A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Clearspace-1

Clearspace-1 is a mission being planned by the European Space Agency aimed at testing and refining ways to clear orbital debris.  The spacecraft itself is being developed by a Swiss startup called ClearSpace and the mission has been tentatively targeted for 2026, with its target being an adapter used on an ESA mission in 2013.  

The adapter is a conical-shaped leftover, roughly 250 pounds (113 kg) in mass, from a 2013 Vega launch that sent a small fleet of satellites into orbit.

While the 250 pound leftover has been in orbit since 2013, the mission is a recent idea as the proliferation of satellites in orbit has focused attention on clearing debris out of low earth orbit.  The target orbits at an altitude as low as 410 miles (660 km).

Mission planners have produced this animation of the spider-like Clearspace craft capturing the adapter.

So what's the "funny thing" that happened to the mission?  Apparently, the target has been struck by something in orbit.  Collisions are exactly why they want to get it out of orbit.

Space tracking systems found new objects nearby the adapter, which ESA learned about on Aug. 10. The objects are likely space debris from a "hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object" that smacked into the payload adapter, the agency said. We may never know if the crashing object was natural or artificial, given it didn't appear in tracking systems.

"This fragmentation event underlines the relevance of the ClearSpace-1 mission," ESA officials wrote in a statement Tuesday (Aug. 22). "The most significant threat posed by larger objects of space debris is that they fragment into clouds of smaller objects, that can each cause significant damage to active satellites."

While it appears only a small piece of the rocket hardware was lost after the collision, the mission plan assumed fully intact hardware. Now evaluations are ongoing to figure out what's next, and the analysis will persist for weeks at the least.

With the mission penciled in for '26, they have time to analyze what's really up there and change their plans appropriately.

Luckily, however, follow-up tracking from the U.S. Space Force and other stations in Germany and Poland found "the main object remains intact and has experienced no significant alteration to its orbit," ESA said. And happily, the risk of these new objects hitting something else is "negligible."

The approach Clearspace-1 uses is apparently to latch onto the target and slow it enough to get it to re-enter the atmosphere.  That seems to only be realistic for larger objects like this adapter.  There's more than that in orbit and this approach looks expensive; after all, it will latch onto the target and then burn itself up along with the target.  There's a staggering number of pieces to deal with, since it has been getting put up there for nearly 70 years with no real efforts to get rid of it. 

ESA estimates that Earth orbit has at least 36,500 debris objects that are more than 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide. Including the smallest trackable objects, that number balloons to an incredible 330 million objects bigger than 0.04 inches (1 millimeter).

Remember also that a lot of meteors are swept up by Earth every day; NASA estimates 48.5 tons of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day.  Before a meteor gets to the surface, it goes through all that junk in orbit and can affect it.  ESA pretty much said they don't know if it was hit by another piece of junk or something like a chunk of meteor.

With Russia's Luna-25 Gone, Next Up is Chandrayaan-3

The supposed race between Russia's Luna-25 and India's Chandrayaan-3 ended over the weekend when (apparently) one or more incorrect commands were sent to Luna-25 to lower its intended orbit in preparation for its landing attempt and resulted in loss of the spacecraft.  This happened Saturday morning the 19th US East Coast time.

At around the same time, Chandrayaan-3 was testing its Lander Hazard Detection and Avoidance Camera (LHDAC) by photographing the far side of the moon.  The LHDAC was designed to help guide the mission's Vikram lander to a safe landing site during its descent onto the lunar surface. 

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) released the images via X, the social media service formerly named Twitter, on Monday (Aug. 21).

The series of four Chandrayaan-3 images were taken on Saturday (Aug. 19) and show a range of geological features, including vast impact craters that cast varying degrees of shadows and lunar mare, or "seas" of cooled moon lava.

 

Assuming that the stories about Luna-25 are correct, it's not a sure thing that it could have landed successfully - just as it's not a sure thing that Chandrayaan-3 can land either.  The terrain is rough; those who remember Apollo 11 will recall that while approaching touchdown on the moon, Neil Armstrong took manual control of the LEM to avoid some larger things in the field they were approaching.  The large lunar plain Apollo 11 was landing on, the Sea of Tranquility, was chosen to improve the chances of not encountering obstacles like those for the first landing.  

India's previous attempt to land on the moon, Chandrayaan-2, Israel's attempt with SpaceIL's Beresheet lander and Japan's Hakuto-R all failed due to the problems of landing without an intelligent pilot looking at the terrain and adapting the flight to it.  The ISRO's approach is this LHDAC vision system. 

"This camera that assists in locating a safe landing area — without boulders or deep trenches — during the descent is developed by ISRO at SAC," ISRO stated.

If Chandrayaan-3 and its mission "partner," the Vikram rover, survive their landing, they will spend an entire lunar day, approximately 14 Earth days, doing science in the landing area.  If it is successful, India will be the first nation since China to join the roster of countries that have successfully landed on the moon.  For now.  Next up to try is going to be Japan.  Their Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) is scheduled to lift off on a H-2A rocket on Aug. 26 from Tanegashima Space Center.  There's suddenly a lot of interest in the moon again.

 

 

Atlantic Hurricane Season Beginning to Warm Back Up

After the early beginning to the Atlantic hurricane season that was briefly talked about here in June it quieted down.  Some of that was Saharan dust over the Atlantic (a frequent occurrence, if not so regular we can set our watches by it) and some of that due to other unfavorable conditions.  I recall watching two or three disturbances that were given very large chances of development but that never did coalesce into storms.  

That has changed in the last week and the big picture has begun to look more like late August in terms of activity.  This map from the 2PM update (EDT) shows a couple of things worth noting.  First, note "SIX" in the middle; that's Tropical Depression six - they don't get named until they achieve tropical storm level.  There are two named storms on the map, Emily and Franklin.  Franklin was named today while Emily was named last night.  Before that, they were large areas like the two with an X in them (and varying colors, denoting chance of development as seen in the drawing key).  A storm named Emily, then is the fifth storm of the year that made it to Tropical Storm level (since E is the fifth letter of the alphabet).

Compare that to Tropical Storm Hilary in the eastern Pacific currently bringing rain to southern California.  H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so the Pacific basin has had more tropical storms than the Atlantic. 

You can't watch anything related to the tropics without someone mentioning sea surface temperatures are "above normal" this year - probably due to last year's Hunga Tonga volcanic explosion as many have said.  Sea surface temperatures are certainly a requirement for tropical storm formation; in fact, they may be a "sine qua non" ("without this, nothing" - to borrow the Latin) but to talk about temperatures without saying other things are necessary is like elementary school science.  It's leaving important things out.  The air rising from the hot sea surface must also rise relatively undisturbed.  Wind shear will destroy a tropical storm as surely as cool temperatures will prevent one from even starting.  The exact strength and development of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a critical part of this.   

