Space Stuff and Launch Info

[Tom.G]

The earlier than expected chute deployment was blamed on correct operation!

A deceleration sensor was used to trigger drogue chute deployment. It sensed the programmed deceleration earlier than expected -- so it opened the chute.

Shortly after landing, an annoucer explained the above and at least implied everything operated correctly -- just unexpectedly.

Doubtful that we will get anything further.

 

[mfb]

9 days and one hour until the launch of Psyche, a mission to the very unusual asteroid of the same name.
The spacecraft will also be the first test of laser communication over interplanetary distances, and it will be the first interplanetary mission with a real payload for Falcon Heavy. The next one is scheduled for October 2024 (Europa Clipper).

It's a day launch but both side boosters return to the launch site, so it should be interesting to watch from close to the launch site.

Countdown

Edit: Delayed by a few days to work on some issue with the spacecraft, looks resolved.

--

Blue Origin gets a new CEO. Bob Smith left, apparently "encouraged" to leave. They hired Dave Limp coming from Amazon, and the internet is already full of jokes.

 

[mfb]

They had a first look at the OSIRIS-REX samples. In addition to the main sample container they also got a lot of stuff scattered around it, which seems to be interesting on its own.

6 days 15 hours until the launch of Psyche.

Russia has determined why Luna-25 crashed. A command to turn on the inertial guidance unit didn't have enough priority to be sent ahead of an engine firing, so the software thought the engine burn wouldn't change the motion of the spacecraft. As a result it fired 50% longer than planned, enough to make it crash. Scott Manley made a more detailed video

12 hours until the launch of two test satellites for the Kuiper constellation on an Atlas V (18:00 UTC, this post is 5:45 UTC). Probably its lightest payload to low Earth orbit ever, it could easily launch 20 of them. Amazon wanted to launch these as secondary payload on Vulcan but then that rocket kept getting delayed. They need to start launching regularly soon and of course you want to test the satellites before, so now a big rocket ends up flying two small test satellites.

Vega will return to flight in a bit under 24 hours. It had a failed launch in December last year.

Musk talked about Starship at the International Astronautical Congress but it was mostly stuff that was known already. Starlink satellites are expected to be the first real payloads and he thinks they can start launching them within a year. While they keep working on Starship they are still increasing the Falcon 9 launch rate.
They have two Falcon launch pads in Florida. At the moment only LC-39A can fly crewed missions and Falcon Heavy, but SLC-40 has been optimized to launch in rapid succession. 5 flights in July, 5 in August, 6 in September. Maybe they want to get the other pad to the same rate. That would allow ~150 launches in a year (~60*2 in Florida and ~25 in California).

 

[mfb]

Looks like a Russian ISS module has a leak. Again.

Nauka had an air leak in July 2021.
Soyuz MS-22 had a coolant leak in December 2022.
Progress MS-21 had a coolant leak in February 2023.
Now apparently Nauka has another leak, probably coolant.

Under 3 days until the launch of Psyche. The weather forecast is very windy.
Edit: Delayed by 1 day due to bad weather.

 

[mfb]

Psyche launch in 1 hour 15 minutes. Forecast says 85% chance of good weather.
NASA blog
NASA live coverage (starts in 25 min)

Other live coverage:
NASA Spaceflight (live)
Everyday Astronaut (starts in 25 min)

 

[Borg]

I'll never tire of seeing the SpaceX boosters returning and landing cleanly.

 

[mfb]

Successful launch and they have acquired a signal from the spacecraft. Shot from the payload separation, spacecraft in the center and second stage of Falcon Heavy to the right:

Successful booster landings, too. Over 150 successful landings in a row now.

 

[mfb]

Boeing openly admits it can't be competitive in spaceflight programs.
They want to do only cost+ contracts, i.e. contracts where the company is incentivized to waste as much money as they can because that will increase the guaranteed profit.

India has successfully tested the in-flight abort system of its crew capsule Gaganyaan. An orbital flight is planned in 2024 and a crewed orbital flight could follow in 2025, making India the fourth country to send people to orbit (and space) with its own hardware.

After a year of accident investigation, Blue Origin plans the next flight of New Shepard on October 31. Spooky unofficial livestream.

