MASS

 

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.