The Silicon Graybeard

I stumbled across the headline that “Falcon 9 reaches a flight rate 30 times higher than shuttle at 1/100th the cost” over on Ars Technica today. My first reaction is that flight rate probably isn't a fair comparison because while the Falcon 9 is approved for crewed missions ("man-rated") a tiny percentage of Falcon 9 flights are with a crew while all shuttle missions were manned. It's just the more I read, the more mind-blowing it gets. 

Author Eric Berger starts out with some of the same numbers covered here in Saturday's post - things like the record fast booster turnaround of Booster 1080, the 400th mission on the night of Saturday Nov. 23rd from Vandenberg Space Force Base, and the two launches within 3 hours in the early morning of Saturday Nov. 30, all of which were in my post. 

This brought the total number of launches in November to 16, a new company record over the old launch record of 14. 

The company's vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, said on the social media site X that SpaceX plans to attempt 15 additional Falcon rocket launches in December.

While they clearly aren't a Falcon 9 launch, the two Falcon Heavy launches they had this year count as two launches, but it's really six Falcon 9 first stages.  

So far this year, SpaceX has launched a total of 119 Falcon 9 rockets, for an average of a launch every 2.3 days. The company has already superseded its previous record total for annual Falcon 9 launches, 92, completed last year. If SpaceX achieves its goal of 15 additional Falcon 9 launches this month, it would bring the company's total this year to 134 flights. If you add two Falcon Heavy missions to that, it brings the total to 136 launches.

This probably started the comparisons because over the three decades it flew, NASA's Space Shuttle flew 135 missions - right between just Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 + Falcon Heavy launches for the year. SpaceX looks as though they will fly as many Falcon 9 missions in one year as the Shuttle flew in its 31 year career.

Is it a fair comparison?  Here's where you get to really hard to answer questions. The shuttle was undeniably more complex than the Falcon 9, and (as mentioned already) every mission was crewed.  It was a bigger ship that carried bigger payloads, while the Falcon 9 was specifically designed under the guide that "the best part is no part." It was designed with "better, faster, cheaper" computers and decades more experience at optimizing engine design.

The principal goal of the Falcon program was to demonstrate rapid, low-cost reusability. By one estimate, it cost NASA about $1.5 billion to fly a single space shuttle mission. (Like the Falcon 9, the shuttle was mostly but not completely reusable.) SpaceX's internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are estimated to be as low as $15 million. So SpaceX has achieved a flight rate about 30 times higher than the shuttle at one-hundredth the cost.

Space enthusiast Ryan Caton also crunched the numbers on the number of SpaceX launches this year compared to some of its competitors. So far this year, SpaceX has launched as many rockets as Roscosmos has since 2013, United Launch Alliance since 2010, and Arianespace since 2009. This year alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more times than the Ariane 4, Ariane 5, or Atlas V rockets each did during their entire careers.

Ryan Caton's Tweet 

The weekend started out on a fun note. A couple of weeks ago, we heard from my nephew inviting us to Thanksgiving at his house as opposed to my brother's house in South Florida where we've been gathering for decades.  It was shaping up to be a family get together like we haven't had, not just in years, but some of the group has never gotten together. 

Nephew is around 5 months older than my son, but while I've known him since he was in diapers, there have been times when we saw each other more often.  Suffice it to say that several years ago, we went through a stretch of hardly ever seeing each other due to the place he was working.  He ended up in West Central Florida and around three years ago, got married. Last January, first child was born. We still hadn't met his wife or the "great niece" (I think that's the relationship). 

The place where they live is one of those areas of Florida with no easy way to get to. While it's about 65 miles between us "as the crow flies," every route the mapping software came up with was around twice that mileage and a two hour drive. 

It was a very nice afternoon, getting to see folks that (in a couple of cases) I hadn't talked to since the late '70s, or early '80s.  Great niece is adorable, and at 10 months, not walking much and not very vocal.

The slide into negative experiences started Saturday morning. I've written many times about our "old man" cat, Mojo, or just plain Moe as we tend to call him. A couple of years ago, he got started on some medication for some blood cell count issues and he has responded very well to the meds he's on.  It'll be three years that he has been under treatment this February.

Saturday morning, I found some blood near one of his food bowls. It looked like he had coughed or sneezed because it was a lot of drops.  As the day went by, we found more blood in more places, but with the exception of some blood very visible on his white fur, no evidence to show this hadn't all happened the previous night. He sneezed a few times, but never expelled any blood, so it was hard to figure.

Until about 10PM last night.  We have two chairs in the radio room, one at the operating position and the other at my workbench. He likes to come into the shack and be social - or just be near me while he takes a nap.  I heard an odd, almost bubbling sound, turned around and he was bleeding from his left nostril. The chair was bloody, blood was dripping onto the floor from sneezing, and more.  After a few minutes it stopped and we put aside our plans to go to a nearby veterinary emergency clinic that's open 24/7.  

He came to bed with us, as always, and in the morning there were no signs of a repeat.  

Until close to 2PM when we heard him sneezing again, this time in the living room.  Again, bleeding from his left nostril, and blood spraying when he sneezed. Again, it didn't last long, and it wasn't what I'd think of as a lot of blood. Maybe a tablespoon.  Maybe.

So it has been a weekend that started with a fun get together and is ending with a couple of nerve-wracking days. His regular vet opens as usual tomorrow morning and we'll call to try to get in ASAP. 

A positive side is that I finally fixed the gate issue caused by Tropical Storm Milton back in October.  The gate now latches and stays latched. I'm not "Done done" - I still have some position tweaking and most of all, patching all the holes where the hardware ripped out. And cleaning the damned fence.

It took too long to figure out how to approach this, but after trying a bunch of times to figure out how to replace the side that got ripped out, it occurred to me that the height of the latch really isn't critical, so why not lower both sides and install both in fresh PVC, around two inches lower than they were?

The piece that was ripped out of the gate is in the red box, but both sides got lowered about an inch.
 

