It's Almost Like The Last 24 Hours Didn't Exist

The two big stories from where I sit were that Starship is working feverishly to make Thursday's launch attempt, and nobody had any sort of definite clue on when that RHESSI satellite would reenter.  

Both of those stories are exactly the same tonight. 

A site I've been looking at today, Satview, has been updating the RHESSI predictions every few hours.  So what's the latest?  The last post says it was updated at 1515 UTC today, or 11:15 AM EST.  They post two predictions: one from themselves, Satview.org, and the other from USstratcom (United States Strategic Command).  

• Satview says reentry begins 4/20 at 0714 UTC; here on the east coast 3:14 AM ET. 
• USstratcom says 4/19 at 2349 UTC.  As I'm writing, that's about 10 minutes ago, 7:49 PM ET.  

Well, at 7-1/2 hours apart, at least the predictions are closer to each other than last night's 16 hours.

USstratcom prediction on the left, Satview.org prediction on the right.  The target indicator over the south Pacific west of South America (left) and over Australia (right) are the predicted locations when the reentry begins.  

As for SpaceX and Starship's Integrated Flight Test, there's scant information.  Space.com quotes Elon as saying,  

"The team is working around the clock on many issues. Maybe 4/20, maybe not," Musk said via Twitter on Tuesday night (April 18).

I've watched enough of the cameras to believe that statement isn't an exaggeration.  It's also true that they always seem to be working around the clock and overcoming obstacles.  It's just that we don't know anything else.  Tomorrow's launch window opens at 8:28 a.m. CT and closes at 9:30 a.m. CT; 62 minutes. 

This morning, we had a Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral, SLC-40, carrying 21 of the new V2 mini Starlink satellites.  During the coverage, one of the commentators said, 

"If we do make an attempt tomorrow, the chances of scrubs are high.  But whether a scrub or liftoff or a rapid unscheduled disassembly, or some combination of all of the above, excitement is pretty much guaranteed."

We'll be watching with our fingers crossed.  

Keep Your Head Up But Don't Get Crazy About It

A 20+ year old NASA satellite is going to reenter the atmosphere tomorrow night, Wednesday 4/19 at 9:30 PM ET.  That is, at 9:30 +/- 16 hours.  Based on that uncertainty of +/- 16 hours, I take that to mean the point at which reentry becomes certain; that is, absolutely starts, could be any time over roughly +/- 10 full orbits.  The uncertainty of where it starts reentry is the uncertainty in where it ends up.  I'll approximate the 20 full orbits as 25,000 miles each or 500,000 miles.

Let me back up a minute.  The satellite is called RHESSI - for the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager.  The satellite was launched on February 5, 2002 to observe solar flares and coronal mass ejections from its low-Earth orbit.  The goal being to help understand how such powerful bursts of energy are created by our sun.  Starting in 2002 the satellite carried out its mission, but it was eventually decommissioned in August of 2018.

It weighs about 660 lbs, and while these things always burn up to some degree, NASA gives the official odds of being hit by a chunk at 1 in 2,467.  I find it hard to justify that big a chance.  Think of it this way: the surface area of the Earth is just under 197 million square miles. Let's be generous and say the size of the particle that doesn't burn up is a few square yards.  Let's say 10 square yards.  In 197 million square miles, there are 61 trillion 10 square yard patches.  Around 70% of that surface area is oceans, big lakes, and followed by very lightly inhabited areas like mountains and deserts.  If the satellite came down in those areas, the only way to know would be by tracking it.  That brings the number of patches of land down to 30% of 61 trillion or 18 trillion.

Now, the area that the satellite can fall in is smaller than the 18 trillion patches because that's based on the entire surface area of the Earth, including the arctic ice cap, Antarctica, and the few large land masses that far north and south.  The orbit never goes over those areas so the satellite couldn't come down there.  The chances of being hit by debris seem to come down to a tiny object - you; maybe a square yard - getting hit by that 10 square yard debris in maybe 10 trillion possible patches.  It makes the odds of winning Powerball seem certain.  

RHESSI's last orbits, from the RHESSI Wiki Entry

The last time we went through one of these watches was for a Chinese upper stage re-entering.

"We Can't Fly This Morning. Would You Like a Wet Dress Rehearsal?"

That's essentially the question that the mission controllers got this morning when a problem surfaced in the final minutes of the countdown to this morning's Integrated Flight Test.  It was a stuck pressurization valve. So while they had all the money and resources in place the company turned the launch attempt into a Wet Dress Rehearsal, testing the last few things they would test before lighting the engines. 

While systems are in place to pump all of the liquid methane and oxygen back to their insulated storage tanks, during the process of scrubbing the launch SpaceX commentators said the minimum recycle time was 48 hours.  Later in the day, we learned they've chosen Thursday the 20th (yeah... 4/20).  The 62 minute launch window opens at 8:28 a.m. CT and closes at 9:30 a.m. CT.  

Over the last few days a small flood of memories of watching the first test flight of the Saturn V has been coming back to me.  I'm aware that I'm not remembering enough which then causes me to fret over whether or not what I'm remembering is true.  The first flight of a Saturn V was called Apollo 4 and it took place on November 9th, 1967.  Lift off was 7:00 AM ET.  I would have been in 8th grade and 13 years old.  I remember waiting for the launch and then hurrying to the school bus stop, and I remember watching the launch on our black and white Philco TV.  I'd swear I remember watching a camera pointed at the base of the rocket that suddenly went blank as the engine bells came above the deck of the launch platform.  I think I recall reading that the camera was found miles away from the launch pad.  

The Saturn V was the most powerful rocket in the history of the world.  You can argue that in getting 14 men to the surface of the moon, the Saturn V changed everything.  Starship is taller and more powerful than the Saturn V.  It's arguable that Starship can change everything, too.

Looking at a collection of Apollo 4 launch videos on  YouTube, this video has the closest to the view I think I remember, at exactly 6:00 minutes into the video.  The details of what happened to the camera are not mentioned, but I think I recall reading that in the next couple of years.

A few weeks ago, we sweated through the multiple attempts to launch Relativity 1.  I recall a few times when they counted down to the point of no return, where a hold means a long countdown recycle, followed by going into a hold.  I shouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened with the Starship IFT.

I'll count on Eric Berger at Ars Technica for some perspective.  

