A Gorgeous Day to Return to the Ground

I'm sure virtually everyone has heard the Crew-9 mission came to a successful conclusion today, returning to splashdown into the Gulf of America off the Florida Panhandle at 5:57 PM EDT today. 

Crew-9 undocked from the ISS and began its nearly 17 hour voyage home at 1:05 AM EDT this morning (Tuesday).

“On behalf of Crew-9, I’d like to say it was a privilege to call the station home, to live and work and be a part of a mission and a team that spans the globe, working together in cooperation for the benefit of humanity,” said NASA astronaut and Crew-9 commander Nick Hague as he and his crew drifted away from the orbiting outpost.

“To our colleagues and dear friends who remain on the station … we know the station’s in great hands. We’re excited to see what you guys are going to accomplish.”

Crew-9 Commander Nick Hague and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who flew to the station last September 28, returned to Earth after having logged 171 days in space.  Their crewmates, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, returned with 286 days in space.  As you'll remember that's thanks to the decision to send Starliner back to the ground unmanned.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon "Freedom" with the Crew-9 and Starliner astronauts on board splashes down under four parachutes off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida on March 18, 2025. (Image credit: NASA+)

It was really quite a pretty day in the Gulf up there today and there are eye-popping videos from lots of sources.  The skies were a beautiful blue, and photogenic as can be.  The four parachutes visible in this photo fall to the Gulf so slowly it almost looked like animation.  A pod of dolphins came up to the capsule to see what all the commotion in the water was from.  

So what's next?  Well, for the ISS, it's business as usual.  Crew-10 will be in place for the regular more-or-less six months.  Work will resume.  For the crew, they'll be given some extra time off - particularly Butch and Suni with their nearly 10 months in space.  There's always time off for recuperation, getting used to being in normal gravity and such.  

SpaceX looks to be ready to launch a privately-funded, crewed mission we first talked about last August - the first manned flight to go into a polar orbit, called Fram 2. NextSpaceflight shows the launch currently scheduled for Monday Mar 31, 2025 at 11:00 PM EDT.

The four commercial astronauts of the Fram2 mission pose inside a Dragon spacecraft training capsule at SpaceX facilities in Hawthorne, California. From left to right: Eric Philips, Rabea Rogge, Jannicke Mikkelsen and Chun Wang, leader and funder of  Fram2's mission.  He's the equivalent of Jared Isaacman on Polaris Dawn and his missions.  Image credit: SpaceX

Good Night Blue Ghost and Thanks for Everything

We knew it was only going to operate for one lunar day, but it was still a little surprising to say goodnight and goodbye to Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Sunday evening after lunar sunset at its landing site on the Mare Crisium Sunday the 16th.  New Moon, after all, is March 29th so parts of the moon still have nearly two Earth weeks of sunlight left.  It's just that the Sea of Crises is closer to the eastern limb, so sunrise and set both happen earlier on the calendar there than farther west on the moon.  

Blue Ghost landed on the moon at 3:34 EST on Sunday March 2nd, so shutting down on the 16th meant 14 days of operation on the moon which was the targeted life of the mission they called Ghost Riders in the Sky. 

"We battle-tested every system on the lander and simulated every mission scenario we could think of to get to this point," Blue Ghost Chief Engineer Will Coogan said in a Firefly statement today (March 17) that announced the end of the mission.

"But what really sets this team apart is the passion and commitment to each other," he added. "Our team may look younger and less experienced than those of many nations and companies that attempted moon landings before us, but the support we have for one another is what fuels the hard work and dedication to finding every solution that made this mission a success."

Blue Ghost was part of NASA's CLPS program - Commercial Lunar Payload Services - and was carrying 10 different payloads for the agency. 

The lander beamed home a total of 119 gigabytes (GB) of data, including 51 GB of science information, before going dark as expected on Sunday at around 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT), according to Firefly.  
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"We're incredibly proud of the demonstrations Blue Ghost enabled, from tracking GPS signals on the moon for the first time to robotically drilling deeper into the lunar surface than ever before," [Firefly CEO Jason] Kim said. "We want to extend a huge thank you to the NASA CLPS initiative and the White House administration for serving as the bedrock for this Firefly mission. It has been an honor to enable science and technology experiments that support future missions to the moon, Mars and beyond."

Firefly documented all 10 of the science payloads on their own website in their "Farewell Blue Ghost" post.  And a YouTube channel called iGadgetPro that I think I watched for the first time ever had a video about the mission closing down that included this text that was left on screen for 30 seconds.  That's a long time for a video that's three minutes long.

Screen capture from the iGadgetPro video.

First Private Mission to Venus Coming Together

Time for a memory jog.  Do you remember that back in 2020, Rocket Lab announced plans to launch the first private mission to Venus.  A search through the blog here shows the mission apparently slipped from it's original 2023 launch goal until 2025 as noted in a report in Space.com published in June 2023.  

The latest news is from today, also at Space.com, and reveals that the current target is in summer of '26.   

"We missed our January 2025 launch window and now wait until the next one summer 2026," said MIT's Sara Seager, a professor of planetary science and leader of the Morningstar Missions to Venus team – a series of planned missions designed to investigate the possibility of life in Venus' clouds.

Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, report progress in installing a heat shield on what's the first private spacecraft targeted for Venus.  The mission, originally intended to launch on Rocket Lab's low lift Electron rocket, has now been upgraded to their bigger Neutron.  The Neutron has yet to fly but that's looking to be getting closer to its first flight tests.  

The goal is to survive the hellish temperatures of Venus' atmosphere down to the surface, and use instruments designed to measure autofluorescence and backscattered polarized radiation to detect the presence of organic molecules in the clouds.  

To survive the temperatures that it will be exposed to, the probe will be protected by a shield NASA imaginatively named HEEET, or Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology developed at Ames.

Engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center complete a fit check of the two halves of a space capsule that will study the clouds of Venus for signs of life. (Image credit: NASA/Brandon Torres Navarrete)

HEET is a textured material covering the bottom of the capsule, a woven heat shield designed to protect spacecraft from temperatures up to 4,500 degrees Fahrenheit (2482 degrees C).

