Space Stuff and Launch Info

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arstechnica has image of the assembled Transporter-1 mission. It looks very chaotic with payloads from so many different customers on board. It will launch 143 satellites, breaking the previous record of 104 in a single launch.
The planned launch is in ~10 hours from now. Deployment of the satellites will take over an hour.

 

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arstechnica has image of the assembled Transporter-1 mission. It looks very chaotic with payloads from so many different customers on board. It will launch 143 satellites, breaking the previous record of 104 in a single launch.
The planned launch is in ~10 hours from now. Deployment of the satellites will take over an hour.

Edit: Success. At least for everything deployed from Falcon 9 directly. Getting information about every secondary deployment (Falcon 9 deploys X which later deploys X1, X2, ...) is difficult.

 

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Green Run Update: NASA Proceeds With Plans for Second Hot Fire Test
As early as the fourth week in February. This is almost a month of delay in a schedule that's already very tight. It is within the margins they had, but now every delay will threaten the launch. They can't push the launch date much: The solid rocket boosters have an expiration date.

 

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It's Mars season!
The Emirates Mars Mission will arrive on Tuesday, the Chinese Tianwen-1 will arrive on Thursday, and the American Perseverance will arrive Thursday next week (Feb 18).

Perseverance (rover+helicopter) is on a trajectory to land directly, so arrival data is landing date. The Chinese mission will go into an orbit around Mars first, its lander/rover are planned to land in April. The UAE mission is an orbiter.

 

[Borg]

American Perseverance will arrive Thursday next week (Feb 18)

I'm looking forward to seeing if my wife and I land safely.

Spoiler

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24877/send-your-name-placard-attached-to-perseverance/

 

[Stavros Kiri]

I'm looking forward to seeing if my wife and I land safely.

Spoiler

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24877/send-your-name-placard-attached-to-perseverance/

God Speed!

 

[berkeman]

and the American Perseverance will arrive Thursday next week (Feb 18).

Very cool animation of the landing! I like how in the final powered phase the rocket assembly seems to be actively looking at the terrain it is heading for and maneuvering to get to the safest/flatest spot.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

It's landing day on Mars! NASA's Perseverance rover will touch down on the Red Planet today

 

[hutchphd]

I am such a Nerd...Jumping up and down in front of the monitor. Those JPL folks are pretty impressive practitioners. Science strikes again.

 

[berkeman]

Interesting article that mentions some of the things the lander did to avoid the hazards in the landing area:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/18/world/mars-perseverance-rover-landing-scn-trnd/index.html

 

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Here is the link between these two images. I added the approximate landing spot in red in the upper image.

 

[Oldman too]

Too cool not to post.

 

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Can't wait for Ingenuity to fly. Unfortunately we'll have to. It is attached to the underside of the rover and deployment is only planned for April/May. Then the rover will drive another 100 meters before Ingenuity makes a first flight.
First flight anywhere outside Earth!

 

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Second SLS test fire on Thursday
They decided to aim at a full-duration test again, i.e. eight minutes, at least four minutes are needed for the critical tests.

The solid rocket boosters have been stacked, the 1 year countdown to launch is ticking and the schedule is tight - if something delays the launch further they might need to open and inspect the boosters again, which would immediately extend the delay.

 

[Klystron]

Apropos space stuff, the New York Times (again) predicts the final handover of building large rockets for space exploration from NASA to commercial enterprise.

The article contains as much politics as science, as expected. The blithe conclusion that NASA simply combine mission with the so-called Space Force; that is, become a minor arm of the military, flies in the face of all that NASA stands for as a bulwark of cooperative peaceful scientific exploration.

Having served roughly a decade in both the USAF and at NASA, their missions remain starkly different even as technology converges. Certainly NASA contains origins in the military but their goals -- peaceful exploration versus defense -- should not be conflated for obvious and terrible reasons. NASA, originally NACA, was precisely created separately from the USAF, actually Aerospace Force, to avoid militarizing space.

Simplicity should never embrace stupidity.

 

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SpaceX launches like crazy this year. 9 launches in the first 3 months, or one every 10 days.

Globally there have been 25 successful launches so far in 2021 (and one failed attempt by the small Hyperbola-1), Falcon 9 made 36% of them. But that's ignoring that Falcon 9 is one of the largest operational rockets.

Globally 703 satellites have been launched this year, 564 of them (80%) by SpaceX, out of that 430 were Starlink.

The summed satellite mass launched is at most 178 tonnes, 118 tonnes (66%) launched by SpaceX (112 tonnes Starlink). 27 tonnes (max) by Russia, 24 tonnes (max) by China, 10 tonnes (max) by others. Various satellites don't have a public mass, I used the maximal capacity of the rocket in that case. All SpaceX payloads had a known mass.

Here is a funny February 2019 prediction: They estimated 600 small satellites will be launched in 2021. We exceeded that number in March.

 

[anorlunda]

Elon Musk in an interview said that Startlink will provide him with a Mars budget several times bigger than NASA's budget. I think that is a contest worth watching.

