There's something funny going on at the Cape

The response to a statement like that used to be "funny as in ha-ha, or funny as in strange?"  Funny strange. 

Stephen Clark at Ars Technica pointed this out last night, saying "There's a secret reason the Space Force is delaying the next Atlas V launch."  I was quickly going from not having noticed it to the "now that you've mentioned it" side.  

As the title suggests, the weirdness started on the scheduled next launch of an Atlas V back on April 9th, a mission to carry 27 Kuiper satellites for Amazon.com's version of a satellite internet constellation like Starlink.  While working on that night's post (about Jared Isaacman's first senate confirmation hearing), I had the live coverage of that mission playing audio, so I heard it going on and switched to watch things a couple of times.  It looked like a plain old scrub due to a line of storms violating some launch criteria or another.  No big deal.  Happens fairly often. 

I expected (along with many others) that they would do a 24 hour reset and go the next night. The next morning, a time for the next launch attempt still  hadn't been posted to NextSpaceflight.com.  April 9th was Wednesday, and it wasn't until the weekend that a Monday launch time was announced.  Then that launch date was deleted, too.  At some point, I start wondering if something else really caused the launch scrub and it was just convenient to blame it on the weather. 

At first, there seemed to be a good explanation for the extended turnaround. SpaceX was preparing to launch a set of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket around the same time as Atlas V's launch window the next day. The Space Force's Eastern Range manages scheduling for all launches at Cape Canaveral and typically operates on a first-come, first-served basis. 

Except that SpaceX was delayed, too.  

It wouldn't have been surprising for SpaceX to get priority on the range schedule since it had already reserved the launch window with the Space Force for April 10. SpaceX subsequently delayed this particular Starlink launch for two days until it finally launched on Saturday evening, April 12. Another SpaceX Starlink mission launched Monday morning.

There are several puzzling things about what happened last week. When SpaceX missed its reservation on the range twice in two days, April 10 and 11, why didn't ULA move back to the front of the line?

Clark says that ULA has always been pretty transparent about launch scrubs, but they've never said anything detailed about the reasons for waiting to launch, only saying, "a new launch date will be announced when approved on the range."  After being sure to say, "The rocket and payload are healthy."

Then, a few days ago, SpaceX postponed one of its Starlink missions from Cape Canaveral without explanation, making this a rather rare week without a launch on the Eastern Test Range.  NextSpaceflight says SpaceX is planning their next launch early this coming Monday, 4/21 (4:15 AM EDT); that delayed Starlink mission will launch around 16-1/2 hours later, Monday evening at 8:48 PM EDT.  The early morning launch is a Cargo Resupply Mission, Cargo Dragon, to the ISS and those missions seem to be higher priority to the Space Force Station.

One more twist in this story is that a few days before the launch attempt, ULA changed its launch window for the Kuiper mission on April 9 from midday to the evening hours due to a request from the Eastern Range. Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, the range commander, spoke with reporters in a roundtable meeting last week. After nearly 20 years of covering launches from Cape Canaveral, I found a seven-hour time change so close to launch to be unusual, so I asked Panzenhagen about the reason for it, mostly out of curiosity. She declined to offer any details.

"The Eastern Range is huge," she said. "It's 15 million square miles. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of players that are using that range space, so there's a lot of de-confliction ... Public safety is our top priority, and we take that very seriously on both ranges. So, we are constantly de-conflicting, but I'm not going to get into details of what the actual conflict was."

Stephen Clark comes to the conclusion that there's something going out in those 15 million square miles that is making Space Force clamp down on launches and it's secret enough that they're not going to say anything about it.  There are several possibilities that can be considered, for example, launches of vehicles that the public isn't supposed to know about.  Perhaps submarine launched missiles or new missiles that the Space Force wants to keep as secret as possible.  That sort of testing, typically leads to cautions in "Notices to Mariners" for boaters or "Notices to Air Men."  Searches for those kinds of notices don't show any released lately.

It's possible that there's something (or some things) that are broken or that need some sort of maintenance.

When launches were less routine than today, the range at Cape Canaveral would close for a couple of weeks per year for upgrades and refurbishment of critical infrastructure. This is no longer the case. In 2023, Panzenhagen told Ars that the Space Force changed the policy.

"When the Eastern Range was supporting 15 to 20 launches a year, we had room to schedule dedicated periods for maintenance of critical infrastructure," she said at the time. "During these periods, launches were paused while teams worked the upgrades. Now that the launch cadence has grown to nearly twice per week, we’ve adapted to the new way of business to best support our mission partners."

Perhaps, then, it's something more secret, like a larger-scale, multi-element military exercise or war game that either requires Eastern Range participation or is taking place in areas the Space Force needs to clear for safety reasons for a rocket launch to go forward.  

As of this evening, that Atlas V launch (Project Kuiper (KA-01) ) is back on the schedule. Monday, Apr 28, 7:00 PM EDT

Pushed by trackmobile railcar movers, the Atlas V rocket rolled to the launch pad last week with a full load of 27 satellites for Amazon's Kuiper Internet megaconstellation. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Lunar Gateway Just Notched a Milestone

The Artemis program's Lunar Gateway crossed off a significant accomplishment this month; on April 1st, but word apparently just got released today.  The milestone is that part of the lunar space station called the Gateway was shipped from its manufacturing at Thales Alenia Space in Italy to the US Counterpart, Northrop Grumman, in Gilbert, Arizona.  

The part of the Lunar Gateway that shipped here is called the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, referred to as the HALO module.  As the name implies, this is the living and working space for astronauts before going to the lunar surface or before returning to Earth.  

NASA calls the HALO module a "core component" of Gateway. Aside from providing astronaut living quarters, the module will offer a range of utilities like command and control, power distribution, communications and tracking. It will also enable research, supporting internal and external science payloads.

The Lunar Gateway is controversial for several reasons.  It's essentially a space station in lunar orbit rather than Earth orbit, and nothing like it has ever been a part of operational missions.  As people familiar with the Apollo landings will immediately recognize, there was nothing like this in the Apollo program.  They flew to the moon, orbited it, landed the (disposable) landing module.  On the way back to Earth, they left part of the lunar module on the moon, flew the other half to lunar orbit, and then threw away that half before leaving for Earth.  Gateway seems to be a work around for inadequacies in the design of the SLS and became obsolete when the Starship versions for landing on the moon were conceived of and settled on.  Let me grab a few words from an older post (November 2022) on Lunar Gateway.

