Wow. I continue to be amazed.

"He's recruiting "creative people" of all types who think that a trip around the Moon would inspire them. Apparently we have two weeks to pre-register with final selection occurring in May."

All signed up! Wish me luck.

Nice. It would be amazing if you got to go.

While I was asleep, SpaceX had a successful Starlink mission. Booster B1049 made its eighth launch and landing, tying the reuse record for Falcon 9.

Next up, Starlink L20 on Monday, Mar 8.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 4th 2021 at 6:43:07 AM

NASA: NASA and Boeing Evaluating Launch Date for Orbital Flight Test-2

Starliner's second orbital flight test (OFT-2) has been delayed several times and it's looking like it'll be even longer yet. The program saw a two week setback thanks to winter storms in Texas affecting software validation and the required replacement of two avionics boxes.

Now the parking situation at the ISS is the next obstacle. With SpaceX's Crew-2 mission scheduled for April 20, the docking port schedule is simply too tight.

Via Chris B (NASA Spaceflight) on Twitter, NASA has awarded the Mars Ascent Propulsion System (MAPS) contract to Northrop Grumman. This is the first component of the Mars Sample Return mission. The MAPS will collect the samples left by Perseverance, and launch them into orbit.

NASA is collaborating with ESA to produce the Sample Return Lander (SRL), which will deliver MAPS to the surface, and the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO), which will collect the launched samples and send them back to Earth.

I think this is all the bits we'll need. It would be funny if SpaceX beats NASA to Mars, though.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 4th 2021 at 10:42:42 AM

They should rename the mission MArs Return Sample.

Edited by petersohn on Mar 4th 2021 at 10:38:19 AM

Missed opportunity (no pun intended).

Jeff Foust with SpaceNews: NASA hikes prices for commercial ISS users

NASA has just announced a massive price increase on commercial transport to and from the space station and the billable time of astronauts.

• The price to bring commercial cargo to Station (upmass) has gone from $3,000/kg to $20,000/kg.
• The price to bring commercial cargo back to Earth (downmass) has gone from $6,000/kg to $40,000/kg.
• The price of ISS crew time has gone from $17,500/hr to $130,000/hr.

This is going to freeze out a lot of businesses who would otherwise have paid to have their experiments taken to orbit. It is not clear how this decision was arrived at but we are pretty certain of the cause: Congress. Yep, who'da thunk it?

In the annual NASA appropriation, funds are allocated for "LEO commercialization efforts". These are a subsidy to make access to space more affordable. In the 2021 budget, Congress appropriated only $17 million of the $150 million NASA had requested, effectively eliminating the subsidy and forcing it to charge full price for services.

There is still some hope of compromise, but it may have to wait until the 2022 budget goes through a Congress controlled by Democrats.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 4th 2021 at 10:50:29 AM

NASA to Provide Update on Perseverance ‘Firsts’ Since Mars Landing

A media teleconference will take place March 5 at 3:30 PM EST (20:30 UTC) and will be streamed on the NASA JPL YouTube channel. I'll post a direct link if I get the chance. The mission team will discuss the Perseverance rover's progress and the preparations for it to start its drive across the Martian surface.

As the commercial sector grows don’t we want NASA to eventually step the subsidies back? Now this is probably too much too soon, but eventually we presumably want there to be economic incentives for private companies to establish their own space stations, don’t we?

That's correct, and Axiom has said its plans for a private space station aren't affected by the change, but the ISS gets a lot of credibility from allowing companies to put things in orbit and experiment on them. It forms a partnership. To have support suddenly revoked like this is a metaphorical slap in the face to those partners.

Heck, even if Estee Lauder just wants to advertise its cosmetics by having them go to space, why shouldn't we embrace that?

Realistically, it's going to be five years at least, maybe ten, before we get a freestanding commercial space station and the ISS can be retired without losing our human presence in orbit. A weaning period is reasonable but not a hard cutoff.

U.S. EVA-72 is under way now as astronauts Kate Rubins and Soichi Noguchi continue work to upgrade exterior hardware on the ISS in preparation for the arrival of new solar panels later this year. Watch via NASA Live.

Ars Technica's weekly rocket report is in. I've covered most of these stories, but I'll give a brief summary anyway.