Opinions are mixed about how successful this flight will be for Super Heavy and Starship. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has given the launch a 50 percent chance of succeeding, but I believe he is probably deliberately lowering expectations here. He has gotten better at that. On the eve of his first rocket launch, the Falcon 1, in March 2006, Musk told a reporter the rocket had a 90 percent chance of reaching orbit.

His first three Falcon 1 launches proceeded to fail.

But since then, SpaceX has gotten rather good at launching rockets. On its debut flight in 2010, the Falcon 9 reached orbit. In 2018, so did the Falcon Heavy. Then, three different versions of Starship prototypes, Starhopper, SN5, and SN8, all successfully launched. So by my count, the last six "new" rockets that SpaceX has debuted have all launched more or less successfully.

Now the hard part is waiting until Thursday morning for the second try.

B7-S24 stacked at sunrise.  SpaceX photo

The Tenth Anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing

On Friday, PJ Media ran a story on the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, talking about how even now, almost no media talks about the attack and why it happened.  

Ten years ago, on April 15, 2013, a brilliantly sunny Monday afternoon, the Boston Marathon was drawing to a close when two nail bombs exploded in quick succession. They killed two people and wounded well over two hundred, maiming some for life. Before the identity of the bombers became known, the establishment media was full of joyful hope that the killers would turn out to be the Bible-quoting Christian terrorists of media myth. Instead, they were Islamic jihadis. As the tenth anniversary of their attack approaches, the same denial still prevails: no one in America wants to discuss why they did it. 

The anti-American press who desperately wanted another Islamic terrorism incident to actually have been committed by their stereotypical conservative, redneck villains (who only exist in their heads) actually got one of their wishes.  The Tsarnaev brothers were actually Caucasians, just not the "whyte pee-poh" that they envisioned.  That is, they were from the Caucasus region of Europe.  

This was almost all that was talked about in the beginning of the investigation.  On the day of the bombing, within hours of the attack, a writer in Esquire magazine (whose name I will not quote) wrote this:

“Obviously, nobody knows anything yet, but I would caution folks jumping to conclusions about foreign terrorism to remember that this is the official Patriots Day holiday in Massachusetts, celebrating the Battles at Lexington and Concord, and that the actual date (April 19) was of some significance to, among other people, Tim McVeigh, because he fancied himself a waterer of the tree of liberty and the like.”

Clearly, the correct way to punctuate that sentence is with a period after the fourth word.  It should simply read, “Obviously, nobody knows anything.”

The PJ Media article has several examples of this kind of thing, but suffice it to say the bombers were committed Muslims and Jihadists.  It's not a coincidence that the 2023 FBI and DOJ are going after Catholic churches; that's the logical extension of that Esquire author and all the others who dreamed it wouldn't be Islamic terrorism.  The FBI still believes that the next great incident of terrorism will come from conservative Christians who attend church regularly.   

April of '13 was the third year of this blog and although it was a major story, I find I only did one story about it, and that was April 23, eight days after the Marathon, with my view of the lessons learned from the attack and response. 

The start of the 2022 Boston Marathon.  David L. Ryan / Boston Globe via Getty Images via WGBH, Boston.

The Post-Hurricane Tower Work is Finally Done

Taking a look at previous posts about the tower damage I sustained back in Tropical Storm Ian at the end of last September, it appears the last mention of what I was working on was on January 22nd, three days before my surgery.  I had said I expected to have the short term fix in place before the surgery (Jan. 26).

Knowing the surgery was coming and that I'd be restricted by that in my ability to work for the heart of the best time of year to work on towers and such hardware, I came up with a workaround: a short term and a long term fix.  The short term fix is up there now, but I need to improve that a bit and that should be done before the mandatory time off.  The long term fix is to change my whole method of cranking the tower over.

My attempt to improve that hit a dumb mistake and I had to go back to original short term fix, and that ended up barfed up.  It stayed barfed up until after my two week followup checkup and then I created a temporary fix that was better.  It involved putting two bar clamps on the tower to position the halves of the wooden tower clamp.  I wasn’t supposed to be doing lifting or anything like what I did, but these clamps went up on February 12.  At least the tower was more secure. 

With those clamps in place, I was able to re-cut a 2x4 to replace the one you see there (painted white) that those clamps held in position, (well, the clamps along with a couple of lag screws).  It also replaced the one I barfed up the day before the surgery by turning it over one too many times.

That improved pressure treated 2x4 went up on March 9th, the first day I was cleared by the surgeon’s office to lift more than 25 pounds.  

(yes, that does mean Left and Front)

With the temporary fix in place, it was time to work on the permanent fix for cranking over and supporting the tower a whole new way.  As described in that January post, it started out based on designs I had seen researching the Aluma Towers MP-2 (mounting pole). 

First step was building things in the CAD world and I started in the direction mentioned in that January post of moving the tower to other side of the pipe I crank the tower over against, and changing it so the tower cranks over from the top of the pipe (around 7-1/2 feet) instead of the hinge on the base.  After a few weeks of very little progress, I took the approach of emulating the house bracket, but about a foot lower, and instead of mounting the bracket to the house, attaching the mounting bracket to that 4” schedule 40 aluminum pipe.  

The tower is on the right, of course.  Everything else is structural aluminum and stainless steel hardware.  There are two main arms made of 3” aluminum channels with 1-3/4” tall sides.  The very end of the arm is a piece of solid 1x2.5” aluminum bar 10” long.  Those are the last major design change; when I started out there were going to be pieces of channel attached to the tower with U bolts, but then I had to connect two pieces of that channel meeting at a 30 (or 150) degree angle.  How to do that just evaded me until I had the idea to rotate the channel stock pieces a few degrees and just grab the tower legs with straight, solid pieces of metal.

That 1x2-1/2 required some machining; first, the inside width of that channel is a bit under 2.5” and the bar was a bit over, so it needed to be reduced in width by around 0.040” (just over 1/32 inch).  Second, the inside corners of the channel have about a 1/8” radius, and I opted to just cut off the corners, leaving a flat.  It’s hard to read the dimensions in this view, but it says those two arms are each 4 degrees away from the centerline of the pipe to tower. 

You’ll notice there’s no obvious hardware in the drawing joining the channels and the solid bars.  That was done with a couple of 5/16 bolts.  The U-bolts around the tower legs are 3/8”.  It would be rather trivial to enlarge the 5/16” holes, but they seem pretty stable.

The completed assembly.

