The Ups and Downs of Texas Tank Watching

Yesterday started out with an interesting summary on the Lab Padre cameras when I was waking up.  Their summary ended with the statement that road closures started in the afternoon and were accompanied by an overpressure notice for people living there in Boca Chica village, near the shipyard.  An overpressure notice is almost always saying they plan to do a static firing.

A few hours later, the mention of overpressure went away.  There were road closures and the next section of the Orbital Launch Integration Tower (OLIT) was transported to the launch complex.  

Today went similarly; an overpressure notice early that went away a few hours later.  Road closures were cancelled, so there's nothing waiting to move between the two major areas, the shipyard and launch complex.  Later today, Teslarati was reporting that the static firing has slipped to next Monday at the earliest.  

The bigger story that broke yesterday is that the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) made the story public that the environmental impact study that was done for SpaceX in 2014 is invalid and they're re-doing it.  The FAA claims it's invalid because it was based on Falcon 9 class vehicles and not Starship which is many times bigger.  The FAA is apparently doing the environmental impact study itself; there's no mention of them outsourcing it to the EPA.  Further, the FAA says any work SpaceX does on the OLIT is at their own risk.  I read that as saying any money they spend building the OLIT is wasted if the FAA says to tear it down.  Isn't that always the case?

• The Federal Aviation Administration has warned Elon Musk’s SpaceX that work on a massive launch tower will be included in the agency’s ongoing environmental review of the Starship facility in Boca Chica, Texas.
• “The company is building the tower at its own risk,” an FAA spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday, noting that the environmental review could recommend taking down the launch tower.

I don't know what would cause them to rule that way, but God forbid there be something like a Saltwater Marsh Beetle that lives nowhere else, or a Texas Snail Darter different from any other little fish.  

SpaceX has conducted multiple short test flights of Starship prototypes over the past year. However, the company needs the FAA to complete the environmental review and issue a license to take the next step in the rocket’s testing. Company leadership has set ambitious goals for the Starship program, with President Gwynne Shotwell last month saying SpaceX is “shooting for July” to launch the first orbital spaceflight of its Starship rocket.
....
The FAA’s letter on May 6 came in response to SpaceX saying in a prior letter that the launch tower in Boca Chica should not be a part of the environmental review because the company “only intends to use the integration tower for production, research, and development purposes and not for FAA-licensed or -permitted launches.”

“However, SpaceX’s project description in the administrative draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment provided to the FAA on May 5, 2021 indicates otherwise,” FAA safety authorization division manager Daniel Murray wrote in response.

The FAA further emphasized that the “480-foot-tall integration tower is substantially taller than the water tower and lightning towers assessed in the 2014” environmental review.

The bright spot was local, and we could have seen it if we tried.  The new drone ship, A Shortfall Of Gravitas arrived at Port Canaveral early today.  Instead of Thursday evening as quoted a couple of days ago, ASOG arrived closer to 12:30 PM EDT. 

The ultimate destination for ASOG is in the back right of the port which is in the top left corner of this picture.  There are three basins, all on the right (north) side of the port.  The last basin has a pair of large cranes, and at full-size I think recovery drone Just Read The Instructions is visible on southeast end of that basin. 

 

 

On Cuba

It's not something that tends to come up in our daily conversations, but a quick search of the blog shows that I have mentioned a few times that I grew up in Miami.  In particular, my folks moved to Miami from New York City when I was three.  It was 1957.  We lived in SW Miami from age four to nine and then in NW Miami from then to a year after I graduated high school.  After that I lived in south Florida, first Ft. Lauderdale and then Boca Raton, for another 8 years before moving here to Central Florida in 1982. 

I say that because living in that part of Florida in those years means that I grew up with a lot of friends whose families had fled Cuba.  A few were very close friends.  It was routine, regular life to see TV news stories of people making it across the Florida straits and making it to land in the most flimsy vessels imaginable. Everyone knew of vessels and family friends who didn't make it; whose boats went down along the way.  Once I was grown up and making a decent salary, I was able to fish saltwater from a boat and not just piers and bridges.  I met people who had run into these floating acts of desperation and called the Coast Guard to help, staying with the floats until the cutter arrived.  There was a saying that I heard that I'll never forget: the sharks are well fed in the Florida Straits.  A lot of people became shark food trying to escape Castro.  

Somewhere along the way, I had drummed into my head that if the Coast Guard found people offshore, they were not obligated to bring them ashore, but if someone got into shallow enough water that they could stand in and touch bottom, that was the US and they were granted asylum.  Yes, they ordinarily were sent to Customs and Immigration detention centers, but that was essentially a formality.  And, yes, it's a special dispensation for Cubans, originally aimed at how to treat those found walking into cities in the Keys or South Florida.

This is all lead in to the story that yesterday Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas delivered a message to Cubans (and Haitians) who might be tempted to make the crossing to Florida to escape the hellholes they're living in.  He told them not to try it.  Don't come because we'll find you offshore and we'll send you back. Secretary Mayorkas is a Cuban refugee himself.  Is he trying to prevent another flood of boats or is he trying to keep Cubans out of the country? 

“DHS is working with our partners to support the Haitian and Cuban people. The Coast Guard along with our state, local, and federal partners are monitoring any activity that may indicate increases in unsafe and irregular maritime migration in the Florida straits, including unpermitted vessel departures from Florida to Cuba.

The time is never right to attempt migration by sea. To those who risk their lives doing so, this risk is not worth taking. Allow me to be clear, if you take to the sea you will not come to the United States,” he said.

The Florida Straits are a hostile place.  It's all deep; off the western end of the keys, closer to Cuba, it's 1500 feet deep; farther north, east of the keys it's 500 to 800 feet deep.  The straits carry the bulk of the water in the Gulf stream north along Florida's east coast.  There is some additional flow west out of the Caribbean that joins and flows north with it.  I recall in the late '70s or maybe 1980 that Haitians would make it west along the northern side of their country and then Cuba before being swept north.  Once off the Florida coast, they'd try to beach themselves on the east coast.   

