new industry.  Aside from Rocket Lab, only a few providers have successfully demonstrated space tugs with propulsion systems, and most of those proven options only allow for small orbit tweaks.  One tug built by Spaceflight Inc., their Sherpa-LTC2, has partially demonstrated the ability to climb from ~300 kilometers to more than 1000 kilometers. 

Future tugs could enable routine changes on the order of hundreds or even thousands of kilometers for multiple payloads per flight. Many prospective providers – including Momentus and Epic – hope to follow up their simpler prototypes (and follow in Rocket Lab’s footsteps) with tugs capable of carrying satellites to high Earth orbits, the Moon, and deep space.

This is the first launch of the year and for more interesting things about it, the Teslarati article and its links to Twitter are a good start.  Their next launch will be Sunday from the same launch complex, SLC-40.  That mission is to launch the next batch of satellites for OneWeb and the booster will return to Landing Zone 1 on the Cape.  It's from SLC-40 because LC-39A is setting up for a Falcon Heavy mission, USSF-67, Thursday, January 12th at 5:39 PM EST.  I'm pretty sure this is the closest spacing between Falcon Heavy missions that they've ever done: the last FH was on November 1st, so just over two months.  There's a backlog of FH missions waiting for their payloads. 

The Top US Launch Companies - Who Are the Other Nine?

How would you rate the top ten US launch companies?  Ars Technica did this posting right before space reporter and author Eric Berger took off for a vacation, and it's an interesting thing to ponder on.  Eric is completely honest in saying it's clearly subjective and what he considered important.  

Please note this is a subjective list, although hard metrics such as total launches, tonnage to orbit, success rate, and more were all important factors in the decision. Also, the focus is on what each company accomplished in 2022, not what they might do in the future.

Since I think there could be no discussion that, in those terms as well as things like importance to the launch business and to the world, #1 has to be SpaceX.  Just on what they've done in '22, not counting anything in the future.  

For reference and as common starting point, let me list the top 10 in his order.  In the column he devotes a paragraph or two to each of them explaining why he chose them.  To save space, I'll list them here by the ranking and say to go read the original.  

2:  United Launch Alliance
3:  Rocket Lab
4:  Northrop Grumman
5:  Virgin Orbit
6:  Firefly
7:  Blue Origin
8:  Relativity Space
9:  ABL Space
10:  Astra

Let me more or less mimic his approach with my top 2-10.  

2: Rocket Lab

By tonnage to orbit, I believe ULA would be number two.  By accomplishments for a launch company I put Rocket Lab ahead of the ULA largely for one mission.  They launched NASA's CAPSTONE satellite (second story in that roundup) into its Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) of the moon.  Part of the reason this is so important is that rocket they used, their Electron booster, is a small satellite lift vehicle and a lightweight upper stage called Lunar Photon propelled CAPSTONE to the moon over the course of the roughly four months it took to get there.  Rocket lab made that upper stage, too.

The combination has the potential to radically change the launch picture.  Small, single satellite missions to the moon or nearby places got cheaper with the trade of them taking longer to get there.

3: United Launch Alliance (ULA)

While ULA had a disappointing year in not launching their Vulcan rocket, it wasn't really their fault; the BE-4s for the first Vulcan mission arrived in '22, not '17 as originally anticipated.  The Vulcan program has been waiting for these engines for a long time.

Plus, to equal SpaceX's total of 61 launches in '22, ULA would have to count up every one of its launches since 2015.  Their Atlas V and Delta IV launches, along with winning a contract for Amazon's Kuiper constellation, which will put a large demand for Vulcans, all combine to give ULA a high rating.  

4: Northrup Grumman 

Here, I can't disagree with Eric Berger at Ars.  Northrup Grumman is a solid launch company; their Cygnus cargo supply missions to the ISS have been important, and have only been made more important by being the only US vehicle capable of boosting the altitude of the International Space Station at the moment, in the case of emergency.  

