Blog for Sunday, May 28, 2023

This is the fifth weekly blog, I think it is a habit. Hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

This week we took grandson Ian, who is graduating from grade school this summer, to our health club for a workout. To warm up, I started with a half mile walk, but he chose to run it and then did 19 flights of stairs on a step-machine while he waited for me to finish my walking. Then, I put him thru my weightlifting workout and finally Carol and I had him hit the racquetball around with us for a half hour. I consider the racquetball event an enormous success because no one got injured. When you get my 300 lbs moving, a racquetball wall could create enormous G-forces on a septuagenarian body.

On one of my daily walks this week, I was listening to Beth’s “Casual Space” podcast with Dr. Kirby Runyon who helps prepare people to identify Arizona geological landmarks while on their Virgin Galactic trips to space. He mentioned Arizona Meteor Crater and its $20 charge for admission. I remember, as a recent High School graduate back in 1967, a friend and I descending into the crater with no contact with anyone on the rim and then having some problems climbing back out. My friend was a better climber than me and I started to have a vision of my bones becoming part to the crater floor mystique. But eventually perseverance paid off and I made it out. Oh, the adventures of youth.

Virgin Galactic launch – On May 25, Virgin Galactic, got back in the sub-orbital launch business with the launch of 6 employees, including 2 pilots and 4 passengers, 3 of whom were space rookies. The 13- minute flight on VSS Unity began with a drop from the VSM Eve carrier plane, continued with a powered ascent to 87.2km (54.2 mi) and ended with a landing in New Mexico. This height qualified them as astronauts because most people recognize the McDowell line at 80 km (50 mi) as the boundary of space, not the more stringent Von Karman line at 100km (62 mi). The recent flight raises the count of people who have gone into space up to 653. This was the first sub-orbital flight in 2023. Blue Origin (BO), the other sub-orbital company, has been grounded since their anomaly with an unmanned mission on New Shepard on September 12, 2022. BO says its nozzle on its booster suffered a “structural fatigue failure”, meaning the nozzle fell apart. The capsule blasted away from the booster and landed safely. But the booster was a total loss. There is no word when they will resume launching people on sub-orbital flights. People in space for 2023 is a low total of 14, with the only other manned launches being 2 Dragon capsules with 4 people on each, the CREW6 mission on March 2 and AX-2 mission on May 21. This low count harkens back to 2021, when Carol won the MASS Prize by being closest in guessing that 49 people would go into space including 22 on sub-orbital flights. Last year, 2021, there were 38 people launched. We’ve got a way to go to break the record of 63 people in the calendar year 1985. That high count was due to 58 people launching on the Space Shuttle and 5 on Soyuz. As a final comment, Virgin Galactic should not be confused with Virgin Orbit that recently went bankrupt and had its assets sold off to RocketLab. Virgin Orbit was trying to launch satellites into space by dropping a rocket slung below the wing of their 747 named “Cosmic Girl’. Airborne launches have a lot of flexibility for launch location around the world but the constraints of the limited rocket size and payload made it a losing business case.

LIGO coming back on line – After a 3-year hiatus, the 2 LIGO gravitational wave observatories are back online with improved sensitivity. They should be able to pick up a signal every 2-3 days now compared to once a week during the 2019-2020 run. The Virgo detector in Italy also was upgraded but technical issues are forcing its shutdown to extend until early Autumn. KAGRA in Japan is also restarting on May 24 but its sensitivity is lower than LIGO. LIGO’s first detection was in 2015 and so far, 90 events have been recorded of black hole mergers, neutron star mergers or one occurrence of a black hole-neutron star combination merger.

 

Blog for Sunday, May 21, 2023

Fourth weekly blog, starting to become a habit, hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

This week Carol and I went for our annual pilgrimage to Shady Hill Nursery, now Countryside Gardens, in Elburn, IL. We’ve been going there for quite a few years. Memories include sharing geranium prices with Silvio, picking up Meteor Shower plants because they look so cool and one-time event where we called the Mund’s when we stopped in at Wahlburger’s restaurant on the way home and surprise, surprise, they joined us for a burger!

Humans to Mars Summit for 2023 (H2M) -- I just finished watching the 27 hours of H2M on YouTube. Beth did a fabulous job as co-host with Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. She also moderated a few of the panel discussions. Very interesting seeing all the representatives from NASA and industry. I feel like I understand NASA’s new “Moon to Mars” strategy much better. One big question I have, is where was Robert Zubrin? He has always been so prominent at other Mars events.