This has been in place for one week (since April 7, to be exact).  Last week was the windiest in months, probably the windiest since the two tropical storms.  My plan is to approach storms the way I always had until Ian.  Before, I removed two lag bolts to free the tower from the house bracket and the one mounting screw in the concrete slab for the tower leg.  The bolt that tore off a piece of that leg.  Now I’ll remove that same bolt on that one leg, plus two nuts on each U-bolt around the tower legs.  Then the tower gets cranked over and the antennas removed and stowed for the storm.  Once those are secured, I’ll crank the tower back up and fasten it in place so that there’s no wind load on the antennas pushing on the tower.  I get the feeling doing a dry run of this, or a few of them, would be a good idea.

While I feel awkward not having good mechanical analyses of various loads from varying directions on this bracket, it’s exactly as well-documented and analyzed as the original house bracket. 

At least for the moment, the house bracket is still in place, but there is nothing attached to it.  It will probably be taken down once I figure out what I’ll need to repair where it has been mounted since the early 1990s. 

A Roundup of Small Stories About Big Rockets - 7

It's On - for Monday

Thanks to commenter BillB who added this to last night's post while I was breaking for dinner:

SpaceX received its FAA launch license just before 5 PM CDT on the 14th. They anticipate launching on Monday, 17 April between 07:00 and 09:50.

It is on! -- my blog

UPCOMING STARSHIP FLIGHT TEST -- SpaceX website

Maybe it's thanks to having kids in the '80s, but I can't hear "it's on" without mentally adding, "like Donkey Kong."  According to that SpaceX launches website:

SpaceX is targeting as soon as Monday, April 17 for the first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in Texas. The 150-minute test window will open at 7:00 a.m. CT.

That's 8:00 AM here on the east coast and a 150 minute window means 2-1/2 hours, so 8:00 to 10:30 AM.  Honestly, I'd be moderately surprised if it really went on Monday because it's the first attempt and those frequently have several scrubs and restarts.  

To quote Musk from early February, "Success is far from certain, but excitement is guaranteed." 

B7-S24 stacked at sunrise.  SpaceX photo

SpaceX may lease High Bay 1 in NASA's VAB

While on the topic, Ars Technica's Rocket Report has a few interesting stories about big rockets this week.  The first one is that back in last August, NASA issued an agency announcement asking for industry proposals to lease the Vehicle Assembly Building High Bay 1 at Kennedy Space Center.  This is the landmark building on the Kennedy Space Center where the Apollo Saturn V, Skylab, Space Shuttle (Space Transportation System), International Space Station and Artemis missions all began.  

The longer story is that NASA is said to have chosen the bidder in November but hasn't talked about it publicly.  Agency spokeswoman Patti Bielling declined to name the winner, saying terms are still being negotiated, and "the process does not conclude until the parties execute the lease, at which time NASA will announce the selection."  

Ars Space Correspondent Eric Berger goes on to say:

I bring this up because two people have told me that SpaceX won the competition to use the high bay for its Starship program. The sources said SpaceX does not plan to perform stacking operations inside the VAB, but rather will use the facility for storage and integration of payloads on Starship before flight. This might be an interim usage by SpaceX while the company develops a larger facility on Roberts Road near the Florida spaceport. It sounds like SpaceX will continue to build Starships in South Texas and ship them to Florida for the time being.

Who Will buy ULA?

It was back at the beginning of March when the rumor surfaced that ULA was for sale.  United Launch Alliance is a joint venture ("marriage of convenience") between Lockheed Martin and Boeing formed in 2005 and driven by the US Fed.gov.  The purpose of the deal was to ensure that NASA, US DOD and intelligence services had continuous access to Delta and Atlas launch vehicles. 

You would be right to expect that there has been a lot financial analyst-type speculation about various companies.  This week, though, the Space Case substack newsletter makes the case that Lockheed Martin is likely to buy out Boeing and take total control of the company.  The case essentially comes down to that Boeing could use the revenue to shore up their balance sheet while Lockheed Martin can afford the cash to buy them out.

NASA Mars mission confident in New Glenn date 

On February 9th (second story) NASA's ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) Mars mission announced they had chosen Blue Origin's New Glenn to get to Mars, in the next (late 2024) planetary launch window.  Principal investigator for ESCAPADE, Rob Lillis of the University of California Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory said, “It hasn’t launched yet and we are concerned about that, but having seen the Blue Origin facility at Cape Canaveral, I was much less concerned after seeing all the work they’ve done. I’m confident they will likely be ready for the launch of ESCAPADE.”

They've announced a preliminary launch window to target, August 6 through 15, 2024 but then add the window “is approximate and provisional."  August of '24 is 16 months away.  I wish I had the confidence PI Rob Lillis has that New Glenn will have a positive flying record in less than a year and a half .

China Practicing Landing "Boosters"

CAS Space, a spinoff from the state-owned Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has begun testing a small vehicle doing vertical takeoffs and landings on ships in the sea off the coast of Haiyang in eastern China's Shandong Province.  

When they say "small vehicle," well, it's not quite 7 feet tall.  It's 2.1 meters or 6 foot 10.7 inches tall and 93 kilograms or just under 205-pounds.  We specify vehicle because it's not a rocket.  It's powered by twin jet engines each with a thrust of 550 newtons.

CAS has been running these tests since the first of the year and there's a video of one of these tests at the linked article.  The little vehicle takes off from land, moves to a vessel offshore, lands, then lifts off again from that barge and rises to 1000 meters (they report).  They say the test flight was 10 minutes long while the video is 1:14 so the vast majority of the flight is deleted.

CAS Space aims to launch its own reusable orbital rockets in the future, as well as a suborbital rocket for space tourism, in a similar fashion to U.S. firm Blue Origin and its New Shepard.

A CAS Space engineer told Chinese state media outlet Global Times that the firm may hold a first test flight of a near-space scientific experiment platform as early as the end of 2023.

CAS is not alone in aiming to develop reusable rockets in China.  The main, state-operated company in China, CASC, is working on a reusable version of the Long March family, called Long March 8.  Other private firms both inside and outside of China are working toward a similar goal.  The article mentions Landspace and iSpace and we've heard that the European Space Agency is also working on reusable rockets.  Reusability changes everything.

Relativity to Move On to Terran R

Those who watched the Terran-1 first flight that never made it to orbit, the "successful failure," have witnessed the only flight of Terran-1 there will ever be.   

