Shyster's thread of Spaaaace.

[Shyster]

[Shyster]

Congrats to ISRO and the nation of India for becoming the fourth country (after the US, China, and Russia/Soviet Union) to place a lander on the Moon and the first to land anything on a lunar pole.

[Sam's Drunk Dog]

[Shyster]

NASA is finally starting to say the thing that everyone already knows: SLS is way too expensive.



A big part of the problem for SLS is that for much of the program, NASA is still using old style "cost plus" contracts where any cost overruns are paid for by NASA and not the contractor. Contractors thus have little-to-no incentive to manage costs or prevent overruns because they aren't on the hook. Just about everything for SLS is behind schedule and over budget.

Contrast that to NASA's commercial cargo/crew contracts with companies like SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, which are all fixed-price contracts. Boeing is going to end up losing billions on its Starliner crew contract with NASA because Boeing has incurred huge expenses fixing all of the multiple problems with Starliner (which still has yet to actually carry a crew), and all of those fixes are on Boeing's dime and not NASA's.

[Shyster]

A failure tonight for the Rocket Lab Electron, which was carrying a commercial Earth-imaging satellite for Capella Space. The launch was normal up through staging, but it appeared that the second stage did not properly ignite. There's a bright flash followed by a shower of sparks at what should be second-stage ignition, and the video then freezes. It looks like there may have been a puff of combustion from the engine, but if there was it didn't last long.

I can't quite tell whether the big shower of sparks is coming from inside the exhaust nozzle or behind it, but there are definitely sparks that aren't coming from inside the engine because you can see them pass between the camera and the nozzle. So I think the sparks are external to the engine nozzle. The Rutherford engines on the Electron are driven by electric fuel and oxidizer pumps, so I'm thinking maybe something like a electrical short or battery explosion produced the flash and shower of sparks.

This is the third failure of an Electron, and all three to date have been caused by faults on the second stage.

[Shyster]

The OSIRIS-REx mission launched in September 2016 on an Atlas V, collected samples from asteroid Bennu in October 2020, and departed Bennu for Earth in April 2021.

[count2infinity]

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa ... y-strategy

It's weird that you still have to swear in on some sort of book, but I suppose this is a good choice for the new head of OTPS for NASA.

[shafnutz05]

Yes please

https://slate.com/technology/2023/09/io ... -nasa.html

[Shyster]

Nearly a decade ago, the European Space Agency announced plans to replace its workhorse Ariane 5 with the new Ariane 6 booster. The explicit goal was to build a cheaper rocket that could compete with the likes of SpaceX's Falcon 9, which at the time was solely an expendable rocket. But not only is the Ariane 6 over budget and years behind schedule, but SpaceX developed the ability to reuse its Falcon 9 boosters and has done so over two hundred times to date. Nothing about the Ariane 6 will be reusable in any way. Now the ESA is asking its member countries to increase the subsidies they are paying so that the Ariane 6 will be more attractive to private satellite operators seeking a ride to space. If the cost of those higher subsidies are factored in, it negates all of the cost savings of the Ariane 6 over the Ariane 5.

One of the early customers for Ariane 6 is Jeff Bezos and Amazon, which has bought a bunch of launches for its Project Kuiper competitor to SpaceX's Starlink. If the new higher subsidies go through, it will mean that European taxpayers will subsidizing every launch of satellites for billionaire Jeff Bezos by roughly $75 million.

[Shyster]

Speaking of SpaceX, they launched twice today from both of their pads in Florida. The first launch was a Falcon Heavy launching the Psyche mission for NASA from LC39A, which is sending a probe to a metal-rich asteriod between Mars and Jupiter. The Falcon Heavy side cores were recovered, and the center core was expended.





The second launch was yet another Starlink launch from LC40.

[tifosi77]

I watched the Psyche launch a few hours after it happened. Had a moment during recovery where they were playing hide-and-seek with one of the boosters.

[Shyster]

That was definitely the longest time separation between booster landings of any Falcon Heavy launch so far.

[Shyster]

India is moving steadily toward becoming the next nation with a manned space program. The recent successful TV-D1 Test Flight was a high-altitude test of the launch escape system (LES) for the Gaganyaan crew vehicle. The Gaganyaan looks rather like a slightly shrunken version of the original SpaceX Dragon 1 capsule, coupled with a service module that houses the orbital engines and solar panels. It will hold three crew members.

The test featured a boilerplate Gaganyaan capsule/service module with a functional LES mounted atop a modified L40H liquid-fueled strap-on booster from the GSLV medium-lift rocket. The whole (rather improvised) setup is evocative of the "Little Joe" and "Little Joe II" rockets that NASA used to test the LES for the Mercury and Apollo spacecraft back in the 60s. ISRO plans three more suborbital atmospheric missions to test various guidance and control systems in flight, followed by three unmanned orbital tests. If all goes well, the first manned mission may be as soon as 2025. The orbital launch vehicle will be ISRO's relatively new Launch Vehicle Mark 3 (which continues India's practice of having the most boring rocket names in the world), which was designed from the outset to be human-rated.