My lead for today was going to be the Axiom 2 mission but then NASA announced the award for the second Human Landing System (HLS) on the moon. HLS leads the way.

Blue Moon Lander

NASA names second HLS team – On Friday, 5/19/23, NASA announced that the Blue Moon Lander from Blue Origin (BO) will be the second HLS lander. A little over 2 years ago NASA awarded SpaceX $2.9 billion for their Lunar Starship as the sole winner of the original HLS competition. Lunar Starship will take 2 astronauts down to the lunar surface as part of Artemis 3 in December of 2025. Blue Origin sued NASA over not being selected. NASA said that they could only afford one team. Subsequently, NASA awarded SpaceX another $1.15 billion for their upgraded “sustainable” version of the Lunar Starship to be used on Artemis 4. Congress said they wanted 2 landers, so there was one more contest. The winner, Blue Origin will get $3.4 billion for their “sustainable” lunar lander that will support the Artemis 5 landing in 2029. They will perform a test unmanned lunar landing in 2028. BO says they are funding over 50% of the effort on their part. The sustainable landers will be able to carry more cargo and up to a crew of 4 to the surface. Plus, they will integrate with the Lunar Gateway and support surface missions for up to 30 days. Hopefully, this isn’t a second choice like Starliner for Commercial Crew, where Boeing is twice as expensive as SpaceX and so late on delivery that the service is missing much of its “window of need”. BO left a bad taste in my mouth with their suit that delayed the startup of the HLS program. The Blue Moon Lander will support up to 20 mt of cargo to the lunar surface in its reusable mode and 30 mt in expendable mode. The 16m tall lander will weigh 16 mt dry and 45 mt loaded with LH2 and LOX. The CIS-lunar transporter/propellant loader is coming from Lockheed Martin. The lander has been redesigned so that the crew section is at the bottom and the fuel tanks are on the top. That removes one of the big criticisms of the original design where astronauts would have to navigate a 12m (40 ft) ladder to climb down to the lunar surface. BO will use the New Glenn rocket to get Blue Moon to lunar orbit. Dynetics was the only other bidder in the recent contest with their ALPACA lander. Not much was said of their bid except that it was more expensive than Blue Moon. I think I sense another MASS Prize contest where we will guess when the first HLS vehicle successfully lands on the moon.

Rayyanah Barnawi, John Shoffner, Peggy Whitson & Ali AlQarni

Axiom 2 mission – Launched on Sunday, May 21, to the ISS with 4 astronauts including Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut that holds the US record for cumulative days in space, John Shoffner, a private astronaut on his first flight, and Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi, two Saudi Arabian astronauts, one male and one female. They will dock to the ISS and spend 8 days performing 14 science experiments and doing social outreach. They will be joined by the ISS crew of 7 including 3 Americans and 3 Russians plus 1 United Arab Emirates astronaut. The mission has been reduced by 2 days due to the conflict on the 2 ISS docking ports for Commercial vehicles. Boeing is to perform their CFT mission with the first manned Starliner capsule in July and SpaceX wants to send their CRS-28 supply capsule with new ISS solar arrays soon. NASA says they want to send 2 private missions to the ISS each year. Axiom is definitely a company with space involvement because they are developing spacesuits for NASA as well as sending a module in 2025 to dock with ISS to build out their own commercial space-station. SpaceX will return the Falcon 9 booster from the launch back to the Kennedy Space Center.

SpaceX hires retired Kathy Lueders from NASA -- Lueders was the head of NASA’s Human Spaceflight division. She follows the former head of the division to SpaceX, Bill Gerstenmaier, who is the VP of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX. Ken Bowersox, who is also a former astronaut and worked for SpaceX before returning to NASA, is the current head of Manned Spaceflight. This relationship can’t help but solidify the attachment that NASA has to the SpaceX Lunar Starship for HLS.

 Blog for Sunday, May 14, 2023

Third weekly blog, starting to become a habit, hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

JUICE is loose! – The 16-meter RIME (Radar for Icy Moons Exploration) antenna finally escapes its mounting bracket. Flight controllers warmed JUICE with sunlight and then fired a non-explosive actuator that jostled the antenna helping it to unfold. The radar should now be able to penetrate down to a depth of 9 km below an icy moon’s surface when it arrives at Jupiter in July 2031.