Which brings us to another chart of these two tropical storms, their predicted paths and strengths.

First, long time hurricane watchers will note that they're turning into the north Atlantic hundreds of miles east of where storms tend to do that.  The early turn to the N or NE is not uncommon in El Nino years as we're in now.  Note the prediction is for Emily to not make hurricane strength, but to weaken to Depression level by 2AM Tuesday and then become post-tropical.  Franklin is predicted to achieve hurricane strength by Thursday afternoon.  I'll have to watch the updates to these predictions because it's not over until the storm dissipates but the trend seems to sending both storms to the northern and eastern Atlantic.  We call those fish storms. 

An entire year of fish storms would be welcome.  

The orange area over the Gulf of Mexico has been predicted to possibly make it to tropical storm status before going into Texas for almost a week (ISTM).  I don't like the colored area covering SpaceX Boca Chica but I don't like it when the predictions are here over the Space Coast, either.

Small Space News Story Roundup 18

Russia's Luna-25 Mission Is In Trouble 

This morning (7:10 AM US Eastern time) while attempting to execute an orbit change into the desired orbit to land from, Russia's Luna 25 probe encountered a problem around the required engine burn.  Information is almost nonexistent; the Russian space agency Roscosmos was very sparse in it's statement. 

However, during the planned maneuver “an emergency situation occurred on board the automatic station, which did not allow the maneuver to be performed with the specified parameters,” according to a translation of the statement. “The management team is currently analyzing the situation.”

That's it.  While the Space News (.com) take is that we don't know with certainty that this will interfere with the attempt to land, it seems likely at the very least to affect the scheduled orbit it would attempt to land from unless the problems are either very minor or very quickly resolved.  

Artist's rendering of Luna-25 on the moon.  Image credit: Roscosmos 

Falcon 9 Leads the World in Mass to Orbit

Hardly a surprising headline given the frequency at which they launch.  The only aspect that's even a little surprising is by just how much they lead the world.  

According to this week's Rocket Report it's not even remotely close.  

According to data from BryceTech, SpaceX lofted 214 metric tons of payload into orbit in the second quarter of 2023. Its next closest competitor was the main contractor for China's space program, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, with 23 metric tons. All told, SpaceX lifted more than three-quarters of mass—primarily Starlink satellites—into orbit during the quarter.

This is for the second quarter of the year alone, and SpaceX lifted over 9 times the mass to orbit as China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).  The numbers for the first quarter weren't exactly the same (at the same BryceTech link), but SpaceX was closer to 10 times the mass to orbit as CASC.

A sobering statistic is how the US launch industry other than SpaceX fared.  The total mass put into orbit by all other US companies was 5 metric tons in the second quarter, about 21% of the mass CASC launched and 2% of SpaceX.  

Some Even Smaller Miscellaneous Stories

Preparation for the Crew 7 mission to the ISS is proceeding nominally.  The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance was transported to pad 39A on Thursday (August 17).   Meanwhile, the Crew 8 crew started training for their mission (most likely early '24) in California.  Crew 7 is scheduled for August 25th, at 3:49 a.m. ET (07:49 UTC).  This will be the 3rd flight for Endurance after having launched Crew 3 and Crew 5.

They're currently planning two missions on calendar Tuesday (east coast time); the mission from Vandenberg is at 2:04 AM EDT and is the one that was originally intended for Friday (yesterday) morning EDT but postponed due to weather.  With Hurricane Hilary expected to bring Tropical Storm conditions to the area, weather might remain a factor.  The second of the two is from Cape Canaveral SFS, SLC-40 at 8:47 PM EDT Tuesday.

SpaceX Shares Views of Booster 9's New Hardware

SpaceX shared some views of Booster 9 with what they refer to as the "vented interstage" to allow hot staging, with two workers on the new hardware that add perspective on the size. 

The hardware is both a heat shield that one worker is sitting on top of and the collar atop the already existing booster with lots of slots left open in it to allow the flames to exit the top and reduce heating of the methane tank, the top tank in Starship.  Another worker is seen with his head and arm sticking through one of those slots just above the front left grid fin.

The interstage adapter looked like this as it was being lifted into place.  

You can see that it's a lot of empty space.  Both images from SpaceX and edited a bit by me to resize and brighten them a bit. 

"Vented interstage and heat shield installed atop Booster 9. Starship and Super Heavy are being upgraded to use a separation method called hot-staging, where Starship's second stage engines will ignite to push the ship away from the booster," the company wrote today (Aug. 18) in a post on X (formerly Twitter) that shared two photos of the new hardware.

"The superhot plasma from the upper-stage engines has gotta go somewhere," Musk told journalist Ashlee Vance in a discussion on X on June 24, during which he revealed the design change. "So we're adding an extension to the booster that is almost all vents, essentially. So that allows the the upper-stage engine plume to go through the sort of vented extension of the booster and not just blow itself up."

This set of pictures makes me lean toward my belief that the road closures on Monday (early next week) are to move B9 back to the Orbital Launch Mount for more testing.  Launch is still "out there" waiting on the FAA and perhaps the lawsuit, but this makes it look like B9 may be considered ready to roll back out to the OLM for follow-on testing.

Is the Next Starship Orbital Test Flight Coming Soon?

I wouldn't think so, but some interesting developments have come up in the last few days that are pointing in that direction.  

The biggest argument against it is in the big news.  After the unsuccessful first Orbital Flight Test, the Federal Aviation Administration said SpaceX would have to submit a mishap investigation report to the agency for review before they would be cleared to launch again.  On Tuesday the 15th the agency said they had received the report and had begun their review.  

"When a final mishap report is approved, it will identify the corrective actions SpaceX must make," an FAA spokesperson told Ars. "Separately, SpaceX must modify its license to incorporate those actions before receiving authorization to launch again.

SpaceX's filing of the mishap investigation report was first reported by Payload, a space industry news publication. The report's content hasn't been released, and SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The report at Payload implies that SpaceX had delayed submitting the report until they had the result of the big static firing back on August 6 to ensure the changes they had made to the Orbital Launch Mount, and especially the most important change, the water deluge system, were proven to have worked. 

• The water deluge system aims to prevent the scattering of rock and sand particles over miles of surrounding areas—a problem that plagued Starship’s April test flight.
• On Aug. 6, the company successfully tested the system during a Starship Booster static fire. The demonstration turned the fire from the Raptor engines into steam, which appeared to create a cleaner, quieter, and shorter plume. 