It has been a 3 sigma, maybe 4 to 6, kind of day. By which I mean nowhere near normal. So a couple of little things that I thought were interesting/cool to pass on. 

Rocket Lab sets a novel record

At least, I think it's novel. 

Two Electron rockets took flight Sunday, one from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula and the other from Wallops Island, Virginia, making Rocket Lab the first commercial space company to launch from two different hemispheres in a 24-hour period, Payload reports.

I question whether it's a record because there's no mention of how many companies can launch in two different hemispheres.  Maybe it's a record because nobody else can even try to do it. BTW, the Sunday being referred to was the 26th. 

SpaceX sets a new company record for turnaround time of a booster between flights

Less than 14 days after its previous flight, a Falcon 9 booster took off again from Florida's Space Coast early Monday to haul 23 more Starlink internet satellites into orbit, Spaceflight Now reports. The booster, numbered B1080 in SpaceX's fleet of reusable rockets, made its 13th trip to space before landing on SpaceX's floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The launch marked a turnaround of 13 days, 12 hours, and 44 minutes from this booster's previous launch November 11, also with a batch of Starlink satellites. The previous record turnaround time between flights of the same Falcon 9 booster was 21 days.

... on the way to another milestone/record ...

400 and still going ... SpaceX's launch prior to this one was on Saturday night, when a Falcon 9 carried a set of Starlinks aloft from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The flight Saturday night [the 23rd of November - SiG] was the 400th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket since 2010, and SpaceX's 100th launch from the West Coast.

This morning had two Falcon 9 launches within just over 3 hours of each other; the first was a Starlink mission for SLC-40 on Cape Canaveral SFS, at 12:00 AM on the 30th. The second was the NROL-126 mission which also carried 20 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, at 12:10 AM local (Pacific time) or 3:10 AM here on the East coast.

All told, there were four Falcon 9 launches since that number 400 launch described above, but I don't see a count of launches for 2024 alone.  With just four weeks left in the year, that should give us a good feel for how many launches they'll get this year.  

File photo of a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SLC-4E. Image credit: SpaceX 

Back at the first of the month, we heard the story that two weeks earlier Voyager 1 had switched to its backup transmitter, down at S-Band - a transmitter that hadn't been used since 1981. 

As predictable as anything can be, the 47 year old Voyagers are doing two thing continually as they age.  First, they're going farther into interstellar space every second.  Voyager 1, for example is 15.4 billion miles from the Sun; the distance from Earth varies more as our rotation around the sun adds and subtracts miles over the course of a year - but that's in the next decimal place after the "4." 

Secondly, they're gradually losing power.  Their Radioisotope Thermal Generators are slowly degrading, losing 4 watts per year. As predictable as the power loss is, over the years more and more of the instruments on the Voyagers have been shut off to reduce power drain. Only four of Voyager 1's instruments remain powered but they're all operating at lower temperatures than they were ever designed and tested for. When some concerns about those temperature excursions started being considered, it was thought that borrowing "a few" watts for some onboard heaters would be a good thing.

So, when engineers commanded Voyager 1 to switch on one of its heaters to give the instruments a gentle thermal massage, a safety feature was tripped because of low power levels. The spacecraft's fault protection system monitors how much energy Voyager 1 has left, and if it deems there to be too little energy for the probe to continue operating, it automatically switches off non-essential systems. It seems that the heater was using too much energy, but the problem was that all the non-essential systems had been switched off long ago to conserve what little power remained, so the fault protection system took it upon itself to switch off the main X-band transmitter and activate the lower-power S-band transmitter instead. 

That description is a bit too anthropomorphic for me; this isn't AI, it's a simpler computer than anything the vast majority of us have ever seen; it was designed in the early 1970s. I'd prefer to say the conditions Voyager was seeing weren't thought of when the software was written and it merely executed code that had the same effect - shutting down the X-band  transmitter.  

The problem was understood early in November and the fix implemented. X-band communication resumed on Nov. 18, with the spacecraft once again returning data from its four remaining instruments: the Low-Energy Charged Particle Experiment, the Cosmic-Ray Telescope the Triaxial Fluxgate Magnetometer and the Plasma Waves Experiment. 

Next summer will be the 48th anniversaries of the two Voyager satellites launches: Voyager 2 launched first on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, just over two weeks later.  Everyone is hoping to see the two make their 50th anniversary in 2027.  

Artist’s illustration of one of the Voyager spacecraft. Credit: Caltech/NASA-JPL

Much like last year, it was a busy day with little things to do that always either take longer than expected or just don't go as expected.  Another thing like last year is we had a SpaceX launch last night that was originally slotted for 10:05 PM, and it kept getting delayed, until it finally went up after we'd given up on waiting up for the night, launching at 11:41 PM.  Last year it was all later times: the first announced launch time was 11:01 PM local and when it actually went at 2:47 AM. 

As usual, we'll be joining my brother's extended family for the holiday with one big exception. Bro's son, my only nephew, got married before Thanksgiving last year, and will be hosting us tomorrow.  We have never met his wife and their first child. While my brother lives a pretty easy 2-1/2-ish hour drive south of us with interstate virtually the whole way, nephew lives on the west side of the state; not as far as the coast, but there's no direct, easy way to get there.  As the crow flies, it's around 70 miles, but any route the map programs give me are in the vicinity of 110 to 120 miles. So two hours driving instead of one, each way. 

A happy and blessed Thanksgiving to all.  May all of you enjoy a wonderful day with your families and friends.  Or by yourself, if that's your day.  However you spend your Thanksgiving, I wish you the best.  Take some time to be deliberately thankful - even for the troubles of life.  Yeah, being grateful for troubles sounds odd, but it sure seems in retrospect that growth occurs in response to trouble, not in response to idyllic wonderfulness. 

Thanks to the EMTs, Nurses, Doctors, LEOs, Firefighters and others who work Thanksgiving so we can have the day off.  Thanks to the military men and women who keep the barbarians from the gates and give us the chance to relax.  For now, eat, drink, and be merry. While there are positive signs in the changes going around since the election, we've got to know the bad actors are mostly still in place.  So who knows what the next year brings?  

