CAFE Standards Are Back - But Hard to Find in the News

Back on April 1st, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg announced new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards for all vehicles to be sold in America, starting in 2024-2046.  The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has a propaganda an informational page on the new standards which require a CAFE of 49 mpg by '26.  To borrow a quote from the wonderful Mark Steyn, it reads like a refrigerator manual written by someone who really loves refrigerator manuals. 

The new Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards require an industry-wide fleet average of approximately 49 mpg for passenger cars and light trucks in model year 2026, the strongest cost savings and fuel efficiency standards to date. The new standards will increase fuel efficiency 8% annually for model years 2024-2025 and 10% annually for model year 2026. They will also increase the estimated fleetwide average by nearly 10 miles per gallon for model year 2026, relative to model year 2021.

Clarity?  Not much.  

Stepping back a bit, I've been writing on battles and skirmishes over CAFE standards for a long time, starting with the push to create a 54.5 mpg standard from the first Obama term's DOT back in 2012.  CAFE Standards are best thought of as the "A" in the name - the average over the vehicles they sell.  Regulating the average says that every vehicle in the manufacturer's lines doesn't need to get 49 mpg, just that the average mileage of everything they sell needs to hit this magic number.  The rules specifically apply to "cars and light trucks" while heavier trucks are in a different class.  The fact that cars are treated differently than trucks is one of the reasons for the popularity of SUVs versus station wagons.  You don't see many station wagons being made these days.  There is great legal wrangling and fighting over how to classify any given vehicle because not every vehicle has a prayer of hitting that kind of mileage.  If the requirement can't be approached, the companies have to restrict the number of SUVs or other light trucks they can sell to push the average up.  This has to all be calculated out in advance as they're determining how many of which models to make. 

I never worked in the auto industry (but I did stay in a ... sorry) but I'm pretty sure that they're working on the preparations for the '23 model year now.  My guess would be that it's too late to make any substantial changes to the 2024 models and preparation for the '25 models isn't likely to be much better.  The way I read that line that, "The new standards will increase fuel efficiency 8% annually for model years 2024-2025 and 10% annually for model year 2026." may be something lawyers would make a million bucks on, but if 2025's CAFE can be 10% less mileage than 2026, that's 44.1 mpg.  2024 can be 8% lower, or 40.6 mpg and 2023 can be 8% lower than that or 37.3 mpg.  The DOT says the current standard is, "a combined fleet-wide fuel economy of 40.3-41.0 mpg."   

Car makers need to figure out how many of their SUVs or muscle cars they can sell balanced against anything in their fleet that gets over 50 mpg (and the higher the better) to bring their averages up.  

Regular readers know I'm fond of pointing out that physics is a bitch and you don't get something for nothing.  The only places where the laws of physics get broken is in commercials and Looney Tunes.  The internal combustion engine has been optimized as a system for over a hundred years, and you're not going to suddenly make it much more efficient.  Instead, to reach the new standards the cars will get lighter, with more plastics and thinner metal structures.  The shorter way to say that is they'll be less safe.  The new standards will cost more lives.  

Reporting on the new standards, the Center for Automotive Research (CAR, of course) quotes DOT indirectly.  

The NHTSA press release notes that under the new standards, fuel consumption will decrease fuel use by over 250 billion gallons through the year 2050 compared to sustaining the previous Trump-era standards. Less reliance on foreign oil, consumer savings on gas, and reduced emissions were also emphasized in the announcement as an advantage of stronger standards. Officials highlighted that carbon emissions would be reduced by 2.5 billion metric tons and estimated that consumers could save almost $1,400 in fuel expenses over the lifetime of a 2029 model vehicle under new rules. However, it is also estimated that the new regulations will likely drive up the cost of new vehicles by nearly the same amount.

Two reactions: first, saying "almost $1,400" is recognizing that we're currently in a situation with very high fuel costs, and if we had lower fuel prices the savings would go down.  Saving that amount over the life of a car is a pretty trivial savings.  $140/year or $11.67/month for a car kept 10 years.  Second, I don't believe that the cost will be equal to what's saved on fuel.  The last several times this was studied the car costs went up more than the money saved on fuel.  

I'm going to reuse a graphic from my 2012 article on the CAFE standards, which shows the annual cost of gas at three prices per gallon from $1.50 to $5.00 gallon, versus the car's mileage and assuming driving 15,000 miles per year.  The curves display a similar shape, illustrating the diminishing returns for each incremental increase in mileage.  At the top curve, a 10 mpg increase from 20 to 30 mpg saves $1,250 or 33.3% less for 50% higher mileage; a 10 mpg increase from 40 to 50 mpg saves $375, or 20% less for 25% higher mileage.  All of the bigger gains were taken on the left end of that plot.

The problem, as always, is that government has no business regulating this sort of thing.  It's the most common, fatal conceit of our single-minded bureaucrats that they think they know better than the free market.  I've got news for the administration: a real half ton pickup (the most common size) that got twice the current MPG would be snapped up so fast it would set every truck sales record there is.  Nobody's against that.  We're just against being forced to pay more for a flimsier, less safe vehicle than we save by buying it, and we're against getting stuck with one that doesn't do everything we need it to do. 

 

 

When We Talk About Space Being Hard

...what we're really saying is there's a very small margin of error.  The people trying to design orbital rockets are not perfect - obviously nobody is - so they're going to make mistakes.  Just like you can ruin a crane or trailer winch by not being sure that it's stronger than the load you're going to lift, you can make up for that with design margin.  If you're going to lift a thousand pound load, you can make sure every part involved in lifting that load is going to be stronger by a defined safety factor.  In something common like lifting a known load, you can buy however much safety factor you want.  

Getting rockets into orbit is different.  The thrust vs. weight costs are a critical design trade.  If you make the rocket stronger, it will weigh more, meaning more fuel is required to lift it, and reducing the payload that can be lifted.  If a part on an engine is going to handle some sort of operating temperature extremes, or a valve has to spin at some number of thousands of revolutions/minute, margin might get very difficult to achieve.  There simply isn't much margin available in the percentage of liftoff weight a rocket can carry.  If the designers don't consider some characteristic or don't even know they need to consider it, the rocket could blow up on the pad or at any point of its mission.  

In my years of design, I referred to margin of error as margin of stupid.  When I screwed up, I owned it.  In some fields with a wide margin of stupid, designers can make lots of mistakes or big mistakes and get away with it.  Things with a wide margin of stupid don't explode in huge fireballs killing everyone and everything around. 

Prior knowledge from lots of research or hiring people who have done it before are the two big ways to get that reduction in stupid mistakes.    