I'd hate to see Cubans and Haitians trying to make the trip, but I wouldn't threaten them with not getting into Florida.  Rather, I'd get the Coast Guard to rescue them and bring them to the US.  And Secretary Mayorkas had better know that he's breaking the law if he deports anyone who makes it to water they can stand up in. 

If you want to learn more and understand what the subjugation of the Cuban people is like, let me point you to Babalu Blog, fourth from the top of my links column.  Or start here.

SpaceX's New Recovery Drone Revealed

Recovery drone Of Course I Still Love You, OCISLY, arrived in Long Beach California on the 6th as commented about here before.  Another comment in that article is that the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station/Kennedy Space Center keeps a much higher pace of operations than Vandenberg on the west coast, and SpaceX needed another recovery drone ship.  I had read that SpaceX had another drone ship called A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) that was being finished, but after reading SpaceXFleet.com, I was influenced to say:

It appears that ASOG is being built in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, but isn't remotely close to being ready to travel to Florida.  Gavin Cornwell of SpaceXFleet Tweets that we're nearing three years since the work on ASOG was announced.

This week, video of the new drone ship ASOG was released.  That's a 30 second clip of a test run off the gulf coast before leaving for Florida.  

ASOG looks rather different from OCISLY.  (Note the Octagrabber under the booster helping to hold it to the deck).  ASOG's deck has some taper on both the forward and aft ends, and the body of the barge appears narrower; on OCISLY, the deck doesn't extend beyond the hull while it does on ASOG. 

It's a bit difficult to see that ASOG's deck is shorter than OCISLY, but it does look a bit narrower.  The major difference, though, is all that ... stuff ... on both ends of OCISLY (I don't know which end is bow and which is stern), while ASOG has nothing visible above deck.  The stern of ASOG has a large covered area which is presumably covering some of the infrastructure that's on OCISLY.  There's a smaller cover on ASOG's bow. 

As anyone who has seen their video on how not to land a spaceship can attest, they used to pretty regularly smash a booster into the bow or stern of both OCISLY and sister ship Just Read The Instructions.  Some of the changes might be an indication that they think they can get by with less area.  I have to admit, it's a rare landing that has more than a little protrusion of one foot beyond the big ring on deck.  It has apparently become easy to land a booster on a figurative postage stamp floating 400 miles from the nearest land.

Eric Ralph at Teslarati takes those observations and makes an interesting extrapolation:

That design decision could be connected to Musk’s indication that ASOG is SpaceX’s first truly autonomous drone ship. While JRTI and OCISLY are both capable of autonomously staying in one specific location after being towed out to sea and prepared by a team of technicians, ASOG may be able to travel several hundred miles out to sea, recover and secure a Falcon booster with its Octagrabber robot, and then return to Port Canaveral to offload the rocket without a single person boarding the drone ship.

In theory, if realized, drone ship ASOG’s full autonomy could easily save SpaceX $1M or more per booster recovery. Still, it remains to be seen if SpaceX is actually at a point where at-sea booster recovery can be truly automated as described above. A Shortfall of Gravitas is currently on track to arrive at Port Canaveral on Thursday evening, July 15th.

 

Superheavy Booster 3 Begins Testing

The testing began last Thursday, July 8th, when B3 was filled with ambient temperature nitrogen for pressure and leak testing.  Testing resumed this afternoon with the first cryogenic test of the huge booster. 

Screen capture from under an hour ago as I type.  B3 is very visibly venting cold, expanding gas from about 2/3 of the way up the booster in three jets and from just below the top in two visible jets.  The road was opened by 6:36 PM, almost exactly a half hour after this visual display.

Work has slowed on the Orbital Launch Integration Tower, apparently they had to wait for some steel sections to be delivered so that the second to last OLIT section could be completed and the last section started. In the interim, it appears at least two Raptor engines have been delivered and possibly installed.  One can be seen here.  With no knowledge of just what tests they want to do with just how many Raptors, we have no idea if they're working toward a static fire this week or just what, but if they wanted to do a two engine static fire test, the parts are in place right now.  

Fellowship of the Raptors - photo by Elon Musk I'm really not sure how many are in that pic, nine or 10?  A full up Superheavy booster will have 29.  I have to wonder how many will end up on B3.

Eric Ralph at Teslarati points out he's a little surprised that they installed Raptors on B3, the first booster ever built to this level, before it had any real cryogenic proof testing done.  They clearly thought they could fix anything that went wrong.  After nearly two years of watching tests (Hoppy's first hop flight was August of 2019), we have to know that it's possible there could be a failure that wastes a couple of Raptor engines.  To borrow Eric Ralph's summary of losing a couple of engines on B3:

Knowing SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk’s goals for Raptor, the latter implication isn’t much of a surprise but it’s always interesting to have direct visual evidence that Raptor is, in fact, so cheap to build and easy to install that the minor effort and few days of possible delays required to reduce the risk of losing multiple engines just aren’t worth it.

 

 

From the "Gotta Love the Headline" Department - Virgin Galactic Edition

The New York Post opens with the Headline, “Richard Branson, on his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, becomes first billionaire to get to space.”  As if that's the important part of the story. 

I'm guessing that like many of you I watched the livestream this morning and saw the test flight.  I had to mute Steven Colbert a bit, and the chatter was a bit too much gushing adoration, but it was interesting to watch in the sense of feeling like a milestone; feeling like it's the beginning of something long awaited.  

The coverage started with Branson showing up at their facilities on a bike - no word that I've seen about whether he got out of an SUV and rode the bike the last few yards like Pete Buttigieg, or even the last few miles, but he didn't look sweaty.  He was immediately taken to task by Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor, who could be heard saying “You’re late! Come on! Let’s get suited up.”  The coverage focused on Branson, and they had him recorded reading a letter to his late mother that was touching, though. 

