Another Highest Sunspot Number Since Cycle 23

Many may not have noticed (or remember) this, but in a post in early July of 2023, I passed on that the month of June '23 had posted the highest monthly average sunspot number since cycle 23 in 2002, or 21 years. 

We just had another one with this July's average sunspot number the highest since 2001.  Also from SpaceWeather.com 

The sun is partying like it's 2001. That's the last time sunspot counts were as high as they are now. The monthly average sunspot number for July 2024 was 196.5, according to the Royal Observatory of Belgium's Solar Influences Data Analysis Center. This eclipses every month since Dec. 2001:

It practically goes without saying, because we've said it so often, but when Cycle 25 started, the experts were predicting a cycle about as weak as Cycle 24 before it, which was the weakest cycle in a century. In this plot from the Data Analysis Center, the gray band on the right is the predicted range - which was already raised from the predictions made in 2020. The dark blue line is the average monthly sunspot numbers and how much higher that has been for the whole cycle compared to the predicted average (red curve) is pretty obvious. 

Instead, Solar Cycle 25 has shot past Solar Cycle 24 and may be on pace to rival some of the stronger cycles of the 20th century. Already in May 2024 we have experienced a century-class geomagnetic storm with auroras sighted in the South Pacific, central America and south Africa.

We're comparing current activity to 2001 back in Cycle 23, which is close to two of the most historic events ever seen. There was a flare in November of 2003 that was the biggest one seen since the satellite age started, it was classed as X28 in retrospect - because it saturated the X-ray detectors on the satellites and they couldn't measure it properly. Now, SpaceWeather.com is reporting that it has been re-classified from X28 to X45.  The kicker is that 45 is based on a completely different way of determining strength than that always used so I'm not sure I buy that the numbers mean the same thing. They also report there was “a CME so powerful” (cool animation) it was ultimately detected by the Voyager spacecraft at the edge of the solar system.

While it's hard to know except by looking back in time, we're close to the peak of Cycle 25. The conventional timing plots confirm we're definitely near the peak and it looks like it will be some time in the next 2 to 3 years, but much like the blue curve in the plot above, it can be tricky to know where the curve really is going. I showed a plot of the progress of the cycle back in May,  and the latest update is just two lines on the chart to the right along the "Months After Start" axis. Yeah, they're higher, but there's very little new information there - which is why I tend to do my cycle updates twice a year.

Another thing I've repeated just about every time I've talked about this is that, yes, Cycle 25 is stronger than predicted and it's definitely stronger than the previous cycle, but that's not saying much. Cycle 24 was the weakest cycle in a hundred years. A bigger challenge is for it to be stronger than cycle 23, which this data shows has happened in two different months, now. Still, that plot I showed back in May shows that 25 has a long way to go to be stronger than 23 in terms of monthly Smoothed Sunspot Number. Probably an impossibly long way. Further, Cycle 23 was weaker than 22 and 22 was weaker than 21.

Small Space News Story Roundup 39

A few short stories that caught my eye. 

Looks like NASA may be giving up on Starliner 

This is a story that merits a hat tip to Larry at Virtual Mirage who posted a link to a story from Ars Technica called  “NASA says it is “evaluating all options” for the Safe Return of Starliner crew.” I missed it yesterday due to watching the storm prep for the weekend I posted about. 

Short version: it's not guaranteed it's going to be a SpaceX Crew Dragon rescue, but doesn't seem smart to bet against that. The article is just full of clues.  Here's a few quotes trimmed back to what seems to be the meat:

One informed source said it was greater than a 50-50 chance that the crew would come back on Dragon. Another source said it was significantly more likely than not they would. To be clear, NASA has not made a final decision. This probably will not happen until at least next week. It is likely that Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator, will make the call.
...
A Flight Readiness Review meeting had been scheduled for today, August 1, several days in advance. However, it was canceled. Instead, NASA put out a vague blog update on Thursday...
...
NASA issued a $266,678 task award to SpaceX on July 14 for a "special study for emergency response." NASA said this study was not directly related to Starliner's problems, but two sources told Ars it really was.
...
SpaceX has been actively working on a scenario in which two or four astronauts launch on board Crew 9. (A normal crew is four) This mission has a nominal launch date of August 18, but it could well be delayed. SpaceX has already identified flight suits that would fit Wilmore and Williams, allowing them to fly home on the Crew-8 spacecraft (presently docked to the space station) or the Crew-9 vehicle.

I've had this picture since I grabbed it back in mid-June to demonstrate how I'll watch Starliner returning. 

I'll be looking just like this. With the exception of this being a young woman who's over 40 years younger and a billion times better looking than I am. Because I care about you readers in my "old man" demographic.

I commented to LL over at his blog (after reiterating some things talked about here in the last month):

I know a pair of test pilots would never say this, but the best thing to do with that Starliner is let it re-enter unmanned. If it burns up in the atmosphere, hopefully, they’ll get data. If it doesn’t burn up, the chances of getting important data go up.

A couple of European companies pushing reusable rockets are facing delays

From this week's Rocket Report, also from Ars Technica. 

The French space agency, the CNES, has been working toward a test flight of a reusable rocket called Callisto. That was supposed to be "by the end of '24" but now looks to be by the end of '25. Or early '26.  

The Callisto rocket is designed to test techniques and technologies required for reusable rockets, such as vertical takeoff and vertical landing, with suborbital flights from the Guiana Space Center in South America.

Callisto, which stands for Cooperative Action Leading to Launcher Innovation in Stage Toss-back Operations, is a joint project between CNES, German space agency DLR, and JAXA, the Japanese space agency. It will stand 14 meters (46 feet) tall and weigh about 4 metric tons (8,800 pounds), with an engine supplied by Japan. Callisto is one of several test projects in Europe aiming to pave the way for a future reusable rocket.

The Themis project, funded by the European Space Agency - the "big guys" in European rockets - is similar in purpose to the Callisto testbed and I've been seeing stories about Themis since 2019. At that time, talk was that first flights wouldn't be until '28. 

This week, the German aerospace manufacturing company MT Aerospace announced it has begun testing a demonstrator of the landing legs that will be used aboard the Themis reusable booster, European Spaceflight reports. The landing legs for Themis are made of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic composites, and the initial test demonstrated good deployment and showed it would withstand the impact energy of landing.

Also delayed ... Like Callisto, Themis is facing delays in getting to the launch pad. ArianeGroup, the ESA-selected Themis prime contractor, had been expected to conduct an initial hop test of the demonstrator before the end of 2024. However, officials have announced the initial hop tests won't happen until sometime next year. The Themis booster is intended to eventually become the first stage booster for an orbital-class partially reusable rocket being developed by MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of ArianeGroup.