Why am I talking about this?  Meet a small California startup in the rocket design business named Pythom (yes, that's an "m" on the end, not like the snake - or programming language).  Their aim is to beat SpaceX to Mars.  From quite literally nothing they aim to launch for Mars by 2024 - the next closest approach.  If not, definitely by 2026.  Pythom was founded by a married couple who are explorers and adventurers: Tina and Tom Sjögren who think of going to Mars as an analogy to sailing to the New World after Columbus.  Tina Sjögren put it like this:

"When Columbus sailed to America, there were both better boats and sailors. But no one else did it. He did. All it took was three weeks. It was not difficult; it was fear that held everyone back. It was believed that one would fall over the edge of the earth. Or be eaten by sea monsters. He showed... that was wrong."

Over at Ars Technica (first link) Space Correspondent Eric Berger notes:

This seems naïve, of course. Even SpaceX, which from the beginning was well-funded and able to hire excellent early employees, is still years away from sending humans to Mars after its founding in 2002. But the Sjögrens are undaunted. "You have to work hard, but you do not have to be very smart," Tina Sjögren added.

Do you see the huge warning flags in that statement.  Yeah, it is a cliche to talk about it being rocket science, but the saying, "it's not rocket science" didn't invent itself.  There is hard stuff there.  With a goal of launching a lander to Mars in 2024, they're working on developing engines and a small payload rocket called Eiger, which will be capable of launching 150 kg (330 lb.s) to LEO.  Somewhere around developing engines and a rocket, they're also working on developing a Mars lander called Olympus.  

Their philosophy is simple.  Since they claim 90 percent of a rocket's cost in the traditional space industry is related to personnel, their website says, "Pythom runs small teams and tight facilities, building in the spirit of early explorers such as Lewis & Clark and Roald Amundsen."  Having been through 40 years of manufacturing companies always striving to do more with less, my reaction isn't to find fault with that, but that it needs to be done intelligently.  My first department to target for cost reduction might not be the safety and mission assurance department.  Just sayin' because based on a video of a recent test they ran, it might be that they assume the design guys will know everything about safety and mission assurance so they never hired anyone for those jobs.

Personally, the colors in that exhaust/desert dust cloud kind of alarm me.  They kind of scream Toxic Nitrogen Compounds.  The part of the video where a couple of staff members find themselves downwind and run at 90 degrees to the cloud is a highlight, and over on Ars Technica, Berger talks about the initial video being on Vimeo, but he saved it and uploaded it to YouTube (where this is linked from).  After some questions to Pythom, they took down the video and uploaded a more sanitized version to Vimeo.  

Jordan Noone, co-founder of Relativity Space, tweeted in response to the video, "We knew better as untrained college students."  For their part, Pythom responded with a long post on their website, explaining a lot of details that aren't evident in that video.

I don't really know what to make of these guys.  They really do seem to need some adults in the room, but the engine does fire and the rocket doesn't explode - nor does it lift off (so at least they got weight greater than thrust).  Apparently nobody was injured here, but it sure looks more like luck than skill.  That said, I've always observed that "all the knowledge and skills in the world have never beaten pure, dumb, luck."  To go back to my original point, they displayed a lot of stupid, but apparently had enough margin of stupid to handle all of it.

The articles on Warp News are rather flattering and admiring in tone.  Warp News also implies that the flight they're aiming for in '24 will carry Tom and Tina, not the Olympus mars lander. 

NASA's Artemis WDR To Resume Tuesday

The folks at the Artemis program left us hanging last week when they aborted their Wet Dress Rehearsal due to a problem with a hydrogen valve on the Mobile Launch Tower (which was quickly repaired).  They didn't offer an update until last Thursday, explaining that a different problem was then found with a Helium check valve on the Centaur upper stage's RL10 engine.  At that point, they said, 

The countdown for the two-day test is currently slated to begin with call to stations beginning at 5 pm EDT on Saturday, April 9 with T-0 planned for 2:40 pm on Monday, April 11.

That never happened.  Instead of the call to stations on Saturday, they issued another update moving the date back another three days.  

NASA is planning to proceed with a modified wet dress rehearsal, primarily focused on tanking the core stage, and minimal propellant operations on the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) with the ground systems at Kennedy. Due to the changes in loading procedures required for the modified test, wet dress rehearsal testing is slated to resume with call to stations on Tuesday, April 12 and tanking on Thursday, April 14.

NASA's Exploration Group's Twitter page noted that when this test is completed, the vehicle will be returned to the VAB.   

I would have to say that (IMO, of course) troubles like this are unfortunate but are not unexpected.  

SLS on Pad 39B at the start of preparations for the Wet Dress Rehearsal tests.  NASA photo. 

Weekly Update on the 1 by 1 - Part 23

I really shouldn't call this a Weekly update because my last update was far from a week ago.  Part 22 was January 30th, so over two months ago!  At the time, I was talking about preparing my piston's connecting rod to be cut out via CNC.  Since then, lots of complicating factors got in the way; big and small interruptions to life, ranging from one of our senior cats having a bad annual physical leading to several tests, lots of things to do and angst to go with it, to a one week house repair project resisting completion for a month, to my not being happy with either my CAD or CAM of the design and then finding an interesting new way to do it.  I do have a bunch of other hobbies, too, after all.

I've been back to it, but haven't started machining the part yet.  Let me pull up the drawing as it's provided with the plans, and shown here in January.  

One of the complications with this part is that I can't just import this into my CAD program, create a solid model of the finished part and then make it.  That big hole on the right end of the crankshaft is 3/8" and needs to be 0.375" exactly.  That means a 3/8 drill bit isn't accurate enough, and what you might think to do is to drill it undersized and then ream to final size.  The problem is that if you then cut the right end off it, you now have something that's neither circular or 0.375" diameter.  It's missing the width of the cutter.  

If you read the that big (four line) note at the bottom in that figure, you'll see the designer says to drill and tap the two holes for #5-40 socket head cap screws that you can see in outline above and below the big hole, then cut off the bottom cap.  Once it's cut off, attach it with the screws you just tapped for, and then drill and ream the big hole.  

That changes everything.  A slight complication is that's assuming the saw cut is .030" wide.  My saw cuts .047 wide.  All this led to re-drawing the part to revise the solid model to make it look like what I need to machine, moving that cap on the right enough for my saw blade.  It's tough to see but that raised area on the right isn't circular.  In CAD, once the two pieces were separated by the width of the saw kerf, I filled in the gaps with solid material, so the .047 segment is straight in those areas.