Before the launch, Branson also [showed] a photo of himself with another billionaire space tourism entrepreneur, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was there to cheer him on.
...
“Great to start the morning with a friend. Feeling good, feeling excited, feeling ready,” Branson wrote on Twitter.

Bezos, the third mogul in the “billionaire space race,” wished Branson luck on Instagram.

“Wishing you and the whole team a successful and safe flight tomorrow. Best of luck!” he wrote.

Sir Richard floating during the minutes of weightlessness.  Virgin Galactic photo. 

Let's face it: missions like this are not about stretching technology's limits, nor about who the first rich tourist in space is - that record was set in 2001 by Dennis Tito.  They're about lowering the threshold for ordinary folks like us.  Right now, we can fly around the planet thousands of times the distance they flew vertically today for tiny fractions of what these missions cost or what the mission Blue Origin flies in nine days auctioned their spare seat for.  When people can fly suborbital missions for what flights across the US cost today, it will a common vacation.  

We just seem to be a step closer to that today.

Shop Update on the 1 by 1

Last Sunday evening, I posted on the engine I'm starting on (the 1 by 1) and in particular, a moderately complex little part that I need two of, the crankshaft counterweights.  It's an odd geometry with almost every dimension defined by the outlines of three different circles; there are only three straight lines in the design, not counting one drilled hole. 

I thought I'd be able to get it done in three setups, while doing it on a rotary table on the mill (the way the designer made his) would take seven setups.  I optimistically said I should be able to get it done Sunday.  Hah!  

I completed them today, and it's on to picking the next part to do and starting that.  

I saw a way to cut out the outlines of both parts from one piece of steel which allowed me to do both parts with the same fixture.  My tool path was designed around using a 3/8" end mill to cut the outline, so by using CAD, I could see how far apart to mount the two parts so that I could cut two in succession.  It wasn't until Wednesday that I could start the cutting.  Between Sunday and Monday, I cut the 6" long by 1-7/8" wide strip of steel from a larger piece then cut it to size and had to reduce it's thickness from 3/8" to 5/16", by taking about .032 off each side.  Except having been messed up by using single cuts and not being a job shop that has to do each piece in the minimum possible time, I took smaller cuts and did more of them.  

This shows the two pieces right after cutting them out.  I like to say it came out almost as if I knew what I was doing.  It was kind of cool watching the cutter cut the one on the right out of the steel without touching the one on the left.

Look between the two of them where the piece of stock that hasn't been cut away has a point that's pointing out of the screen.  See the ledge between the left and right pieces?  It's an arc from that point to the right side of the left counterweight.  What you're seeing is the left one isn't cut to full depth while the right one cut through the steel into my scrap aluminum backing piece in places.  The backing piece is visible on the front left.

I ran into a couple of oddities with the one on the left. The first was that my CAM file thought it was done after cutting down .300 and not full thickness (.312).  I would have sworn that went to the full depth.  It was easy to extract one of the paths around the outline and run that as a separate file, just cutting a little lower by .005 then .010.  Then I rechecked my Z axis and found it was way off - like around .025".  I re-zeroed Z, and added the final trip around the part to the CAM toolpath file to get it to cut the full 0.312 depth.  Then I moved it 2" over to the right to cut the second one

All that irregular depth of cut meant was that when I took them off that fixture they're on, I had to do some file work to make the problem child match the other one.

Now we get to the real meat of this task.  How do I hold those rounded parts so that I can cut out the rectangular relief that goes under the mounting screw?  The vise, like most machinist's vises, doesn't have a flat bottom; it's more like two rails with a lower area between them.  That means I'd be resting rounded parts on an uneven, sorta-convex bottom.  That ain't gonna work, so I thought how could I cut out a matching radius to put the parts in to hold them?  I thought about using the rest of the steel that I cut them out of, but that's the wrong radius.  That radius is 3/8" more than the part because of the cutter going around them cutting out the parts.

It suddenly occurred to me that I could print one.  Take my solid model of the counterweight, build a rectangular box and use my model to subtract that radius from one side of the box.  Make it wide enough to level on both rails in the vise.  An hour and 30 cents worth of filament later, I had a fixture.  The two parts squeezed together are .620 thick, and I made the plastic thinner - like about .575 - so that the jaws wouldn't just squeeze the plastic but would lock the parts in place.  

That left two tasks: make sure they're not tilted, and then get an accurate zero in X.  I have an angle gauge that reads to .05 degree, so I set the angle that way. 

Solving problems like this is one of the main triggers that got me to buy the printer.  Fixturing and work holding are just about the most important aspects of milling and good fixtures can save tons of effort.

Once I cut the rectangular cutout, the printed fixture was a perfect way to hold the two parts to drill the through hole in the parts.  Being backed by plastic and not my vise made it risk free to the vise so a no-brainer to do.  They're not technically done in this picture, there was one more step, but they're pretty close to being done.  

This is after the second setup of the three needed, with the two counterweights alongside the fixture and the 3D printed test counterweight I did to make sure the dimensions were right after I translated from .pdf files to a CAD drawing. 

Those through holes in the counterweights are from a 0.136" drill bit, so they seem to be sized to pass a #6 screw (I dropped a #6 Socket Head Cap Screw into one and it fit just fine).  Where the end of the through hole meets the top of the rounded top edge, the hole gets counterbored with a 1/4" end mill 0.444" deep.  Those holes are finished but don't show up well in a photo.

I'm not sure what the next part is.  I've never made a crankshaft like this one, and it's going to be quite a learning experience.  It's supposed to be cut from 0.50 x 1.00" inch blank, but nobody sells those.  Instead I got a 1-1/4" round bar that will have to be made into the rectangular block.  That could be it.