And remember your shopping cart for Black Friday. Number 127 in a series.  No, not 127 years worth. That means I've been getting emails for black Friday sales since July and I estimate 127 days.

Something SpaceX has never done?  That can't be a very long list. It's got to be easier to list the things they haven't done than what they have.

That's the opening to an article on Ars Technica by Stephen Clark that "NASA awards SpaceX a contract for one of the few things it hasn’t done yet." So what is it?  Launch a nuclear powered payload to the outer planets; in particular the Dragonfly rotorcraft mission to the alien environment of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. We had a fairly deep introductory post about Dragonfly just over a year ago and as the mission is getting closer, it became time to choose the launch vehicle and how it would all be done.  At the end of that post, I pulled a SWAG that the mission wouldn't be until the 2030s. It's looking more like 2028.  NASA awarded the $256.6 million contract Monday, Nov. 25.  

The nuclear power source is a Radioisotope Thermal Generator, RTG, powered by the decay of Plutonium-238, and most folks will know these are nothing new.  RTGs have flown on many previous space missions, including NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers on Mars, the New Horizons spacecraft that beamed back the first up-close views of Pluto, and the long-lived Voyager probes exploring interstellar space.  All of these were launched on vehicles that are either retired, like the Titans or Space Shuttles, or on the verge of retirement like the Atlas V.

That means it's getting to be time to certify some new vehicles. The process has started on ULA's Vulcan and the next vehicle will be the Falcon Heavy.  The Heavy has been completely successful; it has flown a relatively small number of flights, only 11, but they have all been successful.  An important consideration is that the FH is based on the Falcon 9, which is rated to ferry people into orbit - a very high level of confidence - and the most launched vehicle in the world.  NASA already certified Falcon Heavy to launch its most expensive robotic missions, such as the Europa Clipper mission, which launched last month.

That said, there's another level of certification that needs to be done for the RTGs.  This includes a review of the rocket's explosive Flight Termination System (the FTS mentioned during every launch) to ensure it won't damage the payload and cause a release of radioactive plutonium.  

Personally, I wasn't aware that RTGs were still an option. I thought the anti-nuclear power people had somehow gotten NASA to forbid their usage, but it's more the case that missions have gotten away with not using them. Consider Europa Clipper, mentioned just above.  That mission is going to Jupiter, where the solar power is a small fraction of the 1200 Watts/square meter near Earth. Europa Clipper just designed and implemented enormous solar panels (picture of one side at the bottom here).  Dragonfly introduces complications that rule the bigger panels out.  First off, it's going to Saturn where there's less power per square meter than Jupiter and Europa. Saturn and Titan are 10 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is.  More importantly, though, is that Dragonfly is going into the atmosphere of Titan and that will reduce the available power even more.

Dragonfly artist's concept on the surface of Titan. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Steve Gribben 

For a bit more background on the Dragonfly mission itself, I'll hand it over to Stephen Clark.

The Dragonfly rotorcraft will launch cocooned inside a transit module and entry capsule, then descend under parachute through Titan's atmosphere, which is four times denser than Earth's. Finally, Dragonfly will detach from its descent module and activate its eight rotors to reach a safe landing.

Once on Titan, Dragonfly is designed to hop from place to place on numerous flights, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life. This is one of NASA's most exciting, and daring, robotic missions of all time.

After launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in July 2028, it will take Dragonfly about six years to reach Titan. 

It was kind of difficult to pick this story for tonight.  You see, the various news sources are all carrying a story that just sorta hits our inner 10-year old's spot for fart jokes.  It's just that after everyone does their Beavis and Butthead "heh, heh" impression, there's not much left. 

So onto a story that has a more coolness factor.  Firefly Aerospace has completed testing of its Blue Ghost lunar lander, in preparation for launch in January, a few weeks away. 

The company announced its Blue Ghost lunar lander completed environmental testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in mid-October and is now ready to be shipped to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA and SpaceX plan to launch the lander from Launch Complex 39A atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during a six-day window that opens no earlier than mid-January 2025. The mission is known as "Ghost Riders in the Sky."

Blue Ghost will carry a variety of payloads to the moon, some of which are in support of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. CLPS pairs scientific payloads developed by NASA with commercial lunar landers headed for the moon on private missions.

This was thermal/vacuum testing, temperature excursions done in a vacuum chamber. While I don't have a lot of specifics of what was tested and under what conditions, these tests are typically done by setting the satellite on a stand in the vacuum chamber and heating or cooling the hardware to the expected high and low temperature limits.  The performance of the equipment can be measured continuously or only at the desired temperatures, depending on the program requirements. 

Blue Ghost will carry 10 payloads to the moon. One of the more novel and interesting-sounding experiments will be to test a new electrostatic system to repel harmful moon dust. Like some of the other recent lander missions, it will not take a short, direct flight. It will take 45 days to travel to the moon, where it will land in Mare Crisium - the Sea of Crises. Again, like other lunar missions in the last year, Blue Ghost is expected to operate for one lunar day (about 14 Earth days - if they land close to sunrise).  Naturally, I expect there will be efforts to determine if it wakes up the next morning as we saw with JAXA's SLIM lander back last Spring (first story in that roundup).

Blue Ghost will operate for a few hours once night sets in, taking images of the lunar sunset and collecting data on how the surface of the moon behaves during lunar dusk.

Blue Ghost's payloads include a lunar retroreflector that will be used to take precise Earth-moon distance measurements, the Lunar PlanetVac vacuum developed by Honeybee Robotics that will sample moon dust, and the Stereo Camera for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS), a tiny camera that will capture detailed images of how the lunar surface reacts with the lander's exhaust plumes during landing.

Blue Ghost on the moon. Image credit: Firefly Aerospace

Looks like an interesting couple of weeks if we get to read about what it's doing in real time - or close to real time.