The early news on Themis was pretty remarkable from my standpoint because it looked pretty much like a copy of a Falcon 9. To be fair, the Europeans weren't shy about saying they're copying SpaceX.  Everybody's doing it.  

During a presentation last year, the head of the French space agency's launch vehicle program, Jean Marc-Astorg, was asked about the similarities. As part of its development program, Ariane and CNES are also planning a "Callisto" hopper vehicle that is similar the Grasshopper test vehicle SpaceX flew in 2012 and 2013 to demonstrate vertical landing capabilities.

"Callisto is Grasshopper," Astorg said at the time. "The Chinese are also building a similar prototype, I have no problem saying we didn’t invent anything."

Imagine taking a major airliner, like an A380 or a B747, flying it once and throwing it out. Can you imagine wasting that much money?  There would be no air travel.  Not doing reusability smacks of being the kind of thing only a government would do. Maybe do it for the first few steps into space, but 60 years later? It was as recently as 2018 when an ESA representative openly said, 

Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much. This is one difference between rocket-by-government and rocket-by-billionaire programs.

Instead of his "rocket by government," it's helpful to substitute the phrase "morons with money" for the word government.

Well... It's August. Looks Like a Yucky Weekend Coming

August. I've almost waxed poetical about how much I dislike this month. The very first August I was blogging, 2010, I did a post evoking the movie "The Chronicles of Riddick" and the planet Crematoria, where a big chunk of the movie plays out. I've reposted chunks of that, links to it and referenced the ill-named planet rather often. 

Similarly, since about 2014, I've been running a short piece based on a graphic NOAA publishes (or used to; can't get to my old bookmark tonight!) of the statistical day of the warmest temperature of the year. The way I read this, July 26 - 31 are our warmest of the year. Not even in August, but hard to tell apart without instrumentation.

Whether that's the hottest week of the year or not, the conclusion I've used for years still holds:

And that's what life here is like for August plus or minus a week or two.  Stay out of the sun.  Do your outdoor activities near sunrise or sunset.  Don't expose bare skin to the sun any longer than necessary - and even then, use sunscreen if you need to be out when the sun is intense, say from 10 AM to 4 PM.  SPF 3 million is adequate.  Without air conditioning and mosquito control, a technological civilization could not exist here.

The next five days are looking to be worse than usual.  

Why? Two main reasons.  The first one is this, "potential tropical cyclone four" which has been gathering headlines and attention for about a week, and is now transiting over Cuba. 

By this National Hurricane Center prediction, we won't be getting a tropical storm. That will stay off the west coast of the state. While I don't know exactly where any of them are, I think Borepatch, Divemedic and McThag, are all inside the white part of the cone Sunday. I'm sure they all should be fine. All of us been through this many times before. 

The predictions up to this point have done some weird things and a storm that close bears watching closely for weird things. At this point my local NWS forecast office is showing us getting winds at 20 with gusts to 30 on Sunday. (I'm just south of Cape Canaveral, that bump on the east coast). I'll be watching this tomorrow because the last time I could take my tower and antennas down will be in the late afternoon when the storm is over Key West. The only thing worse than taking that down Saturday afternoon is not taking it down if I really should.

Oh, yeah. I mentioned the next five days will be bad for two reasons and that's just one.

The other is that back in May, I got a reminder from "the system" that I'm due for a routine colonoscopy.  The appointment, made well in advance, is for Tuesday.  Those of you who have been through this know that the worst part of it is the night before, which is Monday night. With luck, the storm will stay on that track and be centered somewhere near the Georgia/South Carolina border. With bad luck, I'll be having to be working outside while the storm is clearing out - or stalled too close for comfort. Bad luck could mean not being able to put the tower back up for days.

The last time I went through this, I found that some car seat belts would prevent "liftoff" off the toilet seat and the troublesome, messy aspects of uncontrolled flight around the bathroom. The hardware is still bolted to the floor in the bathroom, I just need to remove a nut, put down the belt, and tighten the nut back down. One on each side of the toilet. It's a five minute job but can save hours of cleaning. 

Old News - But With An Interesting Twist

I have to admit to missing this story at the end of June when it first broke, but one of the two companies NASA awarded a contract to develop their next generation space suits has given up on the job.  

The story dates back almost exactly two years to the start of June of 2022. 

...NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as part of the Artemis program.

The two companies were Axiom Space, whom we've talked about several times here, and Collins Aerospace. I recall remarking at the time that Collins Aerospace was a surprise to me.  They're a descendant of an early radio company that hams will have heard of, Collins Radio (I have an early '60s vintage Collins KWM-2 in my ham shack).  Over the years, they became a subsidiary of Rockwell International as Rockwell Collins and then were acquired in rapid succession by United Technologies Corporation and then Raytheon before becoming Collins Aerospace. At no time that I'm aware of were they involved with space suits.

Less than one year later, in March of '23, Axiom showed prototypes of their suits. At the end of June '24, Collins Aerospace backed out of the contract. 

The development was first reported by Reuters on Wednesday (June 26). "Collins' role in the program has been bumpy and development has fallen behind schedule, and the company has been in talks with NASA officials on how to wind down its role in the program," Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the discussions.

The agency provided an update on Wednesday. "After a thorough evaluation, NASA and Collins Aerospace have mutually agreed to descope the existing task orders on the Collins Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services contract," NASA said in a statement.

It's unclear what NASA will do in response. One alternative is to keep going with Axiom as their only supplier, but NASA seems to really want a vibrant, wide-reaching, private space industry to draw on. Add to that, Axiom isn't going flawlessly smooth, either.  Axiom has yet to complete the critical design review (CDR) process, which can be demanding. They're also battling a difficult supply chain environment, which is especially problematic given that NASA hasn't built new suits for a long time - some since the 1980s.  

Another alternative is to open the bidding process again. A wildcard that wasn't available two years ago is SpaceX, who has designed an extravehicular activity suit for the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission. This suit is so radically different from the Axiom suit that it must be designed to be used differently.  

The Polaris Dawn crew wearing their EVA suits. All four will need to be protected from the vacuum during the space walk as the Dragon capsule will be opened to space for the duration. Image credit: ShaneMielke.com the developer of the Heads Up Display (HUD) inside the suit. 

Companies Describe Mars Sample Return Studies

Since I first heard of it in 2021, I've been trying to keep on top of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission originally conceived as an add-on to the Perseverance Rover (and the Ingenuity helicopter) currently on Mars. The idea has been that Perseverance would save particularly noteworthy samples of rocks or other things it comes across on Mars, stored inside the rover. At some time later, the MSR mission would rendezvous with the rover, they'd transfer the samples and MSR would return the samples to Earth.