While the Artemis III landing will be about as barebones as possible, the Artemis IV Starship will be upgraded with the ability to transport more NASA astronauts (four instead of just two) and more cargo to the lunar surface. It’s not entirely clear, but NASA reportedly wants to land just ~180 kilograms (~400 lb) of cargo with the first crewed Starship, a vehicle likely capable of landing dozens of tons of cargo in addition to several astronauts. NASA hopes that future “sustainable” lander missions, a category that Starship’s Option B landing may or may not fall under, will transport up to one ton (~2200 lb) of cargo to and from the lunar surface.

Gateway’s HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) habitat module arrives in Mesa, Arizona on April 1, 2025, after traveling from Italy, where Thales Alenia Space fabricated its primary structure. (Image credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel)

After Northrop Grumman finishes its HALO work, the module will head to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There, it will be integrated with Gateway's Power and Propulsion Element ahead of a planned 2027 launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

US and UK Militaries Pick Rocket Lab's HASTE Program

Anyone who pays attention to the buzzwords making the news these days will have been sensitized to the word "hypersonic" especially when thrown around with "the M word" - missile.  I personally think it's a bit over-hyped*, but it's a thing.  In a press release on Monday the 14th, Rocket Lab announced they've been cleared by both the US and UK militaries to contract the HASTE system (the Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron - their main launch vehicle) to help with testing and development of hypersonic systems.

"The ability to contribute toward the collective security of the United States and the United Kingdom across both of these important programs is a proud moment for the HASTE team, and a demonstration of Rocket Lab’s commitment to lead from the front when it comes to innovative and unique solutions for hypersonic technology development," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in a statement on Monday (April 14), when the news was announced.

"Keeping pace with global developments means more affordable tests at a higher rate that expands the boundaries of hypersonic technology — and that’s a capability we're already providing all in one platform with HASTE, at a commercial price and cadence that serves the mission of both nations," he added.

Space.com reports the US budget is $46 billion run by the Air Force called the Enterprise-Wide Agile Acquisition Contract while the UK budget is about $1.3 billion (US dollars) run by the U.K. Ministry of Defense project, called the Hypersonic Technologies & Capability Development Framework.  

They also report that HASTE has flown three missions so far, but I seem to find only the first mission got a blog post.  I don't know if something else just bumped them out of the news or if being military missions they didn't get much coverage.  All three missions have been from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 2 in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. 

Image credit: Rocket Lab USA 

*The reason I think "hypersonic missile" is a bit overhyped is that they're not a new thing. Everything that has ever made orbit has been hypersonic. Every ICBM, which operationally don't fly an orbit, is hypersonic. Yeah, I understand that they increase the capability required from anti-missile systems by reducing the available time to respond. The weak spot of every anti-missile system I've ever been aware of is if the other side "floods the zone" by simply sending more than the system can respond to.

The Uncertainties Start Hitting Home

Some years ago, when I started to cover the increasing space activity at my neighbors' place "up the road" part of my reasoning was that I was just plain tired of day-to-day politics and the same old sh.. stuff taking up so much column space.  To reuse my very highly re-used Shakespeare line,  “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing.”  Dropping all but the occasional references to pending laws and other day to day politics made working here more bearable.  

Now we find ourselves in the position that those day to day politics stories are grabbing space headlines.  

The first big example story today traces back to NASA's budget proposals that were revealed last week (second story here).  The budget news was that while the overall department budget was cut by 20 percent, or $5 billion from an overall total of about $25 billion.  What people were upset about is that the cuts seem to be centered on the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.  A 66% cut to astrophysics; a bigger cut than that to heliophysics; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science. 

The second big story traces back to the questions about keeping the SLS, and all of the Artemis program  questions.  In particular, Lunar Gateway.  The Lunar Gateway is a very complex subject partly because it has been changed so many times that it's probably (my idea) too late and too over budget to save.  That combination of words might well apply to the entire Artemis program.

A realistic way of looking at the budget issues is the way most people think and talk about budget cutting is "they can cut anything they want except my favorite programs."  No, we all need to cut something we'd rather not cut.  I crossed that bridge mentally before the last shuttle flight in 2011.  When the bosses want to cut some total number of dollars out of the budget, their tendency is to cut the smallest number of big dollar programs. The talk last Friday was about cutting the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.  Today, Eric Berger at Ars Technica switches to talking about the money spent on the James Webb Space Telescope.  

The JWST cost $10 billion, spread over many years, not just a few.  

However, it is difficult to put a price on advancing our species' understanding of the natural world and the wide Universe we're swimming in. And Webb is doing an amazing job of that.

In 2009, NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission to make infrared observations. This was the latest in a line of space-based infrared observatories, and it cost about 3 percent as much as the Webb telescope. [BOLD added - SiG]

To compare the 2009 WISE with the JWST, take a look at this photo of a planetary nebula called NGC 1514 (NGC is the New General Catalog, one of a few standard international catalogs of deep space objects):

Two infrared views of NGC 1514. At left is an observation from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, NASA-JPL, Caltech, UCLA, Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL), Dave Jones (IAC)

The Webb image is absolutely more usable than the Wise image.  Berger completes this by saying:

Today's photo concerns the planetary nebula NGC 1514. In 2010, using the WISE telescope, NASA project scientist Mike Ressler discovered "rings" around the planetary nebula. Now, thanks to Webb, the rings—which are likely composed of small dust grains, heated by ultraviolet light from a white dwarf star—can be seen clearly. And, oh my, they're spectacular.

The clarity in the Webb photo, compared to what came before, is remarkable.  So, is seeing the Universe in a new light worth $10 billion?

Part of the reason NASA is in a budget crisis now is because of bad decisions made in the last 20 years - like the Lunar Gateway - and the proverbial "chickens coming home to roost."  Seems to me some neat missions are going to have to be dropped.  We can hope the leadership won't be totally stupid, I'm just not sure I see reasons to believe that can happen.

Looks Like Two Incoming Coronal Mass Ejections

During the peak of the solar cycle, as we are in for cycle 25, we tend to focus on sunspots.  These cycles are regularly ranked and compared by their sunspot number, after all; the SSN or Smoothed Sunspot Number. 