 

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Ingenuity centimeters above the Martian surface


A flight will happen no earlier than April 11.

 

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Ingenuity has seen a software issue in a rotor spin test. It will need software updates before the first flight.

Update from NASA
They expect to set a new flight date next week.

 

[anorlunda]

It would be interesting to learn what SW error could not be detected before leaving Earth, but detected on Mars before the first flight.

 

[hmmm27]

Keeps timing out trying to connect to M$'s Windows10 Update server, every few minutes.

 

[jackwhirl]

NASA Picks SpaceX to Land Next Americans on Moon

 

[berkeman]

NASA Picks SpaceX to Land Next Americans on Moon

Looks like they will need to take a ladder...

 

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SpaceX has developed and tested an elevator-like system.
The giant ladder was one of the downsides of the competing National Team proposal.

The tiny NASA funding for the Human Landing System didn't leave many options - even SpaceX, the cheapest proposal, was still too expensive. It only fit after SpaceX agreed to a modified payment schedule. That explains why they only picked a single proposal. SpaceX received the highest rating in non-financial categories, so NASA picked both the cheapest and the best proposal.

Starship is comically oversized for NASA's plan to send just two crew members to the surface in the first mission.

Washington Post article

Edit: Here is the source selection statement

Artemis increasingly becomes a SpaceX program.

* Launching the Gateway core modules: Done by SpaceX
* Resupply of the Gateway: Only SpaceX has a contract so far
* Landing people on the Moon: SpaceX
* Landing cargo on the Moon: No full-scale contracts yet, but Starship is so big that it can easily do that in combination with the crewed missions.

What's left? Getting astronauts to the gateway and from the gateway back to Earth. That's the last task of SLS/Orion, and SLS needs to stay around for political reasons.

 

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Launch of Crew-2 in 50 minutes

Third time SpaceX will launch astronauts, and first time they will do so in a reused capsule and on a reused booster. This will make Dragon the second reusable crewed spacecraft after the Shuttle.
- the capsule ("Endeavour") previously flew the first crewed flight, Demo-2
- the booster ("B1061.2") previously flew the second crewed flight, Crew-1
The Crew-1 astronauts are still on the space station, they will return a few days after Crew-2 arrives. Similarly, Crew-3 will fly to the ISS a few days before Crew-2 will leave, currently planned for October.

 

[hutchphd]

Michael Collins has died. A remarkable human.

 

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The core module of the Chinese modular space station is planned to launch in about 5-6 hours. 3:00 to 4:00 UTC, probably 3:18. No livestream expected.

At 22.5 tonnes it will become the heaviest spacecraft launched by China so far, and one of the largest single payloads in the history of spaceflight. Zvezda, the third ISS module, was a tiny bit heavier at 22.8 tonnes. Saturn V launched far more mass to orbit for the Apollo missions, but it's less clear what you call a spacecraft and what's part of the rocket there.
Skylab at 76 tonnes was the heaviest individual spacecraft that became operational.
Polyus at 80 tonnes was the heaviest spacecraft launched, but due to a malfunction it was in space for just one orbit.
The Space Shuttle launched itself to space, that's heavy as well if you want to count that. Its payloads were lighter.

 

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Success for the Chinese mission.

Crew-1 streaking through the atmosphere over Mexico in preparation for a landing near Florida, filmed by (Crew-2 astronaut) Thomas Pesquet on the ISS:

 

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China's rover has landed on Mars
I don't see pictures, but it's on the surface and has sent back signals.

 

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Another spaceflight seat for the general public - but again US only.

Discovery adventure TV show to launch winning contestant to the space station

They plan a TV show next year, the winner will be sent to the ISS for a week as part of the Axiom-2 mission (most likely Crew Dragon, although Starliner would be a theoretical option).

 

[anorlunda]

Another spaceflight seat for the general public - but again US only.

If I win it, I'll transfer my seat over to you.

 

[berkeman]

Another spaceflight seat for the general public

Are a few flights on the Vomit Comet a standard part of the training for civilian / amateur astronauts? If not, some of these upcoming flights could be pretty unpleasant for the other passengers...

 

[berkeman]

Oh sure, you laugh @Tom.G but about half of the prospective flight candidates get nauseous on their first flight on the VC. At least those were the statistics back about 20 years ago when my ex wife took her NASA squirrel monkeys on their first training flight... (and yes, half of them got sick too)

 

[Tom.G]

Oh sure, you laugh @Tom.G but about half of the prospective flight candidates get nauseous on their first flight on the VC. At least those were the statistics back about 20 years ago when my ex wife took her NASA squirrel monkeys on their first training flight... (and yes, half of them got sick too)

OK, it was an ambiguous response on my part.

Rather than responding to the necessity of the VC "break-in" flights, I was aiming at the understatement of the "unpleasantness" comment.

 

[hutchphd]

I guess the Frank Borman incident on Apollo 8 should be err...brought up? no...maybe mentioned in passing? ...no...um ..definitely not rehashed...

I guess that was not pretty...por guy. Poor guys