Much like how the current landers on the moon have short expected lifespans because the temperatures are beyond what semiconductors have typically been rated to survive, the Venus probe (apparently unnamed) has this mission profile published.  Times are in seconds.  The right side of the curve is at 1 hour, 3600 seconds. It seems, though, the observations will be long over by that time.

The science phase of the Rocket Lab Mission to Venus targets the Venus cloud layer between 72 and 97 miles altitude, enabling around 330 seconds - 5-1/2 minutes - of science observations. (Image credit: NASA/Ames Research Center)

How many years and how much money has been spent to get 330 seconds of data from Venus?  I don't know but it's a bit of perspective on space science.  Brings to mind the Ranger lunar probes from the early 1960s, flying into the moon taking pictures and beaming them back down until they crashed into the moon. 

Well, This is Kinda Embarassing

I noticed something rather surprising this week, and honestly didn't know quite what to do about it.

You see, last month was this blog's 15th anniversary.

I've never missed a blogiversary before.  My actual first posting was Sunday, February 21, 2010.  Since dates move around, instead of celebrating on February 21, I've just used the last Sunday in February.  This year that fell on February 23rd and there was a bunch of little stuff going that just made me forget that all.  Since I'm three weeks late, I could get all Anal-Retentive and say it's my 15-3/52nd or 15.096 blogiversary but then I'd be guaranteed to not find an image to use here.  

So here 'tis

Image by Vecteezy, as it says.  They appear to accept that their images will get used by blogs with no revenue like this one and offer various levels of membership that aren't required.

BTW, these anniversary symbols serve a purpose when I'm looking for old images to reuse. If I can find the first time I used it, the anniversary posts are markers in the calendar to look around. Those of you who use Blogger probably already know this. 

As always, I thank you for stopping by. It's hard to know how many people stop by to read by Blogger's stats. Over the last month, views per day stayed in the 2000-2500 range, going up around my real (February) anniversary to a peak at 14,537 on 2/20.  The stats blogger gives for the last 30 days look like this:

I suspect the peaks are some sort of hacking, perhaps even attacks that Blogger handled.  The annual stats are even weirder, with peaks over 25,000 views per day around the end of May and early June of '24.  This is why I say it's hard to know how many valid visitors a blog gets.  

This will be post 5,208 and at my typical one post/day, I'll hit 5,500 in about 292 days, which is the end of the year.  

If you've read down this far, what are you doing? Just kidding. Double thanks.

Miscellaneous Pi Day Musings

Pi day

So it's pi day - only in countries that use the same month first, day second like the USA - 3/14.  Which we'll write as 3.14 just once a year.

According to Wikipedia, it's the US, Philippines, Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands.  The last two were US territories until the 1980s while the Philippines became independent from the US in 1946 after WWII. The rest of the world will never have a pi day.

In addition to being pi day, it's also Albert Einstein's birthday and the day that Steven Hawking shuffled off this mortal coil. I think nobody in the current generation of scientists has been compared to Einstein as much as Hawking was.  It's interesting they have the same day as major bookmarks in their lives.  One checking in, one checking out.

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

About last night's lunar eclipse

Lunar eclipses aren't very rare.  A particular eclipse isn't necessarily visible every where but wherever you live, in the area that's exposed to it, you'll pretty much see the same thing.  Unlike the solar eclipses where if you're not within a handful of miles of the centerline of its path, you'll see something very different than if you're right on the centerline.  

Last night, though was a very rare eclipse because Firefly's Blue Ghost lander was able to photograph it from the moon and beam the photo back down.  

Sky watchers in the Americas had a beautiful view of the 90 minute event. For a small number of astronomers, however, the real action happened a quarter million miles away in Mare Crisium, where Blue Ghost watched the eclipse from the other direction. Eric Allen of Quebec, Canada, created this composite of both views:

Just to be clear, Blue Ghost is in that roundish dark area next to the right edge of the visible side of the moon, just above the midline.  From the moon, Blue Ghost was photographing the sun passing in front of the sun.  In other words, Blue Ghost was looking at us looking at the moon.  Image credit to Eric Allen, posted at SpaceWeather.com

I was mildly surprised to see  SpaceWeather.com say that this wasn't the first time that a lunar lander watched and photographed a lunar eclipse from the moon.  On April 24, 1967, a television camera on NASA's Surveyor III took a picture of the Earth blocking out the sun over Oceanus Procellarum.  The picture is lower resolution and less interesting looking than the one above. 

The Crew-10 flight is on the way

We were able to watch SpaceX's crew dragon launch tonight, carrying Crew-10 to the ISS and starting the mission to return Crew-9 with Butch and Suni.  Launch was at 7:03PM EDT.  The Dragon is expected to dock autonomously to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at approximately 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 15. Shortly after docking, the crew will join Expedition 72/73 for a long-duration stay aboard the orbiting laboratory. 

NASA’s live coverage resumes at 9:45 p.m., March 15, on NASA+ with rendezvous, docking, and hatching opening. After docking, the crew will change out of their spacesuits and prepare cargo for offload before opening the hatch between Dragon and the space station’s Harmony module around 1:05 a.m., Sunday, March 16. Once the new crew is aboard the orbital outpost, NASA will broadcast welcome remarks from Crew-10 and farewell remarks from the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 crew, beginning at about 1:40 a.m.

...

The number of crew aboard the space station will increase to 11 for a short time as Crew-10 joins NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Don Pettit, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner. Following a brief handover period, Hague, Williams, Wilmore, and Gorbunov will return to Earth no earlier than Wednesday, March 19.Ahead of Crew-9’s departure from station, mission teams will review weather conditions at the splashdown sites off the coast of Florida.

Intuitive Machines IM-2/Athena Mission Summary

If the important goals of a mission include to learn what not to do the same way if it fails, Athena's mission taught a lot. This might be the last public telling of the Athena stories, and there's a lot to digest in there. 

The Athena spacecraft was not exactly flying blind as it approached the lunar surface one week ago. The software on board did a credible job of recognizing nearby craters, even with elongated shadows over the terrain. However, the lander's altimeter had failed.

So while Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, the lander did not know how far it was above the surface.