Don't Forget Your Sunday Viewing

As a friendly reminder, Sunday morning at 6:00 AM PDT, Sir Richard Branson is planning to attempt his first suborbital flight in his VSS Unity 2, aircraft-launched vehicle.  I'm going to assume everyone knows how to convert that, but that's 7AM Mountain, 8AM Central and 9AM Eastern.  Today, the company announced that it will have a livestream, hosted by Stephen Colbert and featuring a new song by Khalid, to publicize the flight into space.

I'll link to the livestream here, but if this isn't working, try the current YouTube link.

As many of us expected, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin appear really miffed that Sir Richard moved a test flight forward in an attempt to grab some headlines that BO thinks should rightfully be theirs.  Our coverage of the story is first here and then here.

In a pair of salty tweets on Friday, Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, took potshots at Virgin Galactic and its rocket-powered space plane. "From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name," the company tweeted. "For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line."

They tweeted this graphic. 

It's almost funny, in my admittedly eccentric view of this, that they included an ozone layer impact line in this graphic.  The impact of the two vehicles' exhaust only matters, if it matters at all, when you're talking lots of flights by both vehicles.  One flight means nothing.  

As you can see, their first argument is that Branson won't really be going into space at all.  They argue the vast majority of the world recognizes 100 km as the Kármán line, while the US had historically recognized 80 km as the entry to space.  The US Air Force awarded astronaut wings to X-15 pilots who flew above 80 km and the US FAA have said that 80 km represents space.  If anything, that distinction may be becoming less clear. 

Meanwhile the World Air Sports Federation, or FAI, uses 100 km to delineate the boundary of space for the purposes of establishing world records. However, the organization says it is looking at lowering this boundary from 100 km to 80 km, due to "recently published analyses [that] present a compelling scientific case for reduction in this altitude." This reevaluation is based partly on the scholarship of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist Jonathan McDowell.

Ars Technica's space correspondent, Eric Berger, put a couple of nice summaries together.  The first is about the companies themselves: Blue Origin vs. Virgin Galactic.

This tone is strikingly smug for a rocket company that has yet to launch any people into space, nor put even a gram of payload into orbit after more than 20 years. At least Branson's other space company, Virgin Orbit, has already successfully reached orbit twice, and should soon begin to do so frequently. And just what sort of image is Bezos going for here, anyway? While he is building a $500 million super yacht, his main competitor in the space race, Elon Musk, is living in a $50,000 house in South Texas so he can be near his engineering and technical teams working on his Starship project.

Ooh, that must sting.  But I think the next line is going to sting even more. 

In the end, the tweets tell us more about Bezos than they do about his rocket—which is excellent—or of Virgin Galactic.

 

 

Today, I Learned About the Great Resignation

I essentially deplore social media and don't hang out on any of it.  (Some consider blogging social media; I don't).  If you happen to hang out on Reddit or TikTok you probably know there's this movement going to encourage millions of people to quit their jobs this coming fall.  It's called “The Great Resignation of 2021,” and the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) presented a story about it.  Since I don't do social media, this is the first I've heard of it.

Whenever I hear about something getting started on social media, I'm always skeptical about how real it is.  When it comes time to turn in their resignation, how many people are actually going to go through with it?  Is it even a real thing or is it just some "influencers" trying to, well, influence a lot of people? 

The article opens with some facts about the economy and situations that you've probably heard, and author Hannah Cox looks at the story in terms of incentives.  Economics can almost be called the study of incentives at its core.  Suffice it to say that the pandemic and the responses to it have created the worst U.S. recession in history, and millions of people are still out of jobs. Yet employers are now complaining about acute labor shortages.  Add in the oft-repeated story that some number of workers are making more with their extended unemployment and other Federal stimulus income and have no desire to go back to work and cut their lifestyle.  These conditions and more have led to the biggest employee's market in memory. 

The first quote that shocked me was, "Monster, a global employment website, recently reported 95 percent of employees are considering changing jobs. This is on top of the 4 million people who already followed through and resigned in April."  Following links convinced me that something is really going on here and some percentage of that 95% is actually going to follow up on The Great Resignation.  

The reasons that people quote for thinking of changing their lives largely revolve around changes they went through during the pandemic.  Perhaps they're in a place where they commute long distances and they saved an hour or two every day, so now they don't want to go back to long commutes.  Perhaps they spent more time with their families and want to keep that up - just work a 40 hour week and be around for their kids more of the time.  In unprecedented numbers, people seem to be trying to re-balance their quality of life. 

Then there's this quote:

According to TikTok user @Katieyowyow, a recruiter with over 300,000 followers on the platform, as many as 1 in 4 employees are planning to leave their job this fall. These employees, she says, intend to spend the summer months using their vacation days and enjoying the benefits of full-time employment before they jump ship and turn in their notice in autumn.

Hmm.  Instead of 95% "considering changing jobs," 25% of employees seems more believable, but even that would wreak havoc on tons of employers.

For the final words, related to the perverse incentives that have led to this situation, I turn the floor over to Hannah Cox of FEE.     

Unfortunately, though, trends like “The Great Resignation” are far from being fueled by market incentives and demands alone. Rather, they are the repercussion of bad, big government policies that have severely tampered with the market for the past year.

The federal government has continued to send an increased amount of unemployment benefits to workers, even as the businesses they shut down struggle to open back up. Workers are responding to this perverse incentive in entirely predictable ways, choosing to stay home or work less—often for more pay than they were able to earn in the workforce—for an extended period of time.

Obviously, without the guarantee of a cushy taxpayer-funded unemployment payment, many of these employees would not have the luxury of simply quitting their jobs. They would have to increase their value if they wanted to demand new working arrangements on the market, or build their way into new career paths while still holding down employment in the meantime.

...

Central planners were warned that these kinds of problems would result from their policies, and yet they persisted anyway. As a result, it is likely we will all continue to see supply shortages and an increase in the price of goods and services.