While sunspots are very often the source of solar weather events that affect us, those things that affect the rest of the solar system don't always come from sunspot complexes.  There were two Coronal Mass Ejections from the sun this past weekend, Saturday the 12th and Sunday the 13th, that came from an area with no spots.  They're visible in this photo posted at SpaceWeather.com, as nearly vertical streaks of motion and then brighter colors.  They show up first slightly left of center, then slightly right of center.  The first one is higher on the solar disk than the second.  

Magnetic filaments are tubes of dense plasma held above the sun's surface by magnetic forces. The two pictured above are about 400,000 km long--longer than the distance between Earth and the Moon. These massive structures can erupt when their magnetic underpinnings become unstable. That happened twice in quick succession on April 12th and 13th--a rare double blast.

Fragments of the exploding filaments ripped through the sun's atmosphere to produce two CMEs, now heading for Earth. A one-two punch from these CMEs could spark a G2-class geomagnetic storm on April 16th. CME impact alerts: SMS Text.

I've been watching predictions like this more during this sunspot cycle (25) than any cycle before now, and I've posted about them several times.  Major geomagnetic storms, not G1 or G2 as being talked about here, but G7, 8 and above, can do substantial damage to the power grid and things connected to the grid that are plugged in when the storm hits.  That said, my experience with Space Weather predictions is that they're less reliable than "plain old" NOAA Earth forecasts so I tend to not go far out of my way to watch for the storms. Watching what's happening in more or less real time is easy to do; just go here. 

According to NOAA's forecast, the impact geomagnetic activity is expected to increase late on April 15 (1800 UTC is 2:00 PM EDT) or early April 16, peaking during the day and tapering off afterward.  Timing CME impacts can be tricky, so keep with Kp, the planetary K index, your aurora alerts turned on if you have any and stay flexible — storms don't always stick to a strict schedule. This forecast is from NOAA here.  This update is from 2025 UTC or 5:05PM EDT.

NOAA Kp index forecast 15 Apr - 17 Apr
             Apr 15    Apr 16    Apr 17

00-03UT        1.67      4.00      4.33      
03-06UT        2.33      3.00      4.33      
06-09UT        2.67      5.00      4.00      
09-12UT        2.33      4.00      3.67      
12-15UT        2.67      6.00      4.33      
15-18UT        2.00      4.00      3.00      
18-21UT        3.00      5.00      2.67      
21-00UT        3.67      4.33      4.00      

With the highest single predicted Kp at 6.0 on Wednesday morning at 8 to 11AM (EDT), this doesn't look to be dangerous, but could be fun for ham propagation on the highest HF bands and the 6m VHF band.

Miscellaneous

A couple of random things to tack onto Saturday night's post about my choosing the next longer project for my shop.  

The first goes with the idea of hit and miss engines.  If you go to a home machinist show like Cabin Fever or a smaller, more local show, I can almost guarantee you're going to see one of these engines from PM Research:

This is a kit of the castings used to make the engine, and while they sell an "almost completely" built kit that's "fully machined" it's not like it's ready to just dump some gasoline, oil and water into it and hit the starter.  Yes, this is called a Red Wing engine and the casting reads Red Wing Minnesota.  I think. 

Before I started on the 1x1, I read about an alternative engine published in a magazine called Model Engine Builder in 2006 which is made from what's referred to as bar stock - chunks of various metals in standard sizes instead of castings like this one - and I bought a pdf of the issue.  "Bar stock" isn't exactly like going into your local lumber store and buying dimensional lumber like 2x4s or 1x10, but it's more like it than not.  The main difference is in the variety of shapes and sizes you can get in a wide variety of metal alloys.  

For the first time, I did a search on YouTube tonight to see if anyone had posted a video of this engine, and found this 17 year old video, which still isn't as old as the engine.  

To me, the Red Wing looks better, but more videos would be more better.

So Many Possibilities

Since the big story of the weekend appears to be sending Katy Perry and an "all woman crew" on a suborbital ride to the Kármán line, and how excited she is to be going on her trip, not much else is being talked about.  So time for a little side story. 

Within the last month or two, someone asked in a comment what's going on in the machine shop, since I haven't posted anything in quite a while.  I haven't posted much because I haven't been doing much with my machine tools, really only little repairs, or the occasional part or two to get something working better. 

As part of that, I seem to have dropped the engine I had started back in '21, called a one by one (or 1x1) because it's a one inch bore and one inch stroke internal combustion engine.  Putting it the way I did, ("I seem to have dropped the engine") underlines that this wasn't a carefully contemplated decision, arrived at by gathering lots of data, compiling that into spreadsheets used to figure what's the best alternative; it just happened.  There were several things that intervened and sucked up time on my big mill, notably tropical storm Ian in  '22 and Milton in '24.  The work after Ian involved totally redesigning the way my tower has been supported since I installed it in the early 1990s and was completed in June of '23.  

I've had to crank the tower over to work on antennas, most recently this past fall for tropical storm Milton.  It has all held together well.  

Again, these interruptions got me away from the 1x1 project long enough to forget where I was and what I had been doing.  It also led me to think more about other projects.  In overview, the 1x1 is much like my first engine, a Webster, in being a free running internal combustion engine.  I've started to get interested in engines that have RPM control - like a primitive cruise control.  The first such engines, called hit and miss engines, have a feedback mechanism that control the engine actually firing or not, so that when they're under load, they "hit" and fire more often than when they're under a lighter load - or no load - when they "miss" most of the time.  They deliver the required power when required.

I'm more interested in making one of those than another version of what I've already done. 

Then there's more.  Ever heard of an orrery?  These are essentially model solar systems, from the relatively simple to the unimaginably complex, whether machined metal like those two or 3D printed plastic like this one.  Include the incredibly simple - just the sun and one planet, like this.

This is a screen capture at around the last 10 seconds of an almost 19 minute video showing how everything here is made.  That's supposed to be the sun on the left and Earth and moon on the right. The motions of the Earth and moon are supposed to be scaled properly.  The big, light colored things are the thumb and fingers of the machinist, wearing surgical finger cots to keep from touching the brass gears and causing corrosion.  I'm guessing the entire thing is about a half inch from end to end.

So what's next?  I don't know.  The orrery appeals to my amateur astronomer and telescope maker side. The hit and miss appeals to my decades of designing electronic control systems or control loops. 

Small Space News Story Roundup 57

Calling one of these "small" might be underselling it... 

Rocket Lab's CEO Peter Beck sees his market segment as healthy and robust

In an April 7th interview in Colorado Springs and reported in SpaceNews, Beck said his company has found a successful market providing dedicated launches for small satellites — a strategy that he said does not directly compete with SpaceX rideshare missions. 

