Space

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SpaceX sets date for next Starship flight, explains what went wrong the last time

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IFT-4 on June 5 —

Clearing blocked filters and clogged valves is the order of the day.

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SpaceX's Starship vehicle undergoes a wet dress rehearsal prior to its fourth launch attempt.

Enlarge / SpaceX’s Starship vehicle undergoes a wet dress rehearsal prior to its fourth launch attempt.

SpaceX

SpaceX is targeting June 5 for the next flight of its massive Starship rocket, the company said Friday.

The highly anticipated test flight— the fourth in a program to bring Starship to operational readiness and make progress toward its eventual reuse—will seek to demonstrate the ability of the Super Heavy first stage to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and for the Starship upper stage to make a controlled reentry through Earth’s atmosphere before it falls into the Indian Ocean.

This mission will carry no payloads as SpaceX seeks additional flight data about the performance of the complex Starship vehicle. It is simultaneously the largest and most powerful rocket ever built and the first launch system ever intended to be fully and rapidly reusable.

As part of its announcement of the flight date, SpaceX provided some information about its learnings from the most recent flight test, Flight 3, which launched on March 14, 2024.

Dissecting Flight 3

During that flight, SpaceX also attempted a soft landing of the Super Heavy first stage. After its separation from the Starship upper stage, as intended, 13 of Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines successfully relit to make a controlled flight through the lower atmosphere. During this boostback burn, however, six of these engines shut down early. Later in the descent, as the rocket neared the sea surface, the rocket was supposed to use the same 13 engines to make a final landing burn.

“The six engines that shut down early in the boostback burn were disabled from attempting the landing burn startup, leaving seven engines commanded to start up with two successfully reaching mainstage ignition,” the company said in its recap of the flight. “The booster had lower than expected landing burn thrust when contact was lost at approximately 462 meters in altitude over the Gulf of Mexico and just under seven minutes into the mission.”

The cause of this failure was traced to blockage in a filter where liquid oxygen flows into the Raptor engines. Notably, a similar problem occurred during the second test flight of Starship in November 2023. SpaceX says it implemented “hardware changes” to address this blockage issue for the third test flight. Now, the company said, “Super Heavy boosters for Flight 4 and beyond will get additional hardware inside oxygen tanks to further improve propellant filtration capabilities.” It will be interesting to see whether the company’s engineers have successfully addressed this issue.

As for the Starship upper stage, the vehicle began losing the ability to control its attitude during its coast phase in space. This was found to be due to clogged valves used by reaction control thrusters on the upper stage. The company’s update notes that “SpaceX has since added additional roll control thrusters on upcoming Starships.” But it is not clear that they will be available for Flight 4. Indeed, the fact that SpaceX is not attempting an in-flight relight of Raptor engines on the Starship upper stage suggests these new roll control thrusters are not yet in place.

Ultimately this lack of attitude control during Flight 3 resulted in a non-nominal reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX was able to maintain contact with the vehicle down to 65 km in altitude before telemetry was lost due to excess heating.

Back to the basics

On Flight 3, SpaceX achieved some important milestones, including the opening of the Starship payload bay door in space and a small propellant transfer demonstration. Due to the loss of attitude control, however, a planned Raptor rocket engine re-light test was not conducted. This is an important test, as Raptor ignition is needed to perform a controlled reentry—essentially to ensure that Starship returns to a remote section of ocean rather than land.

For the next flight, SpaceX is focused on solving the technical issues observed on Flight 3: the filter blockages observed during Super Heavy’s boostback and landing burns, Starship’s attitude control during its coast phase, and managing reentry of that vehicle from orbital velocity.

Once these issues are resolved, the company can proceed to more advanced tests, including landing the Super Heavy booster back at the South Texas launch site, deployment of Starlink satellites, and additional tests of propellant transfer essential for NASA’s Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon.

