FAA Grants Launch License for IFT-7

With a figurative snap of the fingers, the FAA granted a launch license for Starship's Flight Test 7 today, December 17, rendering at least part of yesterday's post obsolete.   

The article on Space.com concludes the headline with "But when will it fly?" and that's the big question. Nothing in the article contradicts things we've already heard about the flight, so the apparent date is still No Earlier Than (NET) January 11.  I found the self-praising tone that the FAA used to be the interesting part of this. 

"The FAA continues to increase efficiencies in our licensing determination activities to meet the needs of the commercial space transportation industry," Kelvin B. Coleman, FAA Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, said in a statement. "This license modification that we are issuing is well ahead of the Starship Flight 7 launch date and is another example of the FAA’s commitment to enable safe space transportation."

Gee, one short paragraph, two sentences long, with two references to how they're not the problem, they're working to increase efficiencies, and this license is another example of how good they are.  Think they're a little motivated by the talk earlier this year about how they're holding back the US in space?  Such that now they're looking over their shoulders for DOGE raiders to come eliminate their jobs? 

There's a bit more talk about the Flight Test, saying they primarily are duplicating last month's IFT-6.  

During the Flight 6 test flight in November, SpaceX skipped the booster catch due to a sensor issue but successfully soft-landed its Starship vehicle in the Indian Ocean, capturing stunning video of the splashdown. The Starship Flight 7 test is expected to recreate that Ship landing in the ocean while also making another attempt at catching the Super Heavy booster.

"The Flight 7 mission profile involves launch of the combined Starship/Super Heavy vehicle from Boca Chica, Texas, a return to the launch site of the Super Heavy booster rocket for a catch attempt by the launch tower, and a water landing of the Starship vehicle in the Indian Ocean west of Australia," FAA officials wrote in the license update.

Static firing of the booster for FT7, last week on December 9.  Image credit: SpaceX

SpaceX Ticking off the Milestones

Ticking off the milestones on the way to Starship Flight Test 7, that is. In this case, running a successful-looking static fire of Starship 33 on Sunday Dec 15 at Boca Chica Starbase.  

Ship 33 during its static engine fire test, Dec. 15, 2024. (Image credit: SpaceX)

A video of the test from Space.com is here.

Its next launch, Integrated Flight Test-7 (IFT-7), is expected around Jan. 11, based on communications between NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has yet to issue a launch license for the upcoming test. Once mated, the Super Heavy/Starship stack towers a staggering 400 feet (122 meters) tall, with the Starship upper stage alone standing taller than the Statue of Liberty.

There has been no announcement of the intended mission, at least not one I've been able to see.  IFT-6 back on November 18th was "mostly successful" but didn't complete one of it's major goals, to catch the SuperHeavy booster with the giant chopsticks as they accomplished on IFT-5.  I assume that will be part of this test's goals as well.  Since Ship 33 is second generation Starship and none have flown, this might be a step backwards to verify both the new things and everything that has already been tested all works as intended.  

My Annual Favorite Christmas Song Post

Well, pretty much annual. It's that time of year again. The tree is up, the house is decorated, at least as much as we do, and we get some music trickling through.  

Regulars here know that I'm somewhat of a blues fan.  I've introduced the outrageously talented Joanne Shaw Taylor, and the late country blues master (and songwriting partner to Eric Clapton) JJ Cale.  More appropriate to Christmas, every year around this time I comment on my favorite bluesy Christmas song, “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” 

The song dates from 1944, is credited to Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine for Judy Garland's 1944 movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, but it's generally acknowledged to be Hugh Martin's writing.  The somber tone is understandable; Christmas of 1944 was three years into World War II, and many people had undergone the hardship of long separations from or the loss of family members. The war was wearing on the national psyche; the death toll was the highest seen since the Civil War.  They were dark days.  It's interesting, then, that Martin has said he wasn’t consciously writing about wartime separations.

You'll note that at the end of the song, the line isn't “hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” it's the more subdued “until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.” Much more fitting to a more somber song written during WWII. The change to “...highest bough” (which seems to be the last) was prompted by Frank Sinatra in 1957. According to Entertainment Weekly in 2006:

Then, in 1957, Frank Sinatra — who'd already cut a lovely version with the movie's bittersweet lyrics in 1947 — came to Martin with a request for yet another pick-me-up. “He called to ask if I would rewrite the 'muddle through somehow' line,” says the songwriter. “He said, 'The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?' ”

That request led to the line we hear most often, although Martin says he thinks the original line is more “down-to-earth.”  “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has become one of the most popular songs year after year.  EW says it's second only to the song Nat King Cole popularized: “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).”  It has been covered by a gamut of artists from Sinatra to Connie Stephens, to James Taylor (who sings something closer to the '40s, Judy Garland version) to '80s metal band Twisted Sister, and many, many more.

I'm not so one-dimensional that this is the only song I can live with for the month, though.  When I play them myself, I tend to start by playing “O Holy Night” although I can't hope to get within a light year of the ability or the vocal range of Kerrie Roberts under any circumstances.

Still, a fingerstyle guitar can approach the sound of the piano in the mix here.  I can't really link to a video that sounds like what I attempt to play because I sit with a piano song book and work from that sheet music. 

And there are more.  If asked to pick my one most favorite Christmas song, as if I could, I'd probably pick one of these two.   There are lots that are fun to listen to once or twice a year, even the cliche' “Jingle Bell Rock” is fun a few times. There are fewer that I could listen to over and over throughout this month.

Before the Story No One Talks About Gets Too Old

Back in September, a cascade of news sources produced a graph that disappeared into the background very quickly.  It's a graph from research paper started by the Washington Post (of all places) aiming to show the most accurate reconstruction of global temperatures for the last half a billion years.  To everyone's surprise, it totally flew in the face of conventional wisdom, so nobody knew what to do about it, and consequently virtually no one talked about it.  Here's the graph - and,  yes, it doesn't say "half billion years", it says the last 485 million, 15 million short of a half billion. I'm rounding it a bit - 15 years out of 500 is 3% - just so I can write or say, "half billion" instead of "four hundred and eighty-five million." ;-)

I got this plot from Watts Up With That? (WUWT), probably the best site for truth about climate change, and I've been meaning to share this for at least a month.  The yellowish circle at the very right is now - the "current geological stage"). We are at the coolest point in the last half billion years (maybe tied with a low around 330 million years ago).  Also pretty evident is that since a short-duration temperature peak 50 million years ago, Earth has been in a cooling period.  If you want to see a zoomed in plot showing just the last 7000 years, I posted that at the end of July, 2023.

