SpaceX Advances the Booster Flight Count Record

On last night's Starlink Group 6-17 mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, SpaceX boosted the record flight count again.  Booster B1058 flew for its 17th mission, taking the status as Fleet Leader.  B1058 flew its 16th mission just over two months ago. 

SpaceX launched its 67th rocket of the year on Tuesday night, a staggering total for the company and its workhorse booster, the Falcon 9. At this pace, a clip of one launch every four days, the company is likely to launch 90 or more rockets during this calendar year.

The liftoff was Tuesday night at 11:38 PM EDT and looked like their wonderfully routine, nearly boring missions.  Booster B1058 had previously flown 11 previous Starlink missions along with GPS III-3, Turksat 5A, Transporter-2, Intelsat G-33/G-34, and Transporter-6.   

In the early days of the Falcon 9, it seemed to be thought that they could fly 10 times without "major refurbishment" - whatever that means.  Now that the 10 flight barrier has been broken many times, that's open for reconsideration.

SpaceX performed a fairly significant assessment of booster wear and tear after its first Falcon 9 stages reached 15 flights, and the company's engineers now believe the rockets can achieve at least 20 flights. Remarkably, SpaceX has been able to push the limits of booster reuse while maintaining a 100 percent record of success across the Falcon 9 rocket's last 228 launches, dating to a pad explosion in September 2016.

As part of its maintenance process, SpaceX still does some basic inspections and replaces engines and other critical components from time to time. Additionally, the company only risks its own internally built Starlink satellites on the most experienced boosters, reserving rockets with less mileage for its customers.

My own take on it (FWIW) is that there probably isn't one convenient number like 10, 20 or any other number.  Parts do fail, but space-rated hardware is supposed to be the best and most reliable parts money can buy.  Perhaps they should institute some sort of cost-tracking that says when the parts that have been replaced in a booster reach some percentage of the cost of making a new one, they should replace it.  I just have no idea what that point should be.  I have to believe that they already do something similar and if every booster needs a certain part replaced by the tenth flight, they'll redesign the part or re-specify it so that it lasts longer.

Moving the launch webcasts from the SpaceX website and YouTube to being on X probably reflects Elon Musk's tendency to think launch webcasts are not worth wasting time or effort on.  His attitude is largely that no one hosts a webcast when an airplane takes off from an airport. So, if SpaceX strives for airline-type operations, why should it broadcast every launch?  

Liftoff of the Starlink 6-17 mission. Image credit: SpaceX

Rocket Lab Loses One

Rocket Lab's string of 20 consecutive successful launches ended Tuesday when the company's Electron rocket suffered "an anomaly" after first stage separation and failed to deliver a small commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite for customer Capella Space into orbit.  

It leaves Rocket Lab with a 90% success rate. 

The mission began with liftoff at 2:55 AM EDT from their Mahia Peninsula launch facility in New Zealand.  The launch was delayed nearly a half hour due to weather; not rain, but solar weather.  Everything appeared to go well through the first stage's BECO (booster engine cut off) and stage separation.

An onboard camera showed sparks around the upper stage engine as it was supposed to ignite. A display on Rocket Lab's live launch webcast showed the rocket's velocity decreasing, which suggested the vehicle's upper stage was not generating any significant thrust.

Video screen capture of Rocket Lab's coverage showing streaks from the apparent sparks.  

“Tough day. My deepest apologies to our mission partners Capella Space,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, posted on social media. “Team is already working on root cause. We’ll find it, fix it and be back on the pad quickly.”

The new author at Ars Technica, Stephen Clark says Rocket Lab's 90% success rate is in the range of "not great; not terrible."  In the small sat launch business, their main competitors are Astra and Firefly but not only is Astra not launching, they're in financial trouble.  Virgin orbit was a competitor, but they declared bankruptcy and shut down.  Firefly doesn't have a large log of successes to compare to.  Rocket Lab's 90% success rate comes across pretty favorably in that market segment. 

The selling point of Rocket Lab and their Electron booster is that they're the sole (or main) payload and so get delivered to their desired orbit.  The 90% success rate, though, pales pretty badly compared to SpaceX's Falcon 9, which has gone over 230 consecutive successful launches.   Yes, customers on a SpaceX rideshare mission would have to go to an orbit that's not what they desire and either use their onboard maneuvering fuel to achieve the desired orbit or use one of the available intermediate stages to get there.  It just so happens that Rocket Lab makes one of these themselves, called the Photon.  It's how Rocket Lab got NASA's CAPSTONE satellite to the moon on one of their boosters.  

Here's the gotcha.  I have no idea how much Photon costs, but Clark reports:

A dedicated commercial launch on Rocket Lab's Electron runs about $7.5 million. According to SpaceX's website, it would charge less than $1 million to launch a 363-pound (165-kilogram) satellite comparable in mass to one of Capella's radar spacecraft.

My guess is that buying a Photon (or someone else's version) wouldn't use all of the $6.5 million difference between SpaceX rideshare and using the Electron.  

Which is not to distract from the fact that Rocket Lab seems to be a well-managed, solid company and is already pressing any agencies that can help to join in their attempt to understand this failure.  I view this as a temporary setback.

Stoke Space Has Their Hoppy Moment

Stoke Space is a well-funded startup space company from Kent, Washington working on the design of a fully reusable orbital rocket.  Their proposed design is two stages to orbit with both stages fully reusable.  More on that in a moment, but the purpose of this post is to link to their test flight yesterday, Sept. 14 on X.  Just like when SpaceX launched Starhopper (video) - now more widely known as Hoppy - it was a test of several key concepts and a lot of design work.  

