Shyster's thread of Spaaaace.

[Shyster]

Good analysis as usual from Scott Manley on today's test flight.

[Shyster]

Pad looks pretty good.

[Shyster]

This shot gives a great sense of the scale of the Starship stack. At 121m, it's roughly the equivalent of a flying 30-story building.

[Shyster]

SpaceX is preparing for the next launch of the secretive X-37B spacecraft, which is NET December 10 and will be on a Falcon Heavy with an expended center core. The last time SpaceX launched an X-37B, it not only used a regular Falcon 9, but the booster did a return-to-launch-site landing, which is reserved for fairly light payloads. The X-37B has also launched multiple times on the Atlas V, and each time that was on a version with no solid boosters, which also indicates a fairly light payload. With this launch on Falcon Heavy, one of two things must be true: either this X-37B is somehow way heavier than prior missions, or the Space Force wants this mission yeeted to a way higher orbit than ever before. The Space Force certainly isn't going to say where this X-37B is going, but orbital objects cannot really be hidden from ground observers and radar stations, so while we won't' know what it's doing, we can tell where it is. It will be interesting to see what kind of orbit it's going into.

[Shyster]

Crazy story. There's one launch remaining of the original version of the Arianespace Vega rocket, which is being replaced by the updated Vega-C (or Vega Consolidation) that replaces two of the rocket's three solid stages and has a larger liquid-fueled upper stage. Arianespace realized they couldn't find in their inventory two of the four propellant tanks used to construct the Vega's AVUM (Attitude Vernier Upper Module) final stage, and after a search they found they had been accidentally sent to a recycling center and shredded. The production line for those tanks has long since been shut down in preparation for the switch to Vega-C.

Officials are working on two options. The first involves using old propellant tanks that were built for qualification tests of the Vega rocket more than a decade ago. Another option is to modify the AVUM+ upper stage that is used by the new Vega-C rocket, but while the AVUM+ used on the Vega-C is based on the original Vega's AVUM, there are differences, and the new, larger AVUM+ stage was never intended to fly on the original version of the Vega rocket.

[Shyster]

The X-37B launch has been delayed 24 hours due to weather.

[Shyster]

The first launch of the new Vulcan rocket, originally scheduled for Christmas Eve, is moving to the right into 2024. ULA recently conducted a wet dress rehearsal of the launch, and it revealed problems with ground equipment for fuel loading. It appears that the fix will take long enough that there won't be enough time for another WDR ahead of the late-December launch window, and ULA president Tony Bruno said they plan to conduct another WDR before launch.

The inaugural Vulcan launch will be carrying the Peregrine lunar lander for Pittsburgh's Astrobotic Technology, and the next optimal launch window to the Moon means that the next launch attempt will likely be NET January 8, 2024.

[tifosi77]

Crazy story. There's one launch remaining of the original version of the Arianespace Vega rocket, which is being replaced by the updated Vega-C (or Vega Consolidation) that replaces two of the rocket's three solid stages and has a larger liquid-fueled upper stage. Arianespace realized they couldn't find in their inventory two of the four propellant tanks used to construct the Vega's AVUM (Attitude Vernier Upper Module) final stage, and after a search they found they had been accidentally sent to a recycling center and shredded. The production line for those tanks has long since been shut down in preparation for the switch to Vega-C.

Officials are working on two options. The first involves using old propellant tanks that were built for qualification tests of the Vega rocket more than a decade ago. Another option is to modify the AVUM+ upper stage that is used by the new Vega-C rocket, but while the AVUM+ used on the Vega-C is based on the original Vega's AVUM, there are differences, and the new, larger AVUM+ stage was never intended to fly on the original version of the Vega rocket.

I thought I replied to this, but apparently not................... what exactly happens here if they can't work a solution? What is the payload?

[Shyster]

I thought I replied to this, but apparently not................... what exactly happens here if they can't work a solution? What is the payload?

The payload is the Sentinel-2C satellite for the European Space Agency, which is the third in a series of imaging satellites designed to take pictures for applications such as agricultural monitoring, glacier measuring, erosion monitoring, water quality, etc. The first Sentinel-2A satellite was launched in 2015 and is nearing the end of its design life.

I don't think the Sentinel-2C is that super critical of a payload. The problem is more than the Vega-C is currently undergoing a redesign of its Zefiro 40 second stage, which failed on the last Vega-C mission, and there was also a test-stand failure that revealed design problems that need to be corrected (the original Vega uses a different second stage). So the Vega-C probably won't fly again until late next year or even 2025 if things don't go smoothly, and there's an increasing backlog of missions waiting for Vega rockets. The idea was that, "Well, there's one old Vega left in inventory, so we can check at least one launch off the backlog," but now that old Vega is missing its upper stage.

The ESA could certainly hire SpaceX to launch some of that backlog. The Vega can take about 1200 kg to SSO, and a Falcon 9 can do 8,000 kg to that orbit even with RTLS, so SpaceX could possibly even take multiple satellites on one launch if they could set up a suitable payload deployer for them. Whether they will is unknown. Most of the Vega missions are science missions for the ESA or European countries that are part of the ESA, so there are "national pride" and "keep the money at home" motivations to launch on their own rockets. The ESA has already had to hire SpaceX to launch some Galileo navigation satellites due to the delays in the Ariane 6 program, and that has chapped their butts already. Which I can understand. If, say, the US Space Force had to buy some European rocket launches because the US rocket companies were all years behind schedule on new hardware (which Vulcan kinda is), I'm sure our politicians would be royally pissed off too.