The problem is that the mission is exceptionally expensive and NASA has been concerned it's essentially not doable. The numbers being talked about to do the mission were up to $11 billion. Briefly, in September of '23, NASA received a report from an independent review board saying that the MSR Mission was unworkable in its current form and wasn't feasible on the schedule and costs they were working under.  They recommended the issues be studied. The studies were disclosed on April 15th, and the agency said everything but that nasty word “cancelled,” ending instead with saying they will seek “out of the box” ideas in a bid to reduce the costs and shorten the schedule for returning samples from Mars.

On June 7, NASA selected seven companies to provide 90 day studies, valued at up to $1.5 million each, to examine different concepts that could reduce the cost or improve the schedule for MSR. Those companies are Aerojet Rocketdyne, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quantum Space, SpaceX and Whittinghill Aerospace. 

Since 90 days - three months - from June 7 is approximately September 7 is when the studies are to be submitted, and they've probably barely started, it's not surprising that nothing has been formally released as ready “for prime time” and to be talked about. Fortuitously, this week is the AIAA ASCEND Conference, being held in Las Vegas. (That's the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Conference dedicated to making humanity interplanetary)  Some of  those seven companies are present for the conference and released some information. Jim Green, former NASA chief scientist, spent some time in the conference on July 30 that featured three of the companies selected for those awards. Neither the companies nor NASA had released details about their studies beyond the titles of their proposals selected by the agency in June. 

Some are looking at ways to revise the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), the rocket that will be delivered to the surface of Mars by a lander that will then launch the samples collected by Perseverance into orbit. NASA, in its request for proposals, highlighted the MAV as a specific area of interest to the agency.

The MAV, as currently designed, is a two-stage rocket using solid motors that is about three meters tall. “We’re going to study how to best optimize going smaller,” said David McGrath, senior fellow at Northrop Grumman, about his company’s study.
...
Quantum Space, a startup developing spacecraft that can operate in cislunar space, is focused on another element of MSR, the final return of samples to Earth. Ben Reed, co-founder and chief innovation officer of the company, said their study is looking at ways to simplify the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO), the ESA-developed spacecraft that will pick up the sample canister, known as the OS, placed in Mars orbit by the MAV and carry it back to Earth.

The study, he said, is “leveraging the investments we have made in cislunar capabilities to allow ERO to only have to bring the OS, the sample canister, back to lunar orbit.” That canister would then be picked up by a version of his company’s Ranger spacecraft for an “anchor leg” back to Earth.
...
Other studies are looking more broadly at the overall MSR architecture. That is what Lockheed Martin is doing, said Beau Bierhaus, principal research scientist at Lockheed Martin Space, making use of the company’s decades of experience developing Mars and other solar system missions and previous studies of MSR that date back to the 1970s.

One focus will be reducing complexity, he said. Past NASA flagship planetary missions typically have had no more than two elements, an orbiter and lander. MSR, he noted, has up to nine, depending on how an element is defined. “Complexity doesn’t scale linearly by the number of elements,” he said. “Each of these things is co-dependent, co-mingled, and there are ripple effects between them, so the complexity scales non-linearly.”

I'd like to leave it there, but I kinda just can't. I'm going to re-post the only other thing I've heard about proposed changes to the MSR mission; this time, from Boeing. You might have noticed that they weren't one of the companies chosen to provide their input in the paragraph up top. They just had to speak up. 

You'll Never Guess What Boeing Proposed to Lower Mars Sample Return (MSR) Costs

Except you won't be surprised when I tell you their proposal was to "simplify the mission" by using the SLS. It reduces the mission to one flight of one (heavy lift) rocket, and you can argue that might be a good way to reduce risk. The problem is that SLS is the most expensive rocket flying in the world and NASA is trying to cut the cost of the MSR mission. Doesn't quite seem like the road to be going down.

What's that saying about "when you only have a hammer every problem looks like a nail?" When you only have an SLS ... 

A conceptual sketch from NASA/JPL-CalTech, showing a helicopter, Perseverance, and the ESA Mars lander on the bottom row, with the ESA's Earth Return orbiter, top row left of center, and NASA's Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) top row right.  The upper left corner picture appears to be a gibbous Earth, but Earth couldn't possibly appear that big from Mars. I'll write that off to someone at JPL-CalTech being overly artistic.  

SpaceX to Move Dragon Splashdowns to West Coast

In a July 26 statement, SpaceX has announced that they plan to move Dragon capsule splashdowns from off the Gulf or East coasts of Florida to the west coast of the US starting in 2025. The move is intended to reduce risks from reentering debris from the spacecraft’s trunk section, as in the incident I covered at the end of May. 

In that May incident, there were reports coming in saying junk from a Dragon capsule ended up on a hiking trail in North Carolina.  This left me confused because "everyone knows" that Dragons are reusable and the same handful of Cargo and Crew dragons have been flying for years, with refurbishment between missions. Then I remembered that they have the equivalent of the Service Modules that Apollo and earlier capsules had, renamed as the trunk, and that those were jettisoned before reentry. 

Since the introduction of the Crew Dragon spacecraft and its cargo variant, the trunk section has been released before the deorbit burn, reentering passively weeks to months later. SpaceX said it chose this option after the company, working with NASA, used “industry-standard models” that predicted that the trunk would break up completely on reentry, with no debris surviving.

That has not been the case. On several occasions sizable pieces of debris from Dragon trunks have survived reentry and landed in Australia, Saskatchewan and North Carolina, among other places. The debris falls caused no damage or injuries but illustrated the risk they posed.

The piece of debris found in North Carolina near Canton, just outside of the city of Asheville at the head of the trail on which it was found. It was later verified to be part of a Dragon trunk. Image credit: Future/Brett Tingley 

Earlier this year, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said the agency was working with SpaceX on ways to better control the debris created by reentering trunks. One option being studied, he said then, would be to jettison the trunk after Dragon performs its deorbit burn, which would allow the trunk to reenter around the same time along the reentry corridor for the capsule.

SpaceX said that is the approach that the company is taking. “SpaceX will implement a software change that will have Dragon execute its deorbit burn before jettisoning the trunk, similar to our first 21 Dragon recoveries,” it stated. It ruled out alternatives that included a complete redesign of the trunk or addition of a propulsion system to it for a controlled reentry.

Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, said in the July 26 statement that SpaceX would have to move a recovery vessel currently based in Florida out to the Port of Long Beach in California and that the changes would likely be first seen on the Crew 9 mission currently set for launch NET Sunday August 18 at 5:39 AM EDT. Return of Crew rotation missions is typically six months after launch, so around the second half of February of 2025.

While the change will mitigate the debris risk, it does pose new problems for Dragon recovery operations. “NASA gave us new requirements, starting with CRS-21, for even tighter return timelines and enhanced science capability,” she said, which was factored into plans for Dragon recovery operations in Florida.