Stoke Space announced they completed a short hop at their test facility in Moses Lake, Washington and said all goals were achieved.  Like Starhopper was a concept test platform for Starship, the upper stage of the Starship/Super Heavy system, this test was the upper stage of their planned rocket. 

During this test, known as Hopper2, we were able to successfully launch the Hopper test vehicle to an altitude of 30 feet and land at its planned landing zone following 15 seconds of flight. The test successfully demonstrated our novel hydrogen/oxygen engine, regeneratively cooled heat shield, and differential throttle thrust vector control system, as well as our avionics, software, and ground systems.

This test was the last test in our Hopper technology demonstration program. We successfully completed all of the planned objectives. We’ve also proven that our novel approach to robust and rapidly reusable space vehicles is technically sound, and we’ve obtained an incredible amount of data that will enable us to confidently evolve the vehicle design from a technology demonstrator to a reliable reusable space vehicle.

The first paragraph of that quote references the fundamental difference between their upper stage and everything else that's flying.  This is a photo of the second stage from a different test, that you may have seen before. 

The difference jumps out at you.  Every other vehicle out there has engines that are gimballed to steer the vehicle - thrust vector control is achieved by changing the direction the engines are pointed.  The engines are bigger and their large engine bells cover the entire area of the base, or close to it.  Stoke, on the other hand changes the thrust of the engines to change the direction of the thrust vector.  With the engines being farther from the center of the stage, the engines have more leverage and it makes room for their regeneratively cooled heat shield.  The engines themselves are said to be conventional liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen engines with their nozzles implemented in that one large circular structure.  The control must be in feeding the fuel and oxidizer to the engines

Andy Lapsa, chief executive of Stoke Space, said in an interview that the hop did allow for some additional testing, such as for position sensors. “It was the first opportunity to put every single component every single piece all together in the fully autonomous closed loop control system.” The flight was also a chance to look for “unknown unknowns,” or unforeseen issues that could be found only by flying the vehicle.

There were non-technical benefits to the hop as well, he added. “There is a very real emotional crescendo to a program like this to actually go and fly.”

Now that they feel the engineering choices made in the design of the second stage are correct and the second stage design work is complete, they've said it's time to move on to designing the first stage.  The first stage will use methane/oxygen, like Starship, New Glenn and other newer vehicles.  It will have seven engines.  The whole rocket (which I can't find a name for) is relatively small lift vehicle; seven metric tons to low-Earth orbit.  

Assuming SpaceX can get Starship operational, Stoke Space has an opportunity to become the second company to build a fully reusable rocket. No company has started with that singular goal for its first rocket.

Stoke Space's second stage, which they call Hopper, during Sunday's Hopper2 test.  Photo credit: Stoke Space.

The #1 Myth About Retirement

I thought I wasn't supposed to run out of time for projects?  The day got away from me again.  I started in the direction of going to pull some weeds around my vertical antenna, but I also wanted to get a look at something on my everyday ride bike.  I've been having intermittent troubles with the rear brake and given that it's the original equipment on a 2005 bike, I thought I should also look at the brake pads.  Which means taking the back wheel off. 

In the process of taking the wheel off, I had to take the chain off.  Well, it devolved into a partial tear down, clean, de-grease, re-grease and maintenance of the whole drive train.  OK, most of the drive train.   Would you believe some of the drive train?  By the time I could get out to pull weeds, the thunderstorms were rolling in.  The weeds will have to wait - and grow a little more after the watering.

While having dinner, I decided to give a try to a movie on Amazon Prime video that I'd seen the trailer for, called A Million Miles Away.  It's a biopic about an immigrant engineer named José Hernandez who devoted his adult life to becoming an astronaut.  When I test a movie like that, I'll start watching with the idea that if there isn't something that catches me, or there is something that absolutely "turns me off",  I'll shut it off and "fuggedaboutit" - while if it's OK but barely catches my attention, it goes in the "maybe come back later" limbo.  

Here's the trailer:

The star of the movie is one of my favorite guys from the Marvel Universe, Michael Peña, who plays a minor character named Luis in the first two Ant Man movies but takes absolute command of the set when he's onscreen.  This role is completely unlike the Ant Man movies and I think he shows respectable acting.  

There are one or two hints about this in the trailer but while there's a little of "I started out as a poor child" / "oh, poor, pitiful me" narrative, by and large the message is if you want something, figure out what you need to do and work toward the goal.  There's no "I'm better than you just because" to it at all.  If you're behind, work harder.  If others get picked ahead of you, figure out what they have that you don't or what they did that you didn't and work on that.  José Hernandez' father gives a five step method when José is elementary school age, and the movie follows it faithfully. 

Overall, worth the two hours watching it.  

Starship Raptor Engine Passes Critical Test for Artemis and HLS

SpaceX has passed a test of starting a Raptor engine after cold soaking at temperatures meant to simulate coasting unpowered for days traveling to the moon.  This is considered a critical test to clear Raptors in the Human Landing System (HLS) to bring astronauts from the Artemis III mission down to the lunar surface in 2025 or '26.  The test only ran the engine for three seconds, since the object of the test was to verify starting at cryogenic temperatures and those temperatures go away pretty quickly.  The test was conducted in August but NASA's Artemis blog only posted about it Thursday (Sept. 14).  SpaceX tweeted a short, 18 second, video on X the same day, showing the test ignition and burn.  

Screen capture from the SpaceX video on X.

As for the Raptor engine test, NASA officials said its success gives the agency more confidence that SpaceX is progressing toward its Artemis 3 obligations. "These tests provide early and mission-like validation of the systems necessary for carrying astronauts to and from the lunar surface," agency officials wrote in the blog post. "Data reviews following these tests provide NASA with continually increasing confidence in U.S. industry's readiness for the mission."