The future isn't necessarily going to be smooth; their final Antares 230 rocket will launch in the spring of 2023, after which time Northrop had to buy three Falcon 9 launches from SpaceX (!) to put its Cygnus spacecraft into orbit.  It's their last Antares for the same reason ULA is burning out their fleet of Atlas V rockets: they used Russian engines.  They've announced an agreement to buy Miranda rocket engines from Firefly to power an Antares 330 rocket. With luck, this booster will make its debut in late 2024.  

From here we get into more speculative territory because none of these companies have operational, orbital class capabilities.  

5: Relativity Space

Here I make a fairly large departure from Eric Berger's, which had these guys at number 8.  I think Relativity is close to an orbital attempt of their Terran 1 prototype, currently speculated to be this month.  It's currently stacked and undergoing testing at SLC-16 on the Cape Canaveral SFS.  It appears they're closer to orbit than the companies farther down in this list (with one exception - the one I rank #8).  CEO Tim Ellis has proven to be a prolific fundraiser, which is plays a big role in the launch business, with more than $1.3 billion raised.  

The Terran 1 is  a prototype designed to be more like the desired goal they're prototyping toward, the Terran R, than is typical in their field.  In October, reports were that Relativity has sold $1.2 billion worth of launches on Terran R and has a "few hundred" million more dollars' worth of contracts under negotiation with customers.  

6: Firefly

Firefly is the company that had that "mostly successful failure" back on October 1st. 

Subsequent to the launch, doubts grew about whether the launch truly was a “success” as the satellites, rather than being left in 300 km circular orbit as planned, were instead left in 270 x 210 km orbits inclined at 137 degrees.  The low perigee will mean that the satellites will re-enter much earlier than planned.

Firefly said the mission was a success, but I'm sure the people behind those satellites didn't think as much of it.  Still, they have up to four Alpha launches planned for '23, so it will be interesting to see if they manage to scale production and cadence in the coming year.  At the same time, Firefly is also working to complete development and testing of its Blue Ghost lunar lander, which could launch to the Moon in 2024 as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Services Payload program.  Finally, as reported in #5, they've succeeded in selling engines to others in the industry.

7: Blue Origin

Blue origin, of course, has yet to reach orbit and their New Glenn rocket that has been talked about for years is still probably not going to launch for another year.  On the whole there's not much positive that can be said about them but the few are important.

First off, after years of schedule slippage they seem to have finally gotten their BE-4 engines through manufacturing and certification.  This is important not only for ULA but for Blue themselves as they'll power the New Glenn.  The other net positive has been their "space tourism" business on their New Shepard suborbital rocket and capsule.  That business is currently in limbo since the September flight, which was aborted when the booster failed explosively - but thankfully proved that their escape system for saving the crew worked.

8: Virgin Orbit

Virgin Orbit's drop in my ratings is for two reasons.  The first is that while they have achieved orbit, it's still more like a novelty than a repeatable thing.  They don't seem to be living up to the expectations for them.  For example, it's true they equaled the most launches they've had in a year in '22.  The negative is that was two launches.  That means they've launched four payloads in two years.  Their total of paying space tourists for a suborbital ride is: zero.  Blue Origin has launched 18.  

All in all it has been a stagnant year for them.  Part of the reason is that the company spent a lot of time and effort getting regulatory approval for a debut launch from Cornwall, England.  The goal is for the   Cosmic Girl aircraft to take off from there with rocket launches over the sea. This mission is now planned for early 2023.

This has led to concern about Virgin Orbit's financial viability, which was then reinforced by the company itself.  Virgin Orbit announced on the evening before Thanksgiving the "cessation" of a securities offering, saying, "Due to current market conditions, the company has elected not to proceed with an offering. Any future capital-raising transactions will depend upon future market conditions." In the short term, they have enough capital to keep going, but they need to dramatically increase their launch cadence to reach profitability.  

9:  ABL Space

Back in August, I reported on speculation ABL would attempt to join the "one metric ton to orbit" club with a launch in early September.  Three months later they still haven't completed that launch and are now talking about a new launch window on January 9th.   Frankly, this launch is getting to the point where it needs to happen.  They have investors and operating money, but they need to start reaching orbit successfully and repeatedly. 