Moons, moons, moons, they’re everywhere! – With the discovery of 62 more moons around Saturn, the planet is up to a total of 145. Ground based telescopes were used to detect objects as small as 1.6 miles (2.5km) in diameter. Astronomers had to track them for 2 years to confirm they were orbiting Saturn. 121 of Saturn’s moons are classified as “irregular”, meaning they orbit opposite or at a large angle from the planet’s rotational plane. All of these new discoveries are in this category and are probably captured objects. Jupiter was in the lead as of February this year when 12 new moons were discovered around it, giving that planet a solar system leading 92 moons. The current total count for the Solar System is 286 moons.

Vast partners with SpaceX to launch first commercial space station – It was announced this week that Vast, a privately held American aerospace company headquartered in Long Beach, California, will partner with SpaceX to launch the first commercial space station, known as Vast Haven-1. The station is based on SpaceX’s design for the lunar Dragon supply module called Dragon XL. Vast said its ultimate goal is to create a massive orbiting space station with artificial gravity. But the initial module will be able to house 4 astronauts for 30 days with the help of a crewed Dragon capsule. The first module would launch on a Falcon 9 rocket in August of 2025. NASA is interested in handling off the scientific work occurring on the ISS to a commercial entity before the ISS is deorbited in 2030. Four companies have received some NASA money to begin maturing their designs: 1) Orbital Reef from Blue Origin plans for a 2027 launch; 2) Axiom Space plans to launch its first module to attach to the ISS in 2024; 3) StarLab from Lockheed Martin plans to be operational by 2027; and 4) a station from Northrup Grumman would begin launching in 2028. If it sticks to its schedule, Vast will beat all the other competitors to a free-standing station because although Axiom would launch first in 2024, its early modules would stay attached to the ISS until 2028.

Dragonfly budget reduced by 18% -- Since we’ve been talking about this quad-copter to Saturn’s moon Titan, I thought I’d share this concerning headline. NASA has requested $327.7 million for the project in the upcoming FY 2024. This is an 18% reduction from the 2023 budget of $400 million. NASA says it should not jeopardize the June 2027 launch date but project scientists are not that sure. NASA’s reduced commitment might be due to the escalating cost of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. Its requested budget is $1.2 billion for 2024 which is a $300 million increase over the previous year. There is concern that these NASA requested budget amounts for 2024 will be cut by 22% if the Republican demands for reduced government spending are realized in the debt ceiling negotiations. Let’s hope the Congress looks at the long-term advantage for the US of funding science and technology development.

Virgin Galactic targets a late May return to sub-orbital spaceflight – On May 9, the company will target its 5^th suborbital spaceflight with a crew of 2 pilots and 3 employees to demonstrate the capability of VSS Unity to perform the mission. They will then move on to a flight with Italian Air Force personnel later this year. VG has a backlog of 1000 seats for spaceflights at $450,000 per seat.

Scott Kelly inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame – Kelly, age 59, is a former astronaut who is currently studying Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) with NASA. Scott’s brother Mark is an Arizona Senator, who is married to, Gabby Giffords, a former Arizona Congresswoman. Scott weighed in on UAPs recently when he said, there are things that have been observed from some really sharp individuals, like Navy Pilots, that warrant further investigation. He’s not convinced they are extra-terrestrial, but maybe objects from a foreign adversary.

Axions the new dark matter candidate – I’m learning a little more about this theoretical particle every day. I watched a YouTube video that explained that dark matter candidates are broken into two major categories at the 1 electron volt (ev) mass dividing line. To show the range of particle masses you have an electron which weighs in at 500,000 ev, an axion which might weigh about 10^-6 ev (1 millionth ev), and a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) which weighs about 10^11 (100 billion ev or about the mass of a xenon atom). WIMPs were the old darling of dark matter possibilities but the lack of detecting them over the last few decades are making them lose favor. The new candidate is the very light axion. Scientists are searching for it in tunable, extremely cold, electromagnetic cylinders. Because the mass of the axion is not known, the detectors need to be tunable, like a radio. The lightness of the axion makes it easier to detect with its wave-like duality. The lightness also means the universe needs a lot of them to account for all the missing mass. Theorists calculate there may be 10^13 (10 trillion) axions in a square centimeter in Earth’s vicinity. Axions are starting to make the <.8 ev neutrinos look like a heavy weight particle.