 

 

Now That Falcon 9 Has Crossed the 10 Flight Barrier

As I think I can say we've all expected, now that Falcon 9 Booster 1051 (B1051) has flown 10 times (back in early May) and they've had a chance to do a thorough inspection, the number of flights to plan for has just taken quite a jump.  

At Barcelona's Mobile World Congress (MWC), CEO Elon Musk addressed the plans in a remote address.    

Now, five and half years after Falcon 9’s first successful booster landing, four years after SpaceX’s first successful booster reuse, and seven weeks after a Falcon 9 first stage’s first ten-flight milestone, Elon Musk says that some of the company’s fleet of boosters are already “slated to fly 20 or possibly 30 times.” Never one to personally rest or allow his companies to rest on their laurels, SpaceX now has a new target to strive for as teams work to ramp and sustain Falcon 9’s launch cadence at record-breaking levels.
...
Back in Musk’s 2018 conference call, he also noted that beyond plans for up to ten flights without refurbishment, Falcon boosters could feasibly be made to fly dozens or even 100+ times with occasional in-depth maintenance – not unlike modern aircraft. Three years later, Musk is now talking about launching certain Falcon boosters 20 or 30 times, while something approximating the recurring maintenance he once described has yet to crop up.

Space industry observers know that SpaceX is leading the industry in launches per year, undoubtedly helped by their decreasing launch costs that come from booster reuse.  In the last week, SpaceX completed their 20th mission of the year.  A couple of days later, a Long March 4C lifted off from China, completing China's 20th mission of the year.  

Excluding SpaceX and China, the rest of the world combined completed its 20th orbital launch hours before SpaceX when US startup Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket successfully flew for the second time. In simpler terms, relative to any other country, space agency, or company, SpaceX led the world in orbital launches for the first half of 2021 – the first time in history a single company has managed that feat.

We know China is talking about reuse, but cutting cost isn't a big concern for China.  They're launching their own missions and probably have the same idea that the European Space Agency voiced of their mission being providing jobs.  The other major players in the "launch for hire" industry are talking about re-use but none of them have recovered their first booster yet. 

But what about the American competitors?  Surely United Launch Alliance (ULA), Boeing and the other giants must be working on it?  Apparently not.  

Not long before it was clear that SpaceX would hit that 10-flight target with at least one Falcon booster, competitors working overtime to rationalize a lack of substantial investment into reusable rockets shifted their goalposts again, expanding rationales to require a fleetwide average of ten flights. Instead of explaining why SpaceX’s reusability plans could never work, as many dozens of aerospace executives have assuredly done over the last 5-10 years, the new attitude du jour is to claim that SpaceX’s ability to achieve its reuse goals was never actually in doubt and that the economics of full booster reuse simply can’t make economic sense!

The link in the quote takes you to Reddit, where Tory Bruno, CEO of ULA, shows up and makes the argument that SpaceX has rolled up far more costs than it appears to get where they are today.  (You'll have to click two links to get to the expanded conversation on Reddit).  Bruno seems to be saying that SpaceX can do this because they have "billions of dollars per year coming in from external investors," but ULA doesn't think it's worth recovering boosters.  They think they can recover the engines using their “SMART (Sensible Modular, Autonomous Return Technology) Reuse” approach and get 2/3 of the benefit of landing the booster for much less developmental budget.  

One of my favorite quotes about engineering is, "engineering is the art of compromise."  There's no such thing as a perfect solution to a complex problem just a series of compromises that must be made to choose what seems to be the best solution for the things you prioritize.  Tory Bruno says, "We specialize in high energy, high complexity orbits," saying their missions are more complex and their orbits harder to achieve than SpaceX's launches.  That means the propellant needed for propulsive booster recovery could make those high complexity orbits impossible.  I know that SpaceX has always said that there are orbits and missions that a Falcon 9 can fly where they won't have enough fuel for the landing and they lose the booster.  They charge those customers more.  

B1051 after her 10th flight and arrival at Port Canaveral.  Richard Angle photo for Teslarati.

First Plywood Satellite Passing Early Tests

"Plywood satellite?"  Yes.  It hasn't gotten much conversation, but the Finnish plywood company Wisa has been working toward putting the world's first plywood satellite into orbit by the end of this year.  It will be built out of the same birch plywood they sell to anyone, but with some custom coatings that are intended to protect it in the vacuum on orbit.  As the company themselves explain: 

One of the most common questions we get is "Why plywood?", and our answer is "why not". Dried plywood is like a natural composite material having its own positive and negative properties – just like all other materials.

The main idea behind WISA Woodsat is to test how plywood behaves not only in space, but also when building a satellite.

In general, the materials used in spacecraft have to be lightweight, impact resistant, electrically conductive, non-magnetic and they have to heat up and cool down easily.

The satellite is being designed and built in Finland following the popular Cubesat format.  The satellite is roughly 10 x 10 x 10 cm, or just under 4" on a side,  the size of a 1U CubeSat.  They are working toward a launch date "before the end of the year" on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket from the Mahia Peninsula launch complex in New Zealand.  

Think of this mission as pure research, a technology proving flight, trying to determine how treated plywood handles the hazardous environment on orbit.  I may be ignorant of everything done with satellites, but all of the ones I've ever worked on were primarily built of aluminum alloys, with differing metals (if need be) based on the physical properties required for a certain spot. 

Wisa says:

The mission of the satellite is to test the applicability of wooden materials, especially WISA-Birch plywood in spacecraft structures and expose it to extreme space conditions, such as heat, cold, vacuum and radiation, for an extended period of time.

They don't say how that will be measured, whether some sensors or just video observations.  For the radio downlink, they're working on using a low data rate communications systems that some hams have been running, called LoRa (Long Range).  There is a worldwide emphasis now on ensuring that satellites with limited missions like this deorbit and don't just become space junk, but I don't see the expected lifetime on orbit.  