This is the second major test of Raptor engine capabilities for NASA and Artemis.  In November '21, SpaceX ran the engine for the duration needed for the long descent to the moon, 281 seconds (4.5 minutes).  The Raptor also had its power level changed during the test to verify those mission requirements.  

You might recall that this June, NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free blasted Starship along with Boeing's Starliner as being fixed price contracts that haven't lived up to his expectations.  He doubted that SpaceX could meet a 2025 launch date and might force the mission out to '26. 

In the Aug. 8 press conference at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida attended by Space.com, Free suggested the agency could leave off the moon landing for Artemis 3,if necessary, and fly an alternate mission with a crew. In that scenario, Starship would be used on a future mission (such as Artemis 4) for the first human lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The agency is looking for multiple successful launches by Starship ahead of authorizing the landing with astronauts, among other milestones, Free said. (Indeed, NASA wrote in its blog post on Thursday that the agency will be watching the performance of Raptor engines during the second launch attempt by Starship.)

There are a few things SpaceX must demonstrate before a lunar landing in addition to getting Starship into orbit successfully.  Of these, the biggest hurdle seems to be successful orbital refueling.  If every Starbase launch is delayed by some agency, the next moon landing is also delayed.  Perhaps NASA might lean on the FAA, FWS, DOJ and any other government bureau trying to impede SpaceX's progress. 

 

Firefly Aerospace Launches Victus Nox Mission

Victus Nox (Latin for "conquer the night") is a US Space Force initiative to have a short response time between notification of a need and the rocket blasting off.  Space Force announced today that the first Victus Nox mission was launched successfully September 14th at 7:28 PM local time from Vandenberg SFB, Complex 2 West.  The companies that achieved the record were Firefly Aerospace for the launch vehicle partnered with Millennium Space Systems which built the payload. 

The rules of the game are that the team is put on a “hot standby,” awaiting an alert notification from the Space Force.  Hot standby can last for up to six months; they were put on standby much more recently than that; August 30th.  At a time the USSF chooses, the launch team will be given a notice that a mission is required and once they get the notice, they have a 60-hour window to transport the payload to Firefly’s launch site at Vandenberg, conduct fueling operations, and integrate it with the Alpha rocket’s payload adapter.  Clearly, the satellite and Alpha rocket have to be built and available.  

“In a major advancement of Tactically Responsive Space capabilities, Space Systems Command and Firefly Aerospace successfully encapsulated a Millennium Space Systems-built space vehicle, mated it to Firefly’s Alpha launch vehicle, and completed all final launch preparations in 24 hours,” the command said.

“Upon activation, the space vehicle was transported 165 miles from Millennium’s El Segundo facility to Vandenberg Space Force Base where it was tested, fueled, and mated to the launch adapter in just under 58 hours, significantly faster than the typical timeline of weeks or months,” said Space Systems Command.

At this point, Space Force gave Firefly the final call to launch and the required orbital parameters. The company then had 24 hours to update the trajectory, encapsulate the payload, transport it to the pad and stand ready to launch at the first available window. 

“Liftoff took place at the first available launch window, 27 hours after receipt of launch orders, setting a new record for responsive space launch,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Guetlein, commander of Space Systems Command.

"The success of Victus Nox marks a culture shift in our nation's ability to deter adversary aggression and, when required, respond with the operational speed necessary to deliver decisive capabilities to our warfighters,"

"This exercise is part of an end-to-end Tactically Responsive Space demonstration which proves the United States Space Force can rapidly integrate capabilities and will respond to aggression when called to do so on tactically relevant timelines," Guetlein added.

I should point out that the mission isn't done at this time, and it's a bit more than 10 hours since the launch as I write.  Their next objective is to initialize the satellite and begin operations in under 48 hours.

Let's see... they had  60 hours in the first step and completed it in "just under 58;" then they had to be ready to launch in 24 hours and all we really know is the desired orbit didn't have a launch window for 27 hours.  I'll call it 58+24 or 82 hours.  At this point, Space Force reminds us the previous responsive-launch record was 21 days, set in June 2021 on the Tactically Responsive Launch-2 (TacRL-2) mission, which was carried out by a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL air-launched rocket.  Going from around 500 hours down to 82 doesn't make that 3 hours (from 27 to 24) I rounded off up above seem that important.

A Firefly Alpha rocket launched the Victus Nox mission for the U.S. Space Force last night, Sept. 14, 2023, 7:28 PM PDT from Space Launch Complex 2 West at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Credit: Firefly Aerospace.

 

Three Weeks to Psyche Mission

Actually, three weeks to launch of the "next big mission" was today, Thursday September 14, at 10:38AM, with the launch now scheduled for Thursday October 5th.  It's big in the sense of being a first ever mission to "... a world  made not of rock or ice, but of metal" as the project's web page at Arizona State University says.  And it's big in the literal, descriptive sense; the spacecraft is so big it requires a Falcon Heavy to lift it.  

Psyche is the mission that was cancelled in '22, and the cancellation had a big impact on how long it will take the satellite to reach it's target; the asteroid 16 Psyche.  That one year delay moves the arrival date out three years - from 2026 to "before the end of the decade."  Then there's the cost.  In 2022, the Psyche mission was estimated to cost $985 million. That's now gone up to $1.23 billion. 

One of my favorite things that I've read about really any satellite mission is in this statement from Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Psyche's principal investigator at Arizona State University.  It's the second small paragraph. 

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

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

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

The mission web page at ASU has an image that they use of the asteroid.  I think that based on Elkins-Tanton's statement that the image is largely imaginative and not based on careful measurement of some sort of imaging or radar. 