“That’s the new challenge ahead of us now and what we’ve been working through here this year, is how do we come back to the West Coast but still maintain all of what we’ve learned and stood up to support crews, not just cargo,” she said, in terms of quick handover of science payloads after splashdown. “We’re working through all of the details of that, but it will be a better capability than we had with Dragon 1 by design.”

Walker adds that one positive out of the changes is that the weather tends to be better off California than off the East coast splashdown locations they've been using. That adds flexibility in mission planning.

The Final Atlas V National Security Mission July 30

What's set to be the final Atlas V missions dedicated to a national security payload is scheduled for Tuesday morning, July 30, at 6:45 AM EDT. 

The mission, for the US Space Force, is known as USSF-51 and is a landmark mission by virtue of being the last US national security mission to fly on an Atlas family rocket. The Atlas rocket family has been flying since 1957. United Launch Alliance has only been around for a small portion of that 67 years, having been formed in 2006. ULA itself says this will be their 100th national security mission. 

USSF-51 rolls from their vertical integration facility toward the launch pad - visible in the distance - on July 27. Image credit: ULA

The Atlas V, the final version of the storied family, first flew in 2002 and has flown 100 missions to date. The 100th mission was the launch of Starliner Crewed Flight Test in early June. Out of those 100 missions, 50 have been National Security missions. 

The Atlas V vehicle is in the process of flying its last missions as the engines it relies on, the Russian RD-180, have been unavailable since about 2014. ULA had stock on hand and bought more to fill their Atlas launch manifest. Atlas V still has 15 more launches on its docket, most of which will loft either Boeing's Starliner or satellites for Amazon's planned Project Kuiper broadband constellation. Current Atlas V payloads will eventually be switched over to ULA's new Vulcan rocket as the remaining Atlas Vs are used up.

More Cannibal Coronal Mass Ejections Incoming

We've talked about cannibal CMEs here on the blog a few times, a term for when a faster moving coronal mass ejection overtakes a slower CME that started before the faster one. The resultant isn't just more material, the overtaking one compresses the original into a denser one capable of more impact on the Earth or wherever it hits. There's an even bigger than typical Cannibal CME coming in according to SpaceWeather.com.

CANNIBAL CME ALERT: A series of M-class flares over the weekend hurled multiple CMEs toward Earth, as many as four or five. According to a NOAA model, the first two CMEs are merging to form a single Cannibal CME. Strong G3-class geomagnetic storms are possible when it reaches Earth on July 30th. Subscribers to our Space Weather Alert Service will receive an instant text message when the CME arrives.

Bonus: Watch NOAA's animated forecast model of the first two CMEs merging to form a Cannibal.

The Cannibal CME is clearing the way for perhaps 2 to 3 more CMEs following behind it. SOHO coronagraphs show a wagon-train of clouds leaving the sun on July 28th:

The first and most potent of these CMEs was launched by an M9.9-class solar flare from sunspot complex AR3765-67 on July 28th (0157 UT): movie. The CME will fly into a void created by the earlier Cannibal CME. With little interplanetary material to slow it down, the storm cloud should reach Earth no later than July 31st. A preliminary NASA model supports this forecast.

Even if the Cannibal CME fails to spark a strong geomagnetic storm on July 30th, the arrival of more CMEs on July 31st could push storm levels to category G3 (Strong) or beyond. This would set the stage for mid-latitude auroras visible from Europe and the USA.

You may have heard that on Tuesday, July 23, the sun launched the biggest solar flare of this cycle and going back to the early '00s (cycle 23) at X14. That flare isn't part of this coming potential storm because of the tremendous good luck we had in where the flare erupted from. It erupted from the far side of the sun and was pointed completely away from Earth. For comparison, the X-class flare that started the massive, historic G5 geomagnetic storm of early May wasn't as strong as the X14 from the far side; the flare on May 10 was X5.8. There were a few Earth-directed flares in those few days in May, but the strongest flare in early May was X8.8 and that was the strongest of Cycle 25 - until last Tuesday's X14.  

Plot of the solar flares around July 23rd's X14 flare. Solar Orbiter was over the farside of the sun when the explosion occurred on July 23rd, in perfect position to observe a flare otherwise invisible from Earth.

Geomagnetic storms like those being expected from the incoming CMEs are usually most evident in shutting down high frequency (shortwave) radio propagation. They can introduce paradoxical improvements in HF and VHF propagation, especially during periods when the geomagnetic K-index is dropping. We tend to look at the numbers posted of the planetary K-index (here, for example) and think of them as static or very slow moving, but much like wind gusts during any sort of storm, the K-index can go up and down on shorter time intervals than the three hour averages plotted there. 

Falcon 9 Returned to Flight

As reported on Tuesday and updated Thursday, SpaceX had applied for permission to restart flying Falcon 9 missions, which was granted Thursday evening.

The launch was this morning, later than originally scheduled, 1:41 AM EDT launch as opposed to its originally scheduled 12:21 AM EDT launch time. This was the 17th flight for first stage booster B-1069, briefly orbital altitudes before returning and landing on Just Read the Instructions (JRTI) drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean about 8:15 later. A little more than an hour after liftoff, the rocket's second stage released its payload into a good orbit, confirmed by SpaceX on X, from which the Starlink spacecraft use their on-board thrusters to reach operational altitudes in the coming weeks. The second stage's second burn was the cause of the failure of the previous Starlink mission that caused the launch pause. 

Video of the launch through booster landing here.  

In Tuesday's post, I somewhat facetiously suggested that compared to "old space" instead of taking months to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, that SpaceX would take, "How about twenty minutes? A half hour?" The official report is that "within hours of the anomaly" the issue and fix were announced and decided upon.

Engineers and technicians were quickly able to pinpoint the cause of the leak, a crack in a "sense line" for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s liquid oxygen system. "This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line," the company said in an update published prior to Saturday morning's launch. [Note: the update is dated July 25, second one down at that link. SiG]

This leak excessively cooled the engine, and caused a lower amount of igniter fluid to be available prior to re-lighting the Merlin for its second burn to circularize the rocket's orbit before releasing the Starlink satellites. This caused a hard start of the Merlin engine. Ultimately the satellites were released into a lower orbit, where they burnt up in Earth's atmosphere within days.

The sense line that failed is redundant, SpaceX said. It is not used by the flight safety system, and can be covered by alternate sensors already present on the engine. In the near term, the sense line will be removed from the second stage engine for Falcon 9 launches.

During a news briefing Thursday, SpaceX director Sarah Walker said this sense line was installed based on a customer requirement for another mission. The only difference between this component and other commonly flown sense lines is that it has two connections rather than one, she said. This may have made it a bit more susceptible to vibration, leading to a small crack.