Relativity Space has announced they are proceeding into development of the larger Terran-R, and they're saying it's going to be bigger than they talked about before.  

(I clipped off the time tag, but Twitter says it was posted at 10:20 AM Wednesday - I assume EDT)

Of course, there's that tiny, minor matter of the failure that kept the second stage from firing properly and the first mission from making orbit.  CEO Tim Ellis says that they're not done with their failure analysis but their understanding is improving.  

(W)hen the Aeon engine's main valves were commanded to open, they opened slower than expected. There was also a problem with the oxygen pump, likely due to a "vapor bubble" at its inlet. As a result of all this, the engine's gas generator did not light, and the engine never reached full power.

The second stage would continue to climb along its (now) free-parabolic trajectory, reaching a max height of 134 km before falling back into the Atlantic.  On the whole, though, the company feels good about their first attempt.  After all, they did better than some other companies have done on their first flight, and among their most important goals was to demonstrate the 3D printed rocket could handle all the stresses it would be expected to, which it clearly did.  

So Relativity is dropping any work on the smaller vehicle and moving to the Terran R. Not only that, but they're increasing the size and payload capacity of the Terran R compared to earlier specs.  

• The first stage will be fully reusable with a rated life of 20 missions.  The second stage will be expendable "for now." 
  
• It will be capable of 23.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. Additionally, an expendable version of the Terran R rocket will carry 33.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. The Falcon 9 is rated for 22.8 metric tons to LEO, but in both cases, the actual payloads depend on the desired orbit.  One number doesn't fit all. 
• Falcon Heavy is rated 63.8 metric tons to LEO. 
• Terran R will be powered by 13 Aeon engines. This corresponds to 3.35 million pounds of thrust. This puts it solidly between Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which has 3.85 million pounds, and the version of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket with four strap-on, solid rocket boosters at 3.1 million pounds of thrust.
• Relativity is dropping the idea of additively manufacturing the entire Terran R rocket. Ellis said the Terran R will still be a "3D printed rocket," but initial versions (at least) will use aluminum alloy straight-section barrels, in response to "overwhelming market demand" for a vehicle of this size.  
• First stage reuse plans look like SpaceX.  The returning boosters will combine grid fins and using different numbers of engines at different times during the return arc.  They'll land on a drone ship off the SE US coast and be refurbished at facilities on Cape Canaveral.
  

This is a major undertaking and while Relativity looks to be well-positioned for it, there's no guarantee, of course.  Relativity has more than $1.3 billion in fundraising, a large factory in Southern California, an engine test site at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, and facilities at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  It has a staff of about 1,000 people.  In addition, they have a customer backlog of $1.65 billion in launch service agreements and an additional $3.68 billion in the customer pipeline.    

The negative side of this is delaying the first launch of the new Terran R to 2026, from the aspirational date of 2024 they've talked about before.

It's impressive to me that a company as young as Relativity Space can be credibly recognized as likely to accomplish this.  NASA and commercial satellite customers have voiced wanting a second company to step forward and challenge SpaceX on innovation, price, and reliability.  Tim Ellis correctly sees that this lane remains open with questions about Vulcan's long-term future, Blue Origin's slow movement on New Glenn, and Rocket Lab's focus on a smaller medium-lift rocket, Neutron.

Relativity graphic showing the features of Terran.

Weekly Small Space News Story Roundup 6

AKA it's such a slow news period that Space.com is running a story on a Marvel movie trailer that was just released.  And another story on a book that relates to the Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy movies.  Two stories on Marvel entertainment?  Seriously?

I swear I'm not making this up.

The Juice Breaks Loose Thursday Morning

The European Space Agency's JUICE Mission - Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer is currently scheduled for launch on Thursday morning, Apr 13, at 8:15 AM EDT.  The mission launches atop an Ariane 5 from the Guiana Space Centre, in French Guiana.  This is the same launch vehicle and location that carried the James Webb Space Telescope to its orbit.  

The Ariane 5 and Juice payload integrated and ready to roll out to the launch pad.  This picture is dated as having been taken on the 8th but posted to the mission website today.  ESA Photo.

SpaceX Called off the WDR today. 

In a move that surprised me, I started watching the Lab Padre cameras before the expected 8AM road closure this morning and it was surprisingly low in visible activity.  Pretty quickly, commenters came to the conclusion it had been cancelled for the day.  Not long after that, people reported the Cameron County website showed no road closures until next Monday, the 17th.  

Much later in the day, the SpaceX main corporate account Tweeted: 

Teams are focused on launch readiness ahead of Starship’s first integrated flight test as soon as next week, pending regulatory approval – no launch rehearsal this week http://spacex.com/launches/

I can find nothing authoritative to get any reliable information on what's planned for this week. 

There's stuff coming; Tuesday, 4/18, is the Falcon Heavy launch, but that's a week away and little news is out.

Starship Ready to Fly - Waiting on FAA

This weekend, SpaceX conducted a final flight readiness review for the first orbital flight of Starship and Super Heavy booster.  Early on Sunday morning, Elon Musk Tweeted that everything was ready for launch.

The company has announced a targeted date for this attempt: Monday, April 17 at 7:00 AM Central.  The only testing they've announced for this week has been that there will be a full Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) on Tuesday, April 11 - when most of you will be reading this.  They have not announced a time for that test at the time of this writing.

In general, a WDR is a simulation of the majority of the countdown's critical activities. Booster 7's first and second stages will be fueled as if they were going to launch, and all steps along the way will be followed up to the moment of ignition, but they will halt the count without starting the engines. This test will increase the company's confidence in its ability to fuel the Starship launch system and ready it for liftoff on the day of the actual launch. 

According to the Weather Underground (because they post 10-day forecasts - out as far as Wednesday, 4/19), that Monday looks to be a good day, morning low of 67, afternoon high of 74, low chances of rain and low amounts of cloud cover. Winds mostly NE at 10-15 mph.  It looks better than Tuesday or Wednesday.  The forecast for the rumored day of 4/20 (Thursday) isn't there at the moment. Personally, I don't put much faith in forecasts that far out based on our 10 day forecasts.

The important part is the mission.  If you follow the space industry, you know deep inside that they eventually reach a point where they've modeled everything that can be modeled and have to actually do the experiment to gather as much data as possible.  That's where SpaceX is. 

