Space transport roundup – Mar.28.2019

A sampling of recent articles, videos, and images dealing with space transport:

** Rocket Lab will try again this evening (22:30 UTC time) to launch an Electron rocket with a DARPA technology demo satellite on board: Launch Complex 1 | Rocket Lab

[ Update: The launch was a success:

Liftoff is at about 12:30 into this recording of the webcast:

]

Rocket Lab is currently targeting no earlier than 22:30, Thursday 28 March UTC (11:30 am, Friday 29 March NZDT) [18:30 EDT, March 28] for the next Electron mission.

The mission is the Radio Frequency Risk Reduction Deployment Demonstration (R3D2) launch for DARPA.

The mission will lift-off from Launch Complex 1 carrying a prototype reflect array antenna designed to improve radio communications in small spacecraft.

Follow @RocketLab on Twitter for regular updates. 

Technical issues and bad weather have delayed the launch from earlier in the week.

** First launch by China’s OneSpace went poorly:

[ Update: OneSpace vows to overcome this setback: Private launch firm: ‘We will never flinch or quit’ – ecns.cn

“We will endeavor to launch another OS-M carrier rocket, as well as two to three OS-X suborbital rockets before the end of this year,” [Shu Chang, CEO of OneSpace,] said late Wednesday at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, where the first OS-M rocket mission was undertaken.

“I accept today’s failure,” he said. “Other solid-propellant carrier rockets before ours also have had setbacks in their development, but all of them passed through hard times and eventually succeeded. Explorations in science and technology have successes and failures. We will never flinch or quit.”

]

Video made by an observer:

An interview held before the launch with OneSpace CEO [Shu Chang]:

** Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser should start delivering cargo to the ISS by late 2020. Here is a new video showing how cargo would be loaded into the vehicle: SNC’s Dream Chaser® Milestone 5 Load/Unload on Vimeo

And here is an older video showing how the Dream Chaser would operate:

** Long-distance rocket transport services could reduce travel times between major global cities to 30-60 minute hops but whether such services are economically viable remains to be proven: Could suborbital point-to-point really be worth $20 billion a year in 2030? – The Space Review

All that said, the commercial aviation revenue is projected to be $885 billion in 2019. Introducing a point-to-point suborbital product could convince 5/8ths of one percent of current long-haul fliers to choose suborbital point to point. That is the percentage required to hit $20 billion a year at $12,000 per flight. That supports UBS’ claim that when the suborbital point-to-point market does finally arrive, it could be much bigger than the orbital, lunar or Mars markets.

** The smallsat launch market is too small to support the many small launch systems currently in development around the world: How the space industry learned to stop worrying and love the bubble – SpaceNews.com

If there’s one part of the space industry that seems the most primed for a shakeout, it’s the small launch vehicle sector. So many ventures have announced plans to create rockets for dedicated launches of smallsats that it’s hard to keep track of just how many are in development. At events like the SmallSat Symposium in Silicon Valley in early February, it was common to hear estimates of 100 or more vehicles in work.

Carlos Niederstrasser of Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems has been keeping track of small launch vehicles programs for several years. As of January, he had identified 112 such vehicles worldwide in various phases of development. That figure, though, includes at least 10 that have since gone defunct and another 10 whose status is unknown. Many of the others are still little more than concepts.

The number of failed launch ventures will “start increasing significantly in the next two years,” he warned in a presentation at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board in Washington in January. “It has to. The market is simply not going to be able to support 112 of these companies moving forward.”

** SpaceX:

**** Second Falcon Heavy launch is set for April 7th and an engine test firing on the pad could happen next Monday: SpaceX’s first Block 5 Falcon Heavy days away from critical static fire test – Teslarati

The first commercial launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket – this time in a Block 5 configuration – is as few as ten days away from a targeted window beginning at 6:36 pm EST (22:36 UTC), April 7th. That target hinges on whether Falcon Heavy is ready and able to roll out to Pad 39A and successfully conduct its first integrated static fire, currently scheduled on April 1st.

The payload for this mission – communications satellite Arabsat 6A – had its original Lockheed Martin manufacturing and SpaceX launch contracts signed back in the first half of 2015, while the 6000 kg (13,200 lb) spacecraft was effectively completed once it was shipped from California to Florida at the start of 2019. After approximately 12 months of delays from an original launch target shortly after Falcon Heavy’s 2018 debut, Arabsat 6A’s four-year journey will hopefully reach completion in a geostationary transfer orbit. At the same time, the US Air Force says that it will be watching this launch – and the one meant to follow soon after – as a critical test along the path to fully certifying the powerful rocket for military launches.