Back on June 14th, the first test of the satellite was completed, using a balloon to carry it to an altitude of 31.2 km, so very far short of being in space but at 102,000 feet it was well above conventional aircraft traffic altitudes.  The system was designed for the balloon to pop after some time at altitude and the satellite recovered.  The moment the balloon popped was captured by its onboard camera.

“All the systems performed as planned during the test flight. The satellite landed eventually in a forest area at Herrala, close to lake Hahmajärvi. The recovery team was on site soon after the landing, but the recovery took a bit more time than expected as the flight equipment had landed on the top of high spruce tree”, says WISA Woodsat mission manager Jari Mäkinen.

As of the end of June, they're constructing the flight satellite and its spare, and everything seems to be going on schedule for a flight.  It's a unique little story and I'll try to keep an eye out for updates as we go forward.

Monday Space News Roundup

First, just a short video linked from Twitter.  This is from last week's Transporter 2 mission.  At the beginning there's a small black speck visible in upper third of the frame.  The video follows that speck for 45 seconds. 

Despite the holiday weekend, dropping in on the Lab Padre webcams showed work being done on Super Heavy Booster 3 (B3).  No word on when tests might start.  The giant crane that has been stacking the Orbital Launch Integration Tower (OLIT) has been lowered onto the ground.  It's either getting extended to place the final section of tower or being worked on for some other reason. 

A shot of B3 being worked on yesterday, the holiday.

By Twitter account Starship Gazer.

As I write four different bucket trucks/cherry pickers are at various heights on B3 for current work.

Finally, as of a couple of hours ago, the Port at Long Beach says they're expecting Mighty Servant 1 carrying OCISLY tomorrow morning at 6AM Pacific time (PDT).  Relayed by Gavin Cornwell of  SpaceXFleet.com. 

Getting Started on the 1 by 1

Just about two weeks ago, I showed a Solidworks (CAD software) rendering of the new engine I'm working on building.  Since Brian's name for the engine is a little long, I've been shortening it to the "one by one" and leaving off "vertical IC engine."  I've started out on working on it, but haven't cut any metal yet.  First, I had to buy some metal.  I had some of what I need, really more than I thought I'd have, but I've done some shopping and gotten in some raw metal.  My standard approach is buy about twice as much as I think I'll need, but sometimes even more than that.  

The next problem is that while for most parts, I can use the simple drawings and make the parts manually, for other parts, I need to create solid models for CNC.  Brian provides pdf copies of drawings for all the parts when he sells plans.  It's very well documented, but pdf files make poor CAD exchange formats.  My CAD program, Rhino3D ver. 5, reads lots of different formats, but when I built the Webster last time, those plans were AutoCAD .DXF format files, which have become an informal standard supported by lots of programs.  

Rhino reads .DXF files very easily.  It says it will read Acrobat .pdf files, and it will sorta kinda read them, after a fashion.  It doesn't import the numbers from dimensions, just the lines near the dimensions; it doesn't distinguish between hidden and non-hidden lines; when it imports straight lines, those will dimension easily, but when it imports circles or portions of circles, those won't dimension at all.  The portion of Rhino that is supposed to dimension the circle's radius or diameter doesn't even know that a circle is even there.  

I have a handful of excruciatingly complex parts that I need to turn into solid models, so this is going to be a Big Deal.   

As a test/experiment, I imported a moderately complex part.  It's simple in just having a constant thickness, but complex in that every external dimension is a radius.  To give a flavor for what I'm talking about, while removing the critical dimensions, this is a clip from the pdf.

I deleted all the leader lines toward dimensions that didn't import, converted what should have been hidden lines, and turned it into solid model.  It worked surprisingly well for this shape.  As a gross test, I printed it. 

It printed well - it printed better than it photographed when I laid it on an old nickel. 

Now the question becomes how to machine it.  Brian works entirely manually, and this is done on a rotary table.  If you look closely at the drawing, you'll find five little cross hairs marking the center of five circles that the rotary table would rotate around.  I think each one of those circles is creating a separate setup on the mill.  After those five setups there are two more: one setup to cut out the rectangle in the base and another setup to drill one through hole with a counterbore.  Seven setups for one little part.  

Creating that rectangular cutout in the bottom will be done second to last.  Starting with a roughly 2" square piece of solid steel, I'll drill a hole through it which will become the position of the cross hairs in that cutout.  My drawing has the center of those cross hairs as X=0, Y=0.  I'll mount that to a tooling plate, assign the center of that hole to be 0,0, and just carve out the outline.  That's using what CAM programs call "waterline" cuts: constant depth passes around the shape.  Once the outline is cut, I'll stand it up in a vise, and cut out that 0.500 wide by 0.447 deep rectangle.  After that, there are two holes, one to drill and one to counterbore.  It goes from seven setups to three.  I should be able to try this out tomorrow. 

It's hard to visualize the final shape based on looking at the waterline cuts, but this is what the toolpaths look like in the GCode proofing program I use.  I'll re-verify this in the CNC controller SW tomorrow, but they generally agree on cuts like this.

Happy Independence Day - 2021

With one exception, I've run this post every July 4th except for two in the 11 years I've been blogging.  Both of those posts were about problems that are still here (2012, 2014) so although they seemed important at the time, the big picture is to remind ourselves of the history, and enjoy the day with family and friends.  The problems will be here on the fifth.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I would have highlighted portions that I think are particularly apt today, but the whole thing would be highlighted. 

Enjoy your day.  To those who serve - and have served - to provide this gift of liberty for us:  Thank You from the bottom of my heart.

 

 

I Don't Like Where This is Going

Tropical Storm Elsa that is. 

At the moment it's looking like Tuesday we'll be getting some weak tropical storm winds out of Elsa.  It's unlikely that we'll put up the shutters and one of the good models (the UK Met) says it might even dissipate before it gets up here.  

Longtime readers will know my standard line about tropical storms, "it's just a poopy day with a press agent."  I expect to be doing my normal, everyday things, but if the winds do get up to 45mph (min for a tropical storm) I'll skip going for a bike ride.  Forget that, I'll just preemptively take the day off.