This is a two sided part, completely symmetrical top to bottom (in and out of the screen in this view).  A brilliant modeler on a forum I read regularly came up with an approach I'd never heard of for machining two sided parts like this.  He machines the part halfway in thickness, fills the space around the part with epoxy, turns the blank hunk of metal over and repeats the machining on the second side (after verifying the machine is still zeroed properly). This operation ends with the parts fully machined and suspended in the epoxy.  A short stay in a toaster oven causes the epoxy to break down and the part can be popped out.  There's fewer steps here than a lot of machining operations.  

I've lifted three pictures of his machining four connecting rods at once for a model of a Ford 300 six cylinder engine. 

Once the top side is machined, the missing aluminum is replaced by Devcon epoxy. 

Then the work is flipped over and re-fixtured on the mill to machine off the aluminum on the back of the connecting rods. Once that's done the parts are ready for the heat treatment to break down the epoxy.

He still has some machining steps to do before they're usable, but easy stuff for him.  

My approach to this part is to learn as much as I can and try some techniques I haven't done before.  For one thing, I'm going to do a roughing pass and a finish pass.  Both will use 1/4" diameter cutters and I'll use finer steps between passes on the finish pass.  My mill's spindle (driving the cutter) is slow for most work in aluminum and especially for a 1/4" diameter cutter. 

 

AX-1 On Orbit, Heading for ISS

Right on schedule at 11:17 this morning, the Axiom-1 mission to the International Space Station launched into space atop a Falcon 9 under bright blue spring skies from pad 39A on the Kennedy Space Center.  At 12 minutes into the flight, the Dragon spacecraft Endeavour separated from the Falcon 9 rocket's second stage and began its in-space journey toward the International Space Station. It is expected to dock with the station on Saturday morning.  

About 9-1/2 minutes after launch, Booster 1062 landed on drone ship A Shortfall Of Gravitas.  A video loop caught it in better than usual coverage today and is on SpaceX's feed on Twitter.  Of note for this mission is that this is the fifth flight of B1062 and the third flight of Crew Dragon Endeavour (capsule C206). 

Eric Berger at Ars Technica points out a statistic that I found mind blowing.  It hasn't taken SpaceX two full years to launch more astronauts than China has in 19 years.

Overall, this was SpaceX's sixth human spaceflight with the Crew Dragon vehicle. The company has transported 22 people into low Earth orbit across those missions in just under two years. To illustrate the rapidity of Dragon's rise, consider that China, widely regarded as having the second-most capable civil space program in the world, has launched 20 astronauts since 2003.

This mission is the first of many that Axiom has planned.  It truly is an historic mission; it's the first completely private mission to the ISS; a private citizen crew launched on private corporation's rocket and capsule.  Commander Michael López-Alegría of Spain and the United States, Pilot Larry Connor of the United States, and Mission Specialists Eytan Stibbe of Israel and Mark Pathy of Canada will spend about 10 days in space and a little more than a week on the station. Their time will be their own, and they will conduct a bit of research and also enjoy the experience of living in space.  

By late 2024, Axiom plans to launch its own spacious module to the station, where its customers will be able to come and go more freely. Before the end of the 2020s, this module and others subsequently launched by Axiom would break off and become an independent, private space station.  Assuming the ISS lasts as long as the end of the 2020s and doesn't need to be decommissioned before then.  

Richard Angle photo for Teslarati.

The mission is hard to sum up in one cute observation.  Yes, the Axiom crew is going to do some experiments, but from everything I can see they're not big new things that have never been done before.  As everyone seems to want to point out, these are wealthy old white men, the most despised demographic in Woke Western Civilization.  They are privileged.  But this isn't a Blue Origin New Shepard flight to just above the Karman line so they can say they've been to space.  Instead of the few hours that Space Tourists on a Blue flight get, these four have been in training for a year, working at Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, at SpaceX in Hawthorne, and other places.  They can fly the Crew Dragon and they know their way around the ISS.   

Final words to Eric Berger at Ars:

The reality is that the crew of Ax-1 is something new: an important part of the transition from spaceflight as primarily a government-led activity to one led by commercial space companies like SpaceX. For example, this will be the fifth flight of this Falcon 9 rocket's first stage, making it a far more experienced booster than has previously been used for human spaceflight. No one really knows where this is all headed, whether it is sustainable, or how weird things might get. But with today's launch, the Ax-1 crew is among the first pioneers to explore this new commercial frontier.

 

 

Rocket Lab Ready to Try For Helicopter Recovery

Back in August of 2019, Rocket Lab - one of the most successful small satellite launch providers - announced that they intend to recover the booster stage of their Electron booster for reuse.  Their intent is to both reduce the costs they charge and increase their launch cadence.  At the time, they were saying they needed to quadruple the number of launches they could do per year to meet demand.    

Unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9, though, Electron wasn't designed for reuse from the blank sheet of paper (or blank screen) stage.  Redesign of the Electron adding the mass of hardware like deployable legs, would undoubtedly lead to either redesign of the rocket or only launching smaller payloads.  The Electron's payloads are already fairly small at 220 kg (485 lb.) so there's basically very little margin there.  

Given that, they opted for a technology the military has used for decades, recovery by putting a parachute on the booster and snatching the stage out of the air with a helicopter.  

As expressed in that August '19 post, they started on a program of capturing data on what the stage went through during descent, and then later recovered some stages that splashed into the Pacific, the first of which was in November of  '20, so 15 months after the announcement they were going to start working toward the goal.  To the best of my knowledge, none of those were actually reused. 

This week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica reports their next mission will be the first attempt to catch a booster.

The company will make this attempt during its next flight, with a launch window that opens on April 19 for the "There and Back Again" mission to deploy 34 small satellites. After the first stage completes its boost phase, at 2 minutes and 30 seconds, it will separate and begin descending at speeds up to 8,300 km per hour.

Falling, spinning, catching? ... Nominally, a drogue parachute should deploy at 13 km altitude, followed by the rocket's main parachute at around 6 km altitude to dramatically slow the stage to 10 meters per second. As the stage enters the capture zone, Rocket Lab’s Sikorsky S-92 helicopter will attempt to rendezvous with the returning stage and capture the parachute line via a hook. If this is successful, Rocket Lab engineers and technicians will conduct a thorough analysis of the stage and assess its suitability for re-flight.

Rocket Lab's website news page has more details.  

Back in August of '19, when asked about how many reuses they wanted for each Electron Booster, CEO Peter Beck replied, "If we could reuse it once we've effectively doubled production. Once would be wonderful. Anything more would be really fantastic."  As we can see from SpaceX now having reused a booster 12 times, that lifetime might well be beyond two.  The disclaimer here is that Falcon 9 was designed for reuse from the get-go while it's an add on feature for Electron.  The first thing that comes to mine is that Falcon 9 is a welded metal booster while the Electron is a carbon fiber composite.  Design details like that might matter.