Artist's illustration of NASA's Psyche spacecraft, as it approaches the asteroid, showing (most of) one its solar arrays.  NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU 

From time to time, you'll run across a story of someone finding an asteroid made of gold or platinum and how rich they could get.  It just kind of underlines that the author doesn't really understand supply and demand as well as the average prospector.  Go to anywhere in the world where there's a good deposit of some gemstone and you'll find the people in charge won't put it all on the market at once so they don't collapse the price.  Psyche is thought to more likely be the heavier metals found in planetary cores like iron, and nickel.  The reasons for the mission have much more to do with understanding how rocky planets with predominantly metallic cores form than finding the value of the metals in it.     

Another Team Joins the Effort to do On-Orbit Refueling

Back in 2019, as part of an announcement of 19 different public/private sector partnerships with 10 different companies, NASA announced that SpaceX and two NASA centers, the Glenn Research Center in Ohio and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, would work together on space-borne refueling systems.  On September 7th, Ship 26 which has long been speculated to be the first Starship that would become an on-orbit fuel depot, rolled to the test area in Boca Chica for testing (video).  The rumor is that Ship 26 will be the third orbital Starship test.  Given we're about to enter the 3rd quarter of this year, I have to conclude that the third orbital mission would most likely be No Earlier Than the second half of '24.    

Title screen from the video on NASASpaceflight - not the video itself.  That's ship 26 on the test pad, being readied for a set of tests that may end up including static firing.  No thermal tiles, no fins or aero surfaces?  It's never going to be reused, so why lift weight you don't need?

All of this to set up the story that two small companies are teaming up with the goal of demonstrating on-orbit refueling. 

Spaceium, a startup building in-orbit pit stops for interplanetary missions, is teaming up with The Exploration Company on a demo mission to refuel a spacecraft in orbit.

The two companies are betting on a future in-space servicing economy, and their missions and timelines mesh well.

Spaceium is working on the problems of refueling, charging, and debris storage, and designing a prototype with a modular architecture to launch next year.  The Exploration Company, often just called TEC, has designed a vehicle called Nyx, targeting a demo flight in 2024, designed to gas up between months-long trips around Earth or the Moon. 

The partnership: Spaceium and The Exploration Company announced this morning that they have signed a bilateral letter of intent to demonstrate cryogenic refueling using Nyx and the planned orbiting service station.

• The station would be stocked with cryogenic bio-methane and oxygen.
• The two companies have also agreed to use Nyx as a host for a servicing module in 2026.

TEC also announced Tuesday that it signed an agreement with Axiom Space to use Nyx to supply a cargo mission to Axiom's planned space station.  

No date is announced in the source article on Payload, but I think it would be optimistic to think this could be operating by 2025 and '26 may be more realistic.  Looking at a website, it can be hard to figure out what's real and what's a rendering or "artist's conception."  I'm not convinced there's actual hardware anywhere.

 

It's a Shockingly Slow Space News Day

It's strange to the point of scary how little is going on.  Going to all my usual hangouts to see what's interesting turned up nothing except things that are months or years out, or things that aren't really noteworthy.  Stories like the three companies under contract to launch Kuiper satellites for Amazon pinky-swear they'll do it.  "Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye."  Not one of the three launch vehicles has flown yet: Ariane 6, New Glenn or Vulcan Centaur.  Does anyone seriously think those launch providers would say anything except that they're preparing to meet their contracts?

Amazon’s 83-launch deal includes 18 Ariane 6 launches, 12 to 27 New Glenn launches and 38 United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur. Credit: Arianespace/Blue Origin/ULA

So what's a space blogger to do?  Well, there's a story that isn't very interesting but it isn't as far out in the future as launching the Kuiper constellation.  More than a year after an engine failure on a flight of their New Shepard suborbital rocket, Blue Origin has announced plans to resume their tourist flights of the little vehicle.

According to two sources familiar with the company's manifest, however, it appears that Blue Origin is finally getting ready to fly the New Shepard launch system again. The company's tentative plans call for an uncrewed test flight in early October. If all goes well, Blue Origin is planning its first crewed mission since August 4, 2022, to take place in mid-February next year.

The flight that was aborted was one year ago today (probably why there's a followup article) and while Blue didn't impress me as being very public with their failure analysis and corrective actions, I've learned that six months after the incident, the mishap team reported having found "hot streaks" on the rocket engine's nozzle and determined that it was operating at higher temperatures than it was designed for.  The company said, "Blue Origin is implementing corrective actions, including design changes to the combustion chamber and operating parameters, which have reduced engine nozzle bulk and hot-streak temperatures."

There's some concern about whether they have hardware to fly for the test early next month - or which vehicle they'll launch.  They appear to have only one available which seems to answer which one they're going to fly.  The rocket is called Booster 4, although there are some reports that they're working on a new one, presumably incorporating any changes the investigation has prompted.

On 9-11

For me, 9-11 always arrives in a fog of memories.  Like the tragedies of JFK's assassination, space shuttle Challenger exploding on ascent, or the triumph of Apollo 11's landing, I'll always remember where I was and details of the day it happened.  

I've long harbored a mixed bag of responses.  The first group of feels is "remember the fallen", "remember the first responders who ran into the buildings", "remember the dead and wounded servicemen, the ones who came back with missing limbs, or injuries that can't be seen" and "remember their families."  All of those feels are still there.  Next, though, came contempt for the politicians and beltway bandits that made money off those fallen servicemen.  The age-old bad guys that Eisenhower coined the term "Military Industrial Complex" for. Those feels are now joined by contempt for and disgust with the current military leadership. 

Everyone says 9-11 changed the world forever.  America of 2023 is so different from the America that I grew up in that it's barely recognizable.  Part of it was the PATRIOT act, which led to that NSA Data storage facility in Colorado (I ran some numbers on it in 2013, but that's pretty outdated) and so very much more.  Peter Grant, Bayou Renaissance Man, ran a piece today linking to a piece on the Last Refuge that presents the case that 9/11 led to the current mess our country is in.  