All of that bodes well, but the FAA might consider the failure of the Flight Termination System to split the booster in half for up to 40 seconds a higher priority and the FTS upgrade would need to be certified before they could be cleared to fly.  Musk said in May that step would probably take longer than anything else in readying for the next Starship test flight.  

Another potential delay is that lawsuit that environmental groups filed against the FAA.  Need I point out how heavily the inputs from "green" organizations are weighted in the current administration?  

There's also a lawsuit filed against the FAA in May by environmental groups seeking a full environmental impact statement and study of SpaceX's launch operations in Texas before allowing Starship test flights to resume. A federal court permitted SpaceX to join the suit as a co-defendant with the FAA in July, then the company asked the court to dismiss the suit.

Depending on the definition of "full environmental impact statement," that could take a couple of years. 

In light of those obvious roadblocks and obstacles, I find it rather interesting that SpaceX requested a maritime exclusion zone from the U.S. Coast Guard for “rocket launching activities” on August 31.  I find it hard to imagine they could actually be ready to launch, although another static firing doesn't seem out of the question.   A quick check of the Cameron County road closures website doesn't have August 31 listed.  Instead it shows an 8AM to 8PM closure on Monday, August 21 with the 22nd and 23rd as alternative days. 

Booster 7 and Ship 25, just a visual reminder of what we could be seeing soon.  Photo from SpaceX on Twitter.  Just because it's a cool pic.

All in all, while I don't think there's much of a chance that anything will launch by August 31, SpaceX is closer to launching again than not.  We may see another static fire or even something we've not seen before.  The story was that Booster 9 was getting the hot staging adapter added so perhaps it's possible they'll fire the Starship while attached to Booster 9 to ensure the booster can take the few seconds of that it will get in operation. 

On Maui, Directed Energy Weapons, and Clickbait

I'm assuming I'm like lots of people in seeing the fire damages in Hawaii and feeling really sick to my stomach.  The stories coming out of there are awful, and much of the awful comes from state police, local police and military groups supposedly there to help the locals, not to make their lives harder.  I wasn't aware of some of the aspects of this as a story about perhaps major land grabbing going on until I watched videos #1 and 2 in this group at 90 Miles From Tyranny - including (in #1) the idea that Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) were being used to destroy things on Maui to drive current property owners out.

I don't want to say it's all just nonsense because of the record conspiracy theorists have of being right almost 100% of the time through Covid and about the J6 protests.  I do want to point out something I've seen that I know is wrong embodied in this Tweet.  

While I don't know offhand what the picture on the left is, the one on the right is a longer-than-typical exposure of a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in May of 2018, taken so that the rocket's trail left a light streak across the sky.  The illustration comes from Eric Berger at Ars Technica, and while I'm not very fond of how he's written this piece, he published the picture on the right and knows it better than any of us.  To me, the picture on the left looks like an explosion, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a bombing photo from any recent war.

Even I recognized the Falcon 9 picture the moment I saw it. I'll wager that those of you who talk about having worked at Vandy or spent time around there might well recognize the scenery faster than I did. If you look at the very top of the clip, you can see the bottom of the phrase, "Vandenberg, most likely Falcon 9."  Whomever @taramspatriot is, she apparently had in front of her what the picture was and chose to use it to imply the rocket launch was a directed energy weapon.  Posting for clicks.

Everyone who has used a laser pointer or even seen one in use knows they don't leave visible trails in the air like both images imply, so why should I expect a DEW to leave one?  The few pictures I've seen of DEWs have been radio frequency sources that are used for crowd dispersal - those are completely invisible.  Of course, anyone who has actually worked on DEWs is welcome to drop observations in the comments.  My bottom line is that with the almost ideally bad weather conditions they had, they don't need DEWs to explain things - at least things I know about.  A powerline blown down or some other ignition source that would have been trivial in better weather, coupled with the strong winds across the region due to a high pressure system to the north and a low system to the south, and any fire is going to spread, pardon the expression, like wildfire.

A larger look at the SpaceX photo from May of '18.  If you know what to look for, this has long exposure written all over it.  The line of clouds the rocket goes through as well as the clouds its liftoff created are blurred from motion as are all the swells or waves in ocean.  Pictures like this "light streak" are far more common from here in Florida than out at Vandenberg.

Intuitive Machines Sets Date for Launch of Their Lunar Lander

The first private lunar landing mission to come from NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services may have just switched from the Astrobotic Peregrine to the Nova-C from Intuitive Machines.  From SpaceNews.com:

The company announced Aug. 14 as part of its second quarter financial results that its IM-1 lunar lander mission is slated for launch on a Falcon 9 during a six-day window that opens Nov. 15 at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. A backup launch window is available in December.

I assume the mission designation IM-1 means Intuitive Machines One.  

The reason the Nova-C is going before Peregrine isn't some leader somewhere deciding one deserves to fly more than the other, it's that the Peregrine has been scheduled to ride on the first flight of the Vulcan Centaur and Vulcan is grounded while Falcon 9s are flying routinely - a few times per week.  Granted, LC 39A is a busy place because it gets reconfigured from Falcon 9s for Falcon Heavies or for Falcons carrying Dragon capsules, whether for cargo or crewed flights.  If ULA completes the fixes for Vulcan faster than expected and LC-39A is more backed up than expected, it could return to the original order.

As of this writing, there has not been a successful lunar landing by private company, or any entity besides the USA, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.  That could change by the end of this month with both India and Russia having landers enroute to the lunar south pole region.

During the quarterly earnings call, CEO Steve Altemus said the testing on the Nova-C lander for IM-1 was wrapping up and they expected to ship the lander to Cape Canaveral "in September." 

IM-1 is not only the first lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines but also potentially the first lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

Computer rendering showing the Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander on the surface of the moon with Earth in the background. (Image credit: Intuitive Machines)  (and yes, that is the logo of Columbia Sportswear.  Sponsorship ?) 

 

 

The C-Band Transition Approaches the Next Big Milestone

Back in 2020, the Federal Communications Commission began the process of carving some C-Band spectrum away from Satellite service providers and turning it into spectrum for ground-based 5G network services.  The plan was to clear 280 MHz of C-band spectrum (plus a 20-MHz guard band) for 5G mobile services in the contiguous United States (CONUS) as early as December 2023, with a portion of that spectrum becoming available as early as December 2021.  The frequencies chosen were in the range of  3.7 to 3.98GHz; and I assume the 20 MHz guard band are 10 MHz farther away on either end or 3.69 to 3.99 GHz.  

