Blog for Sunday, July 2, 2023

It started out as a rough week with computer problems but fortunately my younger son supplied me with a newer computer and some infrastructure modifications and all seems to be working well except for my Uverse TV which is doing a lot of pixelating. But that will be a problem for the coming week.

Virgin Galactic first commercial flight – On June 29, Virgin Galactic flew 4 persons of the Italian Air Force and 2 Virgin Galactic employees. The Italians were all space rookies and they brought the total of people in space up to 659. The flight lasted only 14 minutes from the dropping of VSS Unity from the carrier plane, the powered flight up to 85.1 km (52.9 miles) and finally the landing on the New Mexico runway. So far in 2023, the number of sub-orbital people (12) outnumber the orbital ones (11) for a total of 23 this year.

Asteroid Day on June 30 – Celebrating the Tunguska event from June 30, 1908 where an asteroid flattened 2000 square kilometers of Siberian Forest. The Planetary Society did an event but otherwise it has been a relatively quiet celebration this year.

Euclid Telescope launches – The telescope launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on July 1. It will take 4 weeks to travel out to the L2 Lagrange Point 1.5 million km from earth like the JWST, but this European telescope is much different. It will be a survey telescope that will look at 1/3 of the sky detecting galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away and will use spectroscopy to determine the distance to those galaxies so that it can build a 3-D map of the universe. It will be limited to only 1/3 of the sky because dust in the plane of the Milky Way and ecliptic of the Solar System prevents observation of these faint objects. It will take Euclid 6 years to complete its survey but there will be a partial data release after 2 ½ years. The 3 major goals of the $1.8 billion telescope are: 1) how do galaxies change over time? 2) create a dark matter map by analyzing the distortion of galaxy shapes in its images; and 3) how does the expansion rate of the universe change over time? Those are all interested questions for me and I can’t wait until 2026 to start getting some answers.

 

Blog for Sunday, June 25, 2023

It’s been a relatively slow week of news, but here are a couple of items I learned about recently.

OSIRIS-REx Sample Return -- In the June Planetary Society publication, they had a feature article about the return of the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security- Regolith Explorer) probe with its sample of the asteroid Bennu. It’s been almost 7 years since it was launched on September 8, 2016 to the .5 km diameter carbonaceous asteroid. Scientists think the ancient surface of Bennu might have formed only 10 million years after the Sun making it about 4.5 billion years ago.

The rubble-pile asteroid surprised scientists with its rocky surface and the probe circled Bennu for 505 days before deciding where to take its sample. During the sampling process, people were stunned that the sample arm plunged 2 feet into the surface and created a flurry of dust, rocks and pebbles. Dante Lauretta, chief scientist, feels they might have gotten a 250-gram (a baseball’s mass) sample, far exceeding the 59.5-gram goal.

On Sunday, September 24, 2023, the sample return capsule will detach from the main probe, 4 hours and 60,000 miles away from Earth and then plunge into the atmosphere at a blistering 7.7 miles per second. Protected with a heat shield, the capsule will slow for 2 minutes before deploying its parachute and descending from 3200 ft to a 12 by 50-mile target ellipse in the Utah Test Range. With this heat shield protection, scientists will be able to analyze the material of the asteroid without it undergoing the heat and pressure that a meteor sample would endure.

The asteroid Bennu is known as a Potentially Hazardous Object (PHO) because its 1.2-year orbit brings it within 186,000 miles of Earth every 6 years. Astronomers calculate that it has a 1 in 1800 chance of colliding with Earth between 2178 and 2290. That’s a long shot, but the downside is it would take out an entire continent if it did hit us. The more we understand these objects, the better chance we have of doing something about it when there is a danger of collision.

Euclid Space Telescope to Launch – Euclid is scheduled to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on Saturday, July 1. It will travel for 30 days to the L2 point beyond the moon just like the JWST. But Euclid will be a survey telescope meaning it won’t study individual objects. Over 6 years, it will survey 1/3 of the sky avoiding the plane of the Milky Way and the plane of the Solar System where dust would inhibit its observations. It will map galaxies out to 10 billion light-years away. Using spectroscopy, it will be able to estimate the distance to galaxies and create a 3-D map of the universe. It has 3 major goals: 1) how do galaxies change over time? 2) create a dark matter map by analyzing the distortion of galaxy shapes in its images; and 3) how does the expansion rate of the universe change over time? The first release of data will be 2.5 years after launch. All the mission’s questions are one of intense interest to me, so I can’t wait until 2026 for this first set of data.

 

Blog for Sunday, June 18, 2023

I’m a day late. It was a busy Father’s Day with setting up a new weather station and stopping in for some early Sunday donuts and mead at a local establishment. This is the 8th weekly blog, I think it is a habit. Hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

Today, Monday June 19, US astronaut Frank Rubio will overtake US astronaut, Andrew Morgan, for the 13^th longest stay in space, 271.53 days. Of course, he is setting this record stay with his two fellow cosmonauts from the Soyuz 68S mission that launched on September 21, 2022. If he stays until September 27 of this year, he will set the US record for the longest stay in space at 371 days, breaking Mark Vande Hei’s record of 355 days set in 2022. Not bad for a rookie astronaut on his first mission. He will still be behind 5 other Russians and tied with his 2 fellow cosmonauts for the longest stay in space by any country. Valeri Polyakov has the record of 437.75 days set in 1994-1995 aboard the Russian Mir space station.