EDIT 11/26 8:00 AM: to correct the title - I used a wrong word and called it a lunar rover instead of lander

Let me reframe that situation.  Lunar Outpost, one of the three companies chosen by NASA for the first phase of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) program, announced Nov. 21 that it signed an agreement for SpaceX to use Starship to transport the company’s Lunar Outpost Eagle rover to the moon. The companies did not disclose a schedule for the launch or other terms of the deal. 

One look at the rendering of the Eagle rover and I thought, "who else could do it?"

Lunar Outpost has revised the design of the Lunar Dawn rover it is developing for NASA after Lockheed Martin left the team working on it. Credit: Lunar Outpost

The design they were working to when Lockheed Martin left the program is at the top of this page.  It looks bigger, but it's also kinda cooler looking. 

The Lunar Terrain Vehicle program is an extension of the Artemis program to return the US to the moon.

Each company received a one-year contract to mature the design of their rovers through a preliminary design review (PDR), and the agency will later select at least one of the companies to develop the rover.

The LTV program is structured as a services contract, with the companies responsible for delivering the rover to the moon. Those companies will then be free to use those rovers commercially when not needed by NASA.

Although he didn't name other companies that were invited to propose how they'd get Lunar Dawn to the moon, Justin Cyrus, chief executive of Lunar Outpost, said in an interview that the company selected SpaceX after getting “great responses” from several companies.

“The reason we chose Starship is their technological maturation, the pace at which they move and the quality of that organization.  It’s a vehicle that we think will be able to provide reliable landing on the lunar surface, and we know that they can get it done on the timelines we need.”

As the first quoted (indented) paragraph notes, at this point, no company has been chosen as sole provider of the rover. The three companies (Lunar Outpost, Intuitive Machines and Venturi Astrolab) were given one year contracts through the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) around June of next year.  At that point NASA will either narrow down their options to one or two of the three or ask them all to submit proposals to develop the vehicle and services. 

I find it mildly surprising that CEO Cyrus says no matter what NASA does they will continue development of the Rover.  

The company, he added, plans to continue work on the rover even if not selected for the next phase of NASA’s LTV program, citing commercial interest from potential customers. “This allows us to accelerate those plans pretty drastically,” he said of the funding. “So, no matter what we’re going to be flying this vehicle on Starship.”

There's a recent startup in the EU that's making some good headlines and good progress toward goals that make sense.  The company is called The Exploration Company and it was founded by an economist, Hélène Huby, and of all the possible backgrounds for someone who starts a space transport company, that could be the least expected.  

An economist by training, Huby joined the European aerospace firm Airbus in 2013, working various jobs, including space strategy, before becoming the company's vice president for the Orion spacecraft's service module. As part of NASA's Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon, Europe is building the service module that provides power and propulsion to the Orion capsule.

I think it's a good sign that she thought the program was frustrating.

Why? Because the service module was essentially based on 20-year-old technology, and it wouldn't be reused. In some sense, working on the service module felt like looking into the past rather than working toward the future.

She found herself wanting to build something more modern. Looking across the Atlantic, she drew inspiration from what SpaceX was doing with its reusable Falcon 9 rocket. She watched humans launch into space aboard Crew Dragon and saw that same vehicle fly again and again. "I have a huge admiration for what SpaceX has done," she said.

Huby recognizes that SpaceX is the only company in the Western World that's providing human spaceflight. With that, she realizes that it seems entirely possible that Starliner will never be good enough to be certified or could simply be dropped by Boeing. The only other space program working on manned spaceflight is India's, which is farther behind than Boeing, but it's unclear whether the Indian government will allow the Gaganyaan vehicle to provide launch services for non-Indian customers.

The opportunity she saw was to provide an alternative to SpaceX based in Europe. This would yield 100 percent of the market in Europe and offer an option to countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and other nations interested in going to space.

"I know it's super hard, and I know it was crazy," Huby said. "But I wanted to try."

The story of The Exploration Company is rather remarkable. Huby founded the company in August 2021 with $50,000 in the bank and a team of four people. Three years later, the company has 200 employees and recently announced that it had raised $160 million in Series B funding. All told they have raised $230 million and have already had a prototype capsule launched. 

Her company has already flown a mission, the "Bikini" reentry demonstrator, on the debut flight of the Ariane 6 rocket this last summer. The small capsule was intended to demonstrate the company's reentry technology. Unfortunately, the rocket's upper stage failed on its deorbit burn, so the Bikini capsule remains stuck in space.

Undeterred by that Ariane failure ruining their mission, they've already built a second demonstration vehicle named Mission Possible that will carry payloads for a good sized crowd ("over a dozen") of customers. Mission Possible will launch on SpaceX's Transporter 14 mission, currently estimated to launch next July.

Hélène Huby, chief executive officer of The Exploration Co., during an interview in London, UK, on Friday, March 8, 2024. Credit: Betty Laura Zapata/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In addition to this, the company is working on development of a Cargo craft called Nyx, essentially compatible with the Cargo Dragon and the others that dock at the ISS. It's planned to be the same size as Cargo Dragon and reusable as well.  Unfortunately they don't expect to be ready to fly until 2028, by which time there won't be many more flights to the ISS, but it's expected that newer Space Stations will use the same docking port design. Further down the calendar is a manned version of the Nyx (Crew Nyx?).

I was hoping for more information but...

Blue Origin's First New Glenn Vehicle Stacked on the Pad

We've known since October that Blue has been anxious to get their New Glenn into space. The first launch of a New Glenn was originally supposed to be the ESCAPADE mission to Mars, which required launching during a narrow window between October 13 and 21; but after assessing how much work was left to be done, NASA scrubbed that mission on September 6th. Since then, Blue has been pushing for the flight by the end of this year. 

The first New Glenn has been stacked at launch complex 36 on the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The company simply Tweeted "Gone vertical," Thursday (Nov. 21) on X, with this photo of the rocket.   

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket stands stacked on the launch pad in November 2024. (Image credit: Blue Origin)

What I had been hoping to learn is which version of the New Glenn this is and more about the likely first flight mission.