Not knowing its altitude above the surface was a critical detail. The lander struck the surface on a plateau, toppled over, and began to skid.  It rotated a couple of times before coming to rest in a cold, dark crater.  Intuitive Machines' CEO, Steve Altemus, said, "the landing was kind of like sliding into second base."  

Expectations were high for this mission given that a year ago, IM's first lander (Odysseus) became the first private spacecraft to land on the moon.  For a couple of moments before it fell over.  

In some ways, this mission was even more disappointing. Because Athena skidded across the lunar surface, it dredged up regolith. When it came to a stop, some of this material was blown up into the solar panels—already in a sub-optimal location on its side. The spacecraft's power reserves, therefore, were limited. Almost immediately, the team at Intuitive Machines knew their spacecraft was dying.

"We knew we had slid into a slightly shadowed crater, and the temperature was very cold," Altemus said. "The solar arrays had regolith on them, and they weren't charging, the ones pointing up, enough to give us sufficient power to power the heaters to keep it warm enough to survive."

The temperature in the crater where Athena ended up was approximately minus 280° Fahrenheit (minus 173° C). With the solar arrays generating only about 100 watts of power, there was not enough energy to both power the spacecraft's heaters as well as communicate back to Earth using Athena's high-gain antenna. So instead of limping along for 50 hours, mission operators decided to operate as robustly as they could for 13 hours, and get down as much data as they could.

During those few hours - and the few before the landing - Athena was able to gather useful information.  By landing near the south pole, Athena returned valuable data and imagery to NASA about the area around Mons Mouton.  Their private customers, including Nokia and Lonestar Data Holdings, were able to get some useful information from their payloads.  

In the big picture sense, though, these are simply bright spots in an otherwise disappointing mission. 

Yet what Altemus wants people to understand—which he acknowledges is somewhat difficult to explain—is that this mission was largely a success. What can he possibly mean by that?
...
"It's like losing a Final Four game or an NBA title," he said. "You lose it, and then what do you do? You don't give up. You go back in, you start training again, you start working out again, and that's what the team's doing."

Compared to Odysseus a year ago, Athena flew smoothly.  Altemus reported that during last year's mission every day started with each shift coming in to put out the fire of the day; while Athena made it all the way to within miles above the Moon without significant problems. 

In addition, the company proved out its communications technology that will be used as part of a lunar data relay network that NASA has contracted with Intuitive Machines to develop. Moreover, Athena attempted to land within a few degrees of the south pole, a challenging location due to the solar angle and uneven terrain, and made it down without crashing.

An unsettling part of this mission is that failure of Athena's altimeter; unsettling because Odysseus was also impacted by the failure of its altimeter.  

Although it was a different problem with the spacecraft's altimeter this time—it's still unclear why Athena's rangefinder failed, perhaps due to a thermal or vibration event—it is frustrating to fail for a similar reason. But all the pieces for success are there, and in the demanding environment of spaceflight, Intuitive Machines is close, Altemus said.

Athena on approach to its most important step: landing. Image credit: Intuitive Machines

Final words to CEO Steve Altemus:

"I would say it's more disappointing than really a material setback," Altemus said. "The world was watching, and we put our heart and soul into this company and this vehicle. And I look in the eyes of the team, and they had such ambitions for this mission, Athena and Gracie the hopper. I mean, it was a big leap. It might have been too big a leap on the second mission."

SpaceX Launches SPHEREx and PUNCH for NASA

Last night, March 11 local, SpaceX launched a pair of NASA science missions that will explore the infrared universe and study the solar wind.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 11:10 p.m. Eastern. It placed into sun-synchronous orbits the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) spacecraft and the four satellites of the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission. All five spacecraft were in contact with controllers and functioning as expected after launch, the agency stated.

SPHEREx may sound familiar because I did a post about this mission at the end of January, about six weeks ago, and used this picture. 

NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory was photographed at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in November 2024 after completing environmental testing. The spacecraft’s three concentric cones help direct heat and light away from the telescope and other components, keeping them cool. Credit: BAE Systems

SPHEREx is what's called a NASA medium Explorer-class mission that will perform an all-sky infrared spectroscopic survey imaging the sky in 102 wavelength bands from 0.75 to 5 microns.  The unique-looking telescope with the three cones create a wide-field telescope with a diameter of 20 centimeters.  The spacecraft will be able to complete a single scan of the entire sky in six months.  The overall cost was $488 million.

“Even though SPHEREx uses a small telescope, it looks at the universe in a new way,” said Jaime Bock, principal investigator for the mission at Caltech, during a briefing in January about the mission. “This new capability allows us to address some of the most compelling questions in astronomy.”

Those questions fall into three key themes: studying the early universe, including the era of cosmic inflation immediately after the Big Bang; the formation and evolution of galaxies through the history of the universe; and measurements of water and organic materials in the Milky Way galaxy.

PUNCH, the other mission, has had virtually zero coverage here.  As the first quoted paragraph mentioned, PUNCH is a constellation of four small (64-kg or 141 lb) satellites meant to study the sun.  Three of the four carry wide-field imagers to observe the sun while the fourth has a narrow-field imager.  The mission's goal is to conduct the first three dimensional models of the sun's corona.  

The four spacecraft will work in conjunction, taking images of the sun using different polarizing filters as well as unpolarized images. Scientists will use the images to construct three-dimensional maps of the corona to study how it transitions into the solar wind and the effects of events like coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, from the sun that can create space weather events at Earth.

“The PUNCH scientists hope to better understand the entire inner solar system from the sun, through the corona, out into the inner solar system, and how that material impacts Earth,” said Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, at that briefing.

The four PUNCH smallsats will orbit the Earth to perform three-dimensional mapping of the solar corona.  Reminder of the standard disclaimers: not to scale, artist's concept and all that.  Image Credit: NASA

Dr. Viall says that “The sun is never quiet.  It’s constantly having little explosions. So, even when there’s not a big space weather event, even when there’s not a big CME, there’s still little events that constantly bombard our Earth. PUNCH is the first instrument to have the sensitivity and the resolution to be able to see that daily space weather.”