Since this spectrum was allocated to satellite downlinks, with the majority of it originally things like satellite TV downlinks, they devised a plan to award bonuses to the satellite companies that could comply soonest to specific dates to accomplish their "C-Band Clearing".  On this chart, those dates are the Phase I and Phase II Accelerated Relocation Deadlines of December 5, 2021 and the same calendar date in 2023.  The process is supposed to be finished two years after that, December 5, 2025.

We learned today that industry giant Intelsat has met the conditions for a $3.7 billion award this coming December for meeting the Phase II deadline.  The bonuses come from the $81 billion that the FCC collected auctioning off that spectrum; in essence, the mobile service (mobile phone) companies paid that money to the satellite companies through the FCC middleman.  Intelsat also received a smaller award, $1.2 billion, at the Phase 1 deadline in 2021. 

Weeks after launching its seventh and final C-band clearing satellite, the company said it had achieved certification for work to move broadcast customers into a narrower swath of the spectrum.

The FCC is also reimbursing Satellite providers that had to replace geostationary satellites to clear the spectrum. While Intelsat was able to move C-band services between their existing satellites, they were all approaching the end of their operational lives during the transition plan.  SpaceNews reports Intelsat’s recently launched Galaxy-37 C-band replacement satellite is slated to come online later this year to replace Galaxy-13.

Tom McNamara, senior vice president of commercial programs at Intelsat, who led its C-band clearing project, said the company finished clearing the frequencies and protecting ground earth stations from interfering with telcos in June.

The company officially certified its clearing work July 12, which the FCC automatically validated Aug. 11 after 30 days without a challenge.

Intelsat ordered six C-band replacement satellites in 2020: Two from Northrop Grumman and four — including Galaxy 31 and Galaxy 32 shown here — from Maxar. Photo credit: Maxar

I've written about 5G a few times, mostly a few years ago when it was "the new hotness," and I worked in the satellite TV business, from the early '80s when it was largely C-band through the dawn of the Ku band, small-dish, satellite TV world.  I was amazed at how out of touch I was with this development.  I still get trade magazines (which are harder to drop than you might think) but this was all news to me.  

The trade magazines tend to be talking about 6G now and not much about 5G.  I'm not aware of any 5G provider that went to highest frequencies talked about back in the 2019 time frame (24 GHz) nor any chip makers advertising 24 GHz systems.  That said, I don't think my not knowing means much.

 

 

Small Space News Story Roundup 17

Several little stories going on; here's a couple that caught my eye.

Booster 9 Moved Back to Production Area

After last weekend's static fire test, SpaceX rolled Booster 9 back to the shipyard.  There's some debate over exactly why but one side seems to be saying it's because of the four engines that didn't fire or shut down prematurely, or that the whole test apparently went wrong by not running for the intended full five seconds.  The other side is saying that it's due to needing to install the hot staging extension for B9.  My opinion is they need to do both things and if it's better to do them in the high bay, it's not a question.  Just move the booster and get them done.  

The hot staging extension is at the Massey's test area to be put on the “Can Crusher,” which can apply vertical forces onto the ring as it would experience during flight.  Hot staging is the biggest change to the Starship system in a quite a while and that hardware needs to be proven to the level of everything else.  

More work is also being done on the water deluge system and other infrastructure at the launch site.  Overnight Wednesday to Thursday, the last of the water tanks for the new deluge system arrived at Boca Chica.

Boeing Confident They Will Complete the Six Starliner Flights NASA has Ordered

I read this more as Boeing being committed to getting Starliner certified for flight and not giving up on the program than just that they're going to make the flights.  NASA and Boeing shared the updated launch information in a press briefing on Monday, Aug. 7.

Opening the briefing, Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of the CST-100 Starliner at Boeing, said the teams planned to have the spacecraft ready by early March. “That does not mean we have a launch date in early March, that means that we are ready with the spacecraft then, and we’re now working with the NASA Commercial Crew program, ISS, and ULA [United Launch Alliance] on potential launch dates based on our readiness,” Nappi added.

Starliner has been under development for over ten years.  Boeing announced in 2010 that they were going to be manufacturing the Boeing CST-100 under NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Space Act Agreement.  At the time, they expected the spacecraft to be operational by 2015.  In 2014, NASA selected Boeing and the relatively unknown startup called SpaceX to provide spacecraft to ferry crews and cargo to the ISS.  Boeing received $4.2 billion, and SpaceX received $2.6 billion.

Since inking the contract, NASA ordered six flights for Boeing to operate to the ISS. But the ongoing delays on top of the Station’s likely demise from 2030 have put the plan into question. However, in the press briefing, Nappi asserted there is “no reason to change our plans with the six flights, plus CST fits well into the window that we have, and there are additional flights that are available outside of those six with other customers, so I think we are still committed like we have been in the past.”

NASA added that their plan has been to have two different transportation systems to get crews to the space station.  Once Boeing is certified, they'll split crew rotation flights with SpaceX, each provider getting one launch per year. 

In this artists conceptual drawing, a Starliner, right, approaches an ISS docking port, while a Dragon capsule is docked at another docking port, top left of center.  Mack Crawford for NASASpaceflight.com

A Little Me Me Me

You may have noticed I had no post Wednesday the 9th.  The peculiar part of this is that the previous Wednesday (the 2nd), I also missed a post which I explained about the next day.  It was due to a few recurring car troubles that sucked up far too much of the day and attention.  

As Roseanne Roseannadana used to say, "It just goes to show ya. It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another."  I picked up the car the Monday before that, July 31st, and it continues to start properly.  I suppose I'm more comfortable with it not even two full weeks after picking it up than I expected to be, but it has started without even the slightest balk or hesitation.  

It wasn't the car thing that made me miss Wednesday, it was another.  On Tuesday night, as I was writing that post, we suddenly were interrupted by an alarm.  Not instantly recognizable, but vaguely familiar, we soon realized it was from our kitchen.  The second time we had to have our kitchen rebuilt because of a leaking dishwasher, we added an alarm with a sensor under the kitchen cabinets so leaks from the dishwasher wouldn't have time to ruin the cabinets like before.  It didn't take very long to discover that the cold water valve was dripping.  You can see a drip getting ready to fall in the red highlight box.

There was a puddle on the bottom of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, but not a lot of water.  Since the alarm sensor runs several feet along the lowest part of the floor there, we don't have a way to see the whole length of it. 

Since it looked like it was going to be a simple replacement; unscrew everything attached to the old valve, unscrew the valve from the wall and replace it with a new one, I opted not to call a plumber.  Probably needless to say, it didn't go quite that easily.  For me, plumbing jobs never go as easily as I'd like.  I think most readers know that pipe names have nothing to do with their actual sizes.  Someone once told me that "there's nothing 3/4" about a 3/4" pipe."  It's worse than that.  There are two T connectors visible in this picture, one sort of horizontal attached to a braided metal jacketed hose going off to the right, and another mostly vertical T going to two "poly-something-or-other" tubes running down.  The braided metal jacket (tube) is called a 3/8" and the others are 1/4".  