...Beck said the customers for his company’s Electron rockets are different from those seeking less expensive launches on SpaceX’s Transporter and Bandwagon lines of Falcon 9 rideshare launches.

He explained, “Dedicated small launch is a real market, and it should not be confused with rideshare.  It’s totally different.”  

He said Rocket Lab is experiencing growing demand for Electron from companies who want control over their schedule and orbit, traits that a dedicated launch offers over a rideshare. This has included customers such as Kinéis, a French company that launched its constellation of 25 Internet-of-Things satellites across five Electron missions, and Japanese radar mapping companies iQPS and Synspective.

Something I found particularly interesting is his disdain for the "one ton to orbit" sized boosters that were the subject of headlines just under three years ago.  

That skepticism extends to a new line of European small launch vehicles, like Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum, which crashed less than a minute after liftoff on its inaugural flight March 30. Spectrum and some other vehicles there are targeting about one ton to orbit, which he described as a “no man’s land” of performance: “It’s too small to be a useful rideshare mission, and it’s too big to be a useful dedicated rocket” for smallsats.

We've mentioned Rocket Lab's development of their bigger payload rocket, Neutron. SpaceNews reports development is proceeding and the first Neutron launch looks to be before the end of this year.  Beck remarked that they've used all the lessons they learned getting their Electron to 50 launches faster than any other company's rocket on Neutron, adding, “It’s way easier to build a bigger rocket than it is a little rocket.”

The fight over NASA's budget begins

This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.  Let's just say the opposition can't figure out what to burn, carve a swastika onto, or whom to assassinate. 

In the "big picture" context, the budget is cut by 20 percent, so effectively $5 billion from an overall total of about $25 billion.  What people are upset about is that the cuts seem to be centered on the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more. 

According to the "passback" documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency's science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.
...
Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.

While the Science Mission Directorate continues funding the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (or HST and JWST), the cuts are seen as killing the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, widely considered a more modern version of the Hubble and a possible replacement for the HST rather than the Webb.  The HST was deployed 35 years ago this month: April 25, 1990. Not only has it been in orbit approaching 35 years, it has had many technical problems.  

The kicker is that the Roman Telescope is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years.  Saying the cuts are going to kill off an already assembled successor because of budget cuts, instead of not funding other programs that are much closer to their beginnings doesn't make much sense.  

Other significant cuts include ending funding for Mars Sample Return as well as the DAVINCI mission to Venus. The budget cuts also appear intended to force the closure of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the agency has 10,000 civil servants and contractors.

Note that the Mars Sample Return mission doesn't exist as anything beyond very preliminary documents.  I've seen mention of DAVINCI mission to Venus "in the late 2020s to early 2030s," but that's all. 

Naturally, this is seen as handing China the moon - if not the entire solar system - and the end of everything.  Science policy experts have been characterizing such cuts as an "extinction level" event for what is seen as the crown jewel of the space agency.

Nearly all of NASA's most significant achievements over the last 25 years have been delivered by the science programs, including feats such as Ingenuity flying on Mars, New Horizons swooping by Pluto, and Cassini's discovery of water plumes on Enceladus.
...
"This massive cut to NASA Science will not stand," US Rep. George Whitesides, D-California, told Ars. "For weeks we have been raising the alarm about a rumored 50 percent cut to NASA's world-leading science efforts. Now we know it is true. I will work alongside my colleagues on the Science Committee to make clear how this would decimate American leadership in space and inflict great damage to NASA centers across the country."

Since congress hasn't passed a "real" Federal Budget since 2009 (article from 2012 talking about that), I lean toward thinking that they're not likely to pass this one, either.  Instead, we'll get some number of continuing resolutions to authorize some spending or other. 

An illustration of the field of view of Roman Space Telescope vs. the Hubble Space Telescope.  From the NASA Roman mission website.

China to Manufacture Bricks on the Moon

In the search to come up with ways to produce needed resources on the moon without having to send them up from Earth, China has described plans to make bricks on the moon from the lunar regolith.  Regolith is essentially the lunar equivalent of topsoil, but lacking (as far we've seen so far!) the organic materials in Earthly topsoil. 

The mission is based on a satellite called Chang'e 8, currently scheduled to launch around 2028. The mission is planned as a stepping stone to China's International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) and could, potentially, mark a big breakthrough for moon exploration and habitation.

"Now we have developed the world's first device that produces bricks made of lunar soil. This system harnesses sunlight, collects solar energy, and transmits it to the moon using fiber optics," Wu Weiren, chief designer of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, told China Central Television (CCTV).

Their device heats the soil to temperatures between 1400 to 1500 degrees Celsius by concentrating sunlight.  That's enough to melt the soil.  They then use "3D printing technology" to shape the melted soil into brick-like shapes.  The important aspect here is that they ship only a small amount of technology (mass) "uphill" to the moon to get to this point, and use local resources for everything else involved.  

This is also not the first step that China has made in this area. China has already sent a sample of bricks made from different compositions of lunar soil simulant, meant to mimic real moon regolith, to its Tiangong space station. These will remain outside Tiangong for three years to test their durability in the harsh thermal, radiation and vacuum conditions of outer space and help assess their suitability for building lunar habitats.

Before Chang'e 8 in 2028, China will launch Chang'e 7 in 2026, featuring a lunar rover to explore the area around the south pole of the moon with a particular focus on the search for water. Water is the big game changer on the moon, whether for drinking water or to be used for any number of important things like hydrogen and oxygen for fuel and oxidizer or possibly even improving the bricks' properties.

Screenshot from an animation depicting a future Chinese robotic mission to the moon's south pole. (Image credit: CCTV) (Video here)

Jared Isaacman Clears First Hearing

Over the course of a three hour interview in the Russell Senate Office building next to the US Capitol, President Trump's nominee for NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman faced some tough questions and asked some of his own.  He also spoke to the honor of the position and his admiration of NASA.  

His basic message to members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation was that NASA is an exceptional agency that does the impossible, but that it also faces some challenges. NASA, he said, receives an “extraordinary” budget, and he vowed to put taxpayer dollars to efficient use in exploring the universe and retaining the nation’s lead on geopolitical competitors in space.

“I have lived the American dream, and I owe this nation a great debt,” said Isaacman, who founded his first business at 16 in his parents' basement and would go on to found an online payments company, Shift4, that would make him a billionaire. Isaacman is also an avid pilot who self-funded and led two private missions to orbit on Crew Dragon. Leading NASA would be “the privilege of a lifetime,” he said.