While I feel somewhat chagrined at saying it might take SpaceX as much as a half hour to understand what went wrong and how to fix it, I wouldn't be surprised if saying it took "hours" might be an overstatement. It's easy to focus on the simple contrast between Falcon 9 and Starliner. SpaceX went into their period of launches being forbidden on July 11, when Starliner had been docked to the ISS for five days (July 11). Two weeks later, Falcon 9 is flying while Starliner is in exactly the same place. I think a slightly different way of looking at that is the overall numbers. That was SpaceX's 73rd launch of this calendar year. Just the familiarity of seeing everything a Falcon 9 does during a mission given the shear number of launches they do gives SpaceX an incredible advantage in spotting unusual things.

Before the failure on the night of July 11th, SpaceX had not experienced a mission failure in the previous 297 launches of the Falcon 9 rocket, dating back to the Amos-6 launch pad explosion in September 2016. The short interval between the failure earlier this month, and Saturday's return to flight, appears to be unprecedented in spaceflight history.

Screen capture from this morning's launch on SpaceX's launches page. Image credit: SpaceX 

To borrow a phrase, the weekend is young and SpaceX intends to do two more Falcon 9 launches tonight through tomorrow morning. The first will be at 12:17 AM EDT Sunday morning from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral SFS. The second will be just over three hours later, at 3:24 AM EDT Sunday from SLC-4E, at Vandenberg SFB, California. Note that SFS is an abbreviation for Space Force Station while SFB is for Space Force Base. To grossly simplify, "Bases" have more facilities and resources than "Stations" have.

As We Teeter into August Where's Starliner?

As we collect ourselves to stumble into August, Starliner Crewed Flight Test 1 with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams goes into day #51 of its 8 day mission to the ISS. Yesterday, NASA and Boeing representatives held a press conference to bring everyone up to date on the mission status, but it honestly didn't offer much new content.  

As a short refresher, there are two main problems; possibly related, possibly just coincidental. The spacecraft's reaction control thrusters overheated, and some of them shut off as Starliner approached the space station back on June 6. The other problem involves helium leaks in the craft's propulsion system that have been known about since before launch. 

We're not supposed to say that Starliner is stuck at the ISS or that the crew is marooned in space with no way home. Stephen Green, the Vodkapundit at PJ Media, openly wonders when it becomes acceptable to say these things. 

On Thursday, NASA and Boeing managers said they still plan to bring Wilmore and Williams home on the Starliner spacecraft. In the last few weeks, ground teams completed testing of a thruster on a test stand at White Sands, New Mexico. This weekend, Boeing and NASA plan to fire the spacecraft's thrusters in orbit to check their performance while docked at the space station.

“I think we’re starting to close in on those final pieces of flight rationale to make sure that we can come home safely, and that’s our primary focus right now," Stich said.

Stich acknowledges there is talk about bringing the crew home on a Crew Dragon, since there's one on the station at the moment (Crew 8) and another that will going up to the ISS in the next couple of weeks (Crew 9) but still says their goal is to complete the mission as intended, bringing Wilmore and Williams home on Starliner. 

They just don't know when that will be. You'll recall that the original 45 day rating the mission had was based on some degree of battery recharging, which was then allowed to double to being a 90 day mission. That means this mission can keep going to around the end of August.  

The most important of these tests was a series of test-firings of a Starliner thruster on the ground. This thruster was taken from a set of hardware slated to fly on a future Starlink mission, and engineers put it through a stress test, firing it numerous times to replicate the sequence of pulses it would see in flight. The testing simulated two sequences of flying up to the space station, and five sequences the thruster would execute during undocking and a deorbit burn for return to Earth.

"This thruster has seen quite a bit of pulses, maybe even more than what we would anticipate we would see during a flight, and more aggressive in terms of two uphills and five downhills," Stich said. “What we did see in the thruster is the same kind of thrust degradation that we're seeing on orbit. In a number of the thrusters (on Starliner), we're seeing reduced thrust, which is important.”

The thruster tested on the ground at White Sands Missile Range showed a similar degradation to that seen while trying to dock with the ISS - that's progress. The thruster that showed degraded thrust displayed bulging in a Teflon seal in an oxidizer's poppet valve when it was inspected.  The bulging was considered able to restrict the flow of nitrogen tetroxide propellant. 

"That poppet has a Teflon seal at the end of it," Nappi said. "Through the heating and natural vacuum that occurs with the thruster firing, that poppet seal was deformed and actually bulged out a little bit."

Stich said engineers are evaluating the integrity of the Teflon seal to determine if it could remain intact through the undocking and deorbit burn of the Starliner spacecraft. The thrusters aren't needed while Starliner is attached to the space station. 

More hot-fire testing is being set up for this weekend with the Starliner docked to the space station. 

"It’s a very important set of tests over the weekend that we’ll do," Stich said. "The hot-fire test this weekend will give us confidence in all the thrusters," Stich said.

Assuming good results this weekend, NASA managers could convene a flight readiness review at the end of next week to discuss the health of the Starliner spacecraft. If NASA's leadership signs off on the plan, Starliner could be cleared to return to Earth with Wilmore and Williams as soon as early August. NASA would like to have the spacecraft back on the ground before the launch of SpaceX's next Crew Dragon mission, currently slated for no earlier than August 18.

Time exposure of Starliner on orbit while docked to the Space Station. NASA photo

Unsurprisingly, this extension of the mission and these difficult problems will impact missions further out in the schedule. NASA had hoped the next Starliner flight, would be the Crew 10 mission carrying four astronauts on a six-month expedition at the space station, and would be ready for liftoff in February. Stich ruled that out in a press conference on Friday. The Crew 10 mission has been bumped onto a Crew Dragon, leaving the earliest possible crewed mission for Starliner looking to be six months later, or one year from now.

What Do You Say We Start a New Space Race?

Yeah, I'm being facetious.  

An interesting little story surfaced this week that seems to confirm an idea that has recurred in the science fiction world many times.  Imagine some material is discovered in space that is precious and in limited quantities on Earth but is practically free for the taking on some planet, asteroid, or somewhere else in space. All one has to do is get to the supply and take control over it - suddenly, riches beyond imagination. First one to the supply to get ownership of it is "winner takes all."

The story is based on data from NASA's Mercury MESSENGER probe, the first probe ever sent to orbit the small planet. Briefly, the roughly 1.1 metric ton satellite was launched on August 3, 2004, and went into orbit of Mercury just over 6-1/2 years later, March 11, 2011. It orbited Mercury until April 30, 2015. 

Analysis of the data leads to the conclusion that Mercury seems to have a 10 mile thick layer of diamond beneath the crust of the tiny planet. 

Astronomers have long noted that Mercury is different from other rocky planets they've observed, like Earth or Venus. Differences include its very dark surface, and remarkably dense core. Additionally Mercury's volcanic era seems to have ended fairly quickly in the planet's life. 