It seemed disingenuous to compare current temperatures to the coolest point in the last 7000 years, so comparing it to the coolest temperatures in the last half billion years takes disingenuous to a whole new level.

It's not strictly true that no other outlet than the Washington Post covered this; ZeroHedge covered it and their coverage by "Tyler Durden" is what WUWT based their reporting on. Go read ZeroHedge's coverage, there are several tweets in there that are worth the time to read.

To borrow the quote from ZeroHedge:

Maybe, just maybe, the level of human-caused global warming doom porn pushed by the Government, corporate media outlets, global NGOs and far-Left billionaires is not as apocalyptic as they make it sound.

Maybe, just maybe, the world was starting to recover from whatever dropped the temperature to the half billion year low and it would have started warming no matter what people were doing. Maybe we have nothing to do with the temperature changes.  If they're even real and not just made up.

Drones Over New Jersey?

It's almost hard to avoid the story about drones being reported in New Jersey and other states.  All except for the time required to read and try to extract a real meaning out of the news coverage - that's pretty easy to avoid.  So a trip to a place that ought to be fairly reasonable in its coverage seemed to be in order. Not a local news outlet, or one of the big network names maybe a site more objective?  

Unable to find one I thought would be ideal, I avoided the main media outlets and went to Forbes and "Mystery drones over New Jersey and nearby states"

What Exactly Do We Know About The Drones?

Almost nothing, New Jersey Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia said on X Wednesday. Fantasia’s post was a lengthy summary of a legislative meeting with the Department of Homeland Security about the mysterious sightings. She described the government’s investigation strategy, which includes a coordinated effort led by the FBI with state police, the Office of Homeland Security and the U.S. Coast Guard. She described the dozens of nightly sightings as “coordinated” operations of drones “up to 6 [feet] in diameter” flying for six to seven hours—distances of 15 miles—unrelated to “hobbyists” or the Department of Homeland Security, which “appear to avoid detection by traditional methods (e.g., helicopters, radio frequencies).” They also reportedly aren’t related to military operations, the Picatinny Arsenal said in a statement to NJ Advance Media on Nov. 24.

Dawn Fantasia's post on X is worth the time to read, but all of this ignores the reporting of these drones from New York, Oregon, as well as other states and even other countries, such as the UK and Germany

The FBI and DHS released a statement on Thursday saying the investigation has “no evidence at this time” of “malicious activity” in New Jersey or a “national security or public safety threat.” The statement adds they have not identified “a foreign nexus” for the drones and will continue the investigation. It also said many of the drone sightings have been “cases of mistaken identity,” confusing drones for lawful, identified aircraft.

There are reports of "large and loud" drones that are "the size of SUVs" as opposed to the small, hobbyist class of drones.  There are reports of groups of drones coming off the ocean into New Jersey - I've seen a report of 50 coming ashore together.  There are reports of drones "going dark" and turning off running lights at night, but the mere act of keeping the lights on "most of the time" at night seems like an attempt to avoid collisions.

I'm sure you've seen the congressman saying they're Iranian and coming from a ship at sea.  I find that hard to believe. To borrow a line from the Cold War, "they can't even make a decent clock radio," so how can we expect them to make something as complex as a remote controlled flying drone. 

Besides, I notice that whomever is behind these drones, or whatever they are, they don't fly to areas full of southern, "good ole boys."  It would turn into a giant skeet shooting party. 

The 10 Coolest Things in Space so far in this Century

Eric Berger at Ars Technica took on a pretty mundane topic over at Ars Technica, but managed to blow my mind in the setup.  The topic, the kind that's always a matter of opinion, is to rank the 25 coolest things in space so far in this century.  The subtitle, though, is the thing that kicked me in the head: “Taking stock of spaceflight one-quarter of the way through the 2000s.”  That's right, in three weeks, New Year's Day 2025, we're 1/4 of the way through the 21st century.  Sure, it's obvious when you think about it, I just never gave a moment of thought to it.  

It's an interesting read, far more interesting than the typical end-of-the-year retrospectives we get every year for New Year's, and I wouldn't dream of picking 25 things just to match the number of years but it might be fun to think about the top 10 coolest things.

10: The Voyagers continue in interstellar space

I write about the two voyagers regularly, whenever a story comes up.  Pretty much every time, the problems are things never seen before.  Components are working at temperatures they never were certified for; and that's true for every system on the pair of satellites. The team that got Voyagers started on the mission have all retired or passed away, replaced by younger engineers and techs that have to work on things that they must have confidence won't do something awful because of the two day delay between sending a command and getting results back.  This coming August and September will mark their 48th year in their four year mission. 

9: New Horizons Pluto Mission

On January 19, 2006, at 1900 UTC, Mrs. Graybeard and I were riding our bikes home from a moderately long bike ride and interrupted our ride to watch a rocket arc downrange (saying the ride was moderately long is based purely on where we pulled off the side of the road to watch it). It was the Atlas V carrying New Horizons as it started its mission to fly by Pluto.  The flyby was on July 14, 2015 - close to 9-1/2 years travel. It was the first time since the Voyagers in the 1980s that a probe reached a planet never-before seen in such resolution. No one knew what to expect and the images were jaw dropping.  

8: Philae touches down on a comet

Built by the European Space Agency, Philae was a small robotic lander that traveled to a distant comet, 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, aboard the Rosetta spacecraft. After a journey of about a decade, Rosetta reached orbit around the comet and released Philae. In November 2014, Philae touched down on the comet, but harpoons designed to anchor the spacecraft failed to deploy. Accordingly, Philae bounced a few times before coming to a soft landing on the nucleus.

This marked the first time a spacecraft had ever landed on a comet. Although lying on its side in the shadow of a steep cliff, Philae still returned rich data about the comet’s nucleus over the next half year or so.  It returned images and video from a comet that were at once familiar but also entirely alien.

7: 20 Years of Continuous Exploration on Mars

Since 2004, there have been rovers continuously exploring on Mars, starting with Spirit and Opportunity and continuing through Curiosity in 2012 and 2020’s Perseverance.  The continuous ability to observe and monitor conditions on Mars goes beyond the headline, “search for evidence of life” on Mars to a continuous ability to observe Mars, which could benefit plans to settle on the world.  

Part of the “coolness factor” of 20 years on Mars includes the Ingenuity helicopter and its 72 flights out of a planned 5.  Ingenuity is almost worthy of a spot of its own in the Top 10 coolest.

6: Kepler Space Telescope finding planets

The existence of planets outside our solar system was confirmed in the 1990s, but the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009 changed that picture.  The first planets were detected by monitoring the brightness of stars for periodic dips in brightness that would indicate a planet blocking (occulting in astronomer-talk) the star by passing between the telescope here and the star.  