The large table where Isaacman sat featured company of the four astronauts who will fly on the Artemis II mission, and the six private citizens who flew with Isaacman on his two Dragon missions; Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn were also present. 

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, left, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen watch as Jared Isaacman testifies on Wednesday. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

The meeting started with Senator Ted Cruz stating his priorities for NASA clearly and explicitly: He is most focused on ensuring the United States does not cede any of its preeminence to China in space, and this starts with low-Earth orbit and the Moon. 

“Make no mistake, the Chinese Communist Party has been explicit in its desire to dominate space, putting a fully functional space station in low-Earth orbit and robotic rovers on the far side of the Moon,” he said. “We are not headed for the next space race; it is already here.”

Cruz wanted Isaacman to commit to getting Americans back to the moon ASAP as well as to creating a  sustained presence on the moon or in cislunar space.  Isaacman said he would commit to completing the Artemis II lunar flyby next year and Artemis III lunar landing as currently planned.  Cruz then pushed on Isaacman about keeping the ISS flying through 2030; my guess is because Elon Musk had recently said that it should be deorbited in two years.  Isaacman agreed to that, but when questioned about the Lunar Gateway currently in the Artemis mission plans, Isaacman only said he would work with Congress and space agency officials to determine which programs are working and which ones are not.

Ted Cruz is a big supporter of the Lunar Gateway (a Lunar space station) because it represents jobs for the Johnson Space Flight Center in his state.  Many observers from different backgrounds have questioned the whole concept of the Lunar Gateway in its Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, and concluded it was a bad design compromise.

When questioned about the Space Launch System, Isaacman was more reserved, questioning its history of every piece costing far more than budgeted and delivered many years late.  

He noted, correctly, that presidential administrations dating back to 1989 have been releasing plans for sending humans to the Moon or Mars, and that significantly more than $100 billion has been spent on various projects over nearly four decades. For all of that, Isaacman and his private Polaris Dawn crewmates remain the humans to have flown the farthest from Earth since the Apollo Program. They did so last year.

“Why is it taking us so long, and why is it costing us so much to go to the Moon?” he asked.

In one notable exchange, Isaacman said NASA’s current architecture for the Artemis lunar plans, based on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, is probably not the ideal “long-term” solution to NASA’s deep space transportation plans. The smart reading of this is that Isaacman may be willing to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions as conceived, given that much of the hardware is already built. But everything that comes after this, including SLS rocket upgrades and the Lunar Gateway, could be on the chopping block.

Naturally there were questions about his relationship with Elon Musk.  Isaacman had been an investor in SpaceX, as well as paying for two Dragon missions.  These are what I think of as “de rigueur” - "required by fashion, etiquette, or custom".  They're just expected to ask these things.  To borrow a line from Shakespeare, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Earlier in the meeting, Isaacman had tried to derail those questions by saying he's not beholden to Musk in any way.

“My loyalty is to this nation, the space agency, and its world-changing mission,” Isaacman said. Yes, he acknowledged he would talk to contractors for the space agency. It is important to draw on a broad range of perspectives, Isaacman said. But he wanted to make this clear: NASA works for the nation, and the contractors, he added, “work for us.”

And Furthermore (About the Space Force Contract)

While the timing and subject matter make it seem like a footnote to yesterday's piece on Space Force announcing another round of launch contracts, it really has nothing to do with those contracts, it's the existing contracts, split between ULA and SpaceX.  

Since ULA's Vulcan still isn't ready to launch national security payloads, Space Force is moving a payload from ULA over to SpaceX.  

Space Systems Command, which oversees the military's launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA's Vulcan rocket to SpaceX's Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force's fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world. 

The back story is a bit mind boggling but the biggest part of that is how common this sort of thing is in even as routine a mission as launching another GPS satellite.  Space Force booked the GPS III SV-08  launch in 2023, when ULA was planning to begin flying military satellites on Vulcan by the middle of last year; 2024.  So when Space Force booked this mission, they expected it to have launched a year ago.  ULA and Vulcan were probably on schedule to launch about a year from now.  With luck.

Enter a little phrase in these launch contracts that gives Space Force the option of "launch vehicle trade" between qualified launch services.  GPS III SV-08 looks to launch before the end of May, 7-1/2 weeks from now.  (NextSpaceflight shows "NET May")  Bear in mind that this launch vehicle trade is just that.  In exchange for launching this GPS satellite assigned to ULA, SpaceX has to trade a launch they were assigned over to ULA.  This is not the first time they've done a trade like this.  Last year, Space Force performed a trailblazing SpaceX GPS mission (second story here) and reallocated another future GPS launch to Vulcan.

While ULA has made public statements of 25 launches per year or twice a month, that depends on being a very smoothly operating, "well-oiled machine," in how well they cycle between vehicles.  Not to mention a Vulcan production rate that they've never demonstrated.  So far, there have been two Vulcan launches.  ULA has their work cut out for them.  With the 19 missions added in last week's announcement, the Vulcan backlog now stands at 89 missions.  At 25/year, that's over three years worth of launches. How soon could they make it to 25/year?  Two or three years from now? More?

Last year, the Pentagon's chief acquisition official for space wrote a letter to ULA's owners—Boeing and Lockheed Martin—expressing concern about ULA's ability to scale the manufacturing of the Vulcan rocket.

"Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays," Frank Calvelli, the Pentagon's chief of space acquisition, wrote in the letter.

The GPS III SV-08 satellite shipped to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, last week in preparation for launch at the end of May. Credit: Lockheed Martin

GPS is so well-integrated into our lives now, mostly by way of our phones instead of the dedicated receivers we used decades ago (I still have two sitting around the house) that I don't need to dwell on how important it is.  

This satellite, No. 8 of 10 in the GPS III series, will replace an aging navigation satellite in the constellation. The GPS network has 31 operational satellites (it needs 24 for global coverage), but some of them are quite old. The longest-lived member of the GPS constellation launched in 1997 and was built for a design life of seven-and-a-half years.

The GPS III satellites broadcast more accurate navigation signals, and they're more difficult for an adversary to jam. This generation of GPS satellites also has a new channel compatible with Europe's Galileo navigation network, allowing users to merge signals from both constellations to derive even better position estimates.