The launch time hasn't been announced yet, but I'll be trying to watch it that Tuesday.  I can only wish them tons of luck.   Happy hunting, Rocket Lab!

 

SpaceX & Axiom Space Team Up For Friday Launch

If all goes according to plan, SpaceX will launch their second private manned mission Friday, April 8 at 11:17 AM EDT for Axiom Space.  This will be a one week mission to the International Space Station for Axiom, where the crew of four will be conducting a variety of experiments primarily using equipment already on the ISS.  There have been space tourist missions to the ISS before, but this is more corporate R&D for Axiom, a contender in the development of a private space station.  In this case, the term “private manned mission” means Axiom is paying NASA for access and anything they consume in doing their experiments.  In turn, three of the four-man crew will pay Axiom to work for them in space, which will help defray Axiom's costs.   

Axiom put up an hour long video (55 minutes) of Q&A with the four man crew, one of the company founders and another principal officer, talking about their goals for the mission, but with very little depth about any actual experiments they're doing.  As a company, they're dedicated to opening up space for commerce and the unique things that can be done in microgravity.  

SpaceX Image

Teslarati reports:

The focus of Axiom-1’s crew is three ultrawealthy customers:

• Larry Connor: Ax-1’s pilot and an entrepreneur who accrued his wealth through real estate
• Eytan Stibbe: a venture capitalist and former fighter pilot who could become the second Israeli astronaut ever
• Mark Pathy: CEO of Canadian investment and shipping companies
  

Each paying $55 million for the ten-day journey and eight-day stay at the International Space Station (ISS), Connor, Stibbe, and Pathy are bankrolling the mission. Crew Dragon’s fourth Ax-1 passenger, however, is Michael López-Alegría, a retired four-time NASA astronaut turned private (space) pilot who now works for Axiom Space.

Last fall's Inspiration4 mission, while also a private space mission, was different in lots of details.  It orbited for a shorter period, didn't go to the ISS, and was funded almost entirely by one person (Jared Isaacman).  The mission was primarily intended as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital raising over a quarter of a billion dollars for pediatric cancer research.  The crew of four also conducted other scientific experiments on orbit.    

Crew Dragon is expected to dock with the ISS about 20 hours after liftoff, giving the Ax-1 crew a little over eight full days at the ISS before they’ll need to board Dragon and return to Earth.  If the weather forecast for landing zones looks particularly bad or good leading up to undocking, SpaceX and NASA reserve the right move the departure earlier or later.

 

Amazon to Launch Via ULA, Blue Origin and Ariane

Amazon has become a late player in the world of internet by satellite, having just run a small number of experiments.  This morning, word broke that Amazon had chosen "everybody except SpaceX" to launch "the majority" of their 3,236-satellite Project Kuiper constellation.  Twitter link: to Thomas Burghardt of NASASpaceflight.com.  

This is in addition to nine ULA Atlas V and two RS1 launches from startup ABL that have already been contracted for.  

The thing about that announcement that jumps out at me is that four out of the five launch vehicles named there don't exist yet.  The only one that has actual history is the Atlas V - and is being discontinued.  The Vulcan Centaur won't fly until Blue Origin delivers the BE-4 engines that ULA needs for it, and Blue Origin's New Glenn needs the same engines.  I can find nothing on the status of ABL's RS1 other than being in development.  Strictly by what the companies are saying, Ariane 6 and Vulcan Centaur could fly before the end of '22, although next year is more likely.  New Glenn is unlikely to fly before 2024.  Eric Ralph at Teslarati doesn't see how even the first tiny, ineffective pieces of the Kuiper constellation will launch this year. 

Per Amazon’s Project Kuiper FCC constellation license, the company will need to launch half of its constellation – 1618 satellites – by July 2026. It’s not actually clear if Arianespace, ULA, and Blue Origin will be able to collectively complete the roughly 36 launches that will require over the next four years. In the last four years, Arianespace’s Ariane 5 and ULA’s Atlas and Delta rockets have collectively launched 38 times. The first Kuiper satellite prototype is scheduled to launch no earlier than late 2022, meaning that operational launches are unlikely to begin before Q1 2023.

If there's one thing the Internet age has taught us (IMO, of course), the company that's "firstest with the mostest" wins.  Amazon is looking to be behind OneWeb, so firmly in third place.  It seems hard to imagine that with a constellation of 3,236 satellites that performance could be on a par with the 12,000 satellites that Starlink has authorization for.  The pace of launches required to put up those satellites and the availability of the launch vehicles paints a discouraging picture of how quickly they'll be able to get their service online.  

Image from Teslarati, not credited there.

 

A Testing Day

For the two biggest rockets on Earth.  

After yesterday's setback due to the lightning strike, the Artemis Wet Dress Rehearsal was back on this morning.  They made it until a bit after 4PM EDT, partially filled the Liquid Oxygen (LOX) tank to prechill it, then began pre-chilling the Liquid Hydrogen tank.  That's when they found a valve that wouldn't work properly on the mobile launch tower.  Today's test was called off by 5PM. From the Artemis blog page:

The Artemis I team has ended today’s attempt at the wet dress rehearsal test at 5 p.m. The countdown ended after partially loading liquid oxygen into the Space Launch System core stage tank. This provided the teams a valuable opportunity for training and to make sure modeled loading procedures were accurate. This was the first time using new systems at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39B. The team was able to monitor the Artemis I core stage as it was exposed to cryogenic liquids and gather data that will inform updates to propellant loading procedures.
...
During chilldown of the lines in preparation for loading the liquid hydrogen, the teams encountered an issue with a panel on the mobile launcher that controls the core stage vent valve. The purpose of the vent valve is to relieve pressure from the core stage during tanking. Given the time to resolve the issue as teams were nearing the end of their shifts, the launch director made the call to stop the test for the day. A crew will investigate the issue at the pad, and the team will review range availability and the time needed to turn systems around before making a determination on the path forward.

There is a video feed for the test on a channel called KSC Newsroom, but I saw nothing happening on it, just the rocket stack standing there.  It doesn't figure to be a dramatic test to look at, though.  The news updates are on Twitter, and apparently open to all since I'm not a Twitter member.

---

Meanwhile, over at Boca Chica, SpaceX wasted no time over the weekend by mounting Booster 7 directly on the Orbital Launch Mount.  They arranged for a road closure today and ran cryogenic tests of the infrastructure all the way to B7 and filling the booster itself. 

This screen capture is after the test had completed but you can see the top section of B7, behind and above the chopsticks, is coated with ice that has been frozen out of the moist Gulf air.  Below the chopsticks, there's a gap in the ice on the left side of the booster, while the rest of it is well coated in ice as well. 