SpaceX sets date for next Starship flight, explains what went wrong the last time Read More »

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Rocket Report: SpaceX focused on Starship reentry; Firefly may be for sale

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Fiery news —

“Teams are in the process of completing a follow-on propulsion system assessment.”

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A Falcon 9 rocket launches the NROL-146 mission from California this week.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches the NROL-146 mission from California this week.

SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 6.45 of the Rocket Report! The most interesting news in launch this week, to me, is that Firefly is potentially up for sale. That makes two of the handful of US companies with operational rockets, Firefly and United Launch Alliance, actively on offer. I’ll be fascinated to see what the valuations of each end up being if/when sales go through.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly may be up for sale. Firefly Aerospace investors are considering a sale that could value the closely held rocket and Moon lander maker at about $1.5 billion, Bloomberg reports. The rocket company’s primary owner, AE Industrial Partners, is working with an adviser on “strategic options” for Firefly. Neither AE nor Firefly commented to Bloomberg about the potential sale. AE invested $75 million into Texas-based Firefly as part of a series B financing round in 2022. The firm made a subsequent investment in its Series C round in November 2023.

Launches and landers … Now more than a decade old and with a history of financial struggles, Firefly has emerged as one of the apparent winners in the small launch race in the United States. The company’s Alpha rocket has now launched four times since its unsuccessful debut in September 2021, and it is due to fly a Venture Class Launch Services 2 mission for NASA in the coming weeks. Firefly also aims to launch its Blue Ghost spacecraft to the moon later this year and is working on an orbital transfer vehicle.

Blue Origin makes successful return to flight. With retired Air Force captain and test pilot Ed Dwight as the headline passenger, Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft returned to flight on Sunday morning. An African American, Dwight was one of 26 pilots the Air Force recommended to NASA for the third class of astronauts in 1963, but the agency didn’t select him. It took another 20 years for America’s first Black astronaut, Guion Bluford, to fly in space in 1983. At the age of 90, Dwight finally entered the record books Sunday, becoming the oldest person to reach space. “I thought I didn’t need it in my life,” Dwight said after Sunday’s fight. “But I lied!”

One chute down … This was the seventh time Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has flown people to suborbital space, and the 25th flight overall of the company’s fleet of New Shepard rockets. It was the first time Blue Origin had launched people in nearly two years, resuming suborbital service after a rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. In December, Blue Origin launched another uncrewed suborbital research mission to set the stage for the resumption of human missions Sunday. There was one issue with the flight, as only two of the capsule’s three parachutes deployed. It’s unclear how long it will take to address this problem.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

RFA tests first stage of its rocket. German launch startup Rocket Factory Augsburg announced Sunday that it had begun the hot-fire campaign for the first stage of its RFA One rocket. “We hot-fired a total of four Helix engines, igniting one by one at four-second intervals,” the company said on the social media site X. “All engines ran simultaneously for 8 seconds with a total hot-fire duration of 20 seconds. The test ran flawlessly through start-up, steady-state, and shutdown.” It’s a great step forward for the launch company.

Targeting a test flight this year, but … The test occurred at the SaxaVord Spaceport in the United Kingdom. The RFA One vehicle is powered by nine Helix engines and will have a payload capacity of 1.6 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. The company is targeting a debut launch later this year, but I’m fairly skeptical of that. By way of comparison, SpaceX began test firing its Falcon 9 first stage in 2008, with a full-duration test firing of all nine engines in November of that year. But the rocket did not make its debut flight until June 2010.

China expanding commercial spaceport. China is planning new phases of expansion for its new commercial spaceport to support an expected surge in launch and commercial space activity, Space News reports. Construction of the second of two launch pads at Hainan Commercial Launch Site could be completed by the end of May. The first, completed in December and dedicated to the Long March 8 rocket, could host its first launch before the end of June.