I didn't learn until this job that there are three families of connectors in both sizes, and a connector from one family won't mate with any of the other families.  In the RF world I come from, adapters between connector families are bread and butter products, available by the barrel-full, by the pound, or however many you want.  In the plumbing world, this doesn't seem to be the case.  

In the radio world, this is roughly a 1/4" to 3/8" adapter like I needed.  (These folks are expensive, you can find them cheaper.)

The reason for the long explanation is because I bought the wrong valve on Wednesday and couldn't get everything restored.  The valve I bought had two 3/8" fittings and I needed one of each.  I couldn't come up with an adapter from 1/4 to 3/8".  Since it was approaching evening, it was all I could do to put the leaking valve back in place and search for a valve that would work for me.

Thankfully, the company that made the valve also made one with both 1/4 and 3/8" fittings. The True Value guys were willing to take the return and credit me with the price difference (the one I needed was cheaper than the one I mistakenly bought).  Within an hour of leaving to do the exchange, I had this replaced and everything working. 

Ahhhh...  Everything was fine at the homestead.  Peace and working plumbing.  For about 24 hours.  This repair was finished Thursday by about 11AM.  Friday morning, I turned on the air conditioner in the shop about 10AM.  Within 15 minutes it didn't seem to be cooling off as well as it should.  As Friday went by it was more and more evident that the air conditioner had broken down and it needed someone with the equipment to fix it.  Being the peak of summer, it's their busy season.  No repair tech until next Wednesday.

"It just goes to show ya. It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another."

Remember the Psyche Mission? It's Ba-ack

In the spring of '22 and into June, when the mission was cancelled, the "next big mission" was NASA's mission to an Asteroid called 16 Psyche.  Big in the sense of being a standout among other missions as well as being so big it requires a Falcon Heavy to lift it up on its way.  The launch was cancelled for the year due to a handful of problems between hardware and software on the satellite - more details at that link above.

The satellite itself arrived in Florida this week and preparations are continuing for a launch currently listed as NET October 5 at 10:38 AM.   That's less than two months from today and it could even, possibly, be fall by then (Florida insider joke).  Bearing in mind the one year delay since summer of '22, it's looking at a launch more than a year late, but mission managers said today the probe is essentially ready for launch.  

The delay was a major impact to the mission, though.  For one thing, a launch in '22 would have gotten the satellite to Psyche by 2026.  That one year delay moves the arrival date out three years - to "before the end of the decade."  Then there's the cost.  In 2022, the Psyche mission was estimated to cost $985 million. That's now increased to $1.23 billion.

If the name doesn't bring details back to mind immediately, it's an interesting mission.  16 Psyche is an asteroid believed to be entirely (or almost so) made of metal.  As the mission web page at Arizona State University teases,  “For the first time ever, we are exploring a world made not of rock or ice, but of metal.” From time to time, I come across speculation of someone finding an asteroid made of gold or platinum and how rich they could get.  Chances are Psyche isn't gold-pressed latinum (Star Trek joke), but might be the heavier metals found in planetary cores like iron, and nickel.  (Disclaimer: only my interpretation.)  

Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator at Arizona State University has this perspective:

Scientists aren't sure what awaits the Psyche spacecraft when it reaches its destination. Elkins-Tanton said modeling of the asteroid's appearance based on telescopic observations suggests it has an irregular potato-like shape.

"It's not spherical," she said. "I always say potato-shaped because potatoes come in many shapes, so I'm not wrong."
...
"We’re never going to get to our metal core (inside Earth)," Elkins-Tanton said. "The pressures are too high. The temperatures are too hot. The technology is impossible. ... But there's one way in our Solar System that we can look at a metal core, and that is by going to this asteroid.

“We’ve visited bodies that are made of rock," Elkins-Tanton said. "We've visited icy asteroids. We've looked at comets and the last ... category of objects that we've never visited as a species in our Solar System is bodies made of metal. So this is primary exploration, a new kind of object that humans have never seen before."

Artist's illustration of NASA's Psyche spacecraft, as it will appear with its solar arrays unfurled in space.  NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Fun fact: those solar arrays will generate 20 kW when they're unfolded here near Earth after launch; at 16 Psyche's orbit that will drop to 2 kW. 

All of the major components for the Falcon Heavy are in process and are looking to be ready in time.  The mission will re-use the side boosters from the most recent Falcon Heavy launch of the Jupiter 3 communications satellite, which featured return to launch site (RTLS) booster recoveries.  The Psyche flight will also return the two boosters to landing zones 1 & 2 on the Cape.  After this flight, they will be held for the Europa Clipper mission in October '24.  While the psyche mission, like the Jupiter 3 mission, will expend the center booster core, there are reports the Europa Clipper mission will expend all three Falcon 9 cores.

 

 

Ingenuity's 53rd Flight Was Unexpectedly Important

Last Friday, I posted a little addendum to another post about the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars having had its 53rd flight, with the 54th planned.  

It turns out that the 53rd didn't go as planned, but proved an important part of the helicopter's design.  The flight was aborted, executing a part of the software that has been there since the start but never yet executed in a flight.  Which is to say it was unverified in real world use, on Mars.

Despite its brevity, however, Ingenuity's most recent flight on August 3 was nonetheless an important one for the helicopter. That's because, on its 53rd flight in late July, the helicopter automatically aborted a planned flight of 136 seconds after just 76 seconds and made an emergency landing.

After the flight, the helicopter's operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory determined that the premature landing came after images from Ingenuity's navigation camera did not match data from the vehicle's inertial measurement unit. In short, its on-board computer expected to see one thing, and it saw another.

"Since the very first flight, we have included a program called ‘LAND_NOW’ that was designed to put the helicopter on the surface as soon as possible if any one of a few dozen off-nominal scenarios was encountered," Teddy Tzanetos, team lead emeritus for Ingenuity, said. "During Flight 53, we encountered one of these, and the helicopter worked as planned and executed an immediate landing."

Mission 54 was intended to gather additional data about the conditions that prompted 53 to end early.  The JPL team feels comfortable looking at the views from flight 54 that they understand what prompted the ‘LAND_NOW’ response and feels confident that Ingenuity can get back to flying more rigorous missions soon.

This image of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, visible along the top edge, a bit right of center, was taken by the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 54th flight on Aug. 3, 2023.  At this point, Ingenuity was around 15 feet (officially '5 meters') above the planet.  Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Small Space News Story Roundup 16

Astra's Troubles Deepen 

Astra announced last Friday that they had laid off a quarter of their workforce and reassigned others from launch vehicle to satellite propulsion development as its cash reserves dwindle. 