It might be tempting to compare these tests, but SpaceX wasn't doing a WDR.  Both of them were doing necessary tests; NASA's Artemis test is a bit more focused on ground infrastructure like the launcher tower and the pad connections.  Remember, this SLS booster went through a full eight plus minute static firing last March, so barely over a year ago.  Because of that, we know that the SLS booster is capable of doing everything it's supposed to do, making this primarily a test of the ground-based hardware and software.  SpaceX has been testing their equivalent ground-based infrastructure for the last few weeks so problems like Artemis program had today shouldn't be happening at Boca Chica. 

Russian Space Agency Says It Will End Space Station Support

This has been coming for a while but Saturday, Dmitry Rogozin announced via Twitter that Russia would suspend cooperation with NASA and other space agencies in maintaining the International Space Station (ISS). 

Rogozin said that the “restoration of normal relations between partners” on the ISS would only be possible with the “complete and unconditional lifting of illegal sanctions.”

I open by saying this has been coming both because of what has already been reported here, as well as just learning that Rogozin set a deadline of March 31 for the West to drop sanctions against Russia or Roscosmos would abandon support of the ISS.  He announced his response via Twitter on April 2nd.  That Twitter thread seems to be largely in Russian, except for letters he included from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, The Canadian Space Agency's Lisa Campbell, and The Director General of the European Space Agency (whose name I can't read).  

Nelson's response was pledging his ongoing support for the space station but reiterating that the sanctions will not end.  Nelson presumably already knows, as we've covered here, that NASA would most likely not be at risk of losing the space station and could keep it flying even if Russia abruptly pulls out.  In any sort of critical design, like all manned spaceflight, redundant, independent backups dominate the design approach. 

His letter also includes this interesting little statement:  “New and existing U.S. export control measures continue to allow cooperation between the U.S. and Russia to ensure continued safe operations of the ISS.”  The European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency have similar sanctions carve-outs for Russia when it comes to supplying and maintaining the ISS.  Rogozin’s threats are more related to Russia’s psychological war against the West than a reaction to the sanctions.

Unlike Rogozin's, Nelson's letter holds no bluster or threats, but instead offers an olive branch. While the US will not lift its sanctions, Nelson writes, if the Russian space industry needs Western components to support the flights of Russian Soyuz or Progress vehicles to the space station, NASA will work to facilitate such technology transfers. "Sustaining safe and successful ISS operations remains a priority for the United States," Nelson writes.

While the news echoes the mistaken conclusion that we have no way of correcting the ISS's orbit without Russia, (including the PJ Media piece), the really important thing to bear in mind is that nothing has happened yet.  Rogozin and the thousands of employees at Roscosmos have taken precisely zero concrete actions that would actually initiate pulling the plug on ISS.  Remember the allegations that they were going to abandon astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the ISS?   I've seen nobody mention that he returned from orbit on a Soyuz capsule to Kazakhstan, exactly as usual, with American and Russian workers and officials on site, exactly as usual. 

Dmitry Rogozin - AP file photo by Pavel Golovkin 

Some Small Space News Items

Slow news days lately...

NASA's SLS Wet Dress Rehearsal is proceeding although the weekend has had some nasty weather move through the area.  Earlier this evening, one of the three 600 foot tall towers surrounding the launch pad and vehicle was struck by lightning (which is their designed purpose in life), and as of this evening, there has been no word on whether or not anything was damaged.  Until the storms came, the hope was to have the test completed by Sunday afternoon at 5PM.  Eric Berger at Ars Technica has this reminder. 

NASA officials have said they will update the media on Monday about the results of the test. Of course, this assumes that the wet dress rehearsal test is completed in two days. There are no guarantees of that, as NASA will be working with a complicated rocket and intricate ground equipment and handling 700,000 gallons of extremely cold liquids. It will be a major test for all of these systems. When NASA conducted a similar "countdown demonstration test" of its Saturn V rocket for the first time in 1967, with the Apollo 4 mission, there were all sorts of issues, and the test stretched out to 17 days.

1967 was clearly a long time ago, both in calendar years and in the advancement of engineering of vehicles like the SLS, which is a descendant of the Saturn V and the much more recent Space Shuttle systems.  I would hope we don't see this extending 17 days, but stretching out another one or two days seems very realistic.  FWIW, there's a massive line of storms over the area now, but once this clears the area (after midnight, perhaps even till dawn), the next few days look much better.  

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April is looking to be SpaceX's busiest April yet with six Falcon 9 launches scheduled for the month.  Friday afternoon's Transporter 4 launch was under the same cloud deck we've been under since last Thursday, so we didn't see it from the yard, but could hear it when the rumble reached us.  They're planning to launch all but one of the month's six missions in the first 19 days of the month.  

SpaceX has two Crew Dragon missions – Axiom-1 with four private astronauts and Crew-4 with four government astronauts – scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A on April 6th and April 19th. In the middle, SpaceX intends to launch Starlink 4-14 – the month’s only planned Starlink mission – on April 14th. On April 15th, SpaceX is scheduled to launch the National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) NROL-85 spy satellite out of California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. Finally, SpaceX could launch Egypt’s Nilesat 301 geostationary communications satellite on April 30th.

The CSG-2 mission, back on Jan. 31.  Richard Angle photo.  Just a beautiful shot. 

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I rarely talk much about the business side of the space industry but we all have to know it's very important.  I just don't have much of an "inner CPA" or "inner financial analyst."  This week's Rocket Report had a couple of interesting little items on the business side of a couple of names we all know that are kind of stuck in my head, so I'll share a little. 

Virgin Orbit loses $157 million in 2021. In its first financial results since going public in December after a merger with a special purpose acquisition corporation, Virgin Orbit announced Tuesday a net loss of $157.3 million for 2021 on $7.4 million in revenue. That is compared to a net loss of $121.6 million on $3.8 million in revenue in 2020, SpaceNews reports. Despite the significant loss, the launch company emphasized in an earnings call the increase in revenue, primarily from two LauncherOne missions conducted in 2021.

They lost $157 million, $35 million more than the year before, and that's a good thing?  They had some more revenue, sure, but they still lost $157m after counting that.  All I can say is, "Yikes!" 

The second item is a story I only briefly touched on once, Aerojet Rocketdyne is in the midst of some sort of internal power struggle between the board of directors and a second, self-declared "independent" board of directors that seems to want to take over the company.  The company's future seems to be on the line.  Aerojet is the company behind the RS-25 Space Shuttle Main Engines that are currently on the SLS out at pad 39B and one of the only dedicated engine producers in America.  My reference to them was when the FTC said they were going to sue to block their acquisition by Lockheed-Martin, after which Lock-Mart withdrew their offer to buy.  