[Shyster]

Scrub for tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

[Shyster]

Falcon Heavy moved to Wednesday, and the weather isn't looking good for either Wednesday (70% probability of weather violations) or Thursday (80% probability of weather violations). Not sure about a launch window for Friday.

[Shyster]

Falcon Heavy has been lowered and rolled back. Tracking sites also show that SpaceX recovery ship Doug has turned back to Port Canaveral; Doug was due to recover the fairings. That indicates that whatever the problem is, it will take a while to fix.



Col. James Horne of the Space Force said about the delay:

“We’re working through a couple of technical glitches with our SpaceX team that just are going to take a little bit more time to work through," said Col. James Horne, deputy director of the Space Force's Assured Access to Space directorate. "We haven’t nailed down a specific launch date yet, but we’re going to have to roll back into the HIF (Horizontal Integration Facility) and work through some things on the rocket.”

Horne, a senior leader on the Space Force team overseeing military launches like this one, said the ground equipment problem that prevented liftoff Monday night could be fixed as soon as Wednesday. But it will take longer to resolve other issues he declined to specify. "We found some things that we need to run some analysis on, so that’s what’s driving the delay," he said.

[tifosi77]

It still blows my mind that this s**t actually works.

[count2infinity]

Last year, Voyager 1 started sending some bizarre/glitchy data back to earth. It’s now stopped communication.

Peace out, dude. Enjoy your interstellar travels.

[Kaiser]

That'll be a while. Starting from 1977, it would take Voyager-1 1.62 million years to reach the nearest star.

[count2infinity]

Pretty sure interstellar refers to the area between stars. But yeah… it’ll get to somewhere, sometime. No clue where.

[shafnutz05]

Pretty sure interstellar refers to the area between stars. But yeah… it’ll get to somewhere, sometime. No clue where.

You are correct. So they, in fact, will have plenty of time to enjoy interstellar travel.

[Shyster]

Aww. RIP Booster 1058. That was the one with the NASA logos because it was used on the first SpaceX launch of astronauts to the ISS.

[Shyster]

While China has the new Wenchang Space Launch Site on the coast of Hainan island, which has pads for their next-generation Long March 5 and 7 launchers, China's older rockets like the Long March 2, 3, and 4 families launch from their three legacy spaceports in Jiuquan, Xichang, and Taiyuan. All of those facilities were constructed inland because they were/are used for nuclear-missile development (the Long March 2, 3, and 4 are all derivatives of the Dongfeng 5 ICBM), and the Chicom government back in the day was worried that they could be vulnerable to attack/invasion if they were situated close to the coasts or land borders. That means that spent stages come down over land, and, well, the Chicom government isn't too worried about where they might land. That is especially bad because those older Long March rockets use highly toxic propellants. Those orange clouds? Toxic, mutagenic, and carcinogenic.

[tifosi77]

I can provide visual confirmation that tonight's Starlink launch from Vandenberg SFB made it to separation and second stage ignition, and got about 200 miles downrange before we lost sight.

[Shyster]

Congratulations to ULA (the Vulcan vehicle), Blue Origin (first-stage engines), Northrop Grumman (solid boosters), and Aerojet Rocketdyne (upper-stage engines) for what appears to be a flawless first launch of the Vulcan rocket. In development since 2014, Vulcan uses the same tank diameter as the Delta IV Common Booster Core but switches from hydrolox to liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants, combusted by a pair of Blue Origin BE-4 engines. The Vulcan can fly with 0, 2, 4, or 6 GEM 63XL solid-rocket boosters provided by Northrop Grumman. The upper stage is the "Centaur V," which is an larger and wider evolution of the Centaur III stage used on the Atlas V and uses a updated pair of the time-tested RL-10 engines (first flown in 1963) provided by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The Vulcan is intended to replace both the Atlas V and Delta IV Heavy for ULA.

The payload for this inaugural launch is the Peregrine lunar lander for Pittsburgh's own Astrobotic Technology. Landing on the Moon is scheduled for February 23.

[Shyster]

Uh, oh. Astrobotic just announced an anomaly for Peregrine.

[Shyster]

Unfortunately, it sounds like there's been a propellant leak on the Peregrine lander. A Moon landing is almost certainly out.

[Shyster]

Might have been less of a leak and more of a pop. It looks like something in the propellant system let loose when the system was activated after spacecraft separation. The insulation has been bulged out from a force behind it.

Much respect for Astrobotic here. They are being 100% transparent about this failure, which has to be crushingly disappointing.

[Shyster]

The latest update from Astrobotic says that their working theory of the anomaly is that a valve between a helium tank (used to pressurize the other tanks) and the oxidizer tank didn't close after it was briefly actuated during initialization of the propellant system. That led to a spike of high-pressure helium that over-pressurized and ruptured the oxidizer tank. So indeed more of a pop than a leak.

Alas, space is hard.