In a series of statements, the company said it was making a “strategic reallocation of its workforce,” moving 50 engineers from development of its new Rocket 4 vehicle to production of its Astra Spacecraft Engine, while also laying off about 70 employees to reduce costs.

“We are intensely focused on delivering on our commitments to our customers, which includes ensuring we have sufficient resources and an adequate financial runway to execute on our near-term opportunities,” Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, said in a statement announcing the moves.

They recognize this is likely to slow progress on Rocket 4 but won't project by how much.  They said in a May 15 investors' call that they were not abandoning the launch vehicle development but that they had...

...278 orders to date of the Astra Spacecraft Engine, an electric thruster based on technology it acquired from startup Apollo Fusion in 2021. Those orders have an overall value of $77 million, and the company said it expects a “substantial majority” of those engines will be delivered by the end of 2024.

One might conclude the orders on hand with the potential to bring in cash to keep them running have taken priority over Rocket 4.  

Their financial difficulties aren't really news.  The most recent mention I find I've made of them, from July 14, talked about them doing a "reverse stock split" to raise share prices as they issued new stock, and that there was "substantial doubt" about the company's ability to continue. Back in January when I did a re-stacking and re-writing of Ars Technica's piece on the US' Top 10 Launch Companies, it looked like they were in trouble.  

Is this a death spiral or will they make it out of this?  To use one of my favorite quotes, this one by Niels Bohr: "Prediction is very difficult.  Especially if it's about the future."  

Boeing's Next Starliner Test Flight is Off Until March '24

Boeing and NASA announced yesterday that the next flight of Boeing's Starliner, the crewed test flight has been pushed back to March of '24 as they continue troubleshooting the issues we've covered here several times.  

Boeing has delayed the first flight of its CST-100 Starliner commercial crew vehicle with astronauts on board to no earlier than March 2024 as the company continues to work on issues with the spacecraft’s parachutes and wiring.

There will be a single drop test of a spacecraft with the modified parachute hardware, currently estimated to be November '23.  The potentially flammable tape issue will have a few different fixes available depending on how much has to be taken apart.  

Virgin Galactic's Next Suborbital Flight Thursday

Virgin Galactic has set their next suborbital flight of their Spaceship 2/Galactic 02 for Thursday morning at 10AM Eastern from their Spaceport America in New Mexico.  

Galactic-02 is scheduled to fly a three-person crew, plus the Virgin Galactic astronaut instructor who trained them, plus two company pilots, on a flight to suborbital space on Thursday (Aug. 10).

A full rundown on the mission and the crews of both the suborbital Spaceship 2 and the aircraft that carries it to the required altitude can be found at the link just above. 

Spaceship 2 during its first test flight.  Photo Credit Virgin Galactic.

 

 

Amazon Moves their First Kuiper Mission to Atlas V

Amazon confirmed today that they're moving the launch of their first two Kuiper internet network satellites from ULA's Vulcan Centaur to their Atlas V.  United Launch Alliance's Vulcan was supposed to have its first launch in May of this year (last projected date), but the problems with the Centaur that caused it to explode during tests in March (most recent post here) have pushed that out into the fourth quarter of the year.  That first Cert-1 launch of a Vulcan Centaur was slated to carry the first two of Amazon's Kuiper satellites to begin testing their performance on orbit. 

Amazon had initially planned to deploy KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 by late last year with ABL Space Systems, before the rocket developer’s RS1 vehicle also suffered setbacks.

The Project Kuiper prototypes could launch as soon as Sept. 26 on a dedicated Atlas 5, according to a Reuters report citing Amazon spokesperson James Watkins.

The Atlas V is down to its last launches due to the prohibition of the Russian engines the Atlas uses and all of those vehicles are allocated to customers already.  Amazon has nine Atlas 5 and 38 Vulcan rockets on order from ULA, so I first thought that what happened was simply trading one mission for another.  "Let's swap one Vulcan launch for an Atlas V;" like giving up one place in line for another.  The launch slot in September apparently became open after another mission on ULA's launch schedule faced delays due to payload readiness.  It's possible, but not confirmed, that the payload with readiness issues was the Boeing Starliner crewed flight test, also pushed off closer to '24. 

The company plans to start launching commercial satellites next year amid impending regulatory deadlines for its proposed 3,236-strong low Earth orbit broadband constellation.

Half the constellation must be deployed by July 2026 under rules tied to its Federal Communications Commission license, and the rest three years later.

Amazon expects to open a 31,000-square-meter satellite processing facility in early 2025 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to help ramp up deployment.

 Vulcan with no Centaur upper stage upon arrival at SLC-41 on this past May 11. ULA photo.

 

Booster 9 at Starbase, TX Does a Static Fire

A little after 3PM today, ET, SpaceX fired up Starship Heavy Booster 9 for a static engine firing test.   This caps three days of tests, with a spin prime test on Friday and several tests of the newly-added water deluge system.   As usual with these tests, while it looked largely successful, there was minimal official word from the company, except for one thing: the test was intended to light all 33 engines and burn them for five seconds but lasted 2.74 seconds as four engines shut down early.  

This short video goes through several views of the test, but the water deluge does a pretty effective job of reducing the time you can see any evidence of the engines firing.  The concrete looked completely intact after the test and looking at the video showed no obvious chunks flying or damage to the area, but again, no official word. 

SpaceX began the process of fueling the rocket early this morning but encountered an issue when chilling the lines that run to the rocket, and a red team was sent back to the pad to perform repairs. After repairs were completed, the red team departed and SpaceX spooled up their fuel tank farm again.

After a couple of hours of chilling the fuel lines, filling of the liquid oxygen and liquid methane tanks aboard Booster 9 began at T-Minus 67 minutes.

If you look at the booster in the NSF video capture above you can see white frost on the booster from the bottom to around halfway up, then a gap followed by a much narrower band of frost.  The bottom section of frost is telling us the liquid oxygen tank is nearly full, while the narrow band at the top is showing the amount of liquid methane in the tank.  

An unusual aspect of this test is that SpaceX put up a notice on YouTube that they were counting down to a 2:08 Central time test and covered the test live, as if it were a regular mission.  Except for not having a script like they read while going through the mission. It was quiet when there was nothing to be said.  Video here.  