So, there's a hunger to launch these modernized GPS III satellites. There are two more satellites in this series after GPS III SV-08. They're both finished and in storage, waiting for launch on Vulcan. An upgraded GPS design, known as GPS IIIF, will begin launching in 2027.

Space Force Announces Another Round of Launch Contracts

On Friday, April 4, the US Space Force announced a new $13.7 billion round of launch contracts to put their “most critical” payloads into orbit into the 2030s.  

Unsurprisingly, the contract breakdown is like this:

• SpaceX will get 28 missions worth approximately $5.9 billion
• ULA will get 19 missions worth approximately $5.4 billion
• Blue Origin will get seven missions worth approximately $2.3 billion

As usual, a little more detail adds some clarity. 

Rounded to the nearest million, the contract with SpaceX averages out to $212 million per launch. For ULA, it's $282 million, and Blue Origin's price is $341 million per launch. But take these numbers with caution. The contracts include a lot of bells and whistles, pricing them higher than what a commercial customer might pay. 

Ranking by percentage of missions awarded, SpaceX is the clear winner at 52% of the contract and they're also the lowest cost launch provider.  When you consider that ULA's Vulcan rocket just got certified to fly those missions and Space Force has said a couple of times that ULA's pace is too slow for them, their getting 35% of the launches seems a bit optimistic.  Blue Origin at seven launches might be even more so.

After racking up a series of successful launches with its Falcon 9 rocket more than a decade ago, SpaceX sued the Air Force for the right to compete with ULA for the military's most lucrative launch contracts. The Air Force relented in 2015 and allowed SpaceX to bid. Since then, SpaceX has won more than 40 percent of missions the Pentagon has ordered through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, creating a relatively stable duopoly for the military's launch needs.

The Space Force took over the responsibility for launch procurement from the Air Force after its creation in 2019. The next year, the Space Force signed another set of contracts with ULA and SpaceX for missions the military would order from 2020 through 2024. ULA's new Vulcan rocket initially won 60 percent of these missions—known as NSSL Phase 2—but the Space Force reallocated a handful of launches to SpaceX after ULA encountered delays with Vulcan.

Regular readers might remember a few posts about Space Force launch contracts talking about phases and lanes and that whole thing is still too arcane for me to be comfortable with.  About all I feel comfortable saying is that "Lane 1" is higher risk and tends to go to newer launch vehicles for lower orbits and easier paths to get there. 

Friday's announcement covers Lane 2 for traditional military satellites that operate thousands of miles above the Earth. This bucket includes things like GPS navigation satellites, NRO surveillance and eavesdropping platforms, and strategic communications satellites built to survive a nuclear war. The Space Force has a low tolerance for failure with these missions. Therefore, the military requires rockets to be certified before they can launch big-ticket satellites, each of which often costs hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars.

The Space Force required all Lane 2 bidders to show their rockets could reach nine "reference orbits" with payloads of a specified mass. Some of the orbits are difficult to reach, requiring technology that only SpaceX and ULA have demonstrated in the United States. Blue Origin plans to do so on a future flight.

The military expects to order 54 launches in Lane 2 from this year through 2029, with announcements each October of exactly which missions will go to each launch provider.  This year, it will be just SpaceX and ULA. The Space Force said Blue Origin won't be eligible for firm orders until next year. 

This image shows what the Space Force's fleet of missile warning and missile tracking satellites might look like in 2030, with a mix of platforms in geosynchronous orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and low-Earth orbit. The higher orbits will require launches by "Lane 2" providers. Credit: Space Systems Command

"A robust and resilient space launch architecture is the foundation of both our economic prosperity and our national security," said US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. "National Security Space Launch isn't just a program; it's a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win."

The Sun's Other Cycle

The 11 year sunspot cycle has been something I've posted about many times here, and have done six month progress reports on the current cycle (25) regularly - the most recent was at the end of last December, the 28th.  Let me start by refreshing the end of the year solar cycle plot:

My frequent comment is that cycle 25 is doing well, but is still weaker than cycle 23 (red).  Yes, it's stronger than cycle 24 (pink) but that one was the weakest solar cycle in a hundred years.  In this plot cycle 24 is the one on the bottom, and at least as of this plot in December, the grayish plot of cycle 25 hadn't shown itself to be stronger than 23 in even one month's smoothed sunspot number.  

The (roughly) 11 year sunspot cycle, referred to as the Schwabe cycle, has been tracked longer than other measures because it's something that can be done by photographing the sun and applying the rules of counting the spots.  When researchers looked for more subtle signs that required more instrumentation, they found another cycle superimposed on this one that lasted on the order of 100 years or 9 Schwabe cycles, and called the Gleissberg cycle.  Plotted together, they look like this:

Looking at this plot, cycle 24 (last peak on the right) doesn't look particularly weak, especially compared to the cycle at the last null in about 1913, barely above the minima of the Gleissberg cycle.  

Let me change pace for a little more background that I'm sure some readers will appreciate.  This plot of the two types of cycles comes from a story that gets a bit more into it and leads much deeper.  The article is at the top of Spaceweather.com today.  That article is one paragraph which reads:

THE CENTENNIAL GLEISSBERG CYCLE: You've heard of the 11-year sunspot cycle. But what about the Centennial Gleissberg Cycle? The Gleissberg Cycle is a slow modulation of the solar cycle, which suppresses sunspot numbers every 80 to 100 years. It may have been responsible for the remarkable weakness of Solar Cycle 24 in 2012-2013. New research published in the journal Space Weather suggests that the minimum of the Gleissberg Cycle has just passed. If so, solar cycles for the next 50 years could become increasingly intense. Read the paper here.

It would be "bad form" for me to change the way that second to last sentence is displaying in the excerpted paragraph because it might not be clear that I'm the one who modified it.  So I'll say read that second to last sentence again, and put it right here:  If so, solar cycles for the next 50 years could become increasingly intense.

The first link in that paragraph is to climate.gov, where the graphic of the two cycles just above comes from.  The last link is to a full copy of "Turnover in Gleissberg Cycle Dependence of Inner Zone Proton Flux" at a journal called Space Weather of the AGU, the American Geophysical Union.  Much of the research is done with various satellites in and around the South Atlantic Anomaly, where Earth's magnetic field has several oddities.  