• Rocket Lab released plans to develop its Neutron medium-lift vehicle and to go public via SPAC.
• NASA awards the Mars ascent rocket contract to Northrop Grumman.
• NASA awards the TROPICS mission to Astra. The hurricane-monitoring cubesat constellation will launch aboard three Astra rockets starting next year.
• India launched its first mission of 2021.
• The Air Force Research Laboratory awards SpaceX a contract to develop advanced heat shield materials for hypersonic vehicles.
• Boeing Starliner's second orbital flight test will launch no earlier than late May due to various delays and scheduling conflicts.
• Relativity Space is going to develop its Terran R rocket as a direct competitor to SpaceX's Falcon 9: a reusable medium-lift launch vehicle. Relativity has yet to launch its Terran 1.
• SpaceX discussed the reason for the landing failure of Falcon 9 on the Starlink L19 mission: a engine "boot", or protective cover, developed a hole and allowed hot gases to damage a Merlin 1D engine.
• Space Force officials are developing new strategies to improve launch cadence at the Space Coast, including multiple windows per day. Weather conditions, worsened by climate change, continue to wreak havoc with schedules.
• OneWeb's next launch of Internet satellites aboard a Soyuz rocket will occur later in March according to Roscosmos.
• SpaceX conducted its third high-altitude flight test of its Starship rocket, which landed successfully. However, it exploded minutes afterward. NASA observers were on site and it's unclear how they will view this as the company is currently bidding Starship as a competitor in the Human Landing System contract for the Artemis program.
• NASA veteran George Abbey says SLS should be reconsidered in light of much cheaper commercial options.
• Ars has an inside report on Blue Origin's decision to delay New Glenn's debut until 2022, citing the huge jump from New Shepard, a leadership transformation, and conflicting priorities such as developing the BE-4 engine and participating in the HLS contract.

Via Politico's space blog, we're expecting the Biden administration to nominate a NASA administrator today. Bill Nelson remains the top pick but I've heard unverified rumors on Twitter that it could be someone else.

The choice of administrator could make a huge difference in how NASA will weigh its public contracting vs. commercial space operations and how much emphasis it will put on the Artemis program's targeted Moon landing.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 5th 2021 at 11:31:15 AM

NASA on Twitter: EVA-72 has completed and the astronauts are returning to the airlock.

SpaceNews (Jeff Foust): Will Jeff Bezos kick-start Blue Origin? Does he need to?

A quarter century ago, the space industry was advancing so slowly under government supervision that many believed the only way to achieve the dreams of humanity was for a very rich person to step in and do it themselves. Many turned to Bill Gates, who showed no interest in the idea. Now, as if by serendipity, we have multiple billionaires on the job: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, but only one of those has achieved any measure of success.

Jeff Bezos' impending resignation as CEO of Amazon should offer him the freedom to concentrate on pushing Blue Origin to finally achieve its 20 year goal of putting humans in space and payloads in orbit. It is unclear, however, what his increased involvement will achieve given that he's already the company's primary funding source to the tune of $1 billion per year and spends one day a week there.

Blue Origin has set the record for the most expensive space startup in history not to achieve orbit and seems unlikely to lose that title for the foreseeable future. My own addition: while Bezos' increased attention may be welcome, unlike Musk he is not a rocket engineer, so he can't directly advance Blue Origin's technological ambitions. If anything, it has been acting less like newspace and more like oldspace, with linear development models and endless rounds of expensive component validation.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 5th 2021 at 2:36:22 PM

NASA's Perseverance rover has taken its first test drive on Mars! The rover's official Twitter account brings us some images.

The Crew-2 mission is rescheduled for April 22. Space Twitter thinks it's to find an optimal launch window based on orbits.

Watch the NASA JPL press conference about Perseverance's progress here.

Takeaways:

• All of the rover's systems have checked out so far. Thee are no malfunctions or troublesome issues.
• The main manipulator arm has been tested for range of motion and re-stowed.
• The driving software is fully installed on the rover. This uses the same processor as the software that allowed it to pick a landing spot and is basically a machine-vision self-driving solution, like a Tesla for Mars.
• With the ability to navigate while driving (unlike Curiosity which has to stop every few meters to get a new course), Perseverance can travel up to 200 meters per day, five times faster than its cousin.
• The rover took a thirty-minute test drive by going forward, performing a turn, reversing, then imaging its own landing spot.
• The navigation team is plotting two courses around the sandy terrain on the way to the river delta and is determining which is the best.
• The science team is practically bursting at the seams with enthusiasm and I envision a tug-of-war between the desire to reach the delta and the desire to sample every feature on the way.
• Ingenuity is expected to be deployed by the end of Spring, once they find a suitable takeoff spot. It will be tested incrementally and should fly by Summer.