**** Crew Dragon launch with astronauts could come as early as July or as late as November: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to launch astronauts in July, says Russian source – Teslarati

A source familiar with Russia’s aerospace industry recently informed state newspaper RIA Novosti that NASA has provided Russian space agency Roscosmos with an updated planning schedule for International Space Station (ISS) operations, including a preliminary target for SpaceX’s first Crew Dragon launch with astronauts aboard.

According to RIA’s source, NASA informed Roscosmos that the agency was tentatively planning for the launch of SpaceX’s Demonstration Mission 2 (DM-2) as early as July 25th, with the spacecraft departing the ISS, reentering the atmosphere, and safely returning astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to Earth on August 5th. In a bizarre turn of events, Russian news agency TASS published a separate article barely 12 hours later, in which – once again – an anonymous space agency source told the outlet that “the [DM-2] launch of Crew Dragon is likely to be postponed to November”. For the time being, the reality likely stands somewhere in the middle.

**** Launch and landing highlights compilation video was quietly released recently by SpaceX:

**** Preparations for the Starhopper demo vehicle to begin its first low altitude “hops” continues at the company’s Boca Chica Beach facilities in South Texas: Starhopper progressing toward Static Fire test; Starship/Superheavy updates – NASASpaceFlight.com

Testing of SpaceX’s Starhopper suborbital vehicle in Boca Chica, Texas, achieved a new milestone on Monday with another Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) and pre-burner test of the Raptor engine. This is another step towards engine ignition, which will technically result in its first hop, albeit by just inches due to being tethered to the pad.

**** A Starship must withstand intense heating when it enters the atmosphere of Earth or Mars: SpaceX’s steel Starship glows during Earth reentry in first high-quality render – Teslarati

Aside from a unique lack of ablation for Starship’s stainless steel hull and curious hexagonal steel heat shield tiles, SpaceX may end up having to implement a wholly unproven technology known as transpiration cooling, in which some of Starship’s liquid methane propellant would be intentionally pushed out from micro-scale holes drilled or perhaps laser-cut in certain hexagonal plates. After traveling through the steel skin/shield and out of the holes, the liquid methane would almost instantly vaporize into gas and then plasma as it confronts the spacecraft’s superheated bow shock wave, reducing the thermal loads on tiles with such an active cooling solution installed.

It’s unclear what the resulting methane-rich plasma plume might look like but it’s not out of the question that SpaceX’s graphic design team have either done the math themselves, so to speak, or asked engineers to verify what color Starship’s plasma tail might end up looking like. As shown in the latest render, a plume of hues ranging from light blue and indigo to red through white seems entirely plausible. Regardless, Starship is bound to look spectacular during orbital reentries thanks to its metallic skin and shield and planned hot structure, meaning that the entire windward half of the vehicle could end up glowing red, orange, yellow, and even white-hot, precisely like the thermal testing video Musk recently shared.

**** Two webcams now watch SpaceX Boca Chica Beach facilities to allow you to monitor StarShip activities:

**** Crew Dragon from the recent demo mission without any astronauts on board is lifted from the recovery boat to the dock at Port Canaveral in this video courtesy www.USLaunchReport.com

**** SpaceX raises more funding to pay for its many projects including the Starlink broadband Internet constellation, that presumably would be launched with the help of both the Falcons and StarShips: Baillie Gifford defies Musk critics with £262m capital injection in SpaceX – Citywire

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The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos

Space policy roundup – Mar.27.2019

A sampling of links to recent space policy, politics, and government (US and international) related space news and resource items that I found of interest:

Webcasts:

** Fifth Meeting of the National Space Council:

Vice President Mike Pence asked NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to accelerate the agency’s lunar exploration plans during a National Space Council meeting held at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, March 26. In addition to targeting a human landing on the Moon in 2024, the council also discussed creating a new Moon to Mars Mission Directorate.

** Innovation, Speeding up Acquisition and Space Enterprise Architecture | Kratos Communications – Interview with Jeff Rowlison, VP of Strategy and Government Relations of Defense, Space and Security at Velos

Listen to Jeff Rowlison discuss the effort to leverage innovations coming out of the commercial satellite communications industry to support the Warfighter. Hear him discuss the Air Force envisioning the Warfighter roaming from MILSATCOM to COMSATCOM seamlessly, taking advantage of commercial options to accomplish Warfighter missions. Influencing the pace of innovation, the pace of contracting and acquisition are leaders such as General Hyten, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command and General Raymond, the Commander of U.S. Air Force Space Command. Jeff believes that going forward, companies with the capability to adapt their innovative services to fielded technology will be very important, however nothing happens quickly without funding.

** The Space Show – Tue, 03/26/2019 – 19:00Ian Fichtenbaum talked about “commercial space businesses, risk, acquisitions and more”.