The New Glenn launch is slated to carry one of the company's new Blue Ring spacecraft on a National Security Space Launch certification flight called DarkSky-1 . The U.S. Defense Innovation Unit is sponsoring the effort.

New Glenn comes in two- or three-stage variants with a fully reusable first-stage booster. The two-stage version is 270 feet (82 meters) tall, while the three-stage variant is 313 feet (95 m) tall. For comparison: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is between 209 feet (63.7 m) and 230 feet (70 m) tall, depending on its payload.

My guess is this is the two stage variant, which seems like a prudent first mission. Certify the first and second stages before you add the third stage.  The Blue Ring spacecraft sounds like a dedicated upper stage similar to what other providers offer that can move a payload into different orbits than it was originally delivered to (for example, these from RocketLab).

The ESA Wants a Reusable Super Heavy Lift Rocket

The European Space Agency has announced that it will commission a study to detail the development of a reusable rocket capable of delivering 60 tons to low-Earth orbit, European Spaceflight reports. The agency believes this kind of capability is necessary to to fulfill "critical European space exploration needs beyond LEO, while providing wider space exploitation potentials to answer the growing market opportunities (e.g. mega constellations)." 

Studies of studies ... The agency launched its PROTEIN (Preparatory Activities for European Heavy Lift Launcher) initiative in June 2022, aiming to explore the feasibility of developing a European super heavy-lift rocket with a focus on reducing launch costs. ArianeGroup and Rocket Factory Augsburg were selected to lead studies. The European 60T LEO Reusable Launch System Pathfinder initiative seems to build upon the agency’s PROTEIN studies, even though this link is not explicitly stated.

I imagine that PROTEIN and the study name of "Preparatory Activities for European Heavy Lift Launcher" must be related in some European language that I know nothing about.

NASA Has Begun Stacking the Artemis II Booster

NASA reports that ground teams inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center lifted the aft assembly of the rocket's left booster onto the mobile launch platform, marking the beginning of stacking the booster for the Artemis II mission. For those who don't remember or are new, the next Artemis mission (II) is to do a lunar flyby but not land on the moon.  The target date has been September of '25, but that's looking rather unlikely at this time. Simply assembling the Space Launch System rocket with its Orion capsule is going to take around four months, meaning the end of March. 

On the other hand, the implication of starting now is that they've determined that to fix the Orion heat shield issue isn't going to be a major problem and they may even believe that it won't delay the mission at all. If not, there will probably be an announcement of a new target launch date by around that end of March time frame.

Finally - Starship IFT-6 as seen from the Space Station

NASA Astronaut Don Pettit captured this photo of the Flight Test 6 launch from the International Space Station on Tuesday. Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

If the image doesn't make sense to you, Starship on its booster are both out of the picture. The curved, mostly-horizontal, light band is the beach and in the middle of the picture the bottom of the contrail and billowing launch cloud are a small dark "cloud" with a small white cloud at its top. Nothing is visible as the booster track goes clear until it shows up again as the white lumpy (twisted) looking cloud. That ends in band of thin clouds which I assume is where staging occurred and the booster was dropped.

The day after SpaceX launched Flight Test 6, they received a long awaited approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. 

In a draft version of what is known as an "Environmental Assessment," the FAA indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. Additionally, the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage.

"FAA has concluded that the modification of SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, consistent with the data contained in the 2022 PEA, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action," the federal agency stated in its conclusion.

This isn't final. As always, the FAA is required to open this up for public comment, a period which will end on January 17th, eight weeks from now.  In addition to that, the agency will hold five public meetings to solicit feedback from the local community and other stakeholders to get input on expected impacts of the increased launch cadence. 

And there will be significant impacts. For example, the number of large trucks that deliver water, liquid oxygen, methane, and other commodities will increase substantially. According to the FAA document, the vehicle presence will grow from an estimated 6,000 trucks a year to 23,771 trucks annually. This number could be reduced by running a water line along State Highway 4 to supply the launch site's water deluge system.

SpaceX has reduced the duration of closures of State Road 4 through the area by 85%, by moving launch preparations that could be moved to the "Massey's Test Site," a former gun range they added in 2023. SpaceX is now expected to need less than 20 hours of access restrictions per launch campaign, including landings.  

Contrast the approval for 25 launches per year, pretty much one every other week, with Gwynne Shotwell's statement that she expects them to do 400 Starship launches in the next four years and you see the pretty obvious problem. Doing 25 in the first year turns the next three years to 375 launches and so on. At some point, there are too many launches at the end of the four years to be realistic. SpaceX has a pad on the Kennedy Space Center that has never actually held a vehicle or done any of the things they need the ground infrastructure to do; it's part of Launch complex 39. Plus, there has been talk about building a second launch pad on the KSC to handle Starship launches, Launch Complex 49 (last story of three), but there's talk about the impact of so many launches on the KSC, too. 

All that aside, notice that in the first paragraph quoted above the FAA said, "the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage." 

... SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said the company intends to move to a larger and more powerful version of the Starship and Super Heavy rocket about a year from now. This version, dubbed Starship 3, would double the thrust of the upper stage and increase the thrust of the booster stage from about 74 meganewtons to about 100 meganewtons. If that number seems a little abstract, another way to think about it is that Starship would have a thrust at liftoff three times as powerful as NASA's Saturn V rocket that launched humans to the Moon decades ago. The draft environmental assessment permits this as well.
...
For the time being, SpaceX will still need to receive a launch license from the FAA for individual flights and landings.

Will this quiet the groups trying to kick SpaceX off of South Padre Island, and restore it to being the pretty, unspoiled place they want it to be (but probably never was)? I seriously doubt it. I expect them to hit back with more and even less likely arguments. 

Integrated Flight Test 6, seconds after launch. Image credit: SpaceX

Now imagine looking at this and saying, "400 feet tall and twice the thrust of the Saturn V? I remember when Starships were that small."