I have a lot of questions about the Gleissberg cycle and both the apparent correlations and non-correlations.  If you look at the right end of that combined Schwabe and Gleissberg cycles plot, you'll see one Schwabe cycle that is far higher than those near it and the highest peak in history (back to 1700).  That's cycle 19 in the late 1950s - the one that older hams and radio hobbyists still talk about.  Note that it's before the Gleissberg Cycle peak and the next sunspot cycle, 20, while apparently exactly at the CGC peak, is much smaller than 19.  There are other places in that plot that also seem like the correlation isn't that good. 

And Now for Something Completely Different

It seems the day got away from me, as it appears the weekend might well also, so a totally unrelated, 3D printer story. 

Precious granddaughter (also known as PGD) officially turned into a teenager last month as the clock ticked over to 13.  One of the things we picked off her Christmas list this most recent Christmas was a Taylor Swift CD.  I have no idea how common that is for 13 year olds, but it was easy to do and she was happy to get it.  

Around the middle of January, I broke a plastic measuring teaspoon and thought "why not just print one?" so I found myself looking for models on a few sites.  That's when I stumbled across this, on the public print library at Prusa:

I asked Dear Daughter-in-Law if she thought PGD would like this, got an enthusiastic yes, downloaded the two files and since this was pretty much two full months before her birthday, promptly put it aside. 

When the calendar started getting into March, I setup the printer and did the large piece on the left and then went on to the more intricate piece on the right.  As the printer started getting closer to the end of the print, I could tell it was messed up in a way I'd never seen.  It looked like this:

Compare it to the view on the right in previous picture.  I have no idea why it turned some solid curves into dashed lines, but it clearly did.  The problem turns out to have been the Slicer software I was using, which is from Prusa, like the cookie cutter itself.  

I pretty quickly switched to another slicer software package I have and that one was much closer to the original.  I've since downloaded updated versions of both Slicers.

The two pieces were Priority Mailed to PGD and the first batch of cookies were had a couple of weeks ago.  To borrow/butcher a line, "a splendid time was guaranteed to all" and received by them.

Small Space News Story Roundup 56

A disjointed couple of stories: they don't really go together, but who says they have to? 

The Highly Improbable Approach to launching satellites is gone

Remember the SpinLaunch, the company that planned on spinning satellites in a ground-based centrifuge on the order of 330 feet in diameter until they reached a velocity that could fling them into orbit?  The last post I have about them is from October of 2022.  As we talked about a few times back then, their big and fundamental problem was their flings are harder on the payloads than a typical rocket launch.  The quote I can't forget is the one that went, “It’s a very gentle 10,000 g.”  That's an oxymoron! 

It turns out that SpinLaunch sorta went quiet not long after that test.  You could say they disappeared, for all I heard.  This week they've announced a rather complete change in direction.  They're going to go back to regular rockets. 

"The launch market is relatively small compared to the economic potential of satellite communication," [CEO David] Wrenn said. "Launch has generally been more of a cost center than a profit center. Satcom will be a much larger piece of the overall industry."

The source article at Ars Technica goes into a bit of the details.  I have to say I'm not particularly convinced they've set up a good business plan and have a good chance of success.  I didn't think they had much of a chance with their centrifuge-as-launch-vehicle approach, either.  

The SpinLaunch test vehicle at the end of what appears to have been their last flight test.  It's hard to get a good scale from this video, but it appears to be on the order of 6' long - about the height of the men digging it out of the ground. Screen capture from their video (obviously).

A mission to retrieve Vanguard 1 from the orbit it has been in since 1958

That's 67 years ago.  America had just been shocked by the Soviet Union launching Sputnik 1 in October of 1957.  The newborn American space program had been hard at work trying to get to orbit and the frustration from being beaten to orbit by them was palpable.  It hurt more later in the year when the U.S. Navy's Vanguard rocket failed as the booster toppled over and exploded on its first attempt to put a US satellite into orbit. 

Lately, there has been an effort going to design a mission to retrieve the old satellite and bring it back down; there will be examinations of it for various reasons and then it will probably go into a museum.

The space race was just getting started, and the US Army was the first organization to reach orbit with  Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958.  Vanguard 1 reached orbit on March 17, 1958 as the second U.S. satellite.

The US Naval Research Lab is still the owner of the miniature metal ball of Vanguard 1, and while Explorer 1 reentered in 1970, Vanguard 1 is still in orbit. 

Today, the satellite is in an elliptical orbit with its perigee roughly at 410 miles (660 kilometers), swinging out to an apogee of approximately 2,375 miles (3,822 kilometers) from Earth, with a 34.25 degree inclination.

A team that includes aerospace engineers, historians and writers recently proposed "how-to" options for an up-close look and possible retrieval of Vanguard 1.

A mission like this is probably more complicated than it sounds, due to the satellite not having been designed with any thought given to capturing it a later date.  You can be sure there are no features on the little satellite to grab.  Add to that the fact the it's a small satellite at 3 pounds that's a 5.9 inch diameter aluminum sphere with a 36 inch antenna span.  It would be a delicate, 'handle with care' mission.

Vanguard I satellite, a component of the Vanguard Project, is a small aluminum sphere designed to take part in the International Geophysical Year (IGY) — a series of coordinated observations of various geophysical phenomena during solar maximum, spanning July 1957 through December 1958. (Image credit: NASA)

A hearing has been scheduled for the confirmation of Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator

The committee announced late April 2 that it will hold a confirmation hearing for Isaacman on April 9 at 10 a.m. Eastern. 

A Little Starship Flight Test 9 News

While SpaceX has not concluded its investigation of the loss of Flight Test 8's Starship, and hasn't nailed down a date for FT-9, they have announced that FT-9 will feature the first reuse of a previously flown SuperHeavy booster.   

The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company's Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds.

This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a "flight-proven" Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. SpaceX confirmed a reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on next Starship launch With Thursday's static fire test, Booster 14 appears to be closer to flight readiness than any of the boosters in SpaceX's factory, which is a short distance from the launch site.

SpaceX says 29 of the 33 Raptor engines on Booster 14 will be flight proven, so while not exactly their goal of "no-touch reuse" it's a giant leap in that direction.  At liftoff, SuperHeavy is the most powerful rocket ever built with nearly twice the thrust of the Saturn V that got people to the moon -  16.7 million pounds of thrust.  Without the Starship, Booster 14 itself is 232 feet tall.  

Reuse has come to be accepted as the way things should be, and that shouldn't be a surprise.  Nobody would seriously talk about flying a commercial airliner once and throwing it away.  Spacecraft may fly with smaller safety margins than a car or commercial airliner; that is, the difference between forces the rocket is calculated to be able to survive, and those that it will be exposed to during a real flight, but that's because of the brutality of the mission.  In the car or the Airbus, the extra weight of stronger designs is much less of a burden to live with than with a rocket.  