Kepler did the same, monitoring the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence stars in our neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy, looking for the periodic brightness dips to identify transiting planets. To date, Kepler has detected more than 2,700 exoplanets and found that far from being rare, there are probably at least as many planets in our galaxy as stars, if not many more.  In case it’s not immediately clear, 2,700 has to be a lower limit to the number of exoplanets for two reasons: first, if the plane of the orbit doesn’t line up right, we’ll never see the occultation, and second, if the orbital period is more years than Kepler was able to observe, we’ll never see it. 

5: The James Webb Space Telescope

Another example of late and over budget, but that’s far more understandable for something never done before, like the JWST, than something that’s almost completely reuse of existing hardware like SLS. JWST is a self-deploying multi-mirror infrared (IR) telescope that was bound for an orbit that nothing can reach if the telescope needed to be fixed. A high risk mission.

After lifting off on an Ariane 5 rocket on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope spent half a year unfolding and deploying in space before finally beginning operations. But the astronomical results have been worth it. The saga of Webb has been a story of persistence and perseverance by NASA, Northrop Grumman, and other partners who strived to bring this magnificent instrument online. A happy ending was far from certain, but we got one anyway.

4: The first successful landing of an orbital class rocket

I remember this one vividly.  It was the night of December 21, 2015, from Cape Canaveral and we were watching from the backyard while listening to the Kennedy Space Center Amateur Radio Club live relay on their 2 meter repeater. The landing was below our horizon but we could see the engine burns in the night sky and hear the radio coverage.  It seemed like Sci-Fi for a rocket that had just launched a few minutes earlier to return and land near the launch site. Like many people, we had paid attention to the attempts to land on a barge at sea, and while we were hopeful, those weren’t all that encouraging. That landing changed everything, and the first recovery at sea was in April 8, 2016.

I could go on about how important reuse is, but I’ve done that too much already.

The rest of what follows is all SpaceX.

3: Demo 2 and America's return to manned spaceflight

By the spring of 2020, we had gotten used to SpaceX landing Falcon 9 boosters and their seemingly incredible rate of progress.  On the other hand, since the last Shuttle flight in 2011, NASA had seemingly been sliding backwards, forced into buying rides to the International Space Station from the Russians.  Sliding backwards, that is, until SpaceX’s Crew Dragon came along.
 
The vehicle’s first mission, carrying Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, came during a summer of unrest when America needed a win. The country was still largely shut down by COVID-19, and its politics were fractured by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. America’s return to human spaceflight marked a significant technical achievement by SpaceX, which became the first private company to launch humans into orbit, and it allowed NASA to fly more astronauts to the space station and take full advantage of that facility's research capabilities. Dragon has flown more than a dozen times since.  

2: Falcon Heavy with a choreographed landing of two boosters

Choreographed for the two Falcon 9 boosters to land about one second and a few hundred feet apart on the Cape.  This Falcon Heavy launch, in February of 2018 took the #1 spot in Eric Berger’s polls of readers that he did to write his piece.  It was a visual candy treat – irresistible.  It starts with the 27 Merlin engines of the three strapped-together Falcon 9s, then that choreographed landing, and is topped off with the arresting view of a cherry red Tesla (and Starman) flying away from Earth and out toward Mars.

It was a spectacle that understandably captured the public’s attention. But the new rocket was more than a spectacle. By designing, building, and launching the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX demonstrated that a private company could independently fund and fly the largest and most powerful rocket in the world. This showed that commercial, heavy-lift rockets were possible. By providing competition to the Delta IV Heavy, the Falcon Heavy saved the US government billions. It's likely that the US government will never design and develop a rocket ever again.  

1: Catching the massive superheavy booster with the launch tower at Starbase

I’m rating this as the coolest thing in the first quarter of the 21st Century while Eric Berger at Ars Technica rated it #11.  Everyone knows the visual impact from having watched replays over and over again, I guess I’m just more impressed by that little demonstration.

On October 13 of this year, SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket for the fifth time, but this flight profile was different in that the company sought to recover the Super Heavy first stage. Remarkably, the rocket returned to the launch site, hovered alongside the launch tower, sidled into the space between the pair of massive “chopsticks” then was plucked from the air by them and subsequently set down back on the launch mount.

There are a few reasons why this is such an important event. It demonstrates a number of important things.  First, it verifies the radical approach to catching a rocket (obviating the need for landing legs and reducing launch turnaround times). It allows SpaceX to accelerate the development and testing of Starship.  Finally, the visually stunning tower grab captured the public’s attention and brought wider recognition of Starship’s potential to change spaceflight forever.  In the first few weeks after the mission I heard more people who aren’t particularly interested in day to day space activities talking about how incredible this was, saying things like “Elon Musk makes towers that grab flying rockets out of the air” or talking about how it’s the most fantastic thing they’ve heard about since the moon landings. 

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And there you have it. Lists like the Top 10 of anything are always one person's opinions and I'm sure few, if any, of you will agree with mine. I'm still not tired of watching Falcon 9s land after a successful flight, and I still stop to watch highlights of the flight test with the booster being grabbed by the chopsticks. There were some cool things in Eric's list I couldn't replicate, but he had the top 25 (for 25 years) and I stopped at 10.  

Feel free to voice any opinions, as always.

Another Day Got Away from Me

It was a no news kind of day until I ran into an idea for a post too late to finish it.  I'm only about 25% done, so, as usual, funnin around and I'll try to finish it tomorrow. 

From 90 miles, a truism by Candace Owens: considering the last few years, why should anyone trust "a group of national security officials?"

And a comparison of being led by the star then and now:

Oooo - a stats joke! 

It's a true statement.  To be fair, though, everyone that doesn't confuse them also ends up dying. 

Blue Origin Politely... Gently... Pushing the FAA

In a not-so-subtle signal to regulators, Blue Origin is saying New Glenn is ready so what's holding up our approval to test and launch?

The company published a photo of the payload called Blue Ring for the first New Glenn test flight, a programmable upper stage that's intended to get payloads to different orbits than the one originally launched into, a fairly common concept these days.  

"There is a growing demand to quickly move and position equipment and infrastructure in multiple orbits," the company's chief executive, Dave Limp, said on LinkedIn. "Blue Ring has advanced propulsion and communication capabilities for government and commercial customers to handle these maneuvers precisely and efficiently."

A small pathfinder for Blue Ring is seen set against one half of a payload fairing of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. Credit: Blue Origin 

Blue is widely recognized as not being very public about their plans and goals. This public photo and announcement on LinkedIn are an exception to that.  Speculation is that they're signalling to the regulatory agencies that they want to get this flight before the end of '24.  