Having four engines shutdown within a couple of seconds of starting is unsettling to me, but with no information on what the engines were (all "latest and greatest" or just a hodgepodge?) or details on why they shut down, I'll reserve judgement.  Losing four Raptor 2 or 3 engines would knock around two million pounds of thrust off the available amount and might doom a full mission.  On the other hand, with their philosophy of test, fix, test again, there's really no such thing as failing one of these tests, as long as they learn enough to fix whatever happened.  At some point, they need to get 33 good engines on a booster and I think that time is approaching.

NASA/Lockheed Martin Roll Out X-59

It's almost five years to the day since I posted a piece saying that NASA had made a contract with Lockheed Martin for the next generation X-plane, the X-59 Low Boom Flight Demonstrator (LBFD).  Today it's called the X-59 QuessT (Quiet SuperSonic Technology) so I guess it seems like inflation is affecting acronyms, too.  The jet is the embodiment of experimental technologies intended to dramatically reduce the sound levels of supersonic air travel, in an effort to allow supersonic commercial flights over the continental US.  The goals for the X-59 are to "reduces the loudness of a sonic boom to a gentle thump to people on the ground," perhaps like a car door slamming within a few hundred feet and to "gather data on human responses to the sound generated during supersonic flight," according to NASA.

Lockheed Martin rolled the plane out in public 11 days ago, although word is apparently now just getting out.  That's going by the posted "since" field on the YouTube page for this video.  The audio for this is just some music.  No narration.  No content.  

The footage shows off the unique geometry of the X-59, which features a sharp, extended nose section measuring 38 feet (11.5 meters) in length. Because of the length of this nose section, however, pilots flying the X-59 won't be able to accurately see out of the front of the cockpit, which doesn't even feature a forward-facing windscreen.

The long nose is probably going to be a problem.  It was with the Concorde back when it went into service and its nose was shorter.  An article in Machine Design that was a reference for my August '18 article referred to that:

Flight rules when the Concorde flew demanded that pilots be able to see the runway when they were landing and taking off. That meant engineers had to devise a way for the nose to tilt downwards almost 13^o on takeoffs and landings then go back to its proper position while in flight. To improve visibility on the X-59, Lockheed is using a forward mounted camera. For taxiing and ground handling, a second camera under the nose looks downward when the landing gear is extended. The long nose will still present problems for taxiing and limit its turning radius. This will likely restrict the aircraft from operating out of smaller airfields.

While I'm not a pilot I've had the good fortune to sit in the right front seat of a small plane a couple of times, and I have to think that using a video system instead of just looking through a windshield is something that needs attention in design, so that if the primary system fails the pilot isn't completely blind.  Perhaps it's not that unusual compared to other planes in service today - or even not that different from simply flying on instruments - but reliability is always a major concern in aviation design.  

To remedy this, the experimental jet features what NASA calls an External Vision System, or XVS. XVS is essentially a closed-circuit video system consisting of a forward-facing camera and a cockpit-mounted display in front of the X-59's pilot. The system uses "custom image processing software and camera systems, to create an augmented reality view of the X-59 pilot’s forward line-of-sight along with graphical flight data overlays," according to a 2019 NASA statement.

If you saw Top Gun: Maverick last year, you may remember the scene at the opening of the movie where Tom Cruise is a test pilot in a supersonic plane and is pushing it to Mach 10.  The supersonic plane seen in that movie was based on input from the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, the same group that built the X-59 and that's working on the SR-72 successor to their enormously successful SR-71 Blackbird.  What was seen in the movie wasn't the SR-72, but something based on it crossed with the X-59, which was in the process of being built when the movie was made.  The emphasis was on looking cool while not showing what either plane really looks like.

Those of you who live near Edwards Air Force Base will probably get to be the first to see and hear the X-59 QuessT fly.  Once data is taken that shows the design behaving as intended, flights will extend over other suburban and urban areas and they'll be looking for feedback from the communities on the acceptability of the sounds when the sonic boom/car door slamming reaches you.  

 

Voyager 2 Phones Home

How can you not love the headline that Ars Technica used today?  “Voyager 2 phones home and says everything is cool.”  I guess it didn't take until October, like we talked about last Friday.  

In an update to last Friday's message about having lost contact, JPL wrote:

The agency’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar “shout” more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is operating normally and that it remains on its expected trajectory.

All of this indicates the probe is healthy, on course, and operating normally.  To those who grew up with the Voyager "grand tour of the solar system" completed, and even to some of us who grew up before the two Voyagers launched a few weeks apart in 1977, it can be hard to internalize how much Voyager changed our mental images of the outer planets from before their missions.  

Prior to the launch of Voyager 1 and 2 in 1977 on two different rockets, humans had been gazing at fuzzy blobs in the outer Solar System for hundreds of years. Pioneer 10 and 11 provided some better views of Jupiter and Saturn, but still, very little was known about the planets or their moons. Next to nothing was known of Uranus and Neptune. The Voyagers uncovered complex planetary systems and incredible moons, such as volcano-covered Io, icy Europa, and Titan, with its methane seas.

I went looking for a photograph of Jupiter or Neptune from one of the big observatories from the 1960s.  No joy.  I think I'll have to go to a library and look in old books.  A look at something from one of the great observatories alongside a photo from one of Voyagers could be interesting. 

Voyager 2 with its launch fairing being installed, 1977.  NASA/JPL photo.

Let's make it a TwoFer

Word has been getting out that the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars has taken its 53rd flight and is being prepared for its 54th.  Let me remind you the goals for the mission were first to be able to fly and then to take five test flights.  

The Ingenuity drone flew on July 22 on Mars, achieving Flight 53. According to the Ingenuity flight log, the helicopter fly [sic] horizontally and north across 468 feet (142 meters) of Martian terrain with air time of roughly 75 seconds. Ingenuity soared roughly 16 feet (5 meters) into the air and achieved a top speed of 5.6 mph (2.5 meters per second).

The current goal for Ingenuity is to act as a scout for the Perseverance rover, which carried Ingenuity to Mars.  Together, they're searching for interesting sites to collect samples from, to be loaded on a future mission to bring the samples to Earth.  

 

 

As Cygnus Launched Tuesday Closes Approaches ISS Docking

As Northrup Grumman's final Antares-launched Cygnus cargo resupply mission approaches rendezvous with the ISS, the company talked about planned improvements and upgrades to the Cygnus platform for the coming generation of private space stations being planned or actively developed.  

In presentations at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference Aug. 2, company representatives outlined efforts to enhance the capabilities of the decade-old spacecraft to enable it to serve NASA and others in the coming decade.

“We’re looking at what we have to do with the Cygnus spacecraft, what we have to do with the services that it provides,” said Rick Mastracchio, director of strategy and business development at Northrop Grumman Space Systems. “We’re trying to prepare and think way ahead on how do we start updating the vehicle, making sure we have a spacecraft that will be flying 10 years from now, 20 years from now.”