If I were to try to update this story, it would sound like a Kamala Harris-style word salad, so I'll just refer readers who are interested to Breaking Defense, a news site dedicated to the defense industry.  That article is dated mid-February, so consider it a backgrounder.  The update is the very last piece in this week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica.  I don't think much has changed since February.

First Virtual Reality Headset to Include Smells Coming

Human Factors engineers have been working since the onset of the Covid-19 lockdowns, and remote working via Zoom (and other software), to understand why productivity from home has not kept track with productivity at the office.  Maybe their explanation didn't surprise them or won't surprise you, but it sure surprised me; what's missing is the smells of the office.  They don't have detailed lists of the smells, but it could include the mix of perfumes with different coffees, or maybe the mix of lunches in the break room microwave oven (we used to call that "mullet in the microwave" back in the old days).  

It turns out that the virtue reality/augmented reality and metaverse industry was already pursuing the idea of digitally synthesized odors (DSOs) to bring a new dimension of realism.  Imagine playing a video game in which you can smell an attacker sneaking up behind you; or adding odors to a completely virtual world like that in Avatar.  You can almost smell the gaming software industry money flowing in. Now consider it in a virtual office sense.  Maybe two years ago you flew into Mumbai and smelled that... aroma... that starts as soon as the aircraft air system starts to take in external air.  Maybe next year you can smell Mumbai at home. 

Scratch that.  Bad idea.  From what I've heard from co-workers, Mumbai is pretty excruciating.  If going on trips to places like Mumbai makes you feel important and you like that, you'll probably get good feelings when you smell the Mumbai air.

At least one manufacturer, YoYo Dyne Entertainment, in Grover's Mill N.J., is aiming to bring a first-generation olfactory-enhanced (OE) headset to market in time for the 2022 holiday season, despite setbacks caused by two competing DSO technologies competing to dominate this emerging market.  

As with most technologies that show up overnight, the history of the tech behind this "Smell-o-Vision" headset goes back years and is actually a product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

Digital odor synthesis was invented in the mid-1990s as part of a DARPA research program and has proven its value in several generations of the U.S. Army's battle training simulators. As reported in the April 1, 1995 issue of Electronic Design, the original DSO system, developed by Dr. Apri L'Fuhl, was based on a recently discovered class of organic compounds, known as "Primary Odorants (POs)." 

While each PO has its own distinctive smell, they can be combined in precise ratios with one or more other POs to create a wide range of completely different scents. Modern DSO systems typically use a small cartridge, containing an array of capsules each containing a different PO compound. Each capsule is equipped with a small heating element and a MEMS-based valve that can precisely meter the compound into a vortex mixing plenum where the desired scent is created.

Thanks to the POs’ unique properties, it takes only takes 32 different compounds to produce tens of thousands of unique odors. When Dr. L'Fuhl's team sought to commercialize the technology in the early 2000s, they introduced a new collection of 64 POs that could produce what they referred to as high-definition digitally synthesized odors (HD-DSOs).

The problem with this sort of research is that individual perceptions of odors is very individual.  What's needed is a standard way of measuring and rating the DSOs, as well as standard ways of evaluating and reporting the results.  Enter the Microsoft Nose.  Our noses are connected to the brain over massively parallel neural pathways from the roof of the nose into the brain.  That information needs to be conveyed to the processors in the gamer's headset.  Literally, they needed a nasal network. 

Image credit: Microsoft

YoYoDyne was the first company to license the technology, designed into the OE-VR headset seen in the top picture.  The headset will be entering production early this summer in a repurposed automotive accessory plant, located just outside Flint, Mich.

Branded as the Overthruster-Full Impact, the OE-VR headset will take its place as the flagship product in YoYo Dyne's 2023 collection of its iconic Overthruster series of gaming gear. With a retail price of $799.42, it will come with a basic 32-odorant cartridge, suitable for general-purpose use. The company also will be introducing a series of specialized cartridges that can be used to further enhance specific applications.

“We'd anticipated that there would be a big demand for a high-def cartridge that could create exotic odors to complement the alien landscapes that players encounter in many science-fiction-based VR games” said John Bigbooty, YoYo Dyne's VP of marketing. “We also expect our 'Smell the World' cartridge to be very popular, especially, if Heaven forbid, another nasty COVID variant forces us back into lockdown.”

VP Bigbooty is ahead of the crowd.  He's already introduced a product that he expects to be a Big Thing for the working-at-home set, after consultations with Human Factors Engineering consultants where he found a large percentage of former office workers who now work remotely who expressed a deep nostalgia for the smells of their old workplace.

“To meet this demand, we developed the Daily Grind odor cartridge. When combined with a small software app, it can take a remote worker through a full week of the routine and random smells they miss.”

“We worked hard to faithfully reproduce the environment that office workers call their comfort zone” continued Bigbooty. “When you log in to work, your Full Impact VR headset will greet you with the smell of fresh-brewed coffee that will become increasingly stale as the day goes on. Your day will also be punctuated by occasional bursts of ozone and toner from a virtual copying machine as well as random whiffs of body odors from your virtual co-workers.”

Main source for this article is electronics trade journal, Microwaves & RF, in an overview article on the technology.  

A New Player Arrives at Starbase Boca Chica

Early this morning before sunrise, SpaceX transported Booster 7 to their orbital launch facility, at least temporarily being placed where we get a unique view of the facility.  The booster was in place by 7:40AM CDT as the sun was leaving the frame on the Nerdle Cam.  (This screen capture is clearly much later)

That's Booster 4 on the left (with an apparently damaged grid fin or fin rotating mechanism) and B7 in line (visually) with SN20 in the middle of the frame. 

The first order of tests is going to be an attempt to torture the booster with the type of loads that it's going to see in use and verify it survives and can work.  The emphasis here is a massive mechanical device affectionately known as the ‘can crusher.’ Made up of two large steel structures, that structural test stand’s primary purpose is, to some degree, to attempt to crush Starship test tanks and Super Heavy prototypes. The bottom half of the can crusher was transported to the pad area a week ago Wednesday, March 23.  

The Can Crusher bottom on the way to the orbital launch pad area.  Photo by BocaChicaGal for NASASpaceflight.com 

The major reason for the switch from B4 to B7 is that the Raptor V1.5 engines on B4 have been obsoleted, and the new Raptor V2 engines require a rebuild of the bottom third of the booster.  B7 is the first booster designed to use the new engines – and will carry 33 of them, instead of the 29 older Raptors B4 accommodated.  