First of all, notice how small the payload is compared to the inside of the payload fairing.  That's probably to give potential customers an idea of how big their payloads can be.  This fairing is 7 meters in diameter, 23 feet.  The available fairings vary with the launch platform, so it's a bit of a jump to assume they're comparing to a specific competitor's rocket, but it does give a good first impression, along the lines of "gee, that looks big." 

Additionally, the company appears to be publicly signaling the Federal Aviation Administration and other regulatory agencies that it believes New Glenn is ready to fly, pending approval to conduct a hot fire test at Launch Complex-36, and then for a liftoff from Florida. This is a not-so-subtle message to regulators to please hurry up and complete the paperwork necessary for launch activities. It is not clear what is holding up the hot-fire and launch approval in this case, but it is often environmental issues or certification of a flight termination system.

Blue Origin's release on Tuesday was carefully worded. The headline said New Glenn was "on track" for a launch this year and stated that the Blue Ring payload is "ready" for a launch this year. As yet there is no notional or public launch date. The hot-fire test has been delayed multiple times since the company put the rocket on its launch pad on Nov. 23. It had been targeting November for the test, and more recently, this past weekend.

In addition, it could be personal.  New Glenn was originally projected to launch in 2020, and after a few years of delays, Blue's founder, Jeff Bezos, fired the former CEO, replacing him with Dave Limp in September of '23.  Limp was given a mandate to reform Blue Origin's corporate culture to make it faster and more responsive.  He was also told to get New Glenn in space by the end of '24, we just don't know if there was an actual, "or else" with that mandate.  

Let's be honest: it's a lot easier to put your expensive or valuable payload (including yourself) on a rocket that has flown a lot of times than one that has never flown. It's simply a case of the more you fly the more you can learn about the vehicle. The fact that their BE-4 engines have flown a couple of different launch vehicles on one mission is a bit of a comfort; after all, engine problems are responsible for about half of launch vehicle failures...

However, a million things can go wrong during a launch debut, and it only takes one problem for a vehicle to be lost. With such a large rocket, integrating so many new components and software programs, there could well be hidden problems discovered only in flight.

Additionally, Blue Origin needs to fly its New Glenn rocket in order to identify where the vehicle has margin. Sources have indicated that the payload capacity of the current iteration of New Glenn is closer to 25 metric tons than its advertised mass of 45 tons. This is not uncommon for new launch vehicles, and the company will be able to use real-world performance data to refine the vehicle's hardware and software for future flights. Still, those improvements can only be made after a launch occurs, when data is collected and analyzed.

It turns out that due to changes in "the Big Picture" of NASA and the administration, getting this vehicle tested ASAP could be very important to Blue Origin. As in life or death important. 

And there are other pressures on the rocket company to get moving. Officials with the incoming Trump administration are considering canceling NASA's Space Launch System rocket, a very large but expensive and inefficient-to-produce booster that is part of the agency's plan to return humans to the Moon. Therefore, they are interested to see whether Blue Origin can deliver a privately developed heavy lift rocket in New Glenn to increase the space agency's options for getting astronauts to the lunar surface. Sources have indicated that these officials very much would like to see Blue Origin play a major role in the lunar return, but before that happens the company needs to demonstrate that it can execute on its ambitious, but long-delayed, rocket.

A successful test flight could create a lot of very good Christmases; a loss of vehicle failure could create a lot of very bad Christmases.

Starship Flight Test 7 has a Date

Well, a preliminary "No Earlier Than" date, as they always are this far in advance. 

SpaceX has not yet announced a launch date for Starship's seventh test flight, but the company appears to be eyeing Jan. 11; an email sent by NASA to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration identifies that date as the target. (According to that email, NASA plans to deploy a Gulfstream V jet to observe the upcoming flight.)

The date is just under eight weeks from FT 6 on November 18, which was closer to six weeks after FT 5 on October 13.  I've seen claims that this will be the next generation Starship, and FT6 was said to be the last flight of the 1st generation. There is talk about new, heat shield tiles that aren't the sort of ceramic tiles that have been used since the Shuttle days as well as on Starship, but I've come across nothing with any detail. I'll be trying.

More importantly, work is progressing and today featured a static firing of the SuperHeavy booster.  SpaceX documented the test on X today, posting three photos and a short video of the test. 

Static firing of the booster for FT7.  Image credit: SpaceX

While not an official channel, the SpaceX Launch Manifest site has always seemed to be doing their best to keep up with SpaceX, which is no small task.  It shows that FT-7 is planned for Booster 14 and Ship 33. 

It's the busy time of year and by the calendar, Jan. 11 is only five Saturdays away.  It'll be here before we know it.  

Days Fighting Software

I spend my days working around things written in software, but I guess nothing unique about that. It may be a road you've been down, or it may be useful to someone else, so let me tell you a story. 

The center of this story is a computer interface for battery testing from West Mountain Radio, the exact product I'm using apparently is obsolete, but they have a page full of what they call computerized battery analyzers here.  The one I have, the CBA-IV has been replaced by the CBA-V on that page. I originally got this at the Orlando Hamcation from West Mountain on a Hamfest Special price, and judging by my saved pictures of plots, that must have been in February of 2017.  

This is not a charger; all it does is a controlled discharge of the battery, and handful of other tests.  In the world of battery makers and their specifications, the rates at which you can discharge, as well as recharge, are important limits.  For batteries that might run a power tool, they tend to be rated to the capacity in Amps*hours (Amp Hours or AH) while for something like a car starter, or the various jump starter batteries you can buy now, those are rated in "Cold Cranking Amps".  In the first category, the Ryobi tools have batteries rated in Amp Hours, in different output voltages. 

Judging by the number of Ryobi tools I see around, I'm guessing a fair percentage of you have some.  I have three 4AH 18V One+ batteries, along with a 2 and a 1-1/2 AH.  With these batteries, it's pretty easy to decide on a discharge test. Consider the 4AH battery.  That means, if you were to draw a constant 4A, just the capacity C, it would discharge to "dead" in a bit under one hour.  If you discharge it 2A, that's half the capacity or C/2, and the time to discharge goes to a bit under two hours.  To get closest to the 4AH rating, the convention has been that the manufacturers pretty much rate them at the C/10 discharge or 0.4Amps. For the 2AH battery, C/10 is 0.2A, and so on. As rule of thumb, the lower the discharge current the longer the battery charge's life. That is, if you discharge a battery at C/20 and C/10, the C/20 discharge lasts longer than exactly twice what C/10 lasts and so on.