It slipped under my news radar but the show ‘Stars on Mars” started on June 5. You can catch the previous episodes on streaming or watch new ones at 7PM on Mondays on FOX TV. It is an analog Mars mission with William Shatner as the Earth based communicator, and 12 people including, 2 ex-football players, Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman, cyclist Lance Armstrong and various other TV personalities. I watched the first 2 shows on streaming and it is heavy on the reality-TV and light on the Mars science. I’m not sure if I would recommend it, but I might be hooked on the on-going person dynamics. My biggest question would be what our actual Mars simulation analog astronaut, Beth, thinks of the show?

UAP news is taking off– NASA recently had their first public presentation by their UAP Panel. UAP now stands for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, (recently the word, Aerial, was replaced with Anomalous so that events in space and under water could be included). Now on 6/12/23, we have a high security clearance official, David Grusch, claiming he heard that alien craft with bodies have been recovered and some American people have been murdered by them. These outrageous claims need evidence and so far, none has been produced. Grusch even admits he hasn’t seen evidence directly but only relaying second or third hand accounts. Mick West, a UFO video debunker, has done his best to be a rational mind analyzing the claims, but I’m worried that his level-headed responses will be dismissed by the radicals on the other side. NewsNation has done some broadcasts with Grusch, but they are far from being unbiased reporting. This type of coverage is undermining the report from NASA’s UAP panel which has studied the phenomena for the last 7 months and is trying to bring scientific analysis to the subject.

 

Blog for Sunday, June 11, 2023

This is the 7th weekly blog, I think it is a habit. Hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

The week started out with a bang. I had joined Fraser Cain’s Universe Today as a patreon supporter and he scheduled me for a 15-minute Zoom interview on Monday, June 5. What an honor to talk to someone that I have seen for so many hours of video content with interviews and about astronomy and space issues. I zoomed from my upstairs lair and Fraser noticed my picture of the “Tesla in space” that Elon Musk launched on the first Falcon Heavy rocket. I was also surrounded by my models of the Space Shuttle and ISS and I think my “lava lamp” might have dated me. I told him about our MASS group and hoped he would check out our content. He seemed interested but I know he must be a very busy guy. I thanked him for letting me know about a phone app that identifies birds by their sounds, something that Carol and I are enjoying. Before I knew it, our time was up.

Vulcan rocket test fires its BE4 engines – On 6/7/23, the new rocket fired its engines for a 6-second test and it went according to plan. This is the last major hurdle for the Vulcan rocket to launch before the end of 2023. On its inaugural mission, possibly in July this year, it will send the Peregrine lunar lander from Astrobotic to a soft landing at the South Pole of the moon. The second Vulcan mission is to launch the first DreamChaser space plane to the ISS for a cargo delivery. The rocket uses methane-liquid oxygen burning BE-4 engines which are years late and coming from Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos. Vulcan is a critical rocket. It is needed due to the phase-out of the Atlas 5 which uses Russian based engines. Fortunately, we have a stockpile of Atlas 5 parts already in the US after Russia invaded Ukraine. The DoD has awarded its future military satellite contracts to be launched with 60% coming on Vulcan launches and 40% on SpaceX. The other US rocket, the Delta, is being de-commissioned because it is cost prohibitive. The Vulcan is capable of putting 27.2 mt (60,000 lb) into LEO which is more than a reusable Falcon 9 which maxes out at 22.8 mt (50,000 lb). Blue Origin also plans to use the BE-4 engines on its new rocket, the New Glenn. This rocket is critical because it will be launching the Blue Moon manned lunar lander for NASA.

 

Blog for Sunday, June 3, 2023

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

The Meteor Plant, just above the "Love Blooms Here" plaque, is growing at over 1 inch per day and is now over 25 inches tall. Carol has a phenomenal "green thumb".

The Chinese Manned launch – On May 30, China launched ShenZhou-16 with 3 taikonauts. I’m amazed at the lack of transparency with China’s space program. The taikonauts weren’t announced until a day before launch and when they do a spacewalk it isn’t even announced until after it is performed. China says they want to land people on the moon by 2030. I think that is going to be the motivation behind the United States pursuing their lunar manned program. NASA says it is for science and Mankind, but I think the politicians look at the strategic military perspective. Look at this headline that Dean sent to me this week, NASA head worried China will stealAmerica’s God-given moon water.

It kind of snuck up on me but we set a couple of records for people in space with the Chinese launch and the Virgin Galactic sub-orbital mission on May 25. With the taikonauts, we broke the record for people in orbit with 17, 11 on the ISS and 6 going to or on the Tiangong-3 space station. For total people in space, if you consider the McDowell line (50 mi or 80 km), the record was set on May 25 at 20, you had the 6 Virgin Galactic sub-orbital people, 11 on ISS and 3 from China on Tiangong-3. We are taking baby steps, but slowing becoming a space-faring species.

Boeing’s Starliner Manned Mission Indefinitely Delayed – On June 1, Boeing announced that they are standing down from their launch of the CFT-1 mission with 2 astronauts on Starliner due to 2 issues, a lack of safely margin on their parachutes and flammable tape used to wrap wiring harnesses on the capsule. Boeing decided to get in Commercial Crew in September of 2009. C’mon, Boeing got more money ($4.2 billion) to develop Starliner than SpaceX got for Crewed Dragon, in September 2014. How long do we have to wait to have two independent methods for US astronauts to go into orbit? SpaceX has performed 10 manned missions on Dragon, 7 for NASA and 3 for private astronauts. I’m sure glad it is a fixed-price contract and Boeing has to pony up for the costs of the delay. So far, they have charged $900 million against their corporate earnings for the delayed program. Maybe we should get some more cost-plus contracts on the SLS rocket to prevent the cost overruns that are occurring there?

 

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.