** The Space Show – Sun, 03/24/2019Chris Carberry discussed Explore Mars, their Mars report from late last year, and their upcoming Humans2Mars Event in May 2019.

** The Space Show – Thu, 03/21/2019Henry Vanderbilt and Michael Wallis talked about “The Space Access Society Conference in Freemont, CA from April 18-20, contents, logistics, networking, registration, hospitality, event focus and more”.

** The Space Show – Tue, 03/19/2019 – 19:00Ed Wright discussed the Space Access Society and the upcoming SSI two day space settlement workshop, “SSI:50 The Space Settlement Enterprise” hosted by the Space Studies Institute.

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Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir

ESO: Optical interferometry reveals details of the atmosphere of an exoplanet

The latest report from ESO (European Southern Observatory):

GRAVITY instrument breaks new ground in exoplanet imaging
Cutting-edge VLTI instrument reveals details of a storm-wracked exoplanet
using optical interferometry

The GRAVITY instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made the first direct observation of an exoplanet using optical interferometry. This method revealed a complex exoplanetary atmosphere with clouds of iron and silicates swirling in a planet-wide storm. The technique presents unique possibilities for characterising many of the exoplanets known today. This artist’s impression shows the observed exoplanet, which goes by the name HR8799e. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

The GRAVITY instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made the first direct observation of an exoplanet using optical interferometry. This method revealed a complex exoplanetary atmosphere with clouds of iron and silicates swirling in a planet-wide storm. The technique presents unique possibilities for characterising many of the exoplanets known today.

Aerial view of the observing platform on the top of Paranal mountain (from late 1999), with the four enclosures for the 8.2-m Unit Telescopes (UTs) and various installations for the VLT Interferometer (VLTI). Three 1.8-m VLTI Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) and paths of the light beams have been superimposed on the photo. Also seen are some of the 30 “stations” where the ATs will be positioned for observations and from where the light beams from the telescopes can enter the Interferometric Tunnel below. The straight structures are supports for the rails on which the telescopes can move from one station to another. The Interferometric Laboratory (partly subterranean) is at the centre of the platform.

This result was announced today in a letter in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics by the GRAVITY Collaboration [1], in which they present observations of the exoplanet HR8799e using optical interferometry. The exoplanet was discovered in 2010 orbiting the young main-sequence star HR8799, which lies around 129 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus.

 

Today’s result, which reveals new characteristics of HR8799e, required an instrument with very high resolution and sensitivity. GRAVITY can use ESO’s VLT’s four unit telescopes to work together to mimic a single larger telescope using a technique known as interferometry [2]. This creates a super-telescope — the VLTI  — that collects and precisely disentangles the light from HR8799e’s atmosphere and the light from its parent star [3].

The HR 8799 system harbors four super-Jupiters orbiting with periods that range from decades to centuries. HR 8799e is the innermost planet in this video. This footage consists of 7 images of HR 8799 taken with the Keck Telescope over 7 years. The video was made by Jason Wang, data was reduced by Christian Marois, and the orbits were fit by Quinn Konopacky. Bruce Macintosh, Travis Barman, and Ben Zuckerman assisted in the observations.

HR8799e is a ‘super-Jupiter’, a world unlike any found in our Solar System, that is both more massive and much younger than any planet orbiting the Sun. At only 30 million years old, this baby exoplanet is young enough to give scientists a window onto the formation of planets and planetary systems. The exoplanet is thoroughly inhospitable — leftover energy from its formation and a powerful greenhouse effect heat HR8799e to a hostile temperature of roughly 1000 °C.

This is the first time that optical interferometry has been used to reveal details of an exoplanet, and the new technique furnished an exquisitely detailed spectrum of unprecedented quality — ten times more detailed than earlier observations. The team’s measurements were able to reveal the composition of HR8799e’s atmosphere  — which contained some surprises.

“Our analysis showed that HR8799e has an atmosphere containing far more carbon monoxide than methane — something not expected from equilibrium chemistry,” explains team leader Sylvestre Lacour researcher CNRS at the Observatoire de Paris – PSL and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. “We can best explain this surprising result with high vertical winds within the atmosphere preventing the carbon monoxide from reacting with hydrogen to form methane.”

The team found that the atmosphere also contains clouds of iron and silicate dust. When combined with the excess of carbon monoxide, this suggests that HR8799e’s atmosphere is engaged in an enormous and violent storm.

“Our observations suggest a ball of gas illuminated from the interior, with rays of warm light swirling through stormy patches of dark clouds,” elaborates Lacour. “Convection moves around the clouds of silicate and iron particles, which disaggregate and rain down into the interior. This paints a picture of a dynamic atmosphere of a giant exoplanet at birth, undergoing complex physical and chemical processes.”