It has long been my belief from my ham radio experiences that the big events don't always have the same effects, so we must be missing something else going on around the same times.  One day with a planetary geomagnetic index Kp=3 can be different from another with all the indices the same - or so it seems.  Watching the space weather forecasts can make you realize just how good the terrestrial weather forecasts are.  I'm looking forward to seeing if they get better. 

There's more coming this weekend.   Another heliophysics mission, a trio of smallsats called Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) to study the aurora, will launch on the SpaceX Transporter-13 rideshare mission scheduled for as soon as March 15 at 2:39 AM EDT, also from Vandenberg SFB.

Space Station Crew 10 Mission Launches Wednesday Evening

The ISS Crew 10 mission is preparing to launch Wednesday in the early evening, 7:48 PM EDT, from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral.  Lately the mission has been most often mentioned as replacing Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams' and enabling their ride home from their eight-day turned eight-month Starliner mission.  That's not quite right; they won't return home in the Dragon capsule Endurance launching Crew 10; they're returning with the other two astronauts from the Crew-9 Dragon Freedom launched last summer.

The Dragon spacecraft supporting this mission previously flew NASA’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 missions to and from the space station. Following stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage will land on Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  

The crew consists of NASA astronauts Crew-10 Commander Anne McClain, Pilot Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.  For an on-time launch, the Crew-10 foursome would dock to the orbital outpost at 6 a.m. on Thursday and begin their long-duration mission as Expedition 72 flight engineers. 

Image assembled from individual images on the SpaceX mission page. Image credit: NASA

NASA does these crew swaps roughly every six months, and one of the routine steps is that the new Expedition crew overlaps with the old crew for around a week to make a smoother fransfer to the new expedition.  We'll know more about when and where the reentry will take place over the coming week.  The NASA ISS Blog gives more info on exactly what the crew has been doing.

EDIT TO ADD (3/12 @ 7:30 PM EDT - 0030 UTC on 3/13):  And... scrubbed tonight due to ground hydraulic issue with one of the clamp arms.

 

Blue Ghost's using GPS on the moon due to radio hams

An interesting little story showed up today on QRZ.com, a ham radio site.  It references one of the ham radio satellites called Amsat Oscar-40 or AO-40 and how radio amateurs determined how to use GPS from the moon.

Breaking down that bunch of new terms, Amsat is the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, a group of volunteers who have been helping get amateur radio satellites into orbit since the 1960s.  Amsat was formed in the District of Columbia in 1969 as an educational organization.  Oscar is the acronym from "orbiting satellite carrying amateur radio." Project Oscar launched the first ham satellite on December 12, 1961, barely four years after the launch of Russia’s first Sputnik.

American ham Frank Bauer, KA3HDO, convinced NASA to sponsor the first experiment on the AO-40 mission.  There is documentation of those results (pdf alert) searchable online.  You'll see that the document linked to there is dated October of 2001.  AO-40 was in a group of satellites that Amsat was developing to fly in orbits that took them farther from Earth than earlier satellites, but was retired in 2003, due to some hardware failure. 

For his work Frank Bauer was awarded the Dayton Hamvention's Amateur of the Year in 2017. 

Amateur Radio on the International Space Station International Chair Frank Bauer, KA3HDO, is Hamvention’s 2017 Amateur of the Year. Bauer has been a driving force behind the program since its inception. He also serves as AMSAT-NA Vice President for Human Spaceflight.

In the mid-1990s, Bauer proposed an experiment to have the high-Earth orbit (HEO) AMSAT Phase 3D satellite (AO-40) measure the signal strength of the GPS satellite constellation. The AO-40 experiment subsequently has been cited often in aerospace literature, as it remained the most comprehensive above-the-constellation data source for nearly a decade and led to changes in the system’s specifications and applications. The results of the AO-40 experiment jump started a game-changing transformation in navigation at HEO/GEO altitudes, enabling new and exciting missions in these orbits.

Frank KA3HDO is also named as a consultant on the international team that developed the current Moon lander package named LuGRE.

LuGRE (from "Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment" and pronounced like luger) has been credited with getting GNSS navigation to Blue Ghost on the moon. GNSS refers to the Global Navigation Satellite System, and LuGRE is only working with the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) and European Union’s Galileo.  The receiver on blue ghost was developed by Qascom, an Italian aerospace company.

The goal of the experiment is to access this extensive system from the moon for position, navigation and timing (PNT).  The issue of timing on the moon is something we talked about almost a year ago, April of '24. 

The joint NASA, Italian Space Agency, Qascom, and PoliTO LuGRE team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Image uncredited on QRZ.

Much like Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander itself, LuGRE is part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program.  A short (1-1/2 minute) video about the concept has been posted for a couple of months.

Personally, ham radio satellites have been "up there" for my entire life as a ham, and while I've listened to the downlinks a few times, including from hams on the Space Shuttles long before the ISS and its permanent ham station, I've never had a contact through the satellites.  Whatever you're into.

Going After the Junk Science

Tonight’s ramble is going to be my take on the MAHA movement.  My view is heavily influenced by the years (in the early 1970s) when I studied biochemistry through my junior year of college.  I imagine some people will throw that out as being too “establishment,” but I think there are good things to talk about and ideas to spread around down this road.

The first thing I stumbled across that made me pay attention to RFK Jr. was him saying that in the past, autism struck something like 1 in 10,000 kids while today it’s 1 in 34.  Put another way, it has gone from a 0.0001 portion (0.01% of kids) to (1/34 or 0.0294 (2.94%)  At almost 300 times the previous percentage, that’s a monstrous increase and it really needs to be investigated.  

The problem is that we don’t know, as proven by any real science, why this has happened.  Some people will say vaccinations, but we have just as much proof of that as we do that it was chem trails or that chem trails are simply jet engine exhaust, or anything else.  So how do we establish a cause with as little doubt as we can?  How do we prove if one specific thing causes an effect? 

As I quipped the other day, junk science is a favorite topic of mine, but we have enough now.  We don't need to add volumes more junk in the effort to improve the many widely quoted statistics. 