 

Blog for Sunday, May 7, 2023

I’m going to try blogging weekly to share recent events with you. Any feedback is appreciated.

Elon Musk speaks about April 20^th Starship launch – In an April 30, YouTube video, Musk said the launch was pretty much what he expected. Three of the 33 Super Heavy first stage Raptor engines failed to ignite and two more conked out shortly after. At T+85 seconds they lost thrust vector control and the flight termination command was sent when the rocket began to tumble. But it took a long 40 seconds to destroy the rocket. The next launch will have a more robust termination system. He felt it will only be 4-6 weeks before they try again with Booster 9 and a Starship to be named later. They hope to perform a repeat of the first launch where Starship lands in the ocean off Hawaii. Booster 9 uses electric thrust control rather than a hydraulic-system, this should improve reliability. To prevent the “rock tornado” and creation of a crater below the rocket, SpaceX plans a sandwich of steel plates with a water-cooling system below the rocket. Think of an enormous shower head pointing up toward the rocket. SpaceX thought after their static fire of the rocket that the concrete could absorb the engine exhausts but Starship rose very slowly. That slow ascent might have compressed the sand below the concrete, allowing the concrete to crack and be chiseled out by the exhaust. Musk said that if they had thrust vector control and could have throttled up the engines, Starship would have made it to staging. He hopes to perform 4-5 flights in 2023 and attain orbit. He will provide another update in 3 weeks. Musk plans to spend $2 billion in 2023 on Starship development and he hopes to fully develop the rocket with $5-10 billion. Starship is an integral part of SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation satellite system which will cost another $10 billion.

Grandson Ian got to meet astronaut Duane Carey – On May 1 8^th grader Ian got a picture with retired astronaut Duane Carey, who flew on STS-109, the mission that performed the 4^th Hubble Telescope servicing on March 1, 2002.  My granddaughter, Emily, a kindergartener, also got to meet him at her school on the same day. Emily was so cute as she excitedly exclaimed, “I met a man who was in space!” Carey was the 420^th person to go into space according to supercluster.com. Mankind is now up to 647 people. Yuri Gagarin was number one on April 12, 1961, when he spent 1 hour and 48 minutes in space.

NASA doesn’t have enough plutonium-238 – On May 4, NASA said a lack of plutonium will push back the nuclear-powered Uranus mission launch to the late 2030s. With the reduction of nuclear war heads, I thought we were swimming in extra plutonium, but maybe it’s the wrong isotope. If the Uranus mission makes the goal of launching in 2031-2032, it will be a 13-year trip to the planet. If it is delayed to later in the 2030s, the trip will take 15 years. Fortunately, the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan needs a smaller amount of plutonium for its power pack, so it is still on track for a June 2027 launch. Dragonfly will be an SUV sized, 450 kg (1000 lb), quad-copter that will use the 50% denser than Earth atmosphere (composed of 90% nitrogen 5% methane) to explore Titan’s methane lakes and other surface features for 3.3 years. I can’t wait to see those pictures, but we’ll have to wait until 2034.

Beth will be hosting at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, DC May 16-18 – Best wishes for a successful convention. I still see her scheduled on May 16 to be moderator, but on May 5 I heard she is traveling thru the desert on way to a convention at Biosphere 2 near Tucson. She had already done two analog astronaut experiences in Hawaii and Poland. She will have some analog astronaut  competition from the new Fox network program, “Stars on Mars”. The program will be a reality show with the contestants in a simulated Mars mission. William Shatner will be the ground communicator on Earth and 12 competitors including Lance Armstrong, not related to first man on the moon, but the bike rider from the Tour de France, and other celebrities and social disrupters. The only other competitors I recognize are a couple of ex-football players. It premieres on June 5. I’m not sure I would recommend it but I bet my curiosity might make me check out the first episode.

A black hole ripped a star apart – Spaghettification (I so wanted to see if the spell checker would flag that word), occurred for a star and formed an event 1000 times brighter than a supernova. It was labeled ZTF20abrbeie leading to the trendy name of “Scary Barbie”. Matter falling into a black hole is a much more efficient energy producer than any fusion process within a star, even a supernova.