I use the CBA-IV a couple of times a year, and doing the cycles on my various rechargeable batteries pretty much can take up a month. I started out in the middle last week and had some strange things happen.  Let me start with an example of the output from the CBA.

The software popped up that screen and I just screen-captured the whole software window with the discharge curve and the measured results. Note it measured 3.78 AH, and the tab conveniently says 240625_Discharge.  The numbers are the date of the test, 6-25-2024, so last June 25th. 3.78 AH out of a 4AH hour claim is pretty good - 94.5% - especially for a battery that's several years old.  

When I went to test this same battery this week, I got a result closer to 1.2 or 1.3 AH, which is awful.  So what's going on? 

It's in plain sight on this plot.  See that horizontal line two minor divisions above the bottom of the plot?  There's a green arrowhead on the left end of the line. That line is the voltage it was discharging the battery to in order to decide the test was complete there.  That's 15.5 Volts.  While setting up the test to run this week, it said the test should end at 18.6V.  If you eyeball the plot to see where the red curve looks to hit 18.6, it looks to me like about 1.5 hours.  On the other hand, if you look at the right side of the curve, you can see that it goes into a dive downward toward fully discharged at just about 17V. Setting the discharge to 17 would get all but that last roughly 0.2AH of discharge time.

So today, after charging this battery fully, I set the discharge voltage to 17.0.  The software immediately popped up a warning that it wasn't their recommendation, "are you sure?"  I said  yes. The results came out at 2.96AH which is quite a bit degraded from this test which looks to be 3.6 at 17V.  At the moment, I'm testing the other old 4AH battery to see how it compares to this one.  Then I do the new battery.

What's up with the 18.6V vs 15.5 or the compromise 17V?  The gotcha is that I updated the software in the CBA at the start of the testing - call it Tuesday the 3rd. They apparently changed the recommended voltage in the SW update.

When things go wrong, as they sometimes will, to butcher the poem, look at the software first.

EDIT at 0930 Monday Dec.9:  It became clear this morning that I had remembered the results of that all important last test very incorrectly after I turned the computer on and compared reality to my memory.  The last three paragraphs (before the last line) have been revised to reflect the real data from the shop computer.

Let's Breed Some Chickens - a Repost

The journey to tonight's (re-)post started with this wonderful piece of modern art on Bustednuckles on Friday the 6th. 

You see, it reminded me of something I posted in June of 2021, back closer to peak Covid insanity. I searched for the post and found it easily because it has some words and terms that are unique so the search window finds it easily (top left of the header, when you're at the top of the page).  I read it, got a good laugh out of it, showed to Mrs. Graybeard and she laughed at it, so it turned into "Why not?"  I give you:

Let's Breed Some Chickens 

Back when I was still working, Mrs. Graybeard and I would have lunch together on Fridays.  There were always places to get chicken wings for lunch near where I worked, and having wings once a week became something we just did.  After I retired, it transformed into watching a TV show or two we'd record during the week over wings on Friday nights.  Ordinarily, we'd get over a dozen whole wings to cook for dinner and whatever we didn't have for dinner became my lunch on Saturday.  

Around the time that COVID shutdowns started happening, wings started becoming scarce and hard to find at times and we had to do without.  When they started being available again, I jokingly referred to having a "strategic reserve" of wings in our big freezer, but I don't think we ever had any more than two packages in the freezer.  

If you'll recall, last year the problem was attributed to there being a large institutional demand for wings as opposed to the cuts that most people would buy for home use.  The price of wings collapsed and many were thrown away when the college bassetball tournament they call "March Madness" didn't get held.

This year, the supply started out good but then tightened up quite a bit.  The reasoning looked like it should be the same because there was no shortage of any other chicken parts.  I could walk into the meat section of the local grocery store and find dozens of packages of drum sticks, thighs, and chicken breasts, either boneless/skinless or still on the ribs.  Last week was the first week in a month when there was one small package of wings (about half of what we'd normally buy) and here's the strange part: a package of drumettes, the uppermost portion of a chicken wing.

This started to get on my nerves.  After all, chickens have exactly the same number of drumsticks, thighs and breasts as they do wings; why should those be so commonly available that the store regularly does a BOGO (buy one, get one free) on those parts, but have no wings?  Some research said that the wing restaurants were having problems getting their wings, too, and that wholesale prices for them have doubled.  Small sports bars and other restaurants that sell wings are being pinched by the prices for wings and labor going through the roof - although I bet you only heard about the labor costs.

This led to some web wandering to find out why are wings so scarce. I was surprised that Tyson, the chicken processing giant, was saying it was that their roosters weren't living up to their "job responsibilities."

Could it be the 21st century soy boy problem has moved to the chickens?  Are they feeding the roosters too much soy?  Tyson says no; they simply bought a new breed of Rooster that's supposed to produce meatier offspring, but apparently bought a sales story instead.  They promise things will be better Real Soon, Now. 

While doing my research, I stumbled across a story that might solve the situation, if we can just make something happen.  Some people in various places (cough - China) started rumors that KFC had bred chickens with spiders [now a dead link] to produce chickens with eight legs and six wings.  Since drumsticks aren't in short supply, could it be possible to breed a chicken with more wings?  Not necessarily six wings, although I don't see a problem with that.  Clearly just doubling the number of wings to four would double the production of wings in the country while not oversupplying the parts there are already plenty of. 

(Somebody's wonderful conceptual art of spider-chicken, from the previous link)  ("Spider chicken, spider chicken.  Does whatever a spider chicken does." (Source)) [same dead link]

Now you and I know that you can't crossbreed spiders and chickens.  First off, there's the enormous genetic differences, and then there's the practical issue that they're too different in size to mate.  With the exception of some of our Florida spiders who could probably do it while standing flat-footed on the ground.  Why were there never any murder hornets in Florida?  The mosquitoes raped them and left them for dead.   

But what if you could isolate genes that determine the number of limbs, and somehow get a healthy chicken with more wings?  Like I said before, they don't need to have six wings because four would double the national supply of wings. 

I know what you're thinking. Everything you buy in the store advertises it's not genetically modified and here I am proposing that we extract genes from a spider to modify the chicken genome and get more wing production. I have a theory for that, too. I think that GMO is a "Karen" word (sorry, Karen, I know you don't like being associated with that) and that the people who go to a sports bar to watch a game, drink a few beers and have a few wings are a completely different group from the people that live in fear of GMOs. I think that the two groups have virtually nothing in common. Like this is the Venn diagram of the intersection between the two:

 

Dammit! Now I want some wings.