The gold standard way to really prove causation is double-blinded, randomized, controlled trials (I’ll just call them RCTs because that seems to be common) – and potentially a LOT of those RCTs.  The golden rule here is the bigger the population being experimented on the better.  That makes these sorts of studies hard to do, take a long time, and burn dumpsters full of money.

So what are RCTs?  A controlled trial is an experiment with two groups: the experimental group that gets the thing being tested and a second group called the control that gets something expected to have no effect at all, usually called a placebo.  (While many people envision something like a sugar pill, sugar clearly has effects on some things so the placebo has to carefully chosen – a placebo for an injection might be “normal saline” or saltwater.)  Randomized means that a group chosen to be used in the study is chosen to be as identical as possible, and exactly which group a subject goes into (experimental or control) is chosen randomly.  Blinding a study means either the subject or the experimenter that gives them their treatment knows which group they’re in; double-blinding means that neither the subject getting the treatment or the person giving them the treatment can know if it’s the real treatment or the placebo. 

I hope you’re seeing a big problem here.  Let’s say we want to find if giving a particular vaccination causes autism.  We need two big groups – the bigger the better – to experiment on.  Then we have to monitor them for however long we think it takes to be able to say “if they haven’t gone autistic by now, they’re not going to.”  How long?  Here’s where the question might not be as long as it could be for other things.  Maybe there’s evidence that if they don’t start showing signs in the first couple months they never do; maybe it’s more like if they don’t show signs in five years they won’t, and maybe it’s 10 years or fully adults.

Now it gets harder to run the tests.  Nobody gets one vaccination; today’s kids get larger numbers than even 30 years ago.  In the RCTs, we can test whether getting two specific vaccines staggered in time however the protocols assign them can cause the autism.  They can’t get any other vaccines or anything the control group doesn’t get.  We need more huge groups to experiment on.  

And it gets even harder; astronomically harder.  In probability and statistics classes they cover how to compute how many possible combinations there are.  It’s worse than this, but let’s assume kids get 15 vaccines and we want to test every combination of two out of the 15 in an RCT.  How many RCTs does it take?

That shows that to test 15 vaccines 2 at a time, takes 105 RCTs.  That would be like 1 vs 2, 1 v 3, up to 1 vs 15 then 2 vs every other, 3 vs every other and so on.  If it’s 30 vaccines, twice that “N” in the calculated number, that 105 jumps to 435.  The last time I did any research on this question, the results were that there have never been any tests like even one of these about interactions between combinations of vaccines, but it has been some years since I looked. 

The shear number and cost of those tests could be one of the reasons it has never been done, however just vaccinating everyone instead of testing it rigorously and carefully should not be the way to approach this.  

This is one of the reasons why science is in such deep trouble these days.  Now think of a harder thing to do an RCT on: dietary guidance.  An example some people might be interested in would be something along the lines of “if I eat something they say is bad for me once a week, let’s say bacon, is that going to shorten my life compared to never eating it.”  To do a rigorous RCT, you’d need to get a couple of groups of lots of people that are genetically similar (to rule out effects from that) and study them from childhood throughout their entire lives.  These two groups would need to eat exactly the same thing as each other at every meal for their entire lives before a conclusion could be reached.  How could they be sure it was that one food unless a number in the test group (that ate the food being tested) died that was statistically higher than the number in the control group? 

This experiment is unethical, to say the least.  The experimenters would have to commit a group of children to being experimented on for their entire lives – long before they could make that decision.  Whoever is paying for the test would have to pay for every single meal for both groups for up to a hundred years.  Kids growing up in either group would have to be isolated.  No going out to meals with friends, no just going out for a late night pizza or any sort of “social eating.”  Not to mention not having a conclusion until long past everyone associated with starting the experiment has passed away.

So what are the alternatives to doing a lifelong RCT?  The approach appears to be to study some number of people who get the treatment and then see if the number is close enough to the general population’s incidence of early death (or whatever they’re interested in).  This is relatively easy; the numbers of people are smaller, they aren’t really subjected to getting a test substance, and they don’t need to be housed separately or cared for differently.  In the case of eating the bacon, we’ll give a group of people forms to record what they eat and when.  The typical way of doing this a questionnaire that’s filled out in retrospect, called a Food-Frequency Questionnaire or FFQ.   It’s not quite the same as someone asking, “what did you have for lunch on March 10, 2023?” two years after the fact, but it’s close.  In processing data from the FFQs, the software could separate out those who claimed to have eaten bacon from those who didn’t claim to and see if their rates of death correlated with the general population. 

As I’ve said over and over, it then becomes a matter of correlations, what I call “he-who” studies: he-who eats 3 ounces of bacon/day correlates with the group that lived the expected lifespan, or lived longer or shorter.  To stretch the example to absurdity, let’s say in the past 50 years, life expectancy in the US has gone up.  Anything that has also increased, or has become more common in the same time range can be correlated; we could say that since global temperature has gone up, global warming is extending lifespans.  The standard method of testing whether that correlation is good enough to claim possible causation is to compare the rate of change (slopes) of the two things.  If they’re within a certain range (typically 5%) the correlation is considered good enough to rule out agreement by random chance.  It’s simply not robust enough, IMO. 

Do you see the immediate problem here?  If autism had increased dramatically at the same time that the number of vaccines increased dramatically, as it did, that's automatically a correlation.  One which could mean exactly nothing.

I've mentioned John P. A. Ioannidis on my pages many times before.  He's the author of what’s widely quoted as one of the most downloaded papers in history, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False,” in which he presents data that as much as 70% of published science is wrong.  One of the features of that document is a list of his ROTs (Rules of Thumb) for what makes papers more likely to be good or bad.  Allow me to post two of them here; I think they're relevant:

Corollary 5: The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. 

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

Both of those seem to explain a lot of "newspaper reported science" perfectly.

Guess What? Another Gotaway Day

I got started on a long piece and just didn't get to the point that I feel comfortable putting it up.  It's not like as bad as last Saturday.  Not much is.

The basic idea is the MAHA movement going on and how I'm good with the concept but my concern is that I'd really like to not see them replace all the bad science we're forced to live with now with worse science.  Junk science is a favorite topic of mine, but we have enough now.  We don't need to add volumes more in the effort to improve the many widely quoted statistics.