Elon Musk discussed Starship SN10's landing on Twitter, saying that thrust was lower than expected on a single Raptor despite being commanded higher. They're still investigating why that happened.

Starship's landing procedure is an incredible engineering challenge because it has to balance thrust-to-weight ratios against the minimum throttle of the Raptor engines, redundancy in the event of a failure, and the mass of propellant remaining in the rocket to deliver exactly zero velocity at zero altitude.

The more thrust that is used (more engines/higher throttle), the faster it can decelerate, but if it decelerates too fast, it will reach V=0 too high and waste fuel hovering as it descends. However, if you plan for that and ignite the engines at lower altitude, there's no margin to recover if there's a failure. Further, less fuel required for landing equals more payload that the rocket can deliver to orbit.

Musk now says that they will ignite three engines for the flip and only shut one down to guarantee the necessary thrust. They're running hard into minimum throttle issues in that configuration; the risk is that Starship will start flying back up again.

As a hypothetical passenger on a future Starship flight, I appreciate redundancy over marginal losses in payload...

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 6th 2021 at 9:36:57 AM

Via Twitter, JAXA (Japan's space organization) has released plans for a fully reusable orbital rocket intended to go into service in the 2040s. Clearly inspired by SpaceX's Starship, the vehicle will reuse both the booster and the second stage.

It is remarkable and inspiring to the point of tears how a startup that nobody expected to succeed is utterly dominating the space industry to the point where nearly everyone else is moving towards reuse lest they become totally obsolete.

Incidentally, I received my copy of Eric Berger's book Liftoff today and am about to start reading it. It documents the early days of SpaceX when it was very much a "cowboy" operation with a mere $100 million in startup funding, desperately trying to launch an orbital rocket before the money ran out.

Michael Baylor (NASA Spaceflight), Twitter has linked to SpaceX's plans, filed with the US Army Corps of Engineers, to expand the Boca Chica launch facility (or should I call it Starbase, Texas?) with a second orbital launch mount and landing pad, a secondary fuel farm, and on-site air separation unit among other things.

We've also seen that SpaceX is looking to hire a software developer who would be responsible, among other things, for helping to design the "catch mechanism" for the Superheavy booster launch tower. That is going to be astonishing to see when it's done.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 6th 2021 at 8:20:41 AM

Launch activity update

Starship flew, landed hard, and blew up eight minutes later. Every mission is a step forward. Also, astronauts spacewalked. This week: more SpaceX. As always, visit Next Spaceflight or Everyday Astronaut for details.

Launch counts for 2021

¹ Orbital - Suborbital - Failed
² Booster - Second Stage - Capsule
³ Spacecraft (Progress, Dragon) count as one payload for this list regardless of how many things they're carrying.
⁴ For simplicity, these are grouped by family regardless of specific capabilities.

Recent launches and events

Upcoming launches and events

Other/Miscellaneous

• The second SLS Green Run Hotfire test is now NET Tuesday, March 16 as engineers work on replacing a faulty liquid oxygen prevalve.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 7th 2021 at 7:06:56 AM

NASA Spaceflight is live covering the rollout of Starship SN11 to the launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. Meanwhile we're getting some nice views of the SN10 wreckage being hauled away.

Lockheed Martin is advertising its HLS proposal via a tweet talking up how it uses "2,900 suppliers in 50 states". Uh huh. It's pretty clearly a message aimed not at NASA but at Congress.

Excessive complexity and literally thousands of points of failure are supposed to be an advantage?

That's Never Needs Sharpening for you.

I just had an argument on Twitter with someone who thinks that we need SLS — more broadly, we need a national space launch capability — because China is coming for us and we can't rely on private companies to be responsive to U.S. interests.

I didn't have the heart to continue the fight, but seriously, China's not interested in fighting space war. It's hard enough just to get there in the first place.

You got in a Twitter argument and expected facts and logic to be material to the debate? Come on, you’re smarter then that.

As for defence space flight. That’s not NASA’s area, it’s what the X-37 is for.

I expect that militaries may push single-stage Spaceplanes, as it will be much easier to hide a spaceplane launch then a rocket launch. I think Reaction Engines have actually done some work with the Do D, though they remain independent, as their work getting classified is I believe what drove the founders to exit the British defence establishment and go private.