10: Astra

Back in August (again!), Astra announced a pivot from their existing business model to a rather different approach.  Until that point, the company had been working on their Rocket 3 vehicle, a micro launcher said to be capable of putting small payloads of about 50 kg into low Earth orbit. Instead of sparing no expense to ensure highly reliable vehicles, they assumed their small satellite customers would accept a bit more risk, so they could cut down on their testing, analysis, and redundancy in design.  In return, Astra would pass those launch savings along to customers.  

The problem became that while they iterated quickly from Rocket 3.0 to 3.3, they had seven launches and only 2 were successful - 29%.  While customers might well settle for a bit less reliability in exchange for a more affordable launch, they probably envision something like dropping from 99% reliability to 95 or 90%, not 29.   

Their mission became a shift to Rocket 4.0, providing a launch capacity of 600 kg to low Earth orbit at a price of $5 million.  Given the amount of design work is far more like tearing it all up and starting over than tweaking the existing designs, it's highly unlikely they'll get Rocket 4.0 flying in '23.  

Stage one of the Relativity Space Terran 1 rocket undergoing testing at Launch Complex-16 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  Relativity Space photo by Trevor Mahlmann.  

As always, it's just the way I see it.  Comments are always welcome (as long as they're about this and not how you're working from home making a million dollars a month ;-) ).

 

 

Dwelling on a Meme

Irish posted this meme on Friday and I thought a few words might bring it to life.  

A couple of things.  

First, this would have been a dream station in the 1960s.  It's entirely Collins radio products.  Because of the similarity in appearance between receivers like the 75S-1, 75S-2 and 75S-3, for example or the transmitters that began with 32S, I can't tell you what exactly is in there.  There's a couple of their transceivers but, again, there are model numbers that are rather similar looking.  The big cabinet on the left is 30S-1 linear amplifier. With this resolution picture, it's hard for me guess what radios those are. 

All that aside, a station like this, perhaps 55 or 60 years old, is entirely capable of posting memes just like this picture with text.  From your computer to other computers.  Shitposting memes doesn't have to be done by talking into a microphone.  It requires a modulation mode that many of you may have never heard of: Slow Scan Television or SSTV.  Slow Scan is very often used in the High Frequency (shortwave) spectrum because it only requires an audio bandwidth channel (less than 3 kHz), as opposed to the roughly 5 MHz wide slice of spectrum that fast scan television uses.  Hams can also do fast scan television, at least in the US, if they do their transmissions in the UHF spectrum, which are relatively "wide open spaces." 

The difference between slow scan and fast scan is (brace yourself) speed.  The old analog TV (now obsolete) did 25 to 30 frames per second.  Slow scan sends one picture in more like 30 seconds.  The thing here is that "TV" in the name is a misnomer.  It's not moving pictures, it's more like a slide show.  TV sends nearly identical frames in those 30 frames/second, so they all have to be the same size.  With slow scan you can send different sizes.  Bigger pictures take more time.  

The drawback to SSTV is that an HF channel can change during that half minute or more and the image can get corrupted.  It's not an error-correcting protocol.  Nothing says one couldn't be developed; heck, there might some out there that I haven't heard of.  

Nowadays, most transmission and reception starts and ends in computer.  There are various pieces of software that will take a jpeg, like this meme, convert it to audio tones and send to another hams computer across town or literally anywhere on HF.  It has moved off desktop computers onto phones and tablets.  When I played around with SSTV some years ago, a popular PC program was freeware from a Japanese ham Makoto Mori, JE3HHT, called MMSSTV.  It's from the days of Windows 98.  This club does an introduction to the mode and demonstrates Android operating system SSTV.  Of course, any software like this is going to run under Apple's iOS, too. 

To interface the computer to the radio usually requires a small box that connects to the computer sound card on one end and to the radio's microphone and headphones on the other.  I haven't shopped for something like this for an old radio like these, so I don't have any manufacturers names to look for.