The problems we face now as a country are directly an outcome of two very distinct points that were merged by Barack Obama. (1) The post 9/11 monitoring of electronic communication of American citizens; and (2) Obama’s team creating a fine-tuning knob that it focused on the politics of the targets.  This is very important to understand as you dig deeper into this research outline.

The late 1990s and into 2001 was a seminal moment in technology; the population of people online and communicating electronically skyrocketed, the data began pouring in and was ripe for the picking.  It gave rise to what Sundance at the Last Refuge calls the Fourth Branch of Government or the Intelligence Branch.  The article on Last Refuge is long and detailed but worth going back to. 

While 9-11 led to Afghanistan and Iraq, Iraq was pretty much over with years ago, Afghanistan lingered on.  We're now two years since the disastrous ending in '21.  That was the year that we lost.  We weren't defeated, we formally demonstrated defeating ourselves to the whole world.  We lost in what might have been the most incompetent fustercluck in world history.  A team of Brownie Girl Scouts could have planned and executed that abandonment of Afghanistan better than the Bidenistas did.  For cryin' out loud, they abandoned hundreds of Americans and Afghans that worked for us behind Taliban lines.  Many of those left behind have been assassinated.  They even abandoned Biden's translator in Afghanistan.  By now, the stories have been talked about until everyone has heard them. 

Just to be clear, it's not that I think we should still be in Afghanistan, I'm closer to those who have said we should have gotten out long ago, only we should have done it competently.  We didn't leave from any position of strength, we left with our tails between our legs looking so weak as to be pitiful to the charitable observers and pathetic to the rest of the world.  I'm sure we're especially pathetic to the heirs of Bin Laden who declared us "a weak horse" easy to roll over.  I expect lots more actual attempts to emulate 9/11 while we're showing weakness. There have been reports that many people on the "terror watch list" came across the open border in the last few years.  Not just from the middle east, but from all over the world, joined by Chinese communists.  I'd be shocked to the point of falling over if there aren't Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army special forces teams in the country now.

America is weak now.  Unprecedentedly weak.  I hear numbers around that our non-nuclear weapons stockpiles are essentially gone; given to and used up in Ukraine.  That Ukraine uses more in one day than manufacturers make in a month.  Other adversaries have to be looking at us and thinking "now is the time" to do whatever they thought we'd respond to with force.  It's possible they've decided not to attack us because we're doing such an excellent job of destroying ourselves. 

Distractions

It's one of those occasional "I got nothing" Sundays - too many distractions.  I think the latest thing to break is our dishwasher.  "It just ain't right." Got some troubleshooting to do.

So ... an attempt at humor.  

2/3 of this you've probably seen.  KJP being matched up with Jamie Foxx on the left was around in a lot of places last weekend.  I always think of her as Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons.  I've seen her with more Sideshow Bob-like hair.

Don't Read This If You've Heard This About SLS Before

NASA says SLS is so expensive it's unsustainable.  

Ars Technica posts an article off this week's Rocket Report saying NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable.  

As the title says, everyone already knows SLS and Artemis are too expensive.  I couldn't tell you how many times I've written about it, but the last time I wrote about it I called it an old story about a still new program. 

Published on Thursday, the new report (see .pdf) examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as part of the Artemis program.

"Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states.

All of this reporting is either old stuff that we've all seen or small tweaks to that stuff we've seen.  In the past, I've focused on the RS-25 engines that SLS uses; four on each mission to be exact.   The RS-25 engines are also referred to by their old name, Space Shuttle Main Engines or SSMEs and were first built in the 1970s.  I've been reading and reporting about cost overruns on these engines for years now - and I think they're the reason somebody coined the term "Shuttles' Leftover Shit" for SLS instead of Space Launch System.  In May of '20, I found out that the first stage engines would cost $146 million per engine, so nearly $600 million ($584 m) for just the four engines of the booster core.  Engines that will litter the floor of the Atlantic after one use.  These were reused during the Space Shuttle days. That's not the cost of the core stage carrying them; that's simply the cost of the engines.   

In March of '22, NASA's inspector general said the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion.

In the source article, it's reported that NASA has released some hand-waving report about bringing the price on the RS-25s down to "$70.5 million by the end of this decade."  

However, NASA's inspector general, Paul Martin, said this claim was dubious. According to Martin, when calculating the projected cost savings of the new RS-25 engines, NASA and Aerojet only included material, engineering support, and touch labor, while project management and overhead costs are excluded. 

In a program that's for man-rated space hardware, how can anyone honestly not include project management and other overhead costs?  Many of us have said with space-rated hardware, the actual hardware is almost free compared to the overhead costs.  That was for satellites, though. 

As Eric Berger points out something we've said many times:

And even at $70.5 million, these engines are very, very far from being affordable compared to the existing US commercial market for powerful rocket engines. Blue Origin manufactures an engine of comparable power and size, the BE-4, for less than $20 million. And SpaceX is seeking to push the similarly powerful Raptor rocket engine costs even lower, to less than $1 million per engine.

One option is to completely shut down the program.  I know it would give NASA management and the contractors from SLS and Artemis (not to mention their congressional lackeys) complete nervous breakdowns, but think of it this way: SpaceX's Falcon Heavy can only lift about 2/3 of the payload of the SLS, but does so at $100 Million per launch price is from 2022.  That means two launches give a bigger payload than one SLS launch at about 5% of its price.  It's not as simple as just saying to swap over to the Heavy; the Orion hardware would have to be redesigned, but let's not get into the sunk cost fallacy.  All that money spent on Artemis/SLS/Orion development is gone.  The question is if we keep spending far too much on every launch or if we sink a little more money to cut launch costs.  If we could cut that $4.1 billion per launch down to $300 to $500 million with new hardware costs (essentially doubling the current FH cost by adding new Orion hardware), it saves the money-bleeding that SLS is set to do. 