Not Very Dangerous Asteroid to Pass Earth Early on 7 Dec, UTC

"Not very dangerous?"  I think pretty much any rock that hits Earth could be dangerous, if it happens to hit a person or something important, so why that and not use the comparison headline that calls it "Car-size?"  Much like comparing it to size of a hippo, elephant, stalk full of bananas or whatever, I always say "what car?"  Do they mean a subcompact or SUV? 

They then say it's roughly 15 feet wide and officially called 2024 XS2. 

[It] will make its closest approach to Earth for the next 10 years tonight at 9:47 p.m. EST, or  0247 GMT on Saturday, Dec. 7. 

For many of you, by the time you read this it will have been "last night." 

This is considered a close approach because it's close by astronomical standards - pretty much half the distance to the moon, 122,000 miles.  In terms of Earth orbits, that's about five times the distance of the Geostationary orbit so it seems highly unlikely it will hit anything.  

It should be a nothing.  Unless you're really unlucky.

An artist's illustration of asteroids zooming near Earth. Not this asteroid. (Image credit: ESA - P.Carril)

NASA Announces Delays to Artemis 2 and 3

NASA called a press conference today to announce that the next two Artemis missions have been pushed out in time. Are the dates as far out as watchers have been suggesting?  

NASA announced today (Dec. 5) that it's delaying the planned launch of Artemis 2, a flight that will send four people around the moon and back, from September 2025 to April 2026. And Artemis 3, a crewed moon landing that had been targeted for late 2026, is now scheduled for mid-2027. The extra time is needed primarily to finish prepping the Orion capsule for its first-ever crewed flights, according to NASA officials.

This seems to be the resolution of details mentioned at the end of October, nearly six weeks ago, which said:

NASA says they have found the root cause of the Orion heat shield issues.  But they're not telling us what it was.  Maybe by the end of the year.

And those details were discussed. 

Everything appeared to go well on Artemis 1. However, postflight analyses revealed that Orion's heat shield wore away more unevenly during its reentry to Earth's atmosphere than engineers had predicted. Temperatures inside Orion remained near room temperature, meaning that astronauts would have remained safe, had any been aboard. But engineers needed to figure out what happened — and they've now come to some conclusions, NASA officials announced in today's press conference.

The uneven ablation was a consequence of Orion's "skip" reentry trajectory, in which the capsule bounced off the atmosphere and then came back in again multiple times. This strategy is required to dissipate the tremendous energy associated with high-speed returns from the moon, NASA officials said, but it had an unexpected downside on Artemis 1.

"While the capsule was dipping in and out of the atmosphere as part of that planned skip entry, heat accumulated inside the heat shield outer layer, leading to gases forming and becoming trapped inside the heat shield," NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said today. "This caused internal pressure to build up and led to cracking and uneven shedding of that outer layer."

The solution suggested is what has been talked about since the start of studying the heat shield issues: they will change the trajectory during re-entry away from skipping up and down to a path with a lower, more constant temperature, to keep the pockets of heated gasses from forming and being trapped inside the heat shield. 

As for how far out it has been pushed, back in November of '22, I noted that I've seen a prediction by a guy who has been scary accurate in his predictions saying that Artemis 3 won't launch until '27 instead of '25. Eric Berger at Ars Technica has better sources than I do and says, a more realistic date "for Artemis 3 is probably 2028-ish."  Today's announced date was “mid-2027” which is roughly mid-way between the just-dropped “late 2026” and Berger's “2028-ish.”

After NASA’s Orion spacecraft was recovered at the conclusion of the Artemis 1 test flight and transported to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, its heat shield was removed from the crew module inside the Operations and Checkout (O & C) Building and rotated for inspection. (Image credit: NASA)

It's worth remembering that we're in a relatively low key "space race" to land on the moon. For us it's to land on the moon again; for China it's to land for the first time.

The newly revised Artemis 3 timeline still keeps the United States ahead of China, which has said it plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2030. Both nations are targeting the lunar south pole, which is thought to be rich in water ice, a crucial resource for a settlement or research outpost.

Nelson has said repeatedly that the U.S. needs to establish its lunar toehold first, so China cannot establish norms and practices on the moon — which could include barring other nations from certain areas. And the NASA chief said today that he thinks the U.S. is in good shape to be the lunar leader.

A major hold up for Artemis 3 is that the Human Landing System (HLS) has to be ready to fly by then. SpaceX has not progressed as far as they should have, and while it's hard to not talk about the FAA delays the big picture is simply that the HLS is a long way from ready. There are reports spreading that SpaceX is trying for 25 Starship launches next year - one every other week. There are many steps that must be proven out for Artemis 3 and refueling in space so that the HLS can get to the moon is a very big one.

Trump Picks Jared Isaacman for NASA Administrator

Regular readers will instantly recognize the name of Jared Isaacman, as the tech company CEO who flew this September's Polaris Dawn mission and the Inspiration4 mission in September of 2021. Today, Dec. 4, president elect Trump announced via social media that he has picked Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of payment-processing company Shift4 Payments,to lead NASA. Isaacman both funded and commanded those two missions, flown on SpaceX hardware. (The pilot was Scott “Kidd” Poteet, also from Shift4). The third Polaris program launch has been talked about as the first manned flight of Starship; that might be affected by this appointment.

"Jared will drive NASA's mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology and exploration," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, the platform he launched in 2022.

"Jared's passion for space, astronaut experience and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe and unlocking the new space economy make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new era."

For his part, Isaacman replied (also on X): 

"I am honored to receive President Trump's nomination to serve as the next Administrator of NASA. Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,"

If you followed the two manned missions, you will have also seen that Isaacman has some ... let's just say unusual private jets; the kind only billionaires can have.  Two are pictured at the top here, another is pictured at the top of the Ars Technica coverage of this story.  He flies those, as well.  

It's a very easy prediction that current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson would be highly likely to be let go from that job, and at 82 is not likely to run for office again; he was our State and Federal Representative, as well as our US Representative and Senator at various times.  Coincidentally, Jared Isaacman is exactly half of Nelson's age: 41.

I think it's worth the minute or so to read Isaacman's reply to Trump, copied here from a screen capture:

Getting Up Early Wednesday, Dec. 4?

SpaceX is going to fly for a new fleet record Wednesday morning, currently set for No Earlier Than 5:13 AM EST Wednesday morning from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Booster B1067 will fly for the 24th time, which will establish it as the sole Fleet Leader. 

The mission can be watched live on SpaceX's channel on X, linked here, beginning five minutes before the launch. Alternatively, it can be watched on Spaceflight Now's channel on YouTube, beginning an hour earlier, 4:13 AM EST.  NASASpaceflight's channel on YouTube will also cover the launch starting at 4:13.  Following stage separation, B1067 will land on the A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) drone ship, which will be stationed SE of the cape in the Atlantic.