During this flight test, if it proceeds nominally, the Super Heavy rocket will fire for a couple of minutes before separating from the upper stage and making a controlled descent into the Gulf of Mexico. Like SpaceX did with some of its early Falcon 9 rocket first stages, the company will monitor the vehicle's performance to see if SpaceX is ready to attempt a land-based landing on future missions.

After separating from the Super Heavy rocket, the Starship upper stage will seek to reach orbital velocity before reentering the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. SpaceX plans to land Starship vertically into the ocean, north of the Hawaiian islands.

This test flight will carry no payloads—indeed, the sole purpose is to test the rockets, their engines, and the capability of the vehicles to reenter Earth's atmosphere and make a controlled landing. SpaceX engineers have a million questions for which they seek data. Can the tall rocket clear the launch tower? Will enough of the vehicle's 33 main engines fire long enough to put Starship into its planned trajectory? Will Starship's engines ignite? Can the vehicle survive the harsh conditions of reentry? How intact will everything be once it reaches the ocean?

Since, unlike Falcon 9, Starships can hover vertically, I'd really love to see them hover Ship 24 over the Pacific, motionless, for at least a few seconds before dropping her into the ocean.  We can pay our respects that way.

Booster 7 and Ship 24, last Thursday, 4/6.  SpaceX picture.

 

About That Centaur Engine Anomaly

Back on March 31st in one of my small story roundups, I relayed that ULA CEO Tory Bruno had Tweeted that the Vulcan's upper stage suffered "an anomaly" without specifically saying what happened.  In the last couple of days, some interesting things have surfaced.  Perhaps the most interesting is a photograph tweeted by Eric Berger, the space correspondent for Ars Technica, but this is his personal twitter account. This is said to be the "anomaly" but most of us would call that an explosion. Orange cloud to the left.

This picture and a little more information is used in a video from a YouTube channel that I look at a few times a week, Starbase Pink.  When I first ran across the channel, they had a different name (I think it was SpaceX Pink) and used a synthetic female voice.  When they changed to the current format, they dropped the synthesized voice, going to (I assume) the original channel owner.   

Berger originally says the photo shows the anomaly—a fireball of hydrogen igniting—to the left of Blue Origin's rocket engine test stand, but hydrogen is well-known for having a nearly invisible flame.  Flames of that orange-yellow color are associated with coming from organic chemical bonds with higher radiated heat than hydrogen gives. To me, the fact that the fireball is clearly visible looking toward the sun implies that isn't hydrogen, but I'll say it could be from burning something else that was in the vehicle.

Berger and Ars Technica, to their credit, published a more in-depth coverage of all that's known, and that contains things that don't make sense to me as stated.  

"A column of burning, clear hydrogen shot up into a mushroom cloud that dwarfed the test stand," one source said. "Their test article is definitely more than just 'damaged.'"

...

A Blue Origin source confirmed that a mushroom cloud formed from the anomaly. Afterward, United Launch Alliance asked Blue Origin to delete the explosive video footage from the company's computers, which Blue Origin agreed to do.

(Note: After publication of this article, when asked about the video deletion, Bruno tweeted that this "didn't happen." However, two sources told Ars that after the incident, United Launch Alliance asked Blue Origin to "secure" the video for its investigation. Blue Origin did so, but also removed the video from its own internal servers, reserving access only for a few officials at the company).

The whole story is a bit hard to process.  Upper stages called Centaur have been flying since the '60s, but this one is apparently a new version.  Which answers one of the first questions: why are they testing a Centaur -  unless something major has changed (bearing in mind that "because we feel like it" or "we do this on every other engine" are perfectly valid answers).  Bruno has recently said an upper stage called Centaur V would be able to operate for 40 percent longer in flight and has two-and-a-half times more energy than the Centaur upper stage ULA currently flies, but nobody referred to this engine by that name.  Is this a new Blue Origin engine other than the BE-4s powering the first stage of the Vulcan?  Exactly how big an impact is this for the first Vulcan Centaur mission?  Is it using an older, better known engine?

To this observer, it looks like the plans for two launches this year, including one that would lead to US Space Force certification, are either done for the year or hanging on by a thread.

Happy Easter!

To my reader friends and those who drop by on occasion.  I know the modern thing is to refer to this as Resurrection Sunday - it's the reason for the season after all - but the old fashioned greeting is still OK by this old guy. 

Enjoy your day.  Enjoy your families.  We have nothing in the smoker because the forecast is for rain and wind and those three words don't go together.  However you celebrate, enjoy your day. 

One Year From Today, April 8th

One year from today, the next great American solar eclipse will cover a long stretch of the CONUS, from south Texas up through New England.  Instead of the day before Easter, April 8th next year will be after Easter, which will be on March 31st. 

The Great Eclipse of 2017 was the first one I had ever seen and the two paths overlap in the central US; this graphic extracts both paths.

Son, Dear Daughter in Law and Precious Grand Daughter live in the Indianapolis metro area almost on the centerline of this one.  We met in Tennessee for the '17 eclipse and swore we'd watch this one from their backyard, but we should start figuring out travel plans.  The essential difference in planning is the last one was August and the coming one is April, and typical weather is pretty different between those two months.  Indianapolis might not be a good place to see it.

It's time to start making your plans.

Probably the Weirdest Email of My Life

This afternoon, I got what must have been the weirdest email of my life. Certainly of this blog's life.  It was from Blogger itself: 

Your post titled "Eliminating the Legislative Branch" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at:

http://thesilicongraybeard.blogspot.com/2012/01/eliminating-legislative-branch.html

Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.

The post is dated January 7, 2012 and talks about the President (Bamster) going around the law to appoint someone to the newly organized (back then) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  While a bit snarky, I think it was fairly even-handed.  I made fun of both W's and Bamster's administrations doing the same basic thing: pushing through an appointment for a position that requires senate approval by waiting until the senate wasn't in session so they could just appoint them. 

I'll bet that post has had more reads today than at any time in the intervening 11 years since I posted it, when it combines me testing it at least twice and then having the diminutive but deadly Mrs. Graybeard test it as well.  

I can't imagine what could be "sensitive content" about it, but I have a hard time believing that someone stumbled across it while blog surfing and complained about an over 11 year old post.  There is nothing in their email about disagreeing with them, just what to do when you fix it, but since they never told me what was wrong with it, that's pointless.  Although it's hard to be more pointless than an 11 year old blog post about something that was a minor news story back then. 