Rocket Lab expects Electron to return to flight within this year, recovering from the failure in September, but does not have a launch date yet. Likely November.

 

[mfb]

Looks like Shenzhou 16 had a pretty rough landing. The crew seems to be fine, but you don't want to tumble like that.

 

[mfb]

Jared Isaacman and Tim Dodd discussing astronaut training, Starship and more

Some news items: Polaris Dawn with the first commercial/private spacewalk is still planned for the first quarter of 2024. They'll also launch and land in the spacewalk suit because carrying two sets would take up too much space.

The second Polaris mission will certainly have a spacewalk, too. A repair and reboost of Hubble seems to be the default plan, if NASA doesn't want it they'll do something else.

Edit: Rocket Lab finished its accident investigation, a bad insulation combined with unusual conditions led to an electric arc.

 

[gleem]

On Dec 7 SpaceX will launch the US Space Force X37B space plane with a Falcon Heavy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...n&cvid=466d8e89767341e6922a06b9fe0adcf7&ei=35

 

[mfb]

Second Starship test flight no earlier than November 17

 

[mfb]

i-Space has tested a vertical rocket landing.
It looks similar to the Grasshopper prototype SpaceX flew in 2012. It's large enough to be a first stage of an orbital rocket (Hyperbola-2), but the company might directly work on the larger Hyperbola-3 instead.

 

[mfb]

8 minutes until the launch of Starship.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-2

Edit: Partial success! The first stage flight worked perfectly, with all engines running. Hot staging worked. The ship came close to orbital velocity but exploded shortly before reaching it. The booster exploded during the boostback burn. A major improvement over the first flight, and I expect the third test to reach orbit.

 

[mfb]

Ariane 6 is being prepared for a full-duration static fire test on Thursday.
Edit: On YouTube

North Korea launched a satellite, the first successful launch of Chŏllima 1 on its third flight.

 

[mfb]

Amazon buys 3 Falcon 9 rocket launches for its Kuiper satellites.

We don't know if it's a result of the shareholder lawsuit or just a consequence of the other rockets being delayed. Three launches are not going to change much (~3% of the constellation?), but they'll establish the procedure to launch Kuiper satellites on Falcon 9 and make future additional flights easier if Amazon needs them.

SpaceX has achieved its 250th successful booster landing (166th consecutive success unless I miscounted).

 

[nsaspook]

 

[mfb]

I watched it and I'm not really sure what his message is, or at least how it would apply to Artemis.

What's the point of the scoreboard? Of course Artemis hasn't landed people on the Moon yet. It started 6 years ago, the contract for the first lander is from 2021, and Artemis doesn't have the 4% of the federal funding Apollo had. Asking for a Moon landing now would be absurd.

He suggests to do Artemis more like Apollo, but Artemis is explicitly not a repetition of Apollo. NASA doesn't want missions that put two astronauts on the Moon for a few days. The goal is long-term missions and exploration, working towards a future Moon base.

He discusses how Apollo did meaningful but not too ambitious steps with every mission and then thinks Artemis is doing too much per mission. For crewed missions you don't have much of a choice with SLS only flying once every 1-2 years. If you want to send 10 crews on preparation missions then your project takes 10-20 years, i.e. it's going to get cancelled at some point. It's not the 1960s any more, however, today uncrewed spacecraft can test most of the things crewed spacecraft can. If we include these then there are many smaller steps towards a lunar landing:

* Getting Starship to orbit
* Recovering booster and/or ship
* Reusing booster and maybe the ship
* Demonstrating propellant transfer in orbit
* An uncrewed landing on the Moon (and presumably a take-off demonstration)
* Dock to Orion and repeat that with crew

Meanwhile SLS/Orion do their own three-step program:
* Orbit the Moon without crew, return to Earth (Artemis 1, completed).
* Fly around the Moon with crew, return to Earth (Artemis 2).
* Orbit the Moon with crew, dock with Starship to transfer two astronauts, wait for them to return, return to Earth (Artemis 3).

The Apollo lander needed a real-life lander simulation because (a) simulators were bad and (b) the pilots actually piloted the spacecraft. We didn't have high resolution surface images and we didn't have live image processing to spot obstacles on the ground. Today we have both. Starship won't be landed manually. There will be a big red "abort landing" button, you don't need to fly to train for that.