Fulfilling a mega-need … However this appears to be just the beginning, as the spaceport could have a total of 10 pads serving both liquid and solid rockets. The reason for the dramatic expansion appears to be increasing access to space and allowing China to achieve a launch rate needed to build a pair of low-Earth orbit megaconstellations, each over 10,000 satellites strong. It is also a further sign of China’s commitment to establishing a thriving commercial space sector. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Rocket Report: SpaceX focused on Starship reentry; Firefly may be for sale Read More »

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The first crew launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule is on hold indefinitely

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Pursuing rationale —

“NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward.”

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Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on the eve of the first crew launch attempt earlier this month.

Enlarge / Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on the eve of the first crew launch attempt earlier this month.

Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty Images

The first crewed test flight of Boeing’s long-delayed Starliner spacecraft won’t take off as planned Saturday and could face a longer postponement as engineers evaluate a stubborn leak of helium from the capsule’s propulsion system.

NASA announced the latest delay of the Starliner test flight late Tuesday. Officials will take more time to consider their options for how to proceed with the mission after discovering the small helium leak on the spacecraft’s service module.

The space agency did not describe what options are on the table, but sources said they range from flying the spacecraft “as is” with a thorough understanding of the leak and confidence it won’t become more significant in flight, to removing the capsule from its Atlas V rocket and taking it back to a hangar for repairs.

Theoretically, the former option could permit a launch attempt as soon as next week. The latter alternative could delay the launch until at least late summer.

“The team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy,” NASA said in a statement Tuesday night. “There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed. NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward.”

Delays are nothing new for the Starliner program, but it’s not yet clear how this delay will compare to the spacecraft’s previous setbacks.

Software problems cut short an unpiloted test flight in 2019, forcing Boeing to fly a second demonstration mission. Starliner was on the launch pad when pre-flight checkouts revealed stuck valves in the spacecraft’s propulsion system in 2021. Boeing finally flew Starliner on a round-trip mission to the space station in May 2022. Concerns about Starliner’s parachutes and flammable tape inside the spacecraft’s crew cabin delayed the crewed test flight from last summer until this year.

Boeing aims to become the second company to fly astronauts to the space station under contract with NASA’s commercial crew program, following the start of SpaceX’s crew transportation service in 2020. Assuming a smooth crewed test flight, NASA hopes to clear the Starliner spacecraft for six-month crew rotation flights to the space station beginning next year.

In the doghouse

Engineers first noticed the helium leak during the first launch attempt for Starliner’s crewed test flight May 6, but managers did not consider it significant enough to stop the launch. Ultimately, a separate problem with a pressure regulation valve on the spacecraft’s United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket prompted officials to scrub the launch attempt.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were already strapped into their seats inside the Starliner spacecraft on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, when officials ordered a halt to the May 6 countdown. Wilmore and Williams returned to their homes in Houston to await the next Starliner launch opportunity.

ULA returned the Atlas V rocket to its hangar, where technicians swapped out the faulty valve in time for another launch attempt May 17. NASA and Boeing pushed the launch date back to May 21, then to May 25, as engineers assessed the helium leak. The Atlas V rocket and Starliner spacecraft remain inside ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility to wait for the next launch opportunity.

Boeing engineers traced the leak to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster in one of four doghouse-shaped propulsion pods on the Starliner service module.

There are 28 reaction control system thrusters—essentially small rocket engines—on the Starliner service module. In orbit, these thrusters are used for minor course corrections and pointing the spacecraft in the proper direction. The service module has two sets of more powerful engines for larger orbital adjustments and launch-abort maneuvers.

The spacecraft’s propulsion system is pressurized using helium, an inert gas. The thrusters burn a mixture of toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants. Helium is not combustible, so a small leak is not likely to be a major safety issue on the ground. However, the system needs sufficient helium gas to force propellants from their internal storage tanks to Starliner’s thrusters.

In a statement last week, NASA described the helium leak as “stable” and said it would not pose a risk to the Starliner mission if it didn’t worsen. A Boeing spokesperson declined to provide Ars with any details about the helium leak rate.