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Two weekends ago, I wrote about trying to resurrect an 11 year old PC to take the place of a newer but lower performance PC I use to run a few things in the shop. Since I'm here, let me do a little update to that. 

By the time I posted that, I had gotten it to boot to Win7, but even the simplest things were exasperating.  I'd tell it to uninstall a program, or simply delete a file from a junk directory, and it would just sit there spinning one of it's "processing... processing..." indicators for minutes.  Digging through old DVDs, I found everything that came with this old Dell including some diagnostics and tried to run them.  Originally, it would halt with an error saying something like it couldn't verify it was a Dell PC so it couldn't verify the tests would work and then abort. That took a couple of days to find a way around.  

I gradually improved things, but every time I tried to run a functional test, it couldn't complete testing the older magnetic hard drive.  It didn't fail it, it just never completed the test.  It would get to some block of memory addresses and say the drive didn't provide an Interrupt Request (IRQ) reply fast enough.  Then it would put up a box asking quit or keep testing.  I quit the test several times, and then last Sunday decided to keep hitting Y, telling it to resume testing, thinking maybe it's just one or two bad addresses and after a few minutes, I'd have a list of the bad ones.

That's when I found out it would sit there (doing something or nothing) for up to 10 minutes before starting to retest, and then give me the same question with a different address being bad within a second.  I literally spent 90 minutes waiting for those "Continue (Y)es or (N)o?" prompts.  The kicker is that I could go to the Command line (i.e., DOS) and run the old CHKDSK utility.  That said the HD passed.

I concluded the HD was probably bad.  It's from 2011, after all, and 12 years out of a hard drive is really not that bad.  I looked around the house but couldn't find another drive I could test in its place and after days of debating whether to buy a used drive from eBay, get something newer, or just can the whole thing, went with the second option.  

That drive got here this afternoon, so I plan to try to get that swapped out tomorrow.  And if it doesn't get that computer working, this computer gets another hard drive.

SpaceX Says No Starship Launch Next Week

It seems that Monday's post asking the question of whether we're within a week of Starship's first orbital test was a bit premature.  NASA Spaceflight .com has good coverage of all that's going on, including a few watchable videos.

Ship 24 wasn't stacked on top of Booster 7 until Wednesday and they've stated they still have several days worth of testing, including a full Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR).   

On Thursday, SpaceX did confirm a forward plan. There will be another WDR in the mix, an opportunity set to be taken next week as the launch date target settles on a window the week after. This would come before the FTS arming.

Currently, the well-publicized April 10 NET (No Earlier Than) target had been ruled out by the cancellation of local road and beach closures, with placeholders for the following two days now likely to be related to the upcoming WDR.

The launch attempt would then follow a week later, around NET April 17, based on SpaceX’s updated info.

That reference to the WDR "would come before the FTS arming" refers to the fact that arming the Flight Termination System requires lifting Starship off the booster to access the FTS system.  

NSF linked to this Tweet from SpaceX corporate.  

While I want to see Starship fly as much as anyone, this is all uncharted territory and people are solemnly saying that no heavy lift vehicle has ever lifted off on its first try so scrubs are not just possible, they're highly likely.  They're also "learning moments" when lots of little decisions that went into constructing the countdown get trial by fire.  All of this is good for Starship and SpaceX; it's worth every penny they pay to run the tests.  Every hold or scrub buys risk from future missions. 

The same will apply during the launch, with “priority one” involving the vehicle rising away from the pad without causing major damage to the launch site infrastructure. It could be argued that anything past that point will be a win, as the most powerful rocket in history adds the opening seconds to its maiden trip uphill.

A full mission success would result in the Booster splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico, while Ship 24 re-enters and splashes down off the coast of Hawaii.

Never forget that SpaceX works by the "hardware rich" approach.  They're already in process to build more booster/ship combinations; Booster 9 and Ship 25 are well along the way to being ready for more testing.  B9 is getting engines installed, and S25 has been getting tested at SpaceX's Massey property - which apparently doesn't have any cameras permanently observing.   

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that if B7-S24 doesn't destroy the Orbital Launch Mount or do large amounts of damage, B9-S25 could fly next and relatively soon.  

B7-S24 stacked on the Orbital Launch Mount.  Photo from SpaceX on Twitter.  Because it's a cool pic.

A Fix for Observing the Ignore-o-Sphere

There's an area of the atmosphere that's almost impossible to observe regularly.  At roughly 20 to 60 miles, it's too high for balloons or regular aircraft, while being much (much!) too low for satellites to survive. A New Zealand startup company called Dawn Aerospace is working to improve access to what has been called the ignore-o-sphere.  They're prototyping a series of rocket-powered spaceplanes that are intended to fly research payloads into this height range multiple times a day.

They said today that they had completed the first three test flights of their Mark-II spaceplane.  This is a very early prototype and Dawn doesn't expect to do more than a few test flights on this platform.  

This Mk-II Aurora vehicle measures 4.5 meters long and is powered by a combustion rocket engine fueled by kerosene and hydrogen peroxide. During its initial flights, the vehicle flew to an altitude of about 1,800 meters and reached a maximum speed of about 315 kilometers per hour, the company said.  [5900 feet and 195 mph - SiG]

(The Mark-I vehicle, by the way, flew on a conventional jet engine.)  The test flights are being conducted out of Glentanner Aerodrome on the south island of New Zealand, and will eventually see this vehicle top out at about 12 miles altitude.  The lessons learned from this plane will be put into a second version of the Mk-II Aurora, which could take flight before the end of this year or early in 2024.  

In an interview, Dawn Aerospace chief executive Stefan Powell said this second vehicle would have a far lighter structure, a more powerful engine, and other features that would allow it to climb far higher. The goal is to fly the spaceplane to an altitude of 100 km, above the internationally recognized boundary of space.

The second vehicle will still be small and not capable of carrying more than perhaps 5 to 10 lbs.  It's obviously not going to be carrying a second stage with that power level.  Still, I think that amount of weight is in line with smaller Cube Sats or something specially designed for the purpose.

During their few days of testing, they ran into a problem that demonstrated the value of their rapid reusability model.  

During the first flight, the Mk-II Aurora consumed more fuel than anticipated due to a leak in the propellant system. The next day, Dawn engineers removed the Mk-II Aurora engine, took out the oxidizer tank and found the leak.

“It was reasonably trivial to fix that, put it back together and fly again,” Powell said.