On top of major design simplifications that should slash the cost of manufacturing, Raptor V2’s maximum thrust was boosted from about 185 tons to 230+ tons (~410,000-510,000 lbf). Combined with more engines, Super Heavy Booster 7 could theoretically produce around 7600 tons (~16.7M lbf) of thrust at liftoff, while Booster 4 – which never fired even one of its 29 Raptor V1.5 engines – could have produced about 5400 tons (~11.9M lbf). That 40% increase in max thrust likely necessitated a similarly strengthened thrust section, involving a large number of mostly invisible design changes.

Those changes now need to be qualified and it appears that SpaceX may use B7 – an entire Super Heavy booster that could one day fly – to verify their performance instead of a cheaper, more disposable test tank. The first part of that testing will likely involve simulating the thrust of at least 13 of Booster 7’s engines. The test stand’s ‘cap’ could also be installed on top of Booster 7 once it arrives at the pad, possibly allowing SpaceX to simulate both the thrust of all 33 engines and the stress caused by acceleration during launch, reentry, and landing. Finally, SpaceX has begun installing a custom fixture and plumbing that will allow all of that structural testing to occur while Super Heavy is loaded with liquid nitrogen (LN2) or oxygen (LOx), adding another layer of stress.

Starship Super Heavy will have ~16.7 Million pounds of thrust?  More than twice that of the Apollo Saturn V's 7.5 million lb.s?  I want to see that.

There are road closures scheduled for tomorrow with secondary days of Monday and Tuesday.  I don't know the status of Ship 24 which has been rumored to be paired with B7, even perhaps for the first orbital flight, but S24 will be using Raptor V2 engines as well and needs to begin testing, too.  We don't know if they intend to move other things or start testing B7, but these are becoming interesting times at Boca Chica again.

SpaceX Announced End of Production of Crew Dragon Capsules

In Reuters piece dated Monday, reporter Joey Roulette reported that in an interview with SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell, she told him that they are completing the manufacturing of a fleet of four Crew Dragon capsules, which will fill their known needs.

"We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we'll be refurbishing," SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters, confirming the plan to end Crew Dragon manufacturing.

She added that SpaceX would retain the capability to build more capsules if a need arises in the future, but contended that "fleet management is key."

Since Crew Dragon is reusable and NASA agrees to flying reused capsules for their missions, it's believed that a fleet of four is enough.  Their ultimate goal is to use Starship in place of the Crew Dragon. 

Left to right, Crew Dragon, Cargo Dragon CRS-21, and Crew Dragon from the Demo-2 mission.  SpaceX photos.

Crew Dragon has flown five manned missions since the first operational flight in May of 2020, when it flew its first pair of NASA astronauts and became the U.S.'s primary ride for getting humans to and from the International Space Station in place of the Russian Soyuz.  Since the disruptions caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Crew Dragon has jumped from primary ride, to only ride to and from ISS, until Boeing Starliner gets certified to fly, and that doesn't appear close to happening. 

After each flight, the capsules undergo refurbishment at SpaceX facilities in Florida, which the company calls "Dragonland."

"There's lifetime cycle issues, where once you start using it the third, fourth, fifth time, you start finding different things," said retired NASA astronaut and former SpaceX executive Garrett Reisman, who now consults for the company on human spaceflight matters.

"SpaceX is really good about identifying these issues quickly and then acting quickly to fix them," Reisman added, pointing to an investigation in 2021 in which SpaceX discovered and fixed within months a toilet leak aboard a Crew Dragon capsule that had flown humans twice.

Shotwell didn't specifically address Cargo Dragon 2 production.  Eric Ralph at Teslarati picks up that loose end. 

As of today, SpaceX only has two operational Cargo Dragon 2 capsules in its uncrewed fleet – both of which have already flown twice. Following a recent contract extension, SpaceX is scheduled to complete at least 11 more ISS cargo deliveries and recoveries by 2027 and while it’s possible that the company is confident enough to gamble that two Dragon 2 capsules can complete all 15 CRS2 resupply missions, a SpaceX engineer confirmed that at least one more Cargo Dragon is scheduled to debut in 2022. With three Dragons, that would at least give SpaceX the ability to confidently fulfill its CRS2 obligations even if one capsule is damaged or lost.

Stopping and restarting production can be a difficult proposition, but Gwynne Shotwell says they'll take on that burden if needed.  They'll need to be in continuous production of some set of parts, I'm sure.  Whatever wears out faster or needs replacement more frequently will keep some production line going. 

More than anything, the move to halt the production of Crew Dragon capsules seems to mean SpaceX is anxious to get as much of their talent working on Starship as they can.  Starship has the potential to revolutionize everything about space travel.  I ran a couple of stories based on Casey Handmer's blog post on how Starship is a really big thing that not everybody understands yet.  Even so, Eric Ralph blew my mind with this paragraph.

Crew Dragon is currently used to launch four astronauts at a time. A single crewed Starship could have a habitable volume greater than the entire International Space Station and carry 40 astronauts into orbit inside it in a single launch. Cargo Dragon typically delivers about three tons (~6600 lb) of cargo to the ISS. A Cargo Starship could deliver dozens of tons in one go – more cargo space than NASA would know what to do with after decades sent under the tyranny of razor-thin mass margins.

A Starship docking to the ISS would almost be backwards.  More cargo capability and more crew on the resupply ship than on the ship being serviced.  

 

 

NASA Releases Artemis Schedule - Less Than One Mission Per Year

In an article on Teslarati explaining that new HLS contract award we talked about last Wednesday, space correspondent Eric Ralph links to Loren Grush, space correspondent at The Verge on Twitter.  Ms. Grush said, "NASA's going to give us at least a year off between some flights" and presented this graphic of the Artemis program schedule. 

While the footnote at the lower left says the images of launches in 2025 and 2027 don't mean they occur in those calendar years, the first crewed lunar landing, Artemis III, would need to slip in the wrong direction and Artemis IV move forward for there not to be a one year gap between those missions.  

This shows eight Artemis missions to the moon, including the unmanned Artemis I scheduled for this summer, all spread into nine years.  The first Saturn V launch isn't a 1:1 comparison to the Artemis I mission, but that was in 1966.  The last Apollo mission, 17, was in  1972, six years later.  There were Earth orbiting, lunar orbiting and lunar landing Apollo missions.  The landing missions: 11, 12, and 14-17, or six lunar landing missions, were all between July 1969 and December 1972 or 3-1/2 years.  In addition to those six lunar landing missions, there were five others (I'm including Apollo 13 here, since it didn't land) for a total of 11 missions carrying three astronauts.  The first manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, was in October of 1968 while the last was December 1972.  Four years.  Artemis is looking at six missions in seven years. 