Another difference noted is that patches of graphite, a two-dimensional or sheet form of pure carbon, appear to be common on the surface of the planet. These patches have led scientists to suggest that in Mercury's early history, the tiny planet had a carbon-rich magma ocean. This ocean would have floated to the surface, creating graphite patches and the dark-shaded hue of Mercury's surface. 

"True color" image of Mercury taken by MESSENGER - using various filters on the spacecraft's wide angle camera to balance the reflected colors. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie

The same process would have also led to the formation of a carbon-rich mantle beneath the surface. The team behind these findings thinks that this mantle isn't graphene, as previously suspected, but is composed of another much more precious allotrope of carbon: diamond. 

"We calculate that, given the new estimate of the pressure at the mantle-core boundary, and knowing that Mercury is a carbon-rich planet, the carbon-bearing mineral that would form at the interface between mantle and core is diamond and not graphite," team member Olivier Namur, an associate professor at KU Leuven, told Space.com. "Our study uses geophysical data collected by the NASA MESSENGER spacecraft."

Over the years, more than a couple of sci-fi stories have thought about an asteroid or planetoid that was considered insanely valuable; say solid gold or some unobtainium metal. In this case we're faced with a problem that has happened many times on Earth (although an extreme example): suddenly a prospector discovers a never before seen quantity of a valuable gem stone.  A pragmatic, practical answer to what happens in such a case is that price is really determined by "supply and demand" and if an unlimited supply were to suddenly appear, the price would collapse. It's not uncommon to try to keep such finds secret to keep from disturbing the price.

A gemstone is rather harder to SWAG a value on, compared to a pure metal. In the case of diamonds, there are well established standards - the "four Cs" based on the size of the stone (weight in carats - 5 carats to the gram) color and clarity of the stone along with how well it has been cut. While I could SWAG a calculation of how many kilograms of diamonds would be in a 10 mile thick shell the diameter of Mercury full of diamond crystals, think of thousands of cubic miles of diamonds, the real value would depend on things that would just be more cascaded "wild-ass guesses" and would essentially be meaningless. Bringing it to Earth would shift the supply so drastically that there would be no demand left once they got here.

ABL Space Loses Rocket at Static Fire Test

While it wasn't quite the kind of static fire accident as occurred in China about a month ago, but small satellite launch startup ABL Space lost their second RS-1 launch vehicle on Friday (July 19) after a static fire caused “irrecoverable” damage in a launch pad fire after a test firing. 

You may recall that ABL Space lost their first launch vehicle on its first flight in January of 2023 when all nine engines on the first stage shutdown 10 seconds after liftoff.  That led to the vehicle falling back to the ground, practically on the launch pad, with the resulting explosion damaging the launch pad area badly.

In a brief statement on social media July 22, ABL said its RS1 rocket, which was being prepared for a launch from Kodiak Island, Alaska, was damaged in a fire after a static-fire test on the pad there July 19.

“After a pre-flight static fire test on Friday, a residual pad fire caused irrecoverable damage to RS1. The team is investigating root cause and will provide updates as the investigation progresses,” the company stated. It did not disclose additional details about the incident.

The company had been keeping a relatively low profile as the second launch has been approaching. The company noted in March that it had begun “pre-launch operations” for the mission and had only put up a single blog post since then, that one in May, a blog post about engine testing. 

The second ABL Space RS1 launch vehicle on the pad on Kodiak Island, Alaska, in an undated picture. The vehicle is described as being in the one metric ton (2200 lbs) payload to Low Earth Orbit class, but has never attained orbit. 

Back after the January '23 launch failure, I remarked that it seemed to me they probably could keep going because their financial picture was pretty solid. That appears to still be the case, if not a little better.  From '23:

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

SpaceNews' article on the effects of this setback also mentions that Lock-Mart contract for 58 missions. They add that Lockheed also plans to use the RS1 for its “U.K. Pathfinder” launch for the U.K. Space Agency under a contract awarded in 2018. That launch, from SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands, is expected to be later in 2025.  In addition,

In June, Scout Space announced it selected ABL Space Systems to launch a telescope for space domain awareness observations on the vehicle’s third launch, which at the time was scheduled for later this year. Scout said it chose ABL because it offered a quicker path to launch than flying on SpaceX Transporter missions that are booked for the next year.

Is Falcon 9 Ready to Fly Again? Already?

To refresh the date in everyone's mind, on Friday, July 12, a Falcon 9 flying a Starlink mission had an upper stage anomaly and lost the load of satellites aboard the upper stage when the stage's second ignition failed, resulting in a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. 

The FAA declared that they are "requiring an investigation" and would work with SpaceX on corrective actions. 

I've been of two minds on this; the first is the obvious, "old space" or "Space 1.0" way of doing things. Typically, after a launch failure, a rocket will be sidelined for months while engineers and technicians comb over the available data and debris to identify a cause, perform tests, and institute a fix. The second observation is this is SpaceX we're talking about here. I mean, if it takes the legacy space industry six months, what will they take to see what went wrong and fix it?  Six weeks seems way too long. How about twenty minutes? A half hour?  

So while I've been keeping an eye on NextSpaceflight I haven't been so anal retentive that I check every few minutes, or even every day.  Nevertheless I have been checking. Sure enough, this afternoon, I found this, implying the return to flight will be two weeks to the day from the lost mission:

Screen capture from NextSpaceflight.com 

Unfortunately, this isn't quite the whole story, but a little poking reveals the SpaceX has said they're ready to go, so if the FAA wouldn't mind, would they be so kind as to let them get back to keeping the highest launch cadence in world going?  And, oh by the way, Tuesday night the 23rd would be really nice.

In a summary of the anomaly posted shortly afterward, SpaceX did not identify the cause of the failure beyond saying, "The Merlin Vacuum engine experienced an anomaly and was unable to complete its second burn."

Officially, the company has provided no additional information since then. However, the company's engineers were able to identify the cause of the failure almost immediately and, according to sources, the fix was straightforward.

Yeah... sounds like they understood what went wrong within twenty minutes. Certainly not twenty days. 

Now, internally, SpaceX was confident enough that they understood the issue and how to fix it to schedule a launch for July 15th. They just needed to be polite and respectful to the FAA. 

To that end, a week ago on July 15, SpaceX submitted a request to the FAA to resume launching its Falcon 9 rocket while this investigation into the anomaly continues. "The FAA is reviewing the request and will be guided by data and safety at every step of the process," the FAA said in a statement at the time.

In my mind, I see the FAA bureaucrats filling a tub o' coffee and getting ready to settle down and study reports for a few months. Then they get a message saying, "please sir, can we launch some more?  Say, Tuesday night?" 