But that's getting too far from the main story: flying up to that 30 to 100 km (~18 to 60 miles) range.  

"Above 30 km is too high for balloons and too low for satellites," he said. "Some researchers refer to it as the ignore-o-sphere. We know it has large implications on climate models and weather models. So there is theorized to be a lot of value in understanding this part of the atmosphere better. So we'll probably just start sticking some pretty basic data gathering payloads onboard just because they don't weigh very much." 

They're also planning a larger version of the Mk-II Aurora vehicle capable of achieving orbit and carrying payloads up to 250 kg - a quarter of a metric ton.  That one will be called ... (wait for it) ... Mark-III. 

The Mk-II Aurora in flight.  Dawn Aerospace photo.

Impressive, but impossible to scale just how big that is.  So we have this photo (also from Dawn Aerospace).

That's the actual Mk-II Aurora.  Stefan Powell is in the middle, crouching position.

And... Virgin Orbit Declares Bankruptcy

Not that "it's over" in some final sense just yet, but Virgin Orbit filed for bankruptcy on Monday April 3rd, shortly after the satellite launch company failed to secure two financing deals and furloughed most of its staff.  Virgin Orbit is California based, but is filing for bankruptcy in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. Its first hearing will be held virtually via Zoom on Wednesday (April 5) at 1:30 pm EST (1730 GMT).  Virgin is filing under Chapter 11, commonly known as "reorganization bankruptcy" which allows the company to continue basic operations while it looks for a buyer.

Virgin Orbit's "Start Me Up" mission suffered a rocket launch failure in January 2023 due to a technical error, resulting in the loss of nine customer satellites. By mid-March, the company had paused operations and announced layoffs for about 90% of its workforce. Last week, the company was in conversation with two financers but failed to secure a deal, which seemed to be the last straw and the determining factor behind the company's decision to file for bankruptcy.

The company was valued at $65 million at the end of Monday (April 3) and had its shares plummet by 24% on Tuesday (April 4) soon after it announced bankruptcy, Reuters' Joey Roulette reported early on Tuesday.

While the failure of the January '23 mission out of the UK is probably the one most people will think of first being the most recent, the company has launched 33 satellites to orbit to date.  I'd have to guess that the prices they can charge to put satellites into orbit this way aren't enough to cover the cost of operations.

Virgin Orbit's "first stage", named Cosmic Girl, which carries Launcher One above the densest part of the atmosphere.  Virgin Orbit photo.

Are We Within a Week of Starship's Orbital Test?

As recently as 10 days ago, there were reports that the first orbital test of Starship was looking to be late this month.  To be more specific, there was a published tease that the date might well be April 20 - or 4/20 for the cannabis fans - and Musk is fond of making 4/20 references and jokes.

Today, there's serious talk that the launch may be sooner, with Space.com reporting that launch may be next Monday, 4/10.  

SpaceX appears to have shifted gears.

On Saturday, Booster 7 which had been removed from the Orbital Launch Mount was lifted back onto the launch pad.  On the same day, Ship 24 was moved back to the test area from the shipyard.  It's expected that Ship 24 will be stacked on top of B7 soon. 

Today, the road was marked for closure from 8AM to 8PM (CDT) and B7 underwent a long cryo test session, filling both the LOX and Methane tanks, a good test of all the work done over the last couple of months of preparing the OLM for the launch it will be exposed to.  The testing may vary, but the rated take off thrust of Starship Superheavy boosters is over twice that of the Saturn V moon rockets.  That OLM is going to take a beating!

Then there's the fact that navigational warnings have been issued for the Starship orbital attempt, as Netherlands-based satellite tracker Marco Langbroek noted.  Those warnings cover a window of April 6 to 12th. A fairly important sign is pointing toward next Monday and Tuesday.

It also appears that, tentatively, NASA is reserving the use of its high-altitude WB-57 aircraft for observations of the Starship test flight on April 10 and 11. The agency is closely tracking SpaceX's progress with the massive rocket, as it intends to use the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander for its astronauts as part of the Artemis Moon missions.

Another sign arguing for later in the 6th to 12th window is that SpaceX still hasn't gotten its license for this launch.  It's hard to guess what a Fed.gov agency like the FAA might do, but it appears things are lining up for sooner than the 20th, 

After it launches, the Super Heavy rocket will fly from SpaceX's Starbase launch site eastward, over the Gulf of Mexico. For this test, the booster will not attempt a landing. After stage separation, the Starship upper vehicle is intended to reach orbital velocity before attempting a reentry into Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. If all goes well, it will make a controlled descent and landing into the ocean just north of the Hawaiian islands.

Musk said recently that Starship has about a 50% chance of success on that debut try. But SpaceX is building multiple Starship prototypes at Starbase and plans to launch them in relatively quick succession when they're ready.

"So I think we've got, hopefully, about an 80% chance of reaching orbit this year," Musk said on March 7 during an interview at the Morgan Stanley Conference (video).

 

 

Triple Header

I spent some time relearning something about this blog's history over this weekend.  On Friday, I thought I had done one or two April Fool's Day posts over the years.  I decided I'd do a three-day weekend this year, because - hey, it's a weekend - why not?  I sat down with the Blog Archive tool on the bottom of the right hand column and looked at April 1st posts.  There were more April Fool's Day posts than regular posts.  

There are two things to bear in mind.  

1. Just like "the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club", the first law of an April Fool's Day post is you don't say it's an April Fool's Day post. 
2. Good comedy is harder to write than good science or good opinion.

Since I violated the first law by saying tonight's post is the third of three April Fool's Day posts I'll just say it's one of my favorites.   From 2021...

Norwegian EV Startup Could Challenge Tesla’s Market Dominance

Is the age of the self-recharging Electric Vehicle dawning?  To some extent, it dawned years ago with the concept of regenerative braking - the ability to use the kinetic energy of the car to turn a motor into a generator charging the batteries as the car was dumping energy out of its forward motion.  Realistically, this wasn't enough. The cars still need to be recharged, but what if the car could generate enough power to charge itself when not running?  The laws of thermodynamics say, "there's no such thing as a free lunch," so that energy has to come from somewhere.  Evaluation Engineering magazine today talks about such a concept from an unexpected source: an Electric Vehicle startup in Norway.