I've mentioned John P.A. Ioannidis on my pages many times before.  He's the author of what’s widely cited as one of the most downloaded papers in history, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”, in which he presents data that as much as 70% of published science is wrong.  That's a good number to reduce to as close to zero as we can get, like the national debt.  

So I'll tease that I'm going to work on polishing it up tomorrow.

To be brutally honest, part of the reason for this post is to make sure I can link to this video.  It's a good intro to this subject. 

 

Edit Mar. 9 at 2345 UTC (7:45 PM EDT): in the case of the first link to John P.A. Ioannidis's paper, the host site, PLOS Medicine, changed the URL, so I changed this link to match it.  

And the bad news just keeps on coming...

Last Friday, Feb. 28, was the only time I mentioned an interesting sounding mission from a company called AstroForge a company who plainly says on the front page of that website, “We Mine Asteroids.”  It was the world's first private mission to an asteroid to investigate some ideas for autonomous mining in deep space.

That first link has one that goes to their website and talks about troubles with the probe.  Today we learned it's as good as dead.  

California startup AstroForge launched its Odin spacecraft on Feb. 26, on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that sent Intuitive Machines' IM-2 mission toward the moon. Odin ran into trouble just a few hours later, however, and AstroForge has pretty much given up hope of recovering the 265-pound (120-kilogram) probe.

"The chance of talking with Odin is minimal, as at this point, the accuracy of its position is becoming an issue," the company wrote in an update today (March 6).

AstroForge built Odin in less than 10 months, spending just $3.5 million to do so.  That's not just a tiny fraction of what a similar government-funded space probe would cost, it's a small fraction of what just about every deep space probe costs. 

AstroForge did something the majority of other small startups don't, and put up  a summary page of the mission, "Odin't: A Complete Debrief of Our Deep Space Mission."  It's not your typical small company posting.  As I often do, I include an excerpt to whet your interest. 

TL;DR

• We contacted Odin multiple times on its way to deep space.
• We learned a lot, and many of those changes will be implemented in our next mission, Vestri.
• The chance of talking with Odin is minimal, as at this point, the accuracy of its position is becoming an issue.

Mission Purpose & The Big Picture

We embarked on the Odin mission with a simple yet audacious goal: to push the boundaries of what a privately funded space company can achieve in deep space exploration. The primary objective was to identify whether our models had correctly located a metallic asteroid—one rich in platinum group metals.

But internally, this mission represented something more fundamental: a critical step in our roadmap toward building an actual asteroid mining vehicle.

As our CEO Matt Gialich put it: "We know how to build these craft. These have been built before. They just cost a billion fucking dollars. How do we do it for a fraction of the cost?"

What many don't realize is that 99% of our learnings happened before Odin ever reached the rocket. We learned invaluable lessons about spacecraft construction, wiring, and testing. And while we knew about some of the issues before launch, we made the bold decision to launch anyway—and that made all the difference.

"At the end of the day, like, you got to fucking show up and take a shot, right? You have to try."

Odin Post Separation.  There's a tiny light-colored dot in that green circle; that seems to be Odin  (Credit: Intuitive Machines)

It's an unfortunate conclusion to the February 26 mission that launched Odin, Athena, and Lunar TrailBlazer.  

It's Almost Replay Day

It was a day with a pair of important missions to follow.  First, was the attempt to land the second US-built lander on the moon, Intuitive Machines IM-2 or Athena.  It's worth pointing out this is the second lunar landing in this week alone.  (It's also trivia worth mentioning that both Firefly Aerospace, the makers of Blue Ghost, and Intuitive Machines are located in Texas).  Second was SpaceX's Starship Test Flight, TF-8.  

In the overall big picture sense, both of them were better than their previous milestones but neither one was perfect or even far better than the previous.  More like a replay than a big improvement.  In the first case, that would be Intuitive Machines' IM-1 last year.  In the second, the comparison would be to January's Test Flight 7. 

To borrow a phrase, today's missions weren't exactly the same as the comparison missions but they rhymed.  

In the first case, IM-2, like IM-1 (Odysseus) last year, apparently landed awkwardly.  Watching the NASA/IM video coverage in real time, the mission controllers didn't seem to know that the probe had landed when it was supposed to have.  By the time they terminated the coverage, a half hour after the scheduled landing time, we had a mixed bag of information.  Things like the engine is running (after it was supposed to have landed) then it wasn't running.  The fuel wasn't where they expected it in the tank.  

Beyond that, Crain and the rest of the company, including its chief executive Steve Altemus, could not precisely say what happened. After Athena landed, the engineers in mission control could talk to the spacecraft, and they were able to generate some power from its solar arrays. But precisely where it was, or how it lay on the ground, they could not say a few hours later.

Mission controllers could communicate with the payloads and it sounded like it was all working pretty well, they just didn't know if it was standing up closer to vertical or if it was like Odysseus last year.  Something never explained was keeping them from taking photos and sending them back to Earth.  That can affect all operations, especially big payloads like NASA’s Polar Resource Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME) and the drill from Honeybee Robotics.

In the second case, today's Starship TF-8 started out like January's TF-7.  In that mission, we saw the booster return to Boca Chica and be captured in mid-air, but at about the time that was happening, the Ship was exploding.  Today we saw the booster return to the launch tower and be captured by the chopsticks, and I made note of the display of the status of the six engines on Starship.  This was almost exactly seven minutes after liftoff.  All six of them were in great shape while by that time in TF-7 they were shutting down. 

Note the time in the bottom right panel 8:08, so essentially one minute after the booster capture.  You can see the two vacuum Raptors (big circles) on the left side of the engine pattern are still on but the three, smaller diameter, ground Raptors have shut down.  A few seconds after this screen capture, they were all off.

As the NASASpaceflight guys were going through the video, one of the guys noticed this. Look at the time in this view, 19 seconds before the one above. 

There are more signs of things going seriously wrong in this view.  Now look at the red circle just left of the time.  That bright spot isn't there seconds before this.  The NASA Spaceflight techy guy thinks this the engine getting burned through from the inside.