If NASA and Boeing resolve their concerns about the helium leak without requiring lengthy repairs, the International Space Station could accommodate the docking of Starliner through part of July. After docking at the station, Wilmore and Williams will spend at least eight days at the complex before undocking to head for a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned landing in the Southwestern United States.

After July, the schedule gets messy.

The space station has a busy slate of multiple visiting crew and cargo vehicles in August, including the arrival of a fresh team of astronauts on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and the departure of an outgoing crew on another Dragon. There may be an additional window for Starliner to dock with the space station in late August or early September before the launch of SpaceX’s next cargo mission, which will occupy the docking port Starliner needs to use. The docking port opens up again in the fall.

ULA also has other high-priority missions it would like to launch from the same pad needed for the Starliner test flight. Later this summer, ULA plans to launch a US Space Force mission; it will be the last mission to use an Atlas V rocket. Then, ULA aims to launch the second demonstration flight of its new Vulcan Centaur rocket—the Atlas V’s replacement—as soon as September.

The first crew launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule is on hold indefinitely Read More »

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Blue Origin resumes human flights to suborbital space, but it wasn’t perfect

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“I lied” —

Blue Origin’s space capsule safely landed despite a problem with one of its parachutes.

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Ed Dwight, 90, exits Blue Origin's crew capsule Sunday after a 10-minute flight to the edge of space.

Enlarge / Ed Dwight, 90, exits Blue Origin’s crew capsule Sunday after a 10-minute flight to the edge of space.

More than 60 years after he was denied an opportunity to become America’s first Black astronaut, Ed Dwight finally traveled into space Sunday with five other passengers on a 10-minute flight inside a Blue Origin capsule.

Dwight, a retired Air Force captain and test pilot, had a chance to become the first African American astronaut. He was one of 26 pilots the Air Force recommended to NASA for the third class of astronauts in 1963, but the agency didn’t select him. It took another 20 years for America’s first Black astronaut, Guion Bluford, to fly in space in 1983.

“Everything they did, I did, and I did it well,” Dwight said in a video released by Blue Origin. “If politics had changed, I would have gone to space in some kind of capacity.”

At the age of 90, Dwight finally entered the record books Sunday, becoming the oldest person to reach space, displacing the previous record-holder, actor William Shatner, who flew on a similar Blue Origin launch to the edge of space in 2021.

“I thought I didn’t need it in my life,” Dwight said after Sunday’s fight. “But I lied!”

Since retiring from the Air Force, Dwight became an accomplished sculptor. His works, which focus on Black history, are installed at memorials and monuments across the country.

“The transitions, the separations and stuff were a little bit more dynamic than I thought,” Dwight said in remarks after Sunday’s flight. “But that’s how it’s supposed to be. It makes your mind wonder, ‘Is something wrong?’ But no, it was absolutely terrific and the view … absolutely fantastic. This was a life-changing experience. Everybody needs to do this.”

Ed Dwight stands in front of an F-104 jet fighter in 1963.

Enlarge / Ed Dwight stands in front of an F-104 jet fighter in 1963.

Dwight and his five co-passengers lifted off from Blue Origin’s remote launch site in West Texas at 9: 35 am CDT (14: 35 UTC). Strapped into reclining seats inside a pressurized capsule, the passengers rode Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket into the uppermost layers of the atmosphere. After burning its main engine more than two minutes, the rocket released the crew capsule and continued coasting upward to an apogee, or high point, of nearly 66 miles (107 kilometers), just above the internationally recognized boundary of space.

This was the seventh time Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has flown people to suborbital space, and the 25th flight overall of the company’s fleet of New Shepard rockets. It was the first time Blue Origin has launched people in nearly two years, resuming suborbital service after a rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. In December, Blue Origin launched another uncrewed suborbital research mission to set the stage for the resumption of human missions Sunday.