The first time SpaceX reused a Falcon 9 for a paying customer, it was practically a year after the initial flight and many inspections and tests to ensure everything still behaved as it should.  That mission was in 2017.  They now have over 425 flights of reused boosters.  Reusing B14 is the best way to verify that they knew what they're looking for as they inspected and retested it.  

SpaceX hasn't released a date for the next flight of B14 with its new Starship, but it's still early in the buildup to FT-9 and more likely to be in May than April.  The ship assigned to FT-9 is still in its factory at Starbase.  There have been no test firings of the ship, so it will need to roll out to a test stand for its own static firing tests.  Once that's accomplished, they typically move the ship back to the factory for more work, inspections and finishing touches, before returning it to the pad.  

Booster 14 during Flight Test 7, January 16, 2025. Image credit: SpaceX

I hadn't thought of Fram2 this way

Stephen Greene, "Vodkapundit" at PJ Media, surprised me with an observation about the Fram2 polar orbiting mission that never occurred to me.  It's so obvious when you read that it really resonates.  

"...To boldly go where no man has gone before" launched every episode of Star Trek that I watched in reruns as a kid, but Monday night I watched as two men and two women did it for real aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship that put human beings into a polar orbit for the first time ever.

Son of a biscuit, he's right and we've just been calling it an orbital mission, just like all the other privately-run manned missions to orbit that we've seen.  Except it really isn't.  Nobody has ever done a mission that orbited over one of the poles every half orbit. 

He then goes on to say a few words about the crew members and each of their backgrounds before adding another poignant note:

None are former fighter pilots, NASA astronauts, or government employees of any kind. All show the kind of daring that would make Captain James T. Kirk proud.

Even dedicated space buffs were a bit taken aback when news of Fram2 reminded us that human beings had never flown a polar orbit before. You might wonder why, but Fram2's five-day mission has a stellar rationale. 

What's the rationale?  Nobody has made big deal about it, but while they're bringing a lot equipment for various scientific experiments, perhaps the most important experiment is that they're going to be exposed to the Van Allen belts - through holes over the magnetic north and south poles.  Nobody has been exposed to these belts since the Apollo program, and even the Apollo astronauts avoided the worst doses by transiting quickly through the Belts.  

Fram2 won't fly through the most dangerous parts of the Van Allen Belts but they'll fly through them every orbit, enough to gather data. 

For those of us who grew up in the start of the "space age," watched Mercury, Gemini and Apollo as they happened, this is turning into the space age we always expected to see, just delayed until later.  Still, while we don't know how much they're spending on this mission and the things they're doing, we know that it's all being funded by one man, Chun Wang.  I know he has been called a billionaire, and haven't seen an estimate of his net worth, but between Wang and Jared Isaacman with his Polaris program missions, it's clear that someone who can spread around a few hundred million dollars doesn't have much trouble getting into space if they want to.  Those with less to spread around now can take suborbital spaceflights, like Blue Origin's New Shepard flights. 

To let Stephen Greene have the last words:

It won't be long before millionaires will enjoy short stays aboard luxury space stations in low Earth orbit, just like the ISS but much more comfy. After that, maybe a brief "spacation" won't cost much more than a trip to Disney World. 

The complete whiteness of Antarctica is seen from SpaceX's Dragon during the first-ever human polar orbit during the Fram2 mission. (image credit Fram2/Chun Wang via News13 in Central Florida)

How Bad Was Starliner's Flight? I Had No Idea

Eric Berger at Ars Technica has put up a summary of an interview he had with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams yesterday at Johnson Space Center in Houston.  It's the deepest, most informative thing I've come across about the Starliner Crewed Flight Test mission; the story is both riveting and a high pucker factor.  While the two spent most of the day giving five to ten minute interviews. Berger has a closer relationship with Butch Wilmore and they ended up talking for a half hour.  Berger writes:

I have known Wilmore a bit for more than a decade. I was privileged to see his launch on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan in 2014, alongside his family. We both are about to become empty nesters, with daughters who are seniors in high school, soon to go off to college. Perhaps because of this, Wilmore felt comfortable sharing his experiences and anxieties from the flight.  

The story is definitely worth your time to read, and as I usually do, I'll pass on some excerpts to try to whet your appetite for the story.  

The story starts after launch and their first night in orbit in an unexpectedly cold Starliner capsule.  As they're approaching the Space Station, you'll probably recall they lost some thrusters and the ability to control Starliner.  They knew they should dock with the ISS and felt that they'd be safer there, but they didn't know that their Starliner would hold together or if more failures would come.  As Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go. 

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it wasn't safe to come home, either?

"I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point," Wilmore said in an interview. "I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't."

In the lead-up to this moment, Butch remembered talks he had with Boeing leaders before the mission. 

"Before the flight we had a meeting with a lot of the senior Boeing executives, including the chief engineer. [This was Naveed Hussain, chief engineer for Boeing's Defense, Space, and Security division.] Naveed asked me what is my biggest concern? And I said the thrusters and the valves because we'd had failures on the OFT [uncrewed flight test] missions. You don't get the hardware back. (Starliner's service module is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns from orbit). So you're just looking at data and engineering judgment to say, 'OK, it must've been FOD,' (foreign object debris) or whatever the various issues they had. And I said that's what concerns me the most. Because in my mind, I'm thinking, 'If we lost thrusters, we could be in a situation where we're in space and can't control it.' That's what I was thinking. And oh my, what happened? We lost the first thruster."

The story gets worse from there.  Wilmore adds: "And this is the part I'm sure you haven't heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we've lost 6DOF (6 Degrees of Freedom) control. We can't maneuver forward. I still have control, supposedly, on all the other axes."  

Now they simply could not control the Starliner to the degree they needed to.  The two of them realized they were in a very precarious situation, and it literally was just barely good enough to only probably not get them both killed. There was no need to talk about that with each other; they're both experienced enough as astronauts to know what the situation meant.  That's when the mission control in Houston came up with the scariest solution.  

Turn the entire system of thrusters off and back on again.  Really.  And some of them started working again.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams at the docking port entry to the ISS, soon after their June 6th arrival at the ISS. Image credit: NASA

I'll leave it there as it's fairly close to the actual docking with the ISS and the rest of the story.