I have yet to see an authoritative explanation for why the attempt to recover Booster 13 with the chopsticks was called off, but with the exception of not getting the dramatic, semi-addictive video of the chopsticks catching the Booster it looked to be quite a successful flight test.  (I've probably watched videos of capturing the booster on flight test 5 over 30 times)

Last night, Igor commented that,“Unconfirmed rumor has it there was a malfunction on the tower. Stay tuned.” I watched a video that Scott Manley released early this morning and while not very specific, he puts up some information that agrees with that synopsis.  I expect we'll get a more thorough answer in a day or two. 

The emphasis in this mission was on the Starship, that had been extensively modified, especially in the heat shield. During the SpaceX video stream, one of the Engineering Managers who often narrates those presentations gave some impressive details.

Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer hosting the company's live broadcast of the mission, said teams at Starbase removed 2,100 heat shield tiles from Starship ahead of Tuesday's launch. Their removal exposed wider swaths of the ship's stainless steel skin to super-heated plasma, and SpaceX teams were eager to see how well the spacecraft held up during reentry. In the language of flight testing, this approach is called exploring the corners of the envelope, where engineers evaluate how a new airplane or rocket performs in extreme conditions.

2,100 heat shield tiles?  It wasn't so much to reduce weight (every tile takes up some of the payload capacity of the ship) but to check how specific areas of the Starship's skin handle the searing heat of reentry. In that Scott Manley video, he shows some areas of the exposed skin and how the few thousands of degrees the reentry brought had some of the steel apparently buckling. Yet another reason to use stainless steel instead of aluminum or carbon fiber.  As the heat eased, the stainless just shrugged it off and returned to the original shape.

Many of the removed tiles came from the sides of Starship where SpaceX plans to place catch fittings on future vehicles. These are the hardware protuberances that will catch on the top side of the launch tower's mechanical arms, similar to fittings used on the Super Heavy booster.

"The next flight, we want to better understand where we can install catch hardware, not necessarily to actually do the catch but to see how that hardware holds up in those spots," Tice said. "Today's flight will help inform 'does the stainless steel hold up like we think it may, based on experiments that we conducted on Flight 5?'"

The Space Shuttles had lots of issues with tiles and had a problem that certain tiles could only be used in some places. I've read they practically had only one tile that worked for any specific spot on the shuttle complicating repairs and refurbishment between missions.  SpaceX uses identical hexagonal tiles as a general rule, although it seems to me they must have some tiles that only work in a specific place, or families of tiles for specific places.  

Integrated Flight Test 6, seconds after launch.  Image credit: SpaceX

You might have seen some photos of Elon Musk with a group of VIPs he hosted for the launch, including President-Elect Trump, Ted Cruz, RFK Jr., Donald Trump Jr. and more. A person I didn't recognize was General Chance Saltzman, the U.S. Space Force’s chief of space operations. This is being taken as a sign that Space Force is interested in what the world's biggest and most powerful rocket could do for them.

The important tests on Starship have all been reported as passing successfully.  Proving the Raptor engines can re-ignite in orbit was an important milestone in Starship development. After the mission, Musk said they'd do one more Starship landing in water and would try to catch the ship with a launch tower on the 8th flight. It's debatable when IFT-7 will be but I think it could be before the end of this year.  IFT-8 then, figures to be in the first quarter of '25.

I learned only today why the art on the side of Starship 31 had a cartoon of a banana on it that was holding another banana marked "FOR SCALE."  It was because part of the test of the Starship was to carry a banana into space. For scale some reason I can't explain. The banana is quite visible in this photo inside the ship while it was traveling toward its reentry.

Screen capture from SpaceX's own video during the Flight Test.

Little did I know that bananas are used as standard measuring sticks on some social media sites.  This is the entrance to the rabbit hole of trying to understand how bananas became a standard when bananas aren't all the same size.  They vary widely in size. Amazon sells a "standard" banana just for this. (As always, the link is for information only, I don't make anything if you buy the banana squeeze toy.) I recommend not trying to answer that.

Picture saved from the Amazon product page. I don't know if Starship carried this, a grocery store banana or something even weirder.

There are pictures on the product page showing this "Official Banana for Scale by Citadel Black - Stress Relief Toy," alongside actual grocery store bananas demonstrating that bananas vary widely in size. 

All that aside, I haven't had the time to search for explanations of why Booster 13 aborted trying to be captured in midair like last month's flight. The Ship's hovering and splashdown was much like last month's, but was supposed to have been pushing the ship's capabilities a bit more. The inflight restart of the Raptor engine seemed to have gone as planned and then vertical landing and splashdown in the Indian Ocean looked much like last month's. This time, instead of just having a camera on a buoy, there was a vehicle close enough to the spot to allow an aerial camera - or crewed vehicle - to photograph it.

It would be good idea to not expect her to be a DEI hire and an especially not to treat her like one. You might get crushed like a bug.  Figuratively speaking, of course.

Eric Berger does an interesting article on Gwynne centered around a financial conference on Friday in which she talked about her vision for SpaceX in the coming few years. 

Perhaps it's best to continue with that idea of her not being a DEI, or just being hired to be a pretty face.  She's one of the early hires at SpaceX and was leading their sales effort when there was literally nothing to sell. They were six years away from reaching orbit. 

Apart from founder Elon Musk, Gwynne Shotwell is now SpaceX's longest tenured employee. She joined the company just months after its founding in 2002 as vice president of sales. In 2008, she became president of the company and has led its operations since then. Although she is more diplomatic than Musk, her desire to disrupt the global spaceflight industry is no less intense. She relishes the fight, as her remarks at the business conference indicated.

With the time being close to the sixth test flight of Starship, it's fitting she commented a lot about the future for the groundbreaking rocket. 

"We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years," Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. "We want to fly it a lot."