There's more.  It's hard to see well in this photo but there's an orange mist above the engine on the right with a light blueish-gray mist above that and above the curve that marks the edge of the Starship's body.  He thinks this is raw open fire in the engine compartment.  Which is pretty much what caused FT-7's RUD.  Clearly, the work that SpaceX did to fix Starship wasn't enough.  It delayed the RUD from around the same time as the booster capture, which is close to seven minutes, for around one more minute.  Delaying it two or three minutes instead of one might have saved the mission.

Two missions like these in one day is unusual. They mostly underline the old cliche that space is hard.

 

UPDATE 3/7 at 10:00 AM to add:

Intuitive Machines updated this morning to add that the mission is over:

Images downlinked from Athena on the lunar surface confirmed that Athena was on her side. After landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted.

With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge. The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.

It's looking like NASA lost another mission

As we relayed in last Friday's post, Lunar Trailblazer had run into trouble soon after starting on its way to the moon.  "The probe powered up and began transmitting data after launch, but its operators began noticing power issues and then lost communication with it some 12 hours after launch." 

Today's news hasn't gotten any better.   Probably worse.

In an update published on Tuesday evening, the space agency acknowledged that a mission operations team at the California Institute of Technology is continuing its efforts to reestablish contact with the 200-kg spacecraft intended to orbit the Moon.

"Based on telemetry before the loss of signal last week and ground-based radar data collected March 2, the team believes the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state," the space agency said. "They will continue to monitor for signals should the spacecraft orientation change to where the solar panels receive more sunlight, increasing their output to support higher-power operations and communication."

As a result of this, mission controllers were unable to command thrusters on the satellite to do a course correction that would enable it to attain its planned orbit around the Moon, a polar orbit 100 km above the surface.  If communication could be restored, it's possible that the probe could do some sort of mission, but not the originally intended one to study the form, amount, and location of lunar ice in permanently shadowed craters. 

Pulling a paragraph from last Friday's post:

Lunar Trailblazer was a selection of NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) competition, which provides opportunities for low-cost science spacecraft to ride-share with selected primary missions. To maintain the lower overall cost, SIMPLEx missions have a higher risk posture and less-stringent requirements for oversight and management. This higher risk acceptance bolsters NASA’s portfolio of targeted science missions designed to test pioneering technologies.   

Today's reference link paints a fairly awful picture about these missions.  They list five of these low-cost science missions showing that not one of them succeeded and offered any science return on investment.  Of the five, Trailblazer was a standout.  

It was significantly larger than most of the other SIMPLEx spacecraft, and its cost exceeded the $55 million cap for such missions. Its cost as of late 2022 was $72 million. Due to this higher value, NASA allocated additional resources to ensure its success. Trailblazer's primary contractor was also swapped from Ball Aerospace to Lockheed Martin.

"Lock-mart?"  I might just see your problem.  Another Old Space / Space 1.0 company that needs to answer "so what have you done lately?"  (Editor's note: That link is absolutely not a serious thing.)

In 2022, the Planetary Society did a survey of members to come up with priorities.  They said NASA should increase the cost cap of these missions to $80 million - 45% - to get a higher chance of success. 

Artist's depiction of Lunar Trailblazer at work around the moon. (Image credit: Lockheed Martin Space/Lunar Trailblazer)

Next up to bat, Intuitive Machines' Athena

With the landing of Blue Ghost and beginning of operations in the Sea of Crises (Mare Crisium), the next landing attempt on the moon moves to Intuitive Machine's IM-2 or Athena lander.  Athena, entered her circular lunar orbit on Monday, March 3rd after an engine burn lasting over eight minutes:

The main task in the interval between Monday and Thursday is to verify the orbit's parameters and the probe's health in preparation for the landing.  The "lunar orbit selfies over the next two days" are a bonus, but they're interesting to watch, too.  This link should take you to a video that Athena captured over the Moon's south pole region near her intended landing site, Mons Mouton, which is one of NASA's designated human landing sites for the Artemis campaign.

Intuitive Machines expects a landing opportunity on March 6 at 11:32 a.m. CST. Live landing coverage is scheduled to start at 10:30 a.m. CT / 11:30 a.m. ET on the Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission page and NASA+.  The content on both streams is identical.

After Thursday, the next lander is  looking to be ispace's Resilience, launched alongside Blue Ghost in January.  ispace announced today that they're planning their lunar landing for June 6 at 1924 UTC or 3:24 PM EDT in the US.  However, at almost three months to the day in the future, no telling what could launch by then.

Weekend Score Through Today...

The extended weekend score through today, Monday, March 3 is Firefly 1, SpaceX 0.  We have to restrict this to Firefly's Blue Ghost lander and SpaceX's Starship flight test 8 and ignore things like last night's Falcon 9-carried Starlink 12-20 mission because it was a Falcon 9 launch and not a Starship. Not to mention that it was another Falcon 9 that lifted Blue Ghost into its translunar orbit injection.

That said, congratulations to Firefly's team for successfully landing their Blue Ghost lander on the moon at 3:34 AM EST Sunday morning, making Firefly Aerospace the first private company in world history to achieve that.  The first private lander was Intuitive Machine's IM-1, but although all the paying customers were happy with what they got from their landing on the moon, Odysseus - quickly nicknamed Odie, wasn't considered a successful landing.  During final approach, a leg on the lander broke and after engine cutoff Odie quickly face-planted on the moon. 

Blue Ghost apparently had better software and quite possibly its overall design as well.  In coverage of the landing, there is mention of obstacle avoidance being invoked in the autonomous landing software. 

A camera on Firefly's Blue Ghost lander captured a view of its shadow after touching down on the Moon just after sunrise. Earth looms over the horizon. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

"They’re just fired up right now in the mission control room," said Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO. "They were all just pent up, holding it all in because they were calm, collected, and cool the whole time. Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed. After we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up."

Before IM-1 last year, it had been more than 50 years since an American spacecraft made a controlled landing on the Moon and all of those were government-run projects.  Similarly, China has landed four robotic missions on the Moon since 2013, including two landings on the Moon's far side and two sample return missions. India became the fourth country to land on the Moon in 2023, then Japan became the fifth in January 2024.  Sunday morning's Blue Ghost landing marked the first exception to that government-run predominance in landers. 