 

Followup to Thursday - Two SpaceX Tidbits

Ars Technica's space correspondent Eric Berger brought up a couple of interesting points about this week's Transporter 2 launch and the Falcon 9 booster that lifted it high enough to make orbit.   

This launch continues to cement the progress SpaceX has made toward the viable reuse of rocket first stages. This rocket core, named B1060, for booster number 1060, had previously flown into space seven times. Its first launch was a GPS III satellite mission for the US Space Force on June 30, 2020. With Wednesday's flight, the rocket has now flown eight missions in a calendar year.

That is a rate of one mission every 1.5 months. However, since early January, this same rocket has flown five missions, so it is approaching a rapid cadence of one launch per month. This is unprecedented for the Falcon 9 rocket or any other orbital spacecraft in history. Each of NASA's space shuttle orbiters, for example, typically only flew one to two times per year, needing significant refurbishment between each flight.

Add to that discussion this was the 20th Falcon 9 launch in six full months.  That means 20 launches in 26 weeks, or just over one launch every 9 days, 1.3 weeks.  That means if B1060 is typical, as few as four Falcon 9 boosters could support that cadence for over a year.  Having five or six would give some additional resilience. 

For fun, Ars ran this photo by Trevor Mahlman.  It shows B1060 one year ago, and before this latest flight Wednesday.

 Looks like a new versus used space ship.  The clean streaks are where welds are on the booster, so they clean them to inspect them.

---

The other article you know about; that Booster 3 was transported to the launch area yesterday.  I just couldn't resist showing this picture around; to me, it gives a tremendous sense of the scale.  Photo credit is listed as Elon Musk.

This is B3 leaving the shipyard area and getting transported on this beach road to the launch complex. 

This booster is destined for tests and is not scheduled to fly; they report it was built in six weeks.  The next booster is intended to fly and they're still claiming July or August for the first orbital trial.  That booster is currently being built.  It's easy to assume that its six weeks would be up toward the end of July or later, but it's hard to imagine they didn't start with the "needed by" date already known.  They could have started long enough ago that it will be ready in a few days. We can watch and see what goes on by the day. 

“It's Game On” - Richard Branson to Attempt Flight Before Jeff Bezos

Back in mid-June, I said to "Set Your Alarm" for July to keep up with what seemed to be race developing between Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos.  The essence of the story was that Bezos had announced the date of his flight, July 20th, and a rumor had surfaced that Branson was planning to fly this weekend to beat him into space.

This weekend is out, but news broke late this afternoon that Virgin Galactic said that in the rivalry of the billionaires, Sir Richard, will attempt to go to space next Sunday, July 11.  

In this stock photo from JIM WATSON / AFP / Getty Images, Sir Richard Branson takes off his button-front shirt to don a T-shirt that says "Future Astronaut Training Program" while Air and Space Museum Director Ellen Stofan looks on. The tee is given to him by Virgin Galactic Test Pilot Mark "Forger" Stucky.  The photo is from February, 2019.

Dubbed the "Unity 22" mission, this flight on the VSS Unity spacecraft will carry a full crew of two pilots, Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci, and four mission specialists, including Branson. "Building on the success of the company's most recent spaceflight in May, Unity 22 will focus on cabin and customer experience objectives," the company said in a statement.

Branson added:

I truly believe that space belongs to all of us... After more than 16 years of research, engineering, and testing, Virgin Galactic stands at the vanguard of a new commercial space industry, which is set to open space to humankind and change the world for good. It's one thing to have a dream of making space more accessible to all; it's another for an incredible team to collectively turn that dream into reality. As part of a remarkable crew of mission specialists, I'm honored to help validate the journey.  

Today had been a great day for Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin until this.  Blue Origin was getting praised after they announced they were inviting Wally Funk to join Bezos on the New Shepard flight on July 20.  Funk, 82, was member of the privately funded "Mercury 13" program for women in the 1960s, but ultimately none of those women were selected to go into space.  She is seen as someone who really, really deserves to go to space.  

Now the second guessing and quipping begin.  For example, responding to the news Thursday afternoon, former flight director and space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale tweeted the following: "Talk about schedule pressure! Hope nobody cuts any corners."  To which one BO fan quipped, "I'm not sure there are any corners left to cut at VG."

If Richard Branson gets to space before July 20, as now seems likely, he will have beaten Jeff Bezos both in launching cargo to orbit—with his Virgin Orbit rocket company—as well as personally flying to space, despite starting four years later and spending a fraction of the money.

I don't particularly care who gets to space first, it's just a mildly entertaining diversion from the rest of the news.  Unlike Bernie, AOC and the leftist idiot commenters at Ars Technica, I think billionaires are a net good for the world and while it's still off the distance, Musk, Bezos and Branson (in that order) are doing important things to build the future and a better world. 

Meanwhile, the SpaceX crew at Boca Chica transported Booster B3 to the launch complex where it's expected to undergo testing, and they've added the 7th section to the Orbital Launch Integration Tower.  One more to go.  I've not read how many Raptor engines B3 has, if any, but the first flights to orbit are expected to use 29.  If they static fire 29 Raptors, they'd better have a good water flood system. 

 

 

Day Interrupted

We lost our internet connection about 3:45 this afternoon.  It was out about four hours.  I had gone outside to watch the SpaceX Transporter 2 launch at 3:30, which had been delayed a half hour due to some showers moving through.  We didn't see a thing but the sonic booms from the booster slowing down to land up at the Cape were awesome!  Watch the video at least the part around the booster landing (between 22:30 and 23:50).  There's some outstanding photography in there - views I've never seen. 

When we came back in the house the internet connection was down.  We called our ISP to report an outage closer to 4:00 PM and they said there was an extensive outage in the area.  They predicted it would be back by 6:30, but that was optimistic by a full hour.  