The Czech Republic becomes the 24^th signatory of the Artemis Accords – On May 3, that nation joined Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, the Republic of Korea, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Accords are a fairly benign set of rules that state that nations affirm their commitment to key principles, grounded in the Outer-Space Treaty of 1967, including: use of space for peaceful purposes, transparency, interoperability, emergency assistance, registration of space objects, release of scientific data, protection of space heritage, safe and sustainable use of space resources, deconfliction of activities, and mitigation of orbital debris, including disposal of spacecraft. Of course, Russia and China, feel that the Accords are too US centric and have their own, International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) coalition consisting only of themselves. China this month stated that they plan to have humans on the moon by 2030. NASA’s Artemis 3 mission is scheduled for late November 2024 and plans to land 2 astronauts on the South Pole of the Moon with Starship from SpaceX.

 

Blog for Sunday, April 30, 2023

I’m going to try blogging weekly to share recent events with you. Any feedback is appreciated.

Falcon Heavy launches for 6^th time -- Today, April 30, SpaceX, after much delay, launched a massive communication satellite to geostationary orbit. Part of the delay was that the rocket was hit by lightning as it sat on the pad a couple of days ago. The rest of the delay was due to bad weather. The mission needed so much rocket performance that all 3 cores of the rocket were expended with no landings attempted. SpaceX has still never successfully landed a center core from a Falcon Heavy launch.

Astronomy Day at Harper College – Don and I traveled to the college Saturday night, April 29, for an interesting set of talks and displays. First up, was Kevin Cole, the organizer of the event and astronomer at Harper, who talked about Mars quakes, the Mars rovers and the planet Venus. Next, was Dean talking about NASA’s Artemis program that intends to return humans to the lunar surface. He stated that the transporter-crawler that moves the rocket from the VAB to the launchpad has set the record for the heaviest self-powered vehicle at 6.65 million pounds. It also gets a whopping 150 gallons per mile in fuel efficiency. Lastly, we listened to Jim Kovac talk about extreme exoplanets. There are some really weird ones out there, including “hot Jupiters” and the most common exoplanet, “super Earths”. It was nice to bump into Keith at the event. He joined us for the first two lectures and documented the event with some great selfies. I also said “hi” to Joe DalSanto, astronomer from COD, who attended the event.

JUICE mission has problem with antenna deployment – The probe’s large antenna has deployed only 1/3 its intended length. Scientists think a small pin is protruding only a couple of millimeters and preventing the full extension. The antenna will be needed for the probe to gather information from its ice penetrating radar instrument. We still have time to use thermal expansion and jolts from its thrusters to solve the problem, because the probe will take 7 years and many gravity-assists from Earth and Venus before it arrives at Jupiter in April 2030.

NASA keeping Voyager 2 going until 2026 – Scientists shut down a voltage regulator on the probe freeing more power to keep all the science instruments operating. The Voyagers were launched in 1977. Voyager 2 is 12.3 billion miles from Earth and Voyager 1 is 14.7 billion miles distant.

The Hakuto-R private company lunar lander failed – The Japanese company iSpace said that telemetry from the probe indicated that it ran out of fuel and sped up as approached the lunar surface. That makes for the second private company that failed trying to land on the Moon. An Israeli company, SpaceIL, failed with their Beresheet lander April 11, 2019, spreading some tardigrades on the surface.

Damage from the Starship launch – Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator, feels SpaceX could try again in just a couple of months. Others think that it will take to the end of 2023 to repair the launch pad. Elon Musk was on the Bill Maher Show Friday, April 28, talking about free speech and artificial intelligence. Maher is a big fan of Musk. Elon came across as more human than usual and a genuine thoughtful person. That’s much different than the recent coverage from his takeover of Twitter. SpaceX is said to be spending $2 billion of its money on Starship development in 2023.

Virgin Galactic performed a glide test of their VSS Unity Space Plane – On April 26, they dropped it from a height of 14 km for an unpowered landing in New Mexico. Next flight will be powered and have 2 pilots and 4 employees aboard. If that goes well, VG is prepared to commence commercial service in the second quarter of 2023 with Italian Air Force personnel and expects to fly once a month.

SpaceX getting 2^nd launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base – With this addition, SpaceX will have 2 launch pads in California to go with their 2 launch pads in Florida and 1 in Texas.