Artemis I vehicle on the pad September 1, 2022, before a series of things (including hurricanes) forced the mission to be delayed until November. Trevor Mahlmann photo.

 

 

FAA Completes Review of SpaceX Investigation

As our friends over at Gun Free Zone like to say, BLUF - for Bottom Line Up Front.

The FAA completed their review of the report SpaceX submitted and closed the investigation.  That does NOT mean they are cleared now or will be cleared to fly any time soon. 

That said, completing the investigation is certainly a big step to the second launch.  

"The closure of the mishap investigation does not signal an immediate resumption of Starship launches at Boca Chica," they said in today's statement. "SpaceX must implement all corrective actions that impact public safety and apply for and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next Starship launch."
...
"Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices," FAA officials wrote in today's statement.

The language completely ignores an important point here.  The report being investigated by the FAA was written by SpaceX.  That means that at a minimum they know a very high proportion of what the Feds say need to be changed, and they quite possibly know all of the things the FAA would say need to be addressed.  And a few years of observing how SpaceX works says if they know something needs to be fixed, they're not going to wait around for someone to tell them that.  They're just going to go fix it.  SpaceX issued a statement on X today essentially saying that. 

The site linked to in this post from X is this SpaceX site, the entry dated September 8, 2023.

Elon Musk has previously said the company has made "thousands of upgrades" to Starship, the launch pad and Starbase's huge launch tower.  Someone now has the task of going through what the FAA wants and seeing if it has been done.  Probably an engineering group; if not for the whole task, than to clear up some number of things the FAA said to do that won't be exactly the way SpaceX documentation is worded.

SpaceX image of the "rocket garden" at Boca Chica.  Just because it's a neat picture.  Four Starships and three Super Heavies.  

 

ULA Atlas V Mission from August Set Again

Back at the end of August as hurricane Idalia was approaching Florida, United Launch Alliance rolled the Atlas V for the SILENTBARKER / NROL-107 mission back to their Vertical Integration Facility.  

The mission is back on for Saturday morning at 8:51 AM from SLC-41 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  The launch will be streamed live on YouTube.

From the ULA mission page:

The Space Force's Space Launch Delta 45 weather squadron and Launch Weather Officer Brian Cizek forecasts an 85 percent of acceptable conditions for liftoff.

"Launch weather conditions generally look favorable for Saturday morning, with dry mid-level air limiting Atlantic shower coverage and most diurnal shower/storm activity not likely until later in the day. The primary concern is the small risk of a Cumulus Cloud Rule violation," the weather team says.

The launch time forecast for 8:51 a.m. EDT (1251 UTC) includes a scattered clouds, good visibility, southerly winds 5-10 knots and a temperature near 81 degrees F.

If the launch moves to the backup opportunity on Sunday for some reason, a similar weather pattern holds and the odds of favorable conditions remain at 85 percent.

Photo by United Launch Alliance, Dated September 7th.

 

Watching Japan's XRISM/SLIM Mission Launch

Tonight at 7:42 PM EDT, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) along with its new telescope the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM).  The launch was on the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H-2A.  You may remember the failure of the Japanese H3 launch in early March of this year.  The H3's upper stage failed to ignite and since the H-2A uses a similar engine, the failure grounded the entire fleet until it was understood.  It adds to the pressure to understand the engine failure when you consider the H-2A is due to be replaced by the H3 and this is one of the last H-2A missions.  Once the failure analysis was completed, this mission was then scheduled for August 26th, but was delayed by weather until today. 

Launch of the H-2A carrying XRISM and SLIM from Tanegashima Space Center, Japan,  screen capture of coverage provided by JAXA.

XRISM separated from the second stage 14 minutes after liftoff, entering a roughly 550 x 500-kilometer orbit inclined by 31 degrees. The second stage performed an apogee-raising burn around 46 minutes after liftoff, with SLIM separating from the stage a minute later.

SLIM, also called the Moon Sniper, is heading to the moon in a low-fuel use trajectory; XRISM will stay in LEO.   

SLIM won’t be taking a direct route to the moon. After a lunar transfer orbit burn, it will make a lunar flyby, heading into a wide loop away from the Earth-moon system and returning to enter lunar orbit in around four months’ time. This route allows for a smaller burn to enter lunar orbit, saving propellant and mass. 

SLIM will then orbit the moon for around a month before making its 20-minute descent and landing attempt, with the aim of demonstrating a lightweight landing capability with high accuracy.

The fact that SLIM will take around five months to get to its landing raised a lot of hackles in the chat stream running alongside the YouTube JAXA video.  Similarly, there are many people in positions that get quoted widely saying "we can't go to the moon anymore" comparing missions like this to the lunar probes of the 1960s or even Apollo.  They miss the point that "engineering is the art of compromise" and it may be that planning missions like landings on the moon or another planet are the most extreme examples of compromise. We could launch those sorts of trajectories if we wanted to duplicate the missions.  The reason for the differing trajectories is the mission planners thought their choice of a cheaper launch was a good trade off for getting a lander with the instruments they wanted on it and doing different things.

The JAXA video included a lot of information on both XRISM and SLIM, and the emphasis on SLIM was "instead of landing where we can get to, landing where we want to."  To do that, SLIM will use vision systems. 