It thoroughly messed up my train of thought and where I thought I was going.  As usual for when something like this happens, here's something light - a gun meme from the NSSF.  

 Maybe I'm old, but I've read a couple of reviews that this reminded me of.

An Old Graybeard Story

When I'm not blogging, machining, 3D printing, playing in the ham shack or doing things related to those hobbies, I've been reviewing the ATF's Notice of Proposed Rule Making 2021R-05.  That's the one changing definitions of frames and receivers along with trying to greatly curtail the ability to make "Privately Made Firearms" or PMFs.  My intent is to put together as coherent an argument as I can, so I tend to have the NPRM open and a document in Libre Office in which I'm collecting thoughts.  

This leads to an Old Graybeard story.

The whole thing is reminiscent of the effort to stop the FCC from permitting the use of a bad technology back in the early part of the '00s.  The technology was called Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, and it was a boneheaded idea if ever there was one.  The concept was to take broadband Internet to the homes and instead of putting it over cable TV coaxial cable or Fiber Optics, they were going to use the power grid.  The amount of bandwidth a signal takes is related to the data rate; it's not 1:1 like a 10 Megabit per second line doesn't necessarily take 10 MHz, but in the "you don't get something for nothing" world of engineering, the 10 to 20 Mega Bits per Second signals they were talking about delivering, would take up essentially the entire HF spectrum.  

This was being sold to solve some imaginary problem of lack of broadband into rural areas.  Except the powerline technology isn't compatible with HF signals. Transformers are integral to the AC power grid, stepping voltages up and down over and over again.  These things work at 60 Hz; they won't pass the HF signals.  Every. Single. Transformer would need to have data jumpers around it, the system would need signal processing like amplifiers and filters all over. 

There are many things wrong with the concept besides the hardware problems.  The HF spectrum is allocated internationally and there are many services in there.  Marine radio, commercial aviation, military services, industrial uses, international broadcast and ham radio are just some of the things you hear in HF.  This threatened to wipe those services out near powerlines, which is virtually everywhere in the country.  As a country, we're signatories to several treaties that would obligate us not to interfere with anyone else in the world.

I spent a long time responding to the NPRM from the FCC as just myself; so did the company I retired from.  Since HF receiver design was one of my specialties, I was much more familiar with the reality of those signal levels in that chunk of spectrum, and it was instantly apparent they were going to seriously interfere with every single occupant of the shortwave spectrum.  Not just hams but aviation, broadcasters, military, everyone. Conversely, ham transmitters could render the BPL system useless, too.

"Word on the street" was that the head of the FCC (Colin Powell's son Michael) was in the pocket of industry so it wasn't surprising the FCC made it legal.  They exempted certain frequency bands, notably where their own monitoring stations were located, and a few other government frequency bands.  They allowed other users to sue to shut down the BPL providers and the providers decided fairly early on they'd be facing bankruptcy from lawsuits and quietly went elsewhere in the spectrum. (My interpretation).  Today, long distance/wide area BPL is gone and all that remains are some things that work over the powerlines in your house. 

So what does that have to do with the ATF NPRM?

The lesson that I got out of that experience was the FCC was going to do it regardless of what anybody else said.  The NPRM step was something they had to do because the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 says so.  They collected the thousands of comments against the idea and threw them out. 

To be fair, I've seen honest NPRMs from the FCC in the years since.  The FCC has accepted expert testimony from the ARRL or from groups of amateurs and modified proposed rules.

In the case of the ATF, it's hard to believe they'll respond to comments and improve the rules.  I've never seen them be even as "sorta sometimes reasonable" as the FCC.  I don't see why I'm bothering to work at it, but I just can't not do it.  We can't just say, "whatever you say, Master" to them.  Maybe a massive ground swell of opposition might have an effect. 

 

 

Russia Preparing Their Largest Module Ever for ISS ... But, Why?

According to Ars Technica today, the Russian space corporation Roscosmos released photos on earlier today showing the much-anticipated Nauka space station module being assembled at their facility in the Baikonur Cosmodrone in Kazakhstan.  

This will be Russia's first significant addition to the International Space Station in more than a decade, and it will provide the Russians with their first module dedicated primarily to research. "Nauka" means science in Russian.

This is a sizable module, including crew quarters, an airlock for scientific experiments, and much more. With a mass of about 24 metric tons, it is about 20 percent larger than the biggest Russian segment of the station, the Zvezda service module.

The module is tentatively scheduled to be launched on Russia's Proton rocket No Earlier Than July 15th, which deserves a little elaboration.  First, the Nauka module is more than a dozen years late due to a lack of budget for the project on top of technical issues.  The fact they pressed on to complete the program and get Nauka ready to launch can be interpreted as they saw the need for it and they intend to keep it crewed.  The second point is, the Russians have said they may pull out of the program in 2025 and build a brand-new station. The third point is, well, over to Ars:

So why launch a new module just a few years before exiting the station? One possibility is that the Russians are simply posturing. Some NASA officials have speculated privately that this may be an angle to obtain new funds from the United States. With the success of SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle and nearing availability of Boeing's Starliner, NASA is no longer annually sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Roscosmos to purchase Soyuz seats for access to the station. This was an important source of funding for Russia's space program.

However, NASA would like to keep the station flying for another decade, and for this it needs the Russians. The first elements of the International Space Station were launched in 1998, and it was designed such that the US and Russian segments were dependent upon one another for attitude control, power, and other critical resources. The NASA officials suspect Russia may seek "maintenance" funding from the United States in return for keeping its part of the space station going.

Up close, it looks like an oversized Soyuz capsule.  Both photos from Roscomos, via Ars Technica. 

Ars Technica's space correspondent, Eric Berger, points out that Nauka's launch is an important symbolic win for Russia's space program, in that it is increasingly rare for Roscosmos to develop and fly new hardware. Mostly, the program maintains and launches decades-old spacecraft such as the Soyuz vehicle and the Proton rocket.