I read that 400 Starship launches in four years not as 100 per year, but an increasing number every year - that's how it typically works after all. It's hard to wrap our heads around this, but there might not be enough liquid oxygen and liquid methane production capacity to do that 100/year.  Right now they only have one operational pad, with two more in the works. It helps to note that even now, with Starship flying test flights, SpaceX will launch Starship four times this year, twice the number of Falcon Heavy missions. An acceleration of Starship launches is highly likely. Yes, the Falcon 9 boosters used in the heavy consume RP-1 (high quality kerosene) so the fuel side of that observation isn't the same. 

Shotwell said SpaceX is planning to steadily replace its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches with Starship missions in the coming years. Even the last bastion of Falcon 9 flights—crewed missions on the Dragon spacecraft—will end sooner than people realize, she said.

"Starship obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule," she said. "Now, we are not shutting down Dragon, and we are not shutting down Falcon. We'll be flying that for six to eight more years, but ultimately, people are going to want to fly on Starship. It's bigger. It's more comfortable. It will be less expensive. And we will have flown it so many more times."

It's especially worth reading to read her views on current regulations and the possible nationalization or government priority for their missions.  Go read the whole thing. 

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell and NASA astronaut Bob Behnken share a laugh. Credit: Eric Berger

Flight test 6 has been reset 24 hours to Tuesday.  As before, the launch window begins a 5:00 PM ET, and lasts 30 minutes.  As always, subject to change.   

Since Thursday's update, they completed stacking Ship 31 on booster 13, making this stack either 3113 or1331, depending on whether you think top down or bottoms up.  The Flight Termination Systems (explosives) have been installed, and preparations for launch have been proceeding. Safety regulations restrict the number of people who can be working on the vehicle at one time, and that everyone working on it to have some special certifications.

Reports are going around that the ship and booster for flight test 7 have been chosen and are going to be ready almost immediately.

A little more detail on my favorite image of the last week:

And if you're within a few years of my age, you'll remember a song by English artist Donovan called "Mellow Yellow".  Sort of a nonsense lyrics song, full lyrics here. Since seeing this image a verse from that song has been stuck in my head and it had to be modified.  It started as:

Electrical banana

Is gonna be a sudden craze

Electrical banana

Is bound to be the very next phase

They call it mellow yellow

(Quite rightly)

They call me mellow yellow

(Quite rightly)

and it has morphed into 

Anthropomorphic banana

Is gonna be a sudden craze

Anthropomorphic banana

Is bound to be the very next phase

Yeah, electrical has four syllables while anthropomorphic has five, but if you say "anthropo" really fast, it kinda fits.

A day that got away from me, doing some ham-related stuff. So, as usual, some things that I thought were worth sharing. 

First, for my fellow old timers that had computers in the '70s and '80s, a friend I've known since the early '90s dropped me an email with this picture and a link to Quora where it was posted.

But when I see a price like that from 1989 my instinct is to see what that would cost in today's inflated currency, so off to "USinflationcalculator.com."  The phrase "pucker factor" comes to mind.

And finally one that's among the most reasonable comments I've seen on Artificial Intelligence. I don't remember where I got it but it didn't look like this. It was tilted so that woman's picture, which looks like it was cropped at an angle was really the bottom edge. I edited it to make it look more normal.

The what?  A couple of years ago there was buzz about who was going to emerge as the winner in a race of small launch vehicles; those that can carry one ton to low Earth orbit.  (In all mentions of "one ton", think metric tons. A metric ton is about 10% bigger than an imperial system ton; since a kg is 2.2lbs, 1000 kg is 2200 pounds - 2204.6 to be a bit more precise but for one ton payloads, 2200 is close enough.)

The leader in the smaller satellite launchers was Rocket Lab, but there are two knocks on them.  First, is the Electron booster they've been using for years doesn't lift a metric ton; it's more like 300kg class. The second knock is that they've been emphasizing work on their Neutron, a more direct competitor to the Falcon 9 in lifting capacity and improving costs by reusing parts of their boosters.  It appears a winner has emerged as other companies in the race fell away. 

One of the companies that was talked about as a contender was ABL Space. Founded in 2017, despite several attempts, they have yet to achieve orbit.  Their last attempt was in January of '23, and failed early in the mission.

Tuesday afternoon at 2:27 PM local time (6:27 PM EST), smallsat launcher ABL Space failed in its first attempt to put its RS1 rocket into orbit.  More than that, it was the first launch of their RS1.

"After liftoff, RS1 experienced an anomaly and shut down prematurely. The team is working through our anomaly response procedures in coordination with PSCA and the FAA," ABL said via Twitter 23 minutes after liftoff. (The acronyms refer to the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.)

They've been going through what seems to be a great deal of financial turmoil, laying off much of their staff and reorganizing.  This week they announced they intend to pursue the military market, missile defense in particular.

Another of the companies frequently mentioned in this race was Relativity Space.  They sorta kinda reached orbit in March of 2023 in what was referred to as "a successful failure" in the first flight of their Terran 1. 

"Successful Failure" is an odd turn of phrase that I borrowed from Eric Berger at Ars Technica.  By the things that count the most, the mission was a failure.  Terran-1 failed to reach orbit, after the second stage failed to ignite properly and stay lit.  Further, their chance of being the first rocket burning methane/oxygen to achieve orbit is pretty much over, barring some strange events happening to all the other engines and platforms.  

Berger argues that the mission was successful, proving out the most important aspects of the mission.  The first stage did a complete burn, going through Max Q (highest aerodynamic pressures on the vehicle) at about 80 seconds into the ascent and burning for over two minutes.  The 3D-printed booster stage seemed to perform completely nominally as did its nine 3D-printed engines.  That has to be a great relief to all involved.   

Still, they didn't make orbit.  Like Rocket Lab, they pivoted to a larger vehicle more in line with the Falcon 9, which they're calling the Terran-R.  

Relativity opted to pour its efforts into developing a larger rocket, the Terran R, sized to compete more directly with medium- and heavy-lift launchers like the Falcon 9, Vulcan, or New Glenn. But developing Terran R is a significantly more expensive undertaking, and while Relativity is well-capitalized with a valuation of nearly $4.3 billion, the company hasn't publicized a fundraising round since 2021. At that time, venture capital firms were more freewheeling with their investments in space startups. Relativity quietly raised an undisclosed amount of money last year, resulting in a slight decline in its valuation.