The company plans to launch at least three Starlink missions in rapid succession from its two launch pads in Florida and one in California to determine the effectiveness of the fix. It would like to demonstrate the reliability of the Falcon 9 rocket, which had recorded more than 300 successful missions since its last failure during a pad accident in September 2016, before two upcoming crewed missions.

There is still a slight possibility that the Polaris Dawn mission, led by commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman, could launch in early August. This would be followed by the Crew-9 mission for NASA, which will carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.

Notably, neither of these crewed missions requires a second burn of the Merlin engine, which is where the failure occurred earlier this month during the Starlink mission.

There's a couple of things to note here.  First is that the FAA hasn't approved the two launches mentioned in the screen capture above.  Second is that neither of those two launches are tonight, July 23rd, but rather they're both Thursday night/Friday morning EDT. The first time I looked at NextSpacflight today, all three launches were Falcon 9s instead of two with one Atlas V. That was maybe two hours before I found the referenced article about SpaceX's attempts to get permission to launch, so earlier Tuesday afternoon, it showed the first of three launches as Tuesday night, EDT local.  

EDIT July 25, 2024 at 08:50 PM EDT to add: the FAA has cleared SpaceX to resume Falcon 9 flights.  In a statement posted Thursday evening, SpaceX explained the anomaly: "During the first burn of Falcon 9’s second stage engine, a liquid oxygen leak developed within the insulation around the upper stage engine. The cause of the leak was identified as a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the vehicle’s oxygen system. This line cracked due to fatigue caused by high loading from engine vibration and looseness in the clamp that normally constrains the line." 

FAA says fly away ...

The next launch is currently shown to be Saturday morning EDT. Sat Jul 27, 2024 12:21 AM EDT - which to locals feels like Friday night after midnight. The launch is from LC-39A, on the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA

A Last Look at Apollo 11 and 55 Years Ago

Not exactly a look at Apollo 11 itself, but rather the Apollo program. 

One of the things I don't understand at all is the lunar landing deniers; it's such a stupid thing to wrap one's belief system up in.  I understand that with big conspiracy theories like this, there's simply no way to disprove them.  There's no piece of evidence we could show a true believer that would have them say, "Gosh! You're right!  We did go!" For the last 30 years, I believe it has polled consistently that 6% of the population believes we never went.  There's another group who just claims they're not sure. 

When I worked for Major Southeast Defense Contractor, there was a graybeard Mechanical Engineer whom I became friends with. His first job out of college was with Grumman Aerospace doing support for the Lunar Modules. He talked about being called into a Tiger Team to solve an issue on Apollo 14 because one of the astronauts had tripped over a cable, pulling it out of one of the science packages. For some of you, if I say Mil-38999 connectors, you'll get a visceral nausea at the thought of rewiring and crimping the pins on one of them. In 1/6 G wearing gloves with fingers as wide as small Caribbean islands. They told the 14 crew to abandon it. If you look up how many people worked on the program, sources will say over 400,000 people in 20,000 companies worked on the Apollo program. My friend was just one.

There's so much evidence that a landing denier has to make it a life goal to not see it and truly examine it. Fast Company magazine (of all places) ran a story back in July of 2019 with just a few of the reasons why it's such a silly idea. He starts out philosophically, a really good place to my way of thinking by asking how do we know anything? To borrow a few sentences: 

It’s a little like asking how we know there was a Revolutionary War. Where’s the evidence? Maybe it’s just made up by the current government to force us to think about America in a particular way.

How do we know there was a Titanic that sank?

And by the way, when I go to the battlefields at Gettysburg—or at Normandy, for that matter—they don’t look much like battlefields to me. Can you prove we fought a Civil War? World War II?

In my first iteration of college, I had to take a "mandatory elective" in the Philosophy of Science and questions like this were the entire class. Let's say you went to bed one night, and by the morning, everything in the universe had doubled in size. How would you know? People in class would inevitably talk about measuring things, but if the rulers and every length standard had doubled in size, too, the measurements would say the same things. How could you know? It's not possible to derive a way to prove the entire universe didn't spring into existence, just the way it is mere moments ago, with our memories and experiences fully formed the way they are.

This applies to everything. How do we know that things we observe in other galaxies are the way we say they are? We assume that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, but that's just an assumption because we can't get there to check. Without those assumptions there's precious little we can say about the things we observe, and we like to be able to think we really understand everything we see. 

The thing to remember about the space race was that it was a race.  Remember there was a Soviet Union, who entered the 60s well in front of the US space efforts, and who had the capability to monitor things on the moon as well as we could.  Don't forget they wanted to win that race. If they had any indications that the missions to the moon were faked, don't they think the Soviets would have made it known?  They would have pounced on and revealed any fraud in the blink of an eye, and not just without hesitation, but with great joy and satisfaction. 

In fact, the Russians did just the opposite. The Soviet Union was one of the few places on Earth (along with China, and North Korea) where ordinary people couldn’t watch the landing of Apollo 11 and the Moon walk in real time. It was real enough for the Russians that they didn’t let their own people see it.

Books could be written on why the Soviets didn't make it to the moon; the story I think has the most weight (and I haven't been able to find it lately) is that some of the brightest minds in their space program were killed in a pad disaster that took out the launch structures and those scientists/engineers.  They never recovered from that loss, but they continued the race.  Not everyone recalls that at the time 11's LM landed on the moon, there was a Soviet probe on the surface (Luna 15) - a mission that was supposed to show the world "we can return moon rocks to earth for study without sending humans".  The mission failed. 

With the latest generation of satellites prospecting the moon, we can see the landers and marks on the surface.  These are from later missions, but can we assume that if they faked 11 they would have faked them all?

Apollo 14's landing site.  The dark lines between the descent stage  and the ALSEP are footprints.  (ALSEP = Apollo Lunar Science Exploration Package) 

Apollo 17's site.

Of all the arguments that we regularly read from lunar landing deniers, one has an element of truth to it.  They say the Van Allen radiation belts would have fried the astronauts. Saying "fried" is wrong by orders of magnitude, but there is a measurable effect.  It turns out the astronauts who went through the belts to the moon had a significantly higher rate of cardiovascular disease than astronauts who never went to orbit or those who only went to low earth orbit.     

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether mortality rates due to cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, accidents and all other causes of death differ in (1) astronauts who never flew orbital missions in space, (2) astronauts who flew only in low Earth orbit (LEO), and (3) Apollo lunar astronauts, the only humans to have traveled beyond Earth’s magnetosphere. Results show there were no differences in CVD mortality rate between non-flight (9%) and LEO (11%) astronauts. However, the CVD mortality rate among Apollo lunar astronauts (43%) was 4–5 times higher than in non-flight and LEO astronauts.