SpaceX says that in the event of problems, there are backup windows available until 7:11 AM Wednesday and starting at 5:37 on Thursday, 12/5. 

This is the first of another group of three launches spread between the two Florida and one California launch pads.  Following the Starlink 6-70 mission are the Starlink 9-14 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SLC-4E at 10:05 PM EST Wednesday night and the SiriusXM-9 satellites from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center, 11:10 AM EST Thursday morning.

The fourth mission of B1067, launching the Crew-4 flight to the ISS, April 27, 2022 and landing on ASOG as it will for this launch. Screen captures from the video stream.

Mind-Blowing Numbers on the Falcon 9

I stumbled across the headline that “Falcon 9 reaches a flight rate 30 times higher than shuttle at 1/100th the cost” over on Ars Technica today. My first reaction is that flight rate probably isn't a fair comparison because while the Falcon 9 is approved for crewed missions ("man-rated") a tiny percentage of Falcon 9 flights are with a crew while all shuttle missions were manned. It's just the more I read, the more mind-blowing it gets. 

Author Eric Berger starts out with some of the same numbers covered here in Saturday's post - things like the record fast booster turnaround of Booster 1080, the 400th mission on the night of Saturday Nov. 23rd from Vandenberg Space Force Base, and the two launches within 3 hours in the early morning of Saturday Nov. 30, all of which were in my post. 

This brought the total number of launches in November to 16, a new company record over the old launch record of 14. 

The company's vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, said on the social media site X that SpaceX plans to attempt 15 additional Falcon rocket launches in December.

While they clearly aren't a Falcon 9 launch, the two Falcon Heavy launches they had this year count as two launches, but it's really six Falcon 9 first stages.  

So far this year, SpaceX has launched a total of 119 Falcon 9 rockets, for an average of a launch every 2.3 days. The company has already superseded its previous record total for annual Falcon 9 launches, 92, completed last year. If SpaceX achieves its goal of 15 additional Falcon 9 launches this month, it would bring the company's total this year to 134 flights. If you add two Falcon Heavy missions to that, it brings the total to 136 launches.

This probably started the comparisons because over the three decades it flew, NASA's Space Shuttle flew 135 missions - right between just Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 + Falcon Heavy launches for the year. SpaceX looks as though they will fly as many Falcon 9 missions in one year as the Shuttle flew in its 31 year career.

Is it a fair comparison?  Here's where you get to really hard to answer questions. The shuttle was undeniably more complex than the Falcon 9, and (as mentioned already) every mission was crewed.  It was a bigger ship that carried bigger payloads, while the Falcon 9 was specifically designed under the guide that "the best part is no part." It was designed with "better, faster, cheaper" computers and decades more experience at optimizing engine design.

The principal goal of the Falcon program was to demonstrate rapid, low-cost reusability. By one estimate, it cost NASA about $1.5 billion to fly a single space shuttle mission. (Like the Falcon 9, the shuttle was mostly but not completely reusable.) SpaceX's internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are estimated to be as low as $15 million. So SpaceX has achieved a flight rate about 30 times higher than the shuttle at one-hundredth the cost.

Space enthusiast Ryan Caton also crunched the numbers on the number of SpaceX launches this year compared to some of its competitors. So far this year, SpaceX has launched as many rockets as Roscosmos has since 2013, United Launch Alliance since 2010, and Arianespace since 2009. This year alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more times than the Ariane 4, Ariane 5, or Atlas V rockets each did during their entire careers.

Ryan Caton's Tweet 

The Odds and Ends of Thanksgiving Weekend

The weekend started out on a fun note. A couple of weeks ago, we heard from my nephew inviting us to Thanksgiving at his house as opposed to my brother's house in South Florida where we've been gathering for decades.  It was shaping up to be a family get together like we haven't had, not just in years, but some of the group has never gotten together. 

Nephew is around 5 months older than my son, but while I've known him since he was in diapers, there have been times when we saw each other more often.  Suffice it to say that several years ago, we went through a stretch of hardly ever seeing each other due to the place he was working.  He ended up in West Central Florida and around three years ago, got married. Last January, first child was born. We still hadn't met his wife or the "great niece" (I think that's the relationship). 

The place where they live is one of those areas of Florida with no easy way to get to. While it's about 65 miles between us "as the crow flies," every route the mapping software came up with was around twice that mileage and a two hour drive. 

It was a very nice afternoon, getting to see folks that (in a couple of cases) I hadn't talked to since the late '70s, or early '80s.  Great niece is adorable, and at 10 months, not walking much and not very vocal.

The slide into negative experiences started Saturday morning. I've written many times about our "old man" cat, Mojo, or just plain Moe as we tend to call him. A couple of years ago, he got started on some medication for some blood cell count issues and he has responded very well to the meds he's on.  It'll be three years that he has been under treatment this February.

Saturday morning, I found some blood near one of his food bowls. It looked like he had coughed or sneezed because it was a lot of drops.  As the day went by, we found more blood in more places, but with the exception of some blood very visible on his white fur, no evidence to show this hadn't all happened the previous night. He sneezed a few times, but never expelled any blood, so it was hard to figure.

Until about 10PM last night.  We have two chairs in the radio room, one at the operating position and the other at my workbench. He likes to come into the shack and be social - or just be near me while he takes a nap.  I heard an odd, almost bubbling sound, turned around and he was bleeding from his left nostril. The chair was bloody, blood was dripping onto the floor from sneezing, and more.  After a few minutes it stopped and we put aside our plans to go to a nearby veterinary emergency clinic that's open 24/7.  

He came to bed with us, as always, and in the morning there were no signs of a repeat.  

Until close to 2PM when we heard him sneezing again, this time in the living room.  Again, bleeding from his left nostril, and blood spraying when he sneezed. Again, it didn't last long, and it wasn't what I'd think of as a lot of blood. Maybe a tablespoon.  Maybe.

So it has been a weekend that started with a fun get together and is ending with a couple of nerve-wracking days. His regular vet opens as usual tomorrow morning and we'll call to try to get in ASAP. 

A positive side is that I finally fixed the gate issue caused by Tropical Storm Milton back in October.  The gate now latches and stays latched. I'm not "Done done" - I still have some position tweaking and most of all, patching all the holes where the hardware ripped out. And cleaning the damned fence.

It took too long to figure out how to approach this, but after trying a bunch of times to figure out how to replace the side that got ripped out, it occurred to me that the height of the latch really isn't critical, so why not lower both sides and install both in fresh PVC, around two inches lower than they were?