So who's left? The survivor and therefore apparent winner of the 1-ton race is Firefly Aerospace.  To put it succinctly:

The company's Alpha rocket has reached orbit on multiple occasions, and just this week Firefly announced that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. The 1-ton rocket wars are over: Firefly has won.

A Firefly Alpha rocket launched the Victus Nox mission for the U.S. Space Force on Sept. 14, 2023, 7:28 PM PDT from Space Launch Complex 2 West at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Credit: Firefly Aerospace.

The NASASpaceflight folks had a live feed ready to start within minutes of when I sat down to write.  Originally set to start at 8:00 PM EST,that has shifted later three times already. So far. While the expected run time isn't given they don't tend to do these live streams for more than "a couple" of hours.  The goal?  To stack the Starship on the booster to prepare for Monday's flight test 6 (IFT-6).  

Starship 31 was rolled to the Orbital Launch Mount area on Tuesday, Nov. 12. Superheavy booster 13 was rolled to the pad earlier today, the 14th, and lifted onto the OLM yielding this view, posted to X earlier today. 

Image credit: SpaceX

Unfortunately, the cropping in the photo removes this detail, which changed the ship's name in my mind from Ship 31 to Starship Banana

Image credit: SpaceX

A closeup picture I saw of the Cogent Banana holding a much smaller banana shows the word "SCALE" on the smaller banana. I got the impression that means it's painted to the size of some standardized banana, to enable quick comparisons in videos. Not that I can see how that could be useful.  But I also concluded that Cogent Banana would be a good name for rock band.  Standardized Banana would be a lower level choice.

IFT-6 is currently scheduled for a 30 minute launch window opening at 5:00 PM EST on Monday, November 18 and will look much like previous Flight Test 5. 

The next Starship flight test aims to expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities and get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online. Objectives include the booster once again returning to the launch site for catch, reigniting a ship Raptor engine while in space, and testing a suite of heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for ship reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean. 
...
Several thermal protection experiments and operational changes will test the limits of Starship’s capabilities and generate flight data to inform plans for ship catch and reuse. The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles. The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles. Finally, adjusting the flight’s launch window to the late afternoon at Starbase will enable the ship to reenter over the Indian Ocean in daylight, providing better conditions for visual observations.

Future ships, starting with the vehicle planned for seventh flight test, will fly with significant upgrades including redesigned forward flaps, larger propellant tanks, and the latest generation tiles and secondary thermal protection layers as we continue to iterate towards a fully reusable heat shield. Learnings from this and subsequent flight tests will continue to make the entire Starship system more reliable as we close in on full and rapid reusability.

It's a bit involved but if you're not aware of it, some self-appointed doctor said Starliner/Crew-9 astronaut Suni Williams was looking "gaunt" and various media types ran with it.  By self-appointed I mean that I think he's really an MD but just not connected with NASA or the space station in any way and decided to let the world know his opinions. 

A few days ago, I started noticing a couple of the YouTube click baiters were running stories about Suni being sick or "in trouble" and a rescue mission being put together. After a day or so, I went to the ISS page on blogs.nasa.gov to see if there was mention of any of this.  What I found was not just nothing, but a photo of Suni hard at work and looking pretty much as normal as anyone on the ISS. So I continued to ignore the clickbait. 

Unfortunately, the media circus has continued, getting to the point where the stories attract readership on their own.  Which prompted official statements to the contrary from NASA.

Last week, media outlets like The New York Post and The Daily Mail claimed that International Space Station astronaut Suni Williams' health was deteriorating — and today, (Nov. 13), similar conjectures were made about her fellow ISS inhabitant Butch Wilmore.

In response to the assertions about Williams, both NASA and Williams herself spoke out to confirm that she's fine. Now, in response to those rumors about Wilmore, NASA has chimed in once again.

"All NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station are in good health," Dr. J.D. Polk, chief health and medical officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington, told reporters in an emailed statement on Nov. 13. "It's unfortunate that rumors persist otherwise."

Which leads to the funny line of the day, from Suni Williams herself. 

"I'm the same weight that I was when I got up here," Williams said today (Nov. 12) in a video interview from the ISS, in response to a question from the New England Sports Network.

The same weight as when you got up there? Isn't that pretty much zero since you're weightless?  Sure, we can envision ways to measure weight up there, but I've never heard any talk about doing it.  In the same interview she went on to say: 

She's been riding an exercise bike, running on a treadmill and lifting weights on the ISS, and her body has changed as a result.

"I could definitely tell that weightlifting, which is not something that I do all the time, has definitely changed me. My thighs are a little bit bigger, my butt is a little bit bigger," Williams said.

But, she stressed, "I weigh the same."

One of the issues with living in zero-G is loss of lean body mass, primarily muscle, due to the absence of gravity, which provides 24/7 "resistance training" for those of us in the gravity well.  Muscle atrophy starts quickly.  Because of that, the astronauts spend mandatory time getting exercise on the ISS. They also eat a higher calorie, higher protein diet as protein is essential to build muscle.  

The important part, though, is that Williams, Wilmore, and all of the astronauts on the ISS are monitored by a team of physicians who have experience monitoring and helping people in zero G, as well as having access to every record and measurement NASA has ever taken of people on the ISS.  That's totally unlike the pulmonologist that started this with comments to the Daily Mail. Again, I don't mean to degrade him too much, but he's way out of his element. To my way of thinking this statement quoted in the NY Post is the epitome of being out of his element.  This isn't even sound advice for about half of the population who aren't in zero G.

“They’re intaking very high-calorie foods, as you can tell — cold cuts, and, you know, other meats, the proteins, but high-fat cold cuts — it’s not necessarily a balanced diet,” Gupta told the Daily Mail.

NASA astronaut Suni Williams gives a video interview from the International Space Station on Nov. 12, 2024. (Image credit: NASA)