SLIM, also referred to as “Moon Sniper,” aims to set down within 100 meters of its target point using vision-based navigation. The lander carries observational data from the SELENE orbiter which will be compared to features detected during the autonomous descent and landing. This will greatly reduce the landing ellipsis, or region within which a probe is expected to land based, which is usually on the order of kilometers.

The spacecraft will use a laser range finder, landing radar and navigation camera for the landing attempt, and carries two main 500N engines and 12 smaller engines.

SLIM will also deploy two separate smaller probes, Lunar Excursion Vehicles (LEV), within its last few feet of descent before landing to record the landing site and demonstrate autonomous exploration.  

As usual, more information at the source article, and this time in the video of the mission. 

 

 

Small Space News Story Roundup 19

B9/S25 - Stacked

SpaceX today stacked Ship 25 on top of Booster 9 as preparations for Integrated Flight Test #2 proceed.  This the first stacking with the new vented interstage for hot staging and it seemed like they were being a bit slower than the last time I watched one.  SpaceX pretty much said months ago that Booster 9 and Ship 25 take the next orbital test flight and while it's not going to be this week, the possibility remains that it could be this month.  As has been the case for a while, that depends on how fast the FAA and other bureaucrats move. 

Screen capture from Lab Padre's Rover 2.0 Camera

I expect they'll start verifying that nothing was messed up in moving by cryo testing, then do a full fueling load and drain, followed by either a full wet dress rehearsal or an actual static firing test. 

NASA Prepares for Meteor Sample to Arrive at Earth

I can't say the return to Earth of the sample because it has never been here (unless something really weird is going on), but the meteor sample return mission OSIRIS-REx is due to return to Earth on September 24.  

The mission, Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, launched back in September 2016 atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V to begin its journey to the near-Earth asteroid and after a 2-year trip through space arrived in orbit around Bennu in December 2018.

The orbiter proceeded to study the asteroid for nearly 2 more years, searching for a proper site to conduct its touch-and-go landing in order to collect a viable sample of the asteroid. After a thorough scan of the celestial body, sometimes orbiting less than a mile above the surface, NASA selected its location and commanded the orbiter to lower itself to the surface for the sample. 

It seems like just the other day we were talking about the mission to Bennu and the involvement of astrophysicist Brian May, better known as the virtuoso guitarist of British rock group Queen, as well as designer of a line of electric guitars bearing his name. 

More details at the first link in this section, but the mission had a goal of collecting a roughly 2 ounce sample of the meteor to bring to Earth, but after measurements, they determined they had at least 8 ounces of regolith from Bennu, according to Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator on the mission, whom we met at the second link.  Something we didn't talk about is that this is not the end of the OSIRIS-REx mission.  It will pass by earth, and literally drop off the sample return payload before heading off to its next target.

Teams will conduct a go/no go poll prior to the Sample Return Capsules release from the orbiter, and if for some reason a no is given, they won’t have a chance to recover the sample until 2025 after a risky trip near the Sun.

Once a go is given, the capsule will be released from the orbiter 4 hours before the scheduled re-entry. The capsule will hit the atmosphere at 27,000 miles per hour, followed by a parachute being deployed and a soft touchdown at 10 miles per hour. The orbiter will perform a maneuver after release so it doesn’t enter the atmosphere and will undertake a brand new mission to study the asteroid Apophis.

Ground teams in Utah have been training intensively for their recovery mission.  

And, seriously, how long does it take and how much does it cost to come up with an acronym/mission name like OSIRIS-REx?

 

 

Goodnight Vikram, Goodnight Pragyan

(With apologies to Margaret Wise Brown)  As the moon goes into the gibbous waning phase and lunar night has reached Chandrayaan-3 landing site, we read that both the lander and rover have gone into sleep mode.  When they landed back on August 23, the plan was to spend a full lunar day on the mission - about 14 days here on Earth.  It has been 12 days, but both the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover have been put into "sleep mode" for the next two weeks.  

"Vikram will fall asleep next to Pragyan once the solar power is depleted and the battery is drained. Hoping for their awakening, around September 22, 2023," ISRO said in a post on X on Monday, Sept. 4. 

Just before it went to sleep, the lander performed a short "hop," briefly firing its thrusters to move by about 16 inches (40 centimeters), closer to the already sleeping Pragyan rover. This hop may be seen as a test for a future sample return mission that would need to launch from the moon's surface.

This is where we find out if Vikram and Pragyan have more in common with JPL missions, which typically stretch missions scheduled for short periods into much, much longer operational successes.  Things like the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, that was originally intended for 5 flights and completed its 56th flight 10 days ago on August 25th.  Or the Mars Rover Opportunity, originally scheduled for 90 days and worked for 15 years.  The champions of that are the Voyagers - both 1 and 2 - intended for a four year mission and now in their 46th year.  

They are waiting for their next sunrise on September 22nd.  The lunar temperatures in the depth of night are pretty extreme, but in my experience, the only thing to be wondering about is their batteries.  Let me rush to say I haven't done the test of putting a circuit into a cooler at -200F for two weeks and then turning it on, but I don't even recall seeing an option on data sheets for surviving that and then being re-powered.  

That Tweet, with the photos, should be available here. 

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For those who didn't hear, SpaceX successfully launched their 62nd mission of the year Sunday night, successfully putting 21 Starlink satellites in their preliminary orbits and recovering the booster.  Originally set for around 7:25 PM, there was a cascade of delays until after 11:00 PM (ET, of course). 

Until last night, all SpaceX missions were shown on the SpaceX/launches website, like this one. This launch marked a move to X (formerly Twitter, of course), and no YouTube SpaceX coverage. Thankfully, NASASpaceflight covered it, and you can see it here.  That should start at T-30 seconds.  Unlike SpaceX's previous videos, NASASpaceflight.com starts earlier before the launch, has more interactive hosts with Q&A sessions and sticks with the coverage longer.