Joining Dwight on Blue Origin’s capsule were investor Mason Angel, French businessman Sylvain Chiron, software engineer Kenneth Hess, adventurer Carol Schaller, and Gopi Thotakura, an Indian pilot and entrepreneur. Dwight’s ticket with Blue Origin was sponsored by Space for Humanity, a nonprofit that seeks to expand access to space for all people, and the other five participants were paying passengers.

After cutoff of the New Shepard rocket engine, the passengers had a few minutes to unfasten their seatbelts and float around the cabin while taking in the view of Earth. They returned to their seats as the capsule descended back into the atmosphere. The reusable New Shepard booster reignited its main engine for a propulsive landing back in Texas, while the crew capsule deployed parachutes to slow for touchdown a few miles away.

Two of three

However, one of the three main parachutes did not fully unfurl as the capsule drifted back to the ground. The capsule is designed to safely land with two chutes, a capability Blue Origin demonstrated on a test flight in 2016.

“It looks like we do have two parachutes that have full inflation, the third is not quite fully inflated,” said Ariane Cornell, a Blue Origin official hosting the company’s live webcast Sunday. “Landing with two parachutes is perfectly OK for this system.”

Family members and Blue Origin personnel greeted the passengers as they exited the capsule. All six appeared to be in good spirits and good health.

Although it had no obvious ill effects on the crew or the spacecraft, Blue Origin engineers will investigate the malfunction to determine what went wrong. The capsule’s three main parachutes were supplied to Blue Origin by Airborne Systems, which manufactures parachutes for every US human-rated spacecraft.

One of the three main parachutes on Blue Origin's crew capsule did not fully inflate before landing.

Enlarge / One of the three main parachutes on Blue Origin’s crew capsule did not fully inflate before landing.

Blue Origin

Airborne also provides parachutes for SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, Boeing’s Starliner, and NASA’s Orion capsule. Those parachutes have different designs and sizes than the chutes used on Blue Origin’s capsule, but it wasn’t immediately clear if there might be any crossover concerns on other programs stemming from the malfunction on Sunday’s flight.

The Federal Aviation Administration, the regulatory agency that oversees US commercial space missions, said in a statement it did not consider the parachute issue a mishap. This statement suggests the incident will not trigger a mishap investigation that would require FAA oversight.

Before the 2022 launch failure, Blue Origin’s New Shepard program achieved a cadence, on average, of roughly one flight every two months. Virgin Galactic, the space tourism company founded by Richard Branson, ramped up the flight rate of its suborbital SpaceShipTwo spaceplane over the last year as Blue Origin’s rocket remained grounded.

But Virgin Galactic is about to halt operations of its own spaceship following one more flight with passengers next month. The company says it decided to suspend flights of the VSS Unity rocket plane to focus its resources on developing a fleet of larger air-launched spaceships that are easier to reuse.

This means Blue Origin, assuming it can regain or build on the cadence it demonstrated in 2021 and 2022, will be the only company serving the suborbital space tourism and research market for at least the next couple of years.

Blue Origin resumes human flights to suborbital space, but it wasn’t perfect Read More »

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We take a stab at decoding SpaceX’s ever-changing plans for Starship in Florida

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SpaceX's Starship tower (left) at Launch Complex 39A dwarfs the launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket (right).

Enlarge / SpaceX’s Starship tower (left) at Launch Complex 39A dwarfs the launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket (right).

There are a couple of ways to read the announcement from the Federal Aviation Administration that it’s kicking off a new environmental review of SpaceX’s plan to launch the most powerful rocket in the world from Florida.

The FAA said on May 10 that it plans to develop an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for SpaceX’s proposal to launch Starships from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The FAA ordered this review after SpaceX updated the regulatory agency on the projected Starship launch rate and the design of the ground infrastructure needed at Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), the historic launch pad once used for Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.

Dual environmental reviews

At the same time, the US Space Force is overseeing a similar EIS for SpaceX’s proposal to take over a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of LC-39A. This launch pad, designated Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37), is available for use after United Launch Alliance’s last Delta rocket lifted off there in April.