This result builds on GRAVITY’s string of impressive discoveries, which have included breakthroughs such as last year’s observation of gas swirling at 30% of the speed of light just outside the event horizon of the massive Black Hole in the Galactic Centre. It also adds a new way of observing exoplanets to the already extensive arsenal of methods available to ESO’s telescopes and instruments — paving the way to many more impressive discoveries [4].

Schematic lay-out of the VLT Interferometer. The light from a distant celestial objects enters two of the VLT telescopes and is reflected by the various mirrors into the Interferometric Tunnel, below the observing platform on the top of Paranal. Two Delay Lines with moveable carriages continuously adjust the length of the paths so that the two beams interfere constructively and produce fringes at the interferometric focus in the laboratory.

Notes

[1] GRAVITY was developed by a collaboration consisting of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Germany), LESIA of Paris Observatory–PSL / CNRS / Sorbonne Université / Univ. Paris Diderot and IPAG of Université Grenoble Alpes / CNRS (France), the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Germany), the University of Cologne (Germany), the CENTRA–Centro de Astrofisica e Gravitação (Portugal) and ESO.

[2] Interferometry is a technique that allows astronomers to create a super-telescope by combining several smaller telescopes. ESO’s VLTI is an interferometric telescope created by combining two or more of the Unit Telescopes (UTs) of the Very Large Telescope or all four of the smaller Auxiliary Telescopes. While each UT has an impressive 8.2-m primary mirror, combining them creates a telescope with 25 times more resolving power than a single UT observing in isolation.

[3] Exoplanets can be observed using many different methods. Some are indirect, such as the radial velocity method used by ESO’s exoplanet-hunting HARPS instrument, which measures the pull a planet’s gravity has on its parent star. Direct methods, like the technique pioneered for this result, involve observing the planet itself instead of its effect on its parent star.

[4] Recent exoplanet discoveries made using ESO telescopes include last year’s successful detection of a super-Earth orbiting Barnard’s Star, the closest single star to our Sun, and ALMA’s discovery of young planets orbiting an infant star, which used another novel technique for planet detection.

This wide-field image shows the surroundings of the young star HR8799 in the constellation of Pegasus. This picture was created from material forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The location of HR 8799 is shown.

Links

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Brief Answers to the Big Questions – Stephen Hawking

The Space Show this week – Mar.25.2019

The guests and topics of discussion on The Space Show this week:

1. Monday, March 25, 2019; 2-3:30 pm PDT (4-5:30 pm CDT, 5-6:30 pm EDT): No show for today. Monday is for special and timely programs only.

2. Tuesday, March 26, 2019;: 7-8:30 pm PDT (9-10:30 pm CDT, 10-11:30 pm EDT): We welcome Ian Fichtenbaum of Bradford Space regarding space industry acquisitions such as Deep Space Industries.

3. Wednesday, March 27, 2019; Hotel Mars. See Upcoming Show Menu and the website newsletter for details. Hotel Mars is pre-recorded by John Batchelor. It is archived on The Space Show site after John posts it on his website.

4. Friday, March 29, 2019; 9:30-11 am PDT (11:30 am-1 pm CDT, 12:30-2 pm ED): We welcome authors John Youskauskas and Melvin Croft regarding their book, Come Fly with Us: NASA’s Payload Specialist Program (Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight), which tells the story of the NASA Payload Specialist Program.

5. Sunday, March 31, 2019; 12-1:30 pm PDT (3-4:30 pm EDT, 2-3:30 pm CDT): We welcome back Dr. Christopher Morrison regarding space nuclear propulsion news and developments..

Some recent shows:

** Sun, 03/24/2019Chris Carberry discussed Explore Mars, their Mars report from late last year, and their upcoming Humans2Mars Event in May 2019.

** Thu, 03/21/2019Henry Vanderbilt and Michael Wallis talked about “The Space Access Society Conference in Freemont, CA from April 18-20, contents, logistics, networking, registration, hospitality, event focus and more”.

** Tue, 03/19/2019 – 19:00Ed Wright discussed the Space Access Society and the upcoming SSI two day space settlement workshop, “SSI:50 The Space Settlement Enterprise” hosted by the Space Studies Institute.

** Sun, 03/17/2019 – 12:00Dr. Rachel Seidler discussed “brain white matter and fluid changes associated with human spaceflight and why it matters”.

See also:
* The Space Show on Vimeo – webinar videos
* The Space Show’s Blog – summaries of interviews.
* The Space Show Classroom Blog – tutorial programs

The Space Show is a project of the One Giant Leap Foundation.

The Space Show - David Livingston
The Space Show – David Livingston

Everyone can participate in space