The piece that was ripped out of the gate is in the red box, but both sides got lowered about an inch.
 

Small Space News Story Roundup 47

It has been a 3 sigma, maybe 4 to 6, kind of day. By which I mean nowhere near normal. So a couple of little things that I thought were interesting/cool to pass on. 

Rocket Lab sets a novel record

At least, I think it's novel. 

Two Electron rockets took flight Sunday, one from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula and the other from Wallops Island, Virginia, making Rocket Lab the first commercial space company to launch from two different hemispheres in a 24-hour period, Payload reports.

I question whether it's a record because there's no mention of how many companies can launch in two different hemispheres.  Maybe it's a record because nobody else can even try to do it. BTW, the Sunday being referred to was the 26th. 

SpaceX sets a new company record for turnaround time of a booster between flights

Less than 14 days after its previous flight, a Falcon 9 booster took off again from Florida's Space Coast early Monday to haul 23 more Starlink internet satellites into orbit, Spaceflight Now reports. The booster, numbered B1080 in SpaceX's fleet of reusable rockets, made its 13th trip to space before landing on SpaceX's floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The launch marked a turnaround of 13 days, 12 hours, and 44 minutes from this booster's previous launch November 11, also with a batch of Starlink satellites. The previous record turnaround time between flights of the same Falcon 9 booster was 21 days.

... on the way to another milestone/record ...

400 and still going ... SpaceX's launch prior to this one was on Saturday night, when a Falcon 9 carried a set of Starlinks aloft from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The flight Saturday night [the 23rd of November - SiG] was the 400th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket since 2010, and SpaceX's 100th launch from the West Coast.

This morning had two Falcon 9 launches within just over 3 hours of each other; the first was a Starlink mission for SLC-40 on Cape Canaveral SFS, at 12:00 AM on the 30th. The second was the NROL-126 mission which also carried 20 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, at 12:10 AM local (Pacific time) or 3:10 AM here on the East coast.

All told, there were four Falcon 9 launches since that number 400 launch described above, but I don't see a count of launches for 2024 alone.  With just four weeks left in the year, that should give us a good feel for how many launches they'll get this year.  

File photo of a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SLC-4E. Image credit: SpaceX 

Voyager 1's Communications Issue Fixed, Back to X-Band

Back at the first of the month, we heard the story that two weeks earlier Voyager 1 had switched to its backup transmitter, down at S-Band - a transmitter that hadn't been used since 1981. 

As predictable as anything can be, the 47 year old Voyagers are doing two thing continually as they age.  First, they're going farther into interstellar space every second.  Voyager 1, for example is 15.4 billion miles from the Sun; the distance from Earth varies more as our rotation around the sun adds and subtracts miles over the course of a year - but that's in the next decimal place after the "4." 

Secondly, they're gradually losing power.  Their Radioisotope Thermal Generators are slowly degrading, losing 4 watts per year. As predictable as the power loss is, over the years more and more of the instruments on the Voyagers have been shut off to reduce power drain. Only four of Voyager 1's instruments remain powered but they're all operating at lower temperatures than they were ever designed and tested for. When some concerns about those temperature excursions started being considered, it was thought that borrowing "a few" watts for some onboard heaters would be a good thing.

So, when engineers commanded Voyager 1 to switch on one of its heaters to give the instruments a gentle thermal massage, a safety feature was tripped because of low power levels. The spacecraft's fault protection system monitors how much energy Voyager 1 has left, and if it deems there to be too little energy for the probe to continue operating, it automatically switches off non-essential systems. It seems that the heater was using too much energy, but the problem was that all the non-essential systems had been switched off long ago to conserve what little power remained, so the fault protection system took it upon itself to switch off the main X-band transmitter and activate the lower-power S-band transmitter instead. 

That description is a bit too anthropomorphic for me; this isn't AI, it's a simpler computer than anything the vast majority of us have ever seen; it was designed in the early 1970s. I'd prefer to say the conditions Voyager was seeing weren't thought of when the software was written and it merely executed code that had the same effect - shutting down the X-band  transmitter.  

The problem was understood early in November and the fix implemented. X-band communication resumed on Nov. 18, with the spacecraft once again returning data from its four remaining instruments: the Low-Energy Charged Particle Experiment, the Cosmic-Ray Telescope the Triaxial Fluxgate Magnetometer and the Plasma Waves Experiment. 

Next summer will be the 48th anniversaries of the two Voyager satellites launches: Voyager 2 launched first on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, just over two weeks later.  Everyone is hoping to see the two make their 50th anniversary in 2027.  

Artist’s illustration of one of the Voyager spacecraft. Credit: Caltech/NASA-JPL

Happy Thanksgiving 2024!

Much like last year, it was a busy day with little things to do that always either take longer than expected or just don't go as expected.  Another thing like last year is we had a SpaceX launch last night that was originally slotted for 10:05 PM, and it kept getting delayed, until it finally went up after we'd given up on waiting up for the night, launching at 11:41 PM.  Last year it was all later times: the first announced launch time was 11:01 PM local and when it actually went at 2:47 AM. 

As usual, we'll be joining my brother's extended family for the holiday with one big exception. Bro's son, my only nephew, got married before Thanksgiving last year, and will be hosting us tomorrow.  We have never met his wife and their first child. While my brother lives a pretty easy 2-1/2-ish hour drive south of us with interstate virtually the whole way, nephew lives on the west side of the state; not as far as the coast, but there's no direct, easy way to get there.  As the crow flies, it's around 70 miles, but any route the map programs give me are in the vicinity of 110 to 120 miles. So two hours driving instead of one, each way. 

A happy and blessed Thanksgiving to all.  May all of you enjoy a wonderful day with your families and friends.  Or by yourself, if that's your day.  However you spend your Thanksgiving, I wish you the best.  Take some time to be deliberately thankful - even for the troubles of life.  Yeah, being grateful for troubles sounds odd, but it sure seems in retrospect that growth occurs in response to trouble, not in response to idyllic wonderfulness. 

Thanks to the EMTs, Nurses, Doctors, LEOs, Firefighters and others who work Thanksgiving so we can have the day off.  Thanks to the military men and women who keep the barbarians from the gates and give us the chance to relax.  For now, eat, drink, and be merry. While there are positive signs in the changes going around since the election, we've got to know the bad actors are mostly still in place.  So who knows what the next year brings?  

And remember your shopping cart for Black Friday. Number 127 in a series.  No, not 127 years worth. That means I've been getting emails for black Friday sales since July and I estimate 127 days.