Labor Day 2023

Welcome to Labor day, or as we refer to it this year: August 35th.  While being retired means it's not even a long weekend, we'll be doing something unusual and cooking in the kitchen rather than smoking something.  Tuesday is Mrs. Graybeard's birthday so I'll do the smoking for her day. 

Before I say anything else, I just want to point out something.  Some of you may have seen this story going around; this time notice the title:

I just want to be clear that I'm not that Central Florida Man.  At 100 20mm rounds per second, I could afford to run that for a few seconds.  Maybe. Depending on how much I'd need to spend to get it running. Aside from the obvious fun in firing something like that at all, at 6000rounds/min., it strikes me to be a good deal, if the license fee for it being a fully automatic, belt-fed machine gun really is the same as I'd have to pay for something mundane like a 9mm Uzi.  

Whether Monday is a day off for you, or you're past that as I am, enjoy it! 

SpaceX Tied Last Year's 61 Launches Today

It's the last day of the 35th week of the year and SpaceX today tied last year's record of 61 launches this morning.  Today's launch was from Vandenberg Space Force Base of the Space Development Agency’s Second Tranche 0 Mission at 7:25 AM PDT (video here - with launch close to 14:30 into the video).  The launch appeared to be treated as a classified payload with no views of the satellite.  

Screen capture from today's record-tying Falcon 9 launch video.

Tomorrow starts the 36th week of the year and SpaceX is currently scheduled to break the 61 launch tie tomorrow evening with #62.  Starlink Group 6-12 from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) on the Kennedy Space Center portion of Cape Canaveral.  Liftoff is set for 7:25 PM EDT.  

That leaves 16 weeks in calendar 2023, and Elon Musk had publicly set the goal of 100 launches this year.  A launch cadence of 2-3/8 per week for the next 16 weeks gets them to that lofty goal, or just under one launch every 3 days.  Is that realistically possible?  Today's launch was their 9th of August, which reduces to one every 3.44 days; essentially one every 3-1/2 days.  The pace from January 1 through today has been one every four days so the last month has been an improvement.  Can they make it to 100?

Since one every 3-1/2 days is quite a bit more than "just under one launch every 3 days", it doesn't seem like they can make 100.  There are aspects that could sway that decision, things such as their work to turn Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral SFS and SLC-6 at Vandenberg SFB into functional equivalents of LC-39A.  That would allow either pad to launch manned Crew Dragon or unmanned Cargo Dragons, and Falcon Heavy missions  as well as the more routine Falcon 9 launches.

 

 

Of Course It's Flying at Night

Fresh on the heels of their successful Chandrayann-3 mission, the Indian Space Research Organization will be launching a probe to study the sun.  The mission, called Aditya-L1 is set to launch in the early morning hours Saturday - 2:20 AM US Eastern Time (if it doesn't launch that page is likely to say something else by the time you get to it).

It doesn't need to fly at night because it's not really going to the sun (that just might be the oldest joke I can remember).  The L1 in the mission name is where it's going: the L1 Lagrange point on the sunward side of Earth.  Aditya is Sanskrit for sun.  The James Webb Telescope as well the European Euclid telescope are on the opposite side of the Earth from L1.  Since the L1 point always is exposed to the sun, it's home to NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Satellite SOHO. The advantage of observing from L1 (actually an orbit around L1) is there are no lost observation periods due to occultations or eclipses.  I should point out that this drawing doesn't seem to show well that L1 and L2 are the same distance from earth, about 932,000 miles.  

Image credit to the NASA/WMAP Science Team.

The ISRO lists a large number of research objectives:

• Study of Solar upper atmospheric (chromosphere and corona) dynamics.
• Study of chromospheric and coronal heating, physics of the partially ionized plasma, initiation of the coronal mass ejections, and flares
• Observe the in-situ particle and plasma environment providing data for the study of particle dynamics from the Sun.
• Physics of solar corona and its heating mechanism.
• Diagnostics of the coronal and coronal loops plasma: Temperature, velocity and density.
• Development, dynamics and origin of CMEs.
• Identify the sequence of processes that occur at multiple layers (chromosphere, base and extended corona) which eventually leads to solar eruptive events.
• Magnetic field topology and magnetic field measurements in the solar corona .
• Drivers for space weather (origin, composition and dynamics of solar wind )
  

To accomplish these, the probe brings seven instruments.  

1. Visible Emission Line Coronagraph (VELC)    
2. Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT)
3. Solar Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (SoLEXS) 
4. High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS) 
5. Aditya Solar wind Particle Experiment (ASPEX) 
6. Plasma Analyser Package For Aditya (PAPA) 
7. Advanced Tri-axial High Resolution Digital Magnetometers

 

The article at SpaceNews.com that got me started researching this mission has much more coverage of the various research targets.  After hundreds of years of continually-refined observations, the sun still has lots of mysteries available for study.  The first one they mention is what they call the sun's hottest mystery: the corona is much hotter than the surface of the sun although they are in constant contact.  The corona can reach 2 million degrees Fahrenheit. The photosphere, around 1,000 miles below it, has an average temperature of around 10,000 degrees F, meaning the sun's outer atmosphere is about 200 times hotter than its surface!  

The obstacle to observing the corona from Earth is how much brighter the photosphere is than the corona.  It's typically only visible during a total solar eclipse.  An alternative that works better in space than on the ground is a corona graph, an instrument on a telescope that blocks out the sun so the corona can be seen.  It works better in space because there's no airborne junk to brighten around the image.  Or so I've read.  Aditya-L1 carries one, the first instrument in that list. 

Here's wishing luck to the ISRO and Aditya-L1.