It almost goes without saying that the first thing they're mentioning is increasing the payload capacity.  That would almost certainly be in the list no matter what vehicle you're talking about - with the possible exception being if it was the size of the flying aircraft carriers in the Marvel movies (which DARPA apparently considered building). 

The current Cygnus has a payload of 3750 kg and they're talking about increasing that to 5000 kg.  This will be done by stretching the cargo container by 1.5 meters, which might even be hard to notice in an image scale like the one above.  Called the Mission B version, it's currently penciled in for its first launch in mid '25 on the NG-23 cargo mission.  That mission is also the first launch of the new Antares 330; the vehicle that's the result of collaboration of Northrup Grumman and Firefly.

Apparent in this photo is another big topic of interest, the robotic arm hanging down on the right.  The current Cygnus has to be grabbed by the station's robotic arm and pulled into place to dock, in contrast with SpaceX's crew dragon that autonomously docks with the station.  Northrup Grumman officials say, “Particularly for commercial space stations, a big focus right now is on docking,” because they might not have the arm, or they may not have the arm in place when the first visits to their station are needed.

Northrup is understandably emphasizing their advantage over Cargo Dragon: the ability to raise the orbit of the ISS.  They intend to demonstrate that capability again with the NG-19 mission launched this Tuesday (Aug. 1) to the station, and scheduled to arrive early on 8/3.  

“We like to be able to do a couple of these per mission,” Migliorini said of reboost maneuvers. Those reboosts are done using propellant not needed for the spacecraft’s arrival at the station.

Northrup is talking with companies around the world that are interested in space stations or actively developing them.  Part of that is sales, for sure, but another important part is market research, trying to find out just what the customers want.

Late Week Weekend Update Update

Almost two weeks ago I posted a story about problems with my car I'd been having and called it the Weekend Update.  This is an update to the update.  

As of Monday the Explorer is out of the shop and back in service.  It's working so far, although it worked for a few days two weeks ago.  The bad problem that had it get towed to first my small, local chain shop and then to the dealer was that it wouldn't start no matter what.  The small shop said it started for them once, and they thought it was the PCM (Powertrain Control Module) which they can't work on and the dealer said it wouldn't start for them.  They were still troubleshooting it that weekend, I tentatively concluded with this:

In my spare time, I've been contemplating if I really want to sink a lot of money into a 13 year old car, but it might not be my call.  If it's unfixable, that forces the decision.  If it's many thousands to fix it, it's worth having considered options.

I'll leave out the most agonizing waiting parts, but by the end of last week, they were saying the tech had found that what was keeping it from starting was that the other shop had gotten brake fluid into a connector at the PCM.  With it cleaned out, the car was starting reliably.  The problem as it presented itself was that the PCM couldn't communicate with the instrument cluster, and that meant taking apart the dashboard area to get to things.  

The other problem I mentioned was the check engine light coming on after about 15 minutes of driving, with the small shop showing that it was a sensor saying the fuel tank wasn't sealed properly.  The dealership gave an estimate to repair, in close numbers $600 for the work that had been done and $1600 with replacing the fuel tank (EVAP) sensor.  

Allow me to get philosophical for a minute.  At some point in the two years with the bad ABS module, I noticed the CEL was on - as was (to my knowledge) every fault the dashboard has ever shown me.  With no way of knowing that the CEL was caused by the EVAP sensor or the ABS module, the EVAP sensor could have been bad two years or it could have failed two weeks ago.  Since the conventional wisdom is that the sensor only rarely causes anything serious, I opted to drive around with the CEL on and go with the cheaper option.  I bought a OBD II code reader so I can check and see that this is the only fault or if new ones show up.  "Keep an eye on it," as the small shop said.

Because of spending a handful of years as a production technician in an electronics manufacturer (or two), I have experience with troubleshooting intermittent problems.  So when anyone tells me they've fixed an intermittent I wonder if they fixed it or merely made it more intermittent.  I'll feel comfortable that this "won't start" problem is gone after maybe a thousand successful starts.  That'll take years so I'm still at the point of deciding whether or not I'm looking for a car.  Divemedic's piece yesterday on how so many new cars are going to a subscription model for too many things has convinced me not to go look for a new car, although I really wasn't seriously thinking of it.  But charging me to put an air conditioner in my car and then $20/month to use it - on top of extra gas (if it really needs extra gas)?  YHGTBSM.  FYATHYRIO.

 

Small Space News Story Roundup 15

Tonight's Antares Launch Marked the End of an Era

On August 1, 2023, the last Northrup Grumman Antares rocket lifted off at 8:31 PM Eastern (0031 UTC on August 2).  This is the last launch of the Antares, carrying their Cygnus cargo vessel to the ISS.  The Cygnus will live on, under contract to NASA, but a new launch vehicle is being developed by Firefly, to be called the Antares 330.  Originally expected to fly toward the end of '24, it now looks to be No Earlier Than (NET) summer of '25.  Until that vehicle flies and is certified, Northrup Grumman has contracted with SpaceX for three launches starting later this year (at this point stated as NET November).  

Continuing their tradition of naming Cygnus vehicles for influential individuals in spaceflight, the NG-19 Cygnus was christened the SS Laurel Clark, for the fallen space shuttle Columbia astronaut. Once on orbit, the SS Laurel Clark will spend about 2.5 days catching up to the ISS.

Video Here - should start at about T-15 seconds.  There's a tribute to Laurel Clark about 15 minutes before that.  The whole video is around 51 minutes.  

Europe's Euclid Space Telescope Downloads First Test Images 

Much as the James Webb Space Telescope started downloading test images before starting its "real science" images, the European Space Agency's Euclid Telescope, launched a month ago on July 1, has reached its orbit at the L2 (Lagrange) point and started taking and downloading its first images this week. 

On Monday (July 31), the European Space Agency's Euclid telescope sent its first images back to Earth. And while these seminal portraits are certainly mesmerizing, they also confirm that the space observatory's instruments are working in tip-top shape.

Two images taken by Euclid's instruments. The left was taken by VIS and the right by NISP. (Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA) 

VIS is the visible light sensor, while NISP is the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer which (as the name says) is sensitive to light wavelengths invisible to the unaided (human) eye.  More images and much more information at Space.com. 

It should go without saying that these are test images and not yet usable for the telescope's intended scientific uses, but final words to the team:

"The outstanding first images obtained using Euclid's visible and near-infrared instruments open a new era to observational cosmology and statistical astronomy," Yannick Mellier, astronomer at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris and Euclid Consortium lead, said in a statement. "They mark the beginning of the quest for the very nature of dark energy."