On the one hand, these environmental reviews often take a while and could cloud Elon Musk’s goal of having Starship launch sites in Florida ready for service by the end of 2025. “A couple of years would not be a surprise,” said George Nield, an aerospace industry consultant and former head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

Another way to look at the recent FAA and Space Force announcements of pending environmental reviews is that SpaceX finally appears to be cementing its plans to launch Starship from Florida. These plans have changed quite a bit in the last five years.

The environmental reviews will culminate in a decision on whether to approve SpaceX’s proposals for Starship launches at LC-39A and SLC-37. The FAA will then go through a separate licensing process, similar to the framework used to license the first three Starship test launches from South Texas.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a human-rated version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon on the first two Artemis lunar landing flights later this decade. To do that, SpaceX must stage a fuel depot in low-Earth orbit to refuel the Starship lunar lander before it heads for the Moon. It will take a series of Starship tanker flights—perhaps 10 to 15—to fill the depot with cryogenic propellants.

Launching that many Starships over the course of a month or two will require SpaceX to alternate between at least two launch pads. NASA and SpaceX officials say the best way to do this is by launching Starships from one pad in Texas and another in Florida.

Earlier this week, Ars spoke with Lisa Watson-Morgan, who manages NASA’s human-rated lunar lander program. She was at Kennedy Space Center this week for briefings on the Starship lander and a competing lander from Blue Origin. One of the topics, she said, was the FAA’s new environmental review before Starship can launch from LC-39A.

“I would say we’re doing all we can to pull the schedule to where it needs to be, and we are working with SpaceX to make sure that their timeline, the EIS timeline, and NASA’s all work in parallel as much as we can to achieve our objectives,” she said. “When you’re writing it down on paper just as it is, it looks like there could be some tight areas, but I would say we’re collectively working through it.”

Officially, SpaceX plans to perform a dress rehearsal for the Starship lunar landing in late 2025. This will be a full demonstration, with refueling missions, an uncrewed landing of Starship on the lunar surface, then a takeoff from the Moon, before NASA commits to putting people on Starship on the Artemis III mission, currently slated for September 2026.

So you can see that schedules are already tight for the Starship lunar landing demonstration if SpaceX activates launch pads in Florida late next year.

We take a stab at decoding SpaceX’s ever-changing plans for Starship in Florida Read More »

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Rocket Report: Starship stacked; Georgia shuts the door on Spaceport Camden

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On Wednesday, SpaceX fully stacked the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the mega-rocket's next test flight from South Texas.

Enlarge / On Wednesday, SpaceX fully stacked the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the mega-rocket’s next test flight from South Texas.

Welcome to Edition 6.44 of the Rocket Report! Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility, says the company expects to receive an FAA launch license for the next Starship test flight shortly after Memorial Day. It looks like this rocket could fly in late May or early June, about two-and-a-half months after the previous Starship test flight. This is an improvement over the previous intervals of seven months and four months between Starship flights.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Blue Origin launch on tap this weekend. Blue Origin plans to launch its first human spaceflight mission in nearly two years on Sunday. This flight will launch six passengers on a flight to suborbital space more than 60 miles (100 km) over West Texas. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, has not flown people to space since a New Shepard rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. The company successfully launched New Shepard on another uncrewed suborbital mission in December.

Historic flight … This will be the 25th flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, and the seventh human spaceflight mission on New Shepard. Before Blue Origin’s rocket failure in 2022, the company was reaching a flight cadence of about one launch every two months, on average. The flight rate has diminished since then. Sunday’s flight is important not only because it marks the resumption of launches for Blue Origin’s suborbital human spaceflight business, but also because its six-person crew includes an aviation pioneer. Ed Dwight, 90, almost became the first Black astronaut in 1963. Dwight, a retired Air Force captain, piloted military fighter jets and graduated test pilot school, following a familiar career track as many of the early astronauts. He was on a short list of astronaut candidates the Air Force provided NASA, but the space agency didn’t include him. Dwight will become the oldest person to ever fly in space.