Eric Ralph notices something a little different in that NASA graphic.  Take a look at 2027. Notice there's no reference to a lander, SpaceX or other, just a hab (habitat?) delivered to the Gateway?  After the 2025 SpaceX HLS landing on the moon, the next reference to a lander is 2028: three years.   That would be like Apollo landing Apollo 11 in July 1969 but waiting for Apollo 12 until 1972.  The graphic doesn't specifically say there will be a SpaceX lander in 2028, but that's the most rational place to put the new contract's landing system.

The question of why the launch cadence is so low gets back to something we talked about years ago: the SLS Exploration Upper Stage or EUS.  It's needed for the heavier things that NASA wants to put in lunar orbit, like the lunar gateway and that just-mentioned hab, but it isn't going to be ready to fly until 2027.  In 2018, the SLS version with the EUS, Block 1B, was expected to debut as early as 2024.  NASA now says Block 1B will debut no earlier than 2027.  Put another way, four years after the last "expected to debut date", the date has slipped three years.  I suppose that's progress of some sort.  After four years, they're still not saying "we'll be done in four years" - they're saying "we'll be done in three." 

The current NASA graphic of SLS versions.  The Block 1 SLS currently on the pad doesn't have the Exploration Upper Stage. 

Eric Ralph's article on Teslarati has some interesting perspectives in it.  The wild card; in fact, the wildest card in space exploration is Starship and Super Heavy.  If they meet even most of their goals for that system, I wouldn't be even a tiny bit surprised for SpaceX to be putting their own missions on the moon at rates that put Artemis to shame.  I could certainly see Jared Isaacman buying a trip to the moon like this year's Polaris Dawn.

Biden Budget Proposes Big Boost for Artemis and SLS

The White House released the budget requests for FY 2023 and it includes an 8% increase for NASA, with a major emphasis on funding the Artemis moon-landing program. 

President Joe Biden on Monday released his budget request for the coming fiscal year, and NASA is a big winner. The administration is asking Congress to fund $25.9 billion for the space agency in 2023, an increase of nearly $2 billion over the $24 billion the agency received for fiscal year 2022.

The budget request for NASA includes a healthy increase for the Artemis Program, which seeks to carry out a series of human landings on the Moon later this decade. Notably, funding for a "Human Landing System" would increase from $1.2 billion for the current fiscal year to $1.5 billion, allowing for a second provider to begin work. Additionally, funding for lunar spacesuits would increase from $100 million to $276 million. NASA would also receive substantial funding—$48 million—to begin developing human exploration campaigns for the Moon and beyond.

All of this new funding in the proposed budget comes in addition to the billions that NASA has been spending annually to develop the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. Overall funding for Artemis, therefore, would increase from $6.8 billion in fiscal year 2022 to $7.5 billion in the coming fiscal year, which begins October 1, 2022.

That last citation ($6.8 to $7.5 billion) is a healthy 10% increase for the program.  Last year, in their first budget submission, the Biden White House announced their support for Artemis with a special message by Jen "Chucky" Psaki, but no real details.  Most importantly, they didn't announce new dates for the significant milestones of the program, although it was clear they couldn't make the announced dates when they limited NASA's budget to 1/4 of what they said they needed to make those dates.  

The current schedule for the first three Artemis missions calls for the launch of Artemis 1, an unmanned lunar flyby, this summer; Artemis 2, a crewed lunar flyby, in 2024; and Artemis 3, the landing of two astronauts on the Moon, in 2025.  Last year, that manned landing was listed as '24, not '25. 

With NASA getting the budget they asked for, should congress be holding them to producing results, or are results always out of their hands?  SLS would seem to be an argument that NASA can't be held responsible for results.  

Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, was asked about Congress and whether NASA could commit to landing humans on the Moon by 2025 if the agency received the full budget request this year and in follow-on years.

Free gave an ideal bureaucrat's answer; he didn't answer it at all, simply saying, "we're working on it,"

"I can tell you that every day we are working to get Artemis 1 off, Artemis 2 in 2024, and Artemis 3 in 2025," Free responded. "I'm not sure what commitment looks like to you, but I can tell you that a lot of people come to work every day that are working to get to 2025."

SLS on Pad 39B being prepared for Friday's Wet Dress Rehearsal.  NASA photo.

There are other interesting aspects to this budget.  Briefly, the Europa Clipper has gone over budget and is being funded through the overrun, at the cost of cutting funding to other programs.  The manned side is funding a search for another provider of the Human Landing System, as we talked about last week.  Plus, NASA requested more than twice the current funding level for their program to encourage private space stations like these.  The space agency is currently working with four different contractors on various proposals to have these private space stations either ready to go or already in orbit by the late 2020s.

 

Resolving Some Technical Difficulties

I have some computer issues to deal with, so I've got nothing else. 

This is a Windows 10 computer and I'm perpetually annoyed enough with 10 that I've felt no urges to upgrade to 11.  Pay them to torture me?  Is it gambling that 11 will annoy me more, or is it a mortal lock certainty it's going to annoy me more?

I try to remember to backup the drives on this computer weekly onto a local backup hard drive, a Western Digital "My Cloud" Network Attached Storage (NAS) which is within arm's reach, not to somebody else's computer (AKA - 'the cloud').  Windows 10 kept the completely serviceable Windows 7 backup and restore utility, so I've been running that for around five years.  It doesn't take long, and today it barfed for the first time ever.  It gave me an error message, "Backup encountered a problem while backing up file D:\Misc\. Error:(STATUS_WAIT_2 (0x80070002))," which told me absolutely nothing except that something went wrong.  Where I'd expect it to tell me which file failed, I see no filename, just a period (dot).  When I went to look at the D:\Misc directory to see if I could figure out what file it had trouble with, the entire directory was gone off this computer. 

The longer version of that story is that there are actually two backups on the My Cloud drive, one that I did by just copying every directory and every file from this computer to the network backup drive, and a totally different backup that Windoze creates on the backup drive.  The ones I copied are completely readable, while the Windows backup is compressed in some way into one giant file to save space.  The drawback to Windows' backup is that the backup isn't readable by humans.  That meant I couldn't check it to see if the D:\Misc directory was there in today's backup at all.  I looked at the backup I created and the D:\Misc directory was there, but the most recent files on there were from December of 2020. 

I could copy that directory from the My Cloud over to this computer, but it wouldn't be up to date.  How different was the one in the Windows backup?  For the first time ever, I tried to use the restore part of the Backup and Restore tools.  I was able to use the backup that Windows created last weekend to restore that directory.  The files are pretty much the same dates as my old backup except for the latest ten, which are dated from January of  '21 up to last weekend and not 12/20.  I typically run the backup routine weekly on Sunday, but it moves a day or so either way.

Why did Windoze Backup screw up my hard drive and how can I keep it from doing it again?  I have no idea.  So now I'm trying to understand it.

From the Podcast Macabre.