Intuitive Machines IM-2, or Athena, entered her circular lunar orbit today, March 3rd.  The the landing will be closer to the lunar South Pole than any other mission to date. 

Flight controllers expect Athena to complete 39 lunar orbits until her south pole region landing site has adequate sunlight to power surface operations.

Intuitive Machines expects a landing opportunity on March 6 at 11:32 a.m. CST. Live landing coverage is scheduled to start at 10:30 a.m. CT / 11:30 a.m. ET on the Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission page and NASA+. The content on both streams is identical.

As for Starship Flight Test 8, SpaceX's Missions Page hasn't posted a date for the next attempt yet.

The Rest of the Story

Twice in the past week (last night and last Monday (2/24) for the curious) I had to cover for the events in the previous day or two getting away from me, sucking up all my time, or more honestly leaving me in a state where I couldn't think clearly enough to write.  Now that it's over with, I can tell the story.  This is entirely a "me, me, me" story - more accurately "us, us, us" for Mrs. Graybeard and I, and for me to write this is going to be horribly, gut-wrenchingly sad so this is your chance to close the page and bail out.  

Last chance. 

For the last three years, our old man-cat, Mojo (his name when we adopted him at the rescue center in 2010 - my post about that in August '10) has been slowly sliding downhill, requiring more attention, differing medication doses and more veterinarian visits.  Both emergency and routine visits, sometimes monthly for blood tests.  

This past week the downhill slide turned into outright collapse.  Last weekend he had stopped eating and was having trouble walking.  Petting him by just bending over and gently petting him as he was walking by seemed to almost knock him over.  Over the preceding few weeks, he seemed to realize he couldn't hop onto our bed, and would ask me (seriously!) to pick him up and place him on the bed.  He could still hop onto our sofa - it's a bit lower - and would sleep there most of the day.  By Sunday (2/23) he was sleeping almost constantly, hardly eating or drinking.

The situation Monday 2/24 was we called the vet first thing and asked if he could be seen.  That appointment was 5PM.  The vet gave him a couple of new medications, one in case he had nausea and one to stimulate his appetite.  Tuesday he noticeably improved, eating more of his cat food than we'd seen in maybe a full week.  Wednesday, that decreased a bit, and Thursday, the collapse resumed.  Friday midday, he suddenly lost the ability to put weight on his forelimbs.  By the evening he was too weak to walk.  He had his first episodes of urinary incontinence, first wetting the floor by his litter box, and later losing control in our bed.  In the first case, nothing that a couple of paper towels and a grocery store plastic bag can't take care of; in the second, nothing our washing machine can't.

I awoke Saturday morning to find he had died in his sleep, in my arms.

His favorite sleeping position for the last several weeks has been for me to lie on my right side, facing him and beyond him Mrs. SiG, while he stuck his hindquarters up against my right armpit and facing toward her, my right arm straight, pointing perpendicular to my body.  He couldn't get himself into that sleeping position before I conked out.  I woke up at 4:30 AM and found he was there in that position and realized quickly he felt cool to the touch and wasn't reacting.  I was up for another hour, maybe 1-1/2 hours, thinking about times past and fell back asleep.  By mid morning we had taken his body up to be cremated. 

Pets are in a different world than any of our human interactions and we don't really have a good word for it.  I'm not talking about working dogs, or working animals, which don't share that sort of relationship with us.  I'm talking about house pets.  They're not kids, although many people refer to their dogs or cats as their kids.  We're not among those folks.  We think of them more as a friends, but that's not a good word either.  They're closer and more intimate in many ways than any friend.  They see us as we are all the time we're home.  We are completely ourselves with them - and they with us.  They love, or they don't, in a more pure way than many of us can.  Gun people seem to be a bit more dog people than cat people.  While I have nothing against dogs, I've always preferred cats around the house. 

Mojo was a remarkably sweet little person and was always coming up with fun things to do or just doing something like coming into the ham radio shack to spend some time with me.  Just to be together.  I remember mentioning to his vet that she could do just about anything she'd like to him if she petted him a little first.  Saturday she told me the staff there had thought he was one of the sweetest cats they have in their practice.  There's a handful of places around the house that I simply can't walk past without looking for him.  The papers from the rescue center where we adopted him say he was three years old in June of 2010; his papers from this veterinarian says his birthday was 11/1/2005.  If Nov. 1, 2005 is true, he's 19 and 4 months old.  If the papers from the rescue center are right, he could be closer to 18-1/2.  Both of those are on the long side of average cat length of life.

Over our 43+ years together, we've had seven different cats - always two at a time, with two exceptions.  The first was for one who was our only cat for five years.  Mojo is the second, and was our only cat since Aurora who we adopted a week before him had cancer in December of '22.  Losing them doesn't get any easier. 

Now Mrs. SiG and I have a gaping hole in our lives.  I've choked up nearly to tears several times writing this and all I know from my experience is that the pain doesn't go away, at least for years. Keeping yourself busy is the only thing that seems to help. 

Yeah, I virtually always include a picture. It just doesn't feel right to do that with this subject. If you just have to see what this little guy looked like, I don't have any recent pictures in the blog, but you can search on his name in the search box in the upper left hand corner of the frame.

Sorry, I Can't Do This Tonight

I'm running on empty, so this will be shorter than usual.  

Firefly Aerospace's attempt to land Blue Ghost is still scheduled to land at 0334 EST Sunday morning or 0834 UTC.  Thanks to an anonymous comment to last night's post we find out from Spaceflight Now that NASA and Firefly will join for live coverage starting at 2:30 AM EST.

Besides the official NASA broadcast, the independent space watchers will be adding their own coverages.

• NASA Spaceflight (.com) will start their coverage at the same time.
• Firefly Aerospace announces coverage that probably won't be the same as the first paragraph, since it doesn't mention NASA by name.  It also starts at 2:30 AM EST. 

That's a few examples, but I'm pretty sure they'll all be watchable. 

Screen capture of the "Notify me" YouTube page (not yet set to notify me)