Spaceport Camden is officially no more. With the stroke of a pen, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill that dissolved the Camden County Spaceport Authority, Action News Jax reported. This news follows a referendum in March 2022 where more than 70 percent of voters rejected a plan to buy land for the spaceport on the Georgia coastline between Savannah and Jacksonville, Florida. County officials still tried to move forward with the spaceport initiative after the failed referendum, but Georgia’s Supreme Court ruled in February that the county had to abide by the voters’ wishes.

$12 million for what?… The government of Camden County, with a population of about 55,000 people spent $12 million on the Spaceport Camden concept over the course of a decade. The goal of the spaceport authority was to lure small launch companies to the region, but no major launches ever took place from Camden County. State Rep. Steven Sainz, who sponsored the bill eliminating the spaceport authority, said in a statement that the legislation “reflects the community’s choice and opens a path for future collaborations in economic initiatives that are more aligned with local needs.” (submitted by zapman987)

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Polaris Spaceplanes moves on to bigger things. German startup Polaris Spaceplanes says it is progressing with construction of its MIRA II and MIRA III spaceplane prototypes after MIRA, a subscale test vehicle, was damaged earlier this year, European Spaceflight reports. The MIRA demonstration vehicle crash-landed on a test flight in February. The incident occurred on takeoff at an airfield in Germany before the vehicle could ignite its linear aerospace engine in flight. The remote-controlled MIRA prototype measured about 4.25 meters long. Polaris announced on April 30 that will not repair MIRA and will instead move forward with the construction of a pair of larger vehicles.

Nearly 16 months without a launch … The MIRA II and MIRA III vehicles will be 5 meters long and will be powered by Polaris’s AS-1 aerospike engines, along with jet engines to power the craft before and after in-flight tests of the rocket engine. Aerospike engines are rocket engines that are designed to operate efficiently at all altitudes. The MIRA test vehicles are precursors to AURORA, a multipurpose spaceplane and hypersonic transporter Polaris says will be capable of delivering up to 1,000 kilograms of payload to low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Jay500001 and Tfargo04)

Rocket Report: Starship stacked; Georgia shuts the door on Spaceport Camden Read More »

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Europe is uncertain whether its ambitious Mercury probe can reach the planet

Science, Space / /

Hear me bepi, hold together —

“We are working hard on resolving these uncertainties.”

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An artist's rendering of the BepiColombo mission, a joint ESA/JAXA project, which will take two spacecraft to the harsh environment of Mercury.

An artist’s rendering of the BepiColombo mission, a joint ESA/JAXA project, which will take two spacecraft to the harsh environment of Mercury.

ESA

This week the European Space Agency posted a slightly ominous note regarding its BepiColombo spacecraft, which consists of two orbiters bound for Mercury.

The online news release cited a “glitch” with the spacecraft that is impairing its ability to generate thrust. The problem was first noted on April 26, when the spacecraft’s primary propulsion system was scheduled to undertake an orbital maneuver. Not enough electrical power was delivered to the solar-electric propulsion system at the time.

According to the space agency, a team involving its own engineers and those of its industrial partners began working on the issue. By May 7 they had made some progress, restoring the spacecraft’s thrust to about 90 percent of its original level. But this is not full thrust, and the root cause of the problem is still poorly understood.

This is an ambitious mission, with an estimated cost of $2 billion. Undertaken jointly with the Japanese space agency, JAXA, BepiColombo launched on an Ariane 5 rocket in October 2018. So there is a lot riding on these thrusters. The critical question is, at this power level, can BepiColombo still perform its primary task of reaching orbit around Mercury?

The answer to this question is not so clear.

A three-part spacecraft

The spacecraft consists of three components. The “transfer module