The looming issue here is that they can't conclusively say it was the Van Allen belts, just that it was something to do with leaving Earth's protective magnetosphere, but they only left the magnetosphere briefly; Apollo 11 was four to five days (I'm guessing here) but other missions were longer.   That brings more concern to a Mars mission, as well as doing work on the moon.   

You'll note I haven't said a word about the frequent complaints I've seen from landing deniers, about the photography. Not seeing stars; seeing land that isn't as perfectly smooth and straight as they seem to expect it to be.  Anybody who learned photography in the film days knows how empty those arguments are the minute they hear them. If you think that the stars should be visible with the foreground as brightly lit as peak afternoon sun on a beach, you don't understand the first thing about the brightness ranges films can handle. I've honestly never seen a single argument about a photograph that has stood up to casual knowledge of film photography.

With current technology mission plans, called "boost and coast", a Martian trip is a long undertaking.  Mars and Earth reach opposition (closest point) roughly every two years (it varies).  Launched around then a trip to mars then takes about seven months.  After that, as Earth continues to advance ahead of Mars, the return trip takes longer.  A quick stay on Mars turns into seven months to get there and ten months to a year coming back.  If one is going to travel for 18 months, a year and a half, it makes a reasonable argument to stay longer.  Seven months to Mars, then explore 16 months until Earth is approaching for the return trip to get shorter?  

A potential solution is nuclear powered spacecraft.  I've been talking about this for years, but a nuclear powered engine can accelerate half the way there and decelerate half the way.  There are designs for engines that "burn" low yield atomic explosions - impulse power - for thrust.  Some designs that have been investigated would allow 60 day trips to Mars instead of seven months.  By now everyone has heard of the bone loss, edema and other problems astronauts on the ISS face.  Those can be solved by artificial gravity on the spacecraft, like the science fiction books used to say.  Yes, it will make the spacecraft heavier and the mission more expensive.   Nobody ever suggested there was anything remotely easy about it.  Judging by reading what Elon Musk seems to think an exploratory trip to Mars requires and the many Starship cargo loads he's talking about, I think Elon gets it. We're in good hands. 

55 Years Ago This Afternoon, Apollo 11 Was Leaving the Moon

After all the hype and excitement, Apollo 11 spent less than 24 hours on the moon.  They landed at 4:18 PM on the 20th and fired the LM ascent engine to leave the moon at 1:54 PM on the 21st (all times EDT, as has been the convention for these few posts).  Other missions would stay longer, and bring increasing sophistication, including color video cameras and electric vehicles to get the crews around on the surface.

I first posted this picture back in 2018, and it's good but incomplete: 

After "living or dead", I would change that statement to say, "the only human living or dead in all of history" for emphasis.  At 9:44 AM, when Mission Control sent their wake up call to Collins, someone in Mission Control noted,"Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins is experiencing during this 47 minutes of each lunar revolution when he's behind the Moon with no one to talk to except his tape recorder aboard Columbia."

The return flight depended on the performance of a system never tested in its intended use: the Lunar Module ascent engine. The prime contractor on the engine was Grumman Aerospace; the contractor for the engine was Bell Aerosystems. They delivered an engine that relied on hypergolic propellants - a system which doesn't require an igniter because the fuel and oxidizer explode on contact. It worked flawlessly on every Apollo mission that landed on the moon. It is said that the ascent stage was the one system that Neil Armstrong expressed concern about failing, because there was no backup. If it failed, they were going to die on the moon.

It wasn't the only such single point failure.  If the engine fired but a set of explosives called the guillotine failed - a system that blew apart all of the connections between the two halves of the lunar module - there was no way to fix or recover from that, either.  I'd be surprised if there weren't more possible single point failures. 

The liftoff was at 1:54 PM EDT and the LM docked with the CM at 5:35 PM.  The lunar module was jettisoned at 7:42 PM.   Apollo 11 didn't have the ability to record its departure from the moon, but later missions did.  This is a 30 second video of the LM launch during Apollo 17 - the last men to ever visit the moon.

The crew will start their engine burn for the three day return flight to Earth in the early hours of tomorrow morning, July 22nd; 12:56 AM (ET). Reentry, splashdown in the Pacific, and transfer of the crew to an isolation unit as a precaution against possible, unknown, lunar microorganisms will occur on July 24th.  Over the course of the last few days, I've read things I haven't read in years, if ever.  One the things that's noteworthy is this sentence from the NASA Apollo 11 log.

It is recognized as the most trouble-free mission to date, almost completely on schedule and successful in every respect.

This has been a fun little romp down through the historical notes from Apollo 11 over the last few posts. For many of us, if not all, it was one of the highlight moments of our lives we can recall. With the passing of Michael Collins back in 2021, only one of the three crew members is still with us: Dr. Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, now age 94. I've read that he has a home around here somewhere; I don't know if it's a place he just visits on occasion or just what. It would be a wild thing to run into Buzz in a store while shopping.

55 Years Ago Today - "The Eagle Has Landed"

This morning at 9:27 EDT, Buzz Aldrin crawled into the Lunar Module Eagle and began the lengthy process of powering things up for the short mission life of the module.  An hour later, Neil Armstrong joined Buzz in the LM.

A little over three hours after that, 1:47 PM, they released the latches and separated from the Command Module.  At 2:12, Michael Collins fired thrusters on the CM moving it two miles away from the LM.  Except for that small altitude difference, both vehicles remained in their initial orbit from yesterday's lunar orbit insertion until 3:08 PM when Armstrong fired the descent engine to lower the Eagle's orbit. 

What follows is a 20 minute video depicting the landing which is easily the best modern reconstruction of the landing that I've seen.  It combines video from the window as Armstrong would have seen it with the audio traffic from Mission Control.  The first three minutes gives a modern simulation and animation of how it all worked; after that, it goes to the view recorded on the LM with spacecraft communication on the left speaker and mission control intercom on the right.  Yes, I think it's worth the time. 

The LM touches down at 4:18PM EDT.

At 6:00 PM, Armstrong radios down to mission control that he recommends they start the EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) sooner than planned; at 9 PM.  Although they don't make the 9PM goal, the 10:39 beginning of the EVA is still five hours earlier than the mission plans.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, this was the last vacation I would ever take with my parents. July of 1969 was the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years of school, and I was 15 years old. Like millions of people around the world, I hung by the front of the black and white TV; this one in my uncle's house in New York City.  We watched intently but I don't recall exactly how much we saw or if we watched until 1:11 tomorrow morning when the EVA officially concluded. It's a sobering thought how many of the family members there on that historic day and night have passed away. Both of my parents, my uncle and aunt, and I'm simply not sure how many else. 

Over the years, this meme from Aesop at Raconteur Report has become my default way of thinking of the Apollo program itself. While he clearly means the landing of Apollo 11, I can see the entire Apollo program as a strong contender for the Peak of Western Civilization.