The Fjord Motor Company, a Norwegian electric-vehicle startup, has announced it’s accepting deposits for orders of its unique and revolutionary Mocky SUV Crossunder. The five-place Mocky is packed with all of the features offered by its competitors, including a 350HP fully electric drivetrain (available in 2- or 4-wheel drive), a 300-mile range, a center screen display, and reconfigurable seating.

The feature that stands out from other “green” automotive market leaders, like Tesla with its ultra-fast-charging vehicle offerings, and Toyota with its “self-charging” hybrids, is a true, off-grid, point-of-energy-source, self-charging capability. Fjord’s Mocky incorporates a patent-pending tire design, developed in collaboration with Korean global tire giant Yancancook, that features a water-wheel-like tread that’s said to also have exceptional hydroplaning and snow/mud performance.

When the car isn't needed for driving, it can be parked in a convenient stream and the configuration of the car changed from the driver's position to allow the energy from the stream to turn the tires and charge the car.   Fjord makes it more convenient with electrohydraulic jacks behind the rear wheel wells, so that the car just has to have its back half in the running stream.  All the driver has to do is ensure the car is pointed as close to upstream as reasonable and command ChargeStream™ on the Mocky’s center-screen controls.

Fjord estimates 10% to 80% charging times of around 10 hours, so it's better if you can leave the car while you're at work, or can accept less charge, but it's also feasible for electric car camping if you can park alongside a stream.  The longer the car is in the stream, the better.  Now Fjord makes a claim I don't think is reasonable: 110% charge efficiency due to excess battery heat being used for cabin warming.  They also claim the heat can make dinner using a cleverly integrated fish-poaching pot located in the frunk.  I think we'll have to wait for some objective reviews of the car from some reviewers that can measure these things.  I should point out that for the risk averse buyers, the Mocky comes with standard dual SAE J1772 DC charging ports.

Fjord Motor Company publicity photo of the Mocky from Evaluation Engineering.  Bearing more than a slight resemblance to Ford's recently introduced Mustang Mach-E, Fjord Motor's Mocky offers comparable range and performance, as well as its industry-leading HydroCharge self-charging system and an autopilot that gets smarter as you drive it.

An autopilot that learns?  Artificial Intelligence Autopilot?

"Apart from killing Toyota’s ‘self-charging’ hubris, and Tesla’s now-Lilliputian charging rates and abilities, the only unaddressed advantage Tesla has over Fjord is autonomous self-driving, though Elon Musk has delivered more hot air than full capability to date," said Lief Niessan, CEO of The Fjord Motor Company.

“As a startup, we had limited engineering resources and cash available to us, so we looked for an AI (artificial intelligence) toolset that was available in the Open Source community to form the basis of the Mocky’s self-driving capability,” continued Niessan. “Our engineers worked closely with OpenAI and we managed to score a beta copy of their GPT-3 Artificial Intelligence toolset.”

For those unfamiliar with GPT-3, the toolset features an AI engine that was trained by crawling the entire expanse of the internet. GPT-3 has been demonstrated to compose music, write essays, perform medical diagnosis, and has even been used to complete partial photographs.

Niessan relates some of the interesting issues they've encountered with OpenAI "trained by crawling the entire expanse of the internet" in the Evaluation Engineering article.  He relates, for instance, that the system would add 2π MPH (or 3π kmh on metric highways) to the legal speed limit, having determined a speed that created the shortest travel times and carried an almost zero probability of a speeding citation being issued.

Fjord Motor Company is nothing if not innovative.  Pricing for the base model Mocky 2WD starts at $39,995 (USD), which includes StreamCharge™, dual J1772 DC charge ports, and the in-frunk fish-poaching pot.  While the cost of the self-driving option was not revealed by Fjord at press time, Lief assured us that active members of the Open Source community who deliver more than 500 lines of useful code to GitHub would receive the autonomous EV option at no cost.

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One of the things I love about this post is the photo of the Mocky. It looks virtually identical to the Mustang Mach-E, except right in the middle of where a grill ought to be, the Mocky replaces the galloping horse with a galloping reindeer.  

A serious article 11 months later featured Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm next to the car they drove to a serious PR event on how serious the administration is about building charging stations.  What was that car?  The Mach-E. 

Man Indicted for Selling “Ground” to EE Freshmen

Georgia State police today announced the arrest of a suspect with a long record of arrests for fraud, scams and cons.  The suspect's name and other details have not yet been released.  The indictment was for selling entry-level electrical-engineering students at the Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”) small parcels of real estate, leveraging the fact that they had been told their circuits and systems needed as much “ground” as possible.

The unidentified man says he got the idea from listening to his niece, a first-year student in an electronics program. She told him that the instructor and textbooks repeatedly cited the need for more and better “ground” to make circuits work, or for system safety—you could never have enough of this so-called “ground.”

After listening to her, the alleged con artist developed a long list specific ground types to sell, such as signal ground, ac-line ground, power ground, RF ground, and shield ground. It did seem like you just never have enough of this thing called ground.

In the world of scams and cons that I've heard of, this one sounds like it will be hard to get a conviction on, because the only dishonest thing about this appears to be selling misinformation; selling pieces of land to students as a way to get more and better ground. 

The indicted man would find odd-shaped pieces of real available land (similar to fabric remnants) and work with the owners to buy those few square feet here and there. He would then resell these small pieces at a much higher price complete with a legitimate deed to the students, saying “you’ll be needing more ground for your projects to succeed, and as you know, they’re not making more land.”

Note that the charges don’t claim he sold land that he did not own or misrepresented the land itself. Instead, the charges are focused on selling land under false representation of the application of the land. Ironically, it’s not entirely clear if the charges against him (no pun intended) will actually “stick,” since the transactions themselves were completely legal and properly done.

Selling misinformation, of course, is something the government does all day, every day - with exceptions for weekends and every holiday known to man.  I suppose it's the old story that the reason men like this get arrested is that the government doesn't want the competition.  

An ironic twist to this story will be most familiar to hams, hobbyists, and engineers who specialize in broadcast; especially in the AM Broadcast Band (AM BCB) or lower frequencies.

Of course, for higher-power transmitter towers and antennas such as those used by commercial broadcasters, especially in the lower-frequency “medium wave” band (several megahertz and lower frequencies/long wavelengths), the land on which the antenna sits actually is critical. In most cases, these antennas need acres of relatively conductive ground to form a ground plane under the antenna, as well as install grounding rods for the lightning rods protecting the antennas. But that’s a different “ground” story and a few square feet won’t make a difference.