[Shyster]

While I am happy to see a launch date scheduled for the first Vulcan mission—Christmas Eve, seriously? Way to eff up the holiday plans for most of the space/science reporters in the country.

[Shyster]

Drone view of the Shenzhou-17 manned launch to China's Tiangong space station.

[Shyster]

After spending a couple days with their newly arrived Shenzhou-17 colleagues, the Shenzhou-16 crew returned today from China's Tiangong space station. And they got a bit of a thrill ride on landing. Reports are that all crew members are fine, despite the rollover on landing.

[Shyster]

New record for Falcon 9 landings at 18. Booster 1058 is the oldest active Falcon 9 booster and first flew in May 2020, launching the Crew-6 mission to the ISS (the first crewed Dragon launch). It has also launched one cargo Dragon mission, one military communications satellite (for South Korea), two Transporter ride-share missions, and 13 Starlink missions. B1058 is distinguishable from its colleagues because it has NASA logos from its first mission.

[Shyster]

Looks like SpaceX is close to finishing up the new crew-access tower and arm at LC-40 in Florida. Right now, LC-39A is the only pad with crew access for manned missions. Adding a tower at LC-40 means there is a backup pad to LC-39A if something were to happen to that pad, and since LC-39A is also the only east-coast pad capable of launching Falcon Heavy, it eliminates scheduling issues if a FH and crewed launch need to take place around the same time. It's not clear when it will first be used for a crewed mission, but it could be the AX-3 private spaceflight to the International Space Station in January 2024.

I might be wrong, but if AX-3 does use LC-40, I think that would be the first manned US launch from a launch pad other than LC-39A and B since Apollo 7 in 1968. If not, then the Starliner Boe-CFT mission scheduled for next April may take that distinction. A crew-access tower was installed for Starliner at LC-41 years ago, but the repeated delays to the Starliner program means it hasn't been used yet.

[Shyster]

[Shyster]

Starship test flight 2 could be as soon as this Friday.

[Shyster]

FAA license granted for Starship Integrated Flight Test 2. The two-hour launch window opens at 7:00 a.m. CST.

There have been over a thousand changes to the whole Starship / Super Heavy / launch pad infrastructure since the first launch. Probably most visible will be the new water-deluge system intended to prevent the concrete hailstorm from last time. The Super Heavy booster has switched from hydraulic engine steering to an electric system (a failure of the steering system is why the first launch tumbled out of control). The Raptor 2 engines are updated versions that incorporate multiple design changes from months of additional testing. A big change is a switch to "hot" staging where the Starship will ignite its engines while still attached to Super Heavy and before Super Heavy fully shuts down its own engines. Typically, rockets switch off their booster engines for a few seconds before jettisoning the first stage and lighting the upper stage engine. Russian and Chinese launchers have used hot staging for decades, but US rockets have generally not done so. It requires that the interstage be vented and the top of the booster shielded, but it does increase the overall lift capacity slightly, and you don't need any sort of separate stage-separation motors or mechanism because the thrust of the upper stage does that work. Finally, in case things go wrong, SpaceX has designed and certified a new and more-powerful flight termination system that should kaboom the vehicle more effectively.

The mission profile for IFT-2 the same as the first attempt. The goal is to put Starship on a suborbital trajectory where it would reenter around Hawaii and (after hopefully surviving reentry) land in the ocean. The Super Heavy booster is going to try to do a boostback burn and then do a powered water landing in the Gulf. I would say the three main test objectives/questions are: (1) can the whole launch stack work, including staging; (2) can the Super Heavy come back and land on target; and (3) will the Starship survive reentry using the current heat-shield system.

[Shyster]

IFT-2 delayed 24 hours for part replacement.

[robbiestoupe]

Who’s watching?

[robbiestoupe]

Looks like all engines firing this time. A good sign

[Shyster]

That was amazing. All 33 Raptors running all the way to staging. The combined exhaust forming massive mach diamonds was awesome. Hot staging seemed to work as planned. If the graphics were accurate, it looked like Super Heavy started losing engines on the boostback burn, and it likely triggered the FTS once its couldn't make its trajectory. That new FTS really works, that's for sure. Shame that Starship also appeared to trigger its FTS, and only around 10 seconds before engine shutdown. I think there may have been some sort of leak. Going back over the stream, around T+7:00, it looked like Starship started to emit a plume, and watching the "fuel gauge" graphics on the screen, around that point the amount of LOX started to drop faster than the amount of CH4. They were falling at pretty much the same rate prior to that point. So I'm thinking a LOX leak that caused a shortfall in performance, and Starship triggered its FTS when the guidance computers realized it wouldn't make the planned trajectory.

But anyway, tremendous progress.