We don't know how many refueling flights Starship will need, yes. So what? We have an upper limit, and so far nothing suggests that limit would be broken. Future performance improvements can lower the number of flights needed, which means we don't have a specific number yet. I can't see how the option to save flights would be a bad thing.

So let's look at the summary points at 1:01:40:

• "Look at the mission differently." - that's implying everyone is wrong about the mission now. Bold statement. Unless he wants people who are right to be less right in the future.
• "In a world of talkers, be a thinker and a doer." - sure, but it's ironic given that he is a talker.
• "Ask the hard questions." - I agree, but that doesn't need a 1 hour talk. I don't see him ask many hard questions in the talk. Why NRHO to meet up with the lander is an excellent question, and he discusses that - unfortunately it's too late to change that now. Why SLS at all is a question he never mentions. Probably because the talk is in Alabama, he is from Alabama, and most of his aerospace contacts are in Alabama. Can you guess which state is most dependent on SLS jobs? Why did NASA wait until 2020 to start contracts for the lander as the most difficult component, with less than 1/10 of the budget for the vehicle that has an easier job? I don't see him ask that either.

----

Avio accidentally scrapped two tanks needed to fly Vega - before flying the final Vega.

 

[mfb]

It's getting busy on the Moon. A crewed mission is not close yet, but governments and private companies are racing to put payloads on the surface to have a valuable product in the future.

• SLIM is a Japanese mission currently orbiting the Moon with a planned landing January 19.
• Nova-C is a private mission to the Moon with a planned Falcon 9 launch January 12 and a planned landing January 19 or 21.
• Peregrine is a private mission to the Moon with a planned Vulcan Centaur launch. The nominal date for that launch is December 24 with an expected landing January 25, but it's going to be the first flight of the rocket. They did a wet dress rehearsal and couldn't finish all tests, which means the launch will likely shift to January 8 or later. It's probably delaying the landing as well.

SLIM could become the first successful Japanese lander while Nova-C and Peregrine will be the first American landing attempts since Apollo 17.

----

Falcon Heavy is scheduled to launch the Boeing X-37B spaceplane on Tuesday 01:14 UTC, in 1 day and ~6 hours. We don't know to which orbit it will go, but it will be higher than its previous low Earth orbit missions.
Edit: Delayed to some point later in December.

 

[mfb]

Boeing X-37B on the Falcon Heavy launched, people are still looking for its orbit.

Vulcan is on the pad and preparing for its maiden flight in 16 hours (07:18 UTC). It will launch Peregrine towards the Moon. It's the first ULA-developed rocket and it will become its rocket for everything, with a variable number of solid rocket motors for different missions. The Delta family has just a single launch left, Atlas V has 17 launches left.
Live coverage will be here:



SLIM is still on track to try its Moon landing on January 19, Peregrine will follow, Intuitive Machines now aims at a Nova-C launch mid February and presumably a landing in late February.

 

[mfb]

The Vulcan launch delivered Peregrine to the right orbit but the payload now has a propellant leak. They are still looking into what they can do, but a Moon landing is ruled out.
SLIM and Nova-C, in that order, should be the next landing attempts now.

 

[Astronuc]

Boeing X-37B on the Falcon Heavy launched, people are still looking for its orbit.

Vulcan is on the pad and preparing for its maiden flight in 16 hours (07:18 UTC). It will launch Peregrine towards the Moon. It's the first ULA-developed rocket and it will become its rocket for everything, with a variable number of solid rocket motors for different missions. The Delta family has just a single launch left, Atlas V has 17 launches left.
Live coverage will be here:



SLIM is still on track to try its Moon landing on January 19, Peregrine will follow, Intuitive Machines now aims at a Nova-C launch mid February and presumably a landing in late February.

Unfortunately, Peregrine has problems, and moon landing unlikely.

Just hours later, though, Astrobotic reported an inability to orient Peregrine's solar panel towards the Sun and keep its battery topped up. A propulsion system glitch was found to be causing a critical loss of fuel and damaging the spacecraft's exterior.

The company said Monday the mission had "no chance of soft landing" -- dashing hopes for the first ever successful landing by a non-government mission, and America's first soft touchdown on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...on-fails-and-nasa-program-delayed/ar-AA1mIwyD

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced the agency was pushing back its planned return of astronauts to the lunar surface from December 2025 to September 2026, citing safety issues with the Orion crew capsule.

 

[mfb]

Successful maiden flight of Gravity-1 by Orienspace. With 6.5 tonnes to low Earth orbit this is a very large rocket for a startup. It's launched from a ship and the exhaust creates an interesting pattern. Launch video:

 

[mfb]

The livestream seems to cover the upcoming press conference only but the Japanese Moon lander should be on the surface in one way or another now.

Edit: Successful landing
Japan has become the fifth country to softly land on the Moon.

Edit2: Looks like there are signals coming from the surface, but not what the scientists expect. Maybe something broke.

Edit3: No solar power at the moment, lander runs on its battery. It talks to Earth.

 

[Borg]

Edit: Successful landing

Kind of. Stricken Japanese Moon mission landed on its nose

 

[mfb]

It was supposed to land on its side, just rotated a bit too much.

Speaking of landings... Ingenuity has a damaged rotor. Its 72nd flight was the last one.

A Cygnus capsule is being prepared for its first flight on a Falcon 9 (January 29). It used to launch on Antares, but the combination of Russian engines and Ukrainian first stage isn't flying that well now.

IM-1, the next flight to the Moon, is now scheduled to launch February 14.

 

[berkeman]

It was supposed to land on its side

That's its side in the artist's image below? I thought it was supposed to land on its feet/struts/whatever...

 

[mfb]

That is its side as seen by the engine. Another hop test of a future Chinese rocket (roughly the size of a Falcon 9 booster):

 

[mfb]

The Nova-C Moon lander from Intuitive Machines is being prepared for launch. It has an instantaneous launch window on February 14, 05:57 UTC (21 hours after this post). NASA live coverage will be here.
If successful, it will be the first US mission to land on the Moon since Apollo 17.

It uses cryogenic propellant (methane+oxygen), so SpaceX had to modify the ground equipment and the fairing of its Falcon 9 to load that as late as possible to minimize boil-off.

 

[berkeman]

It has an instantaneous launch window on February 14, 05:57 UTC

Why is it so short? Wikipedia says that the term means that the launch window can be as short as one second!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_window

 

[Tom.G]

Why is it so short? Wikipedia says that the term means that the launch window can be as short as one second!

Most likely Fuel Economy.

They are seemingly limiting to, or limited by, an essentially ballistic trajectory to reach the Moon. Rockets with extra fuel capacity and navigation capability can adjust to a slightly non-optimal launch time and still reach their target landing site or orbit.

For low-orbit Earth-circling satellites the launch time doesn't much matter. For other Solar System targets, missing a launch window means the target is in a different place.

Cheers,
Tom

 

[mfb]

Either the countdown works without issue or they need ~10-15 minutes to check what's wrong before they can restart the countdown. Launching a few seconds later wouldn't be an issue for orbital mechanics, but making a launch window a minute long is no difference to an instantaneous launch window. Launching 10 minutes later puts you in the wrong orbital plane. It's the same for launches to the ISS where you need to match its orbital plane.

Something was wrong with the methane temperature, next attempt will be tomorrow (1 day ~1 hour from now).

 

[mfb]

Methane temperatures are good now. T-53 minutes

https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/02/...launch-falcon-9-rocket-on-moon-bound-mission/ (live)
https://plus.nasa.gov/scheduled-video/clps-intuitive-machines-im-1-launch-coverage/ (starting in 8 min)

From the NASA coverage: Falcon teams use sensors and knowledge from the Starship team (which works with methane) for the methane fueling.

SpaceX has launched a military satellite a few hours ago and prepares a Starlink launch in California - it's possible they'll launch three times within 24 hours, which would be a new record.

Edit: Successful launch. Landing is planned to be in a few days.

 

[mfb]

The lander has test-fired its engine successfully. It has also taken a few images of Earth. In one of them you see the Falcon 9 upper stage floating around:

Landing should happen on the 22th.


The second launch of H3 was successful. Japan has a successor to the H-II now.

 

[mfb]

Intuitive Machines has an active YouTube channel following the mission.
Flight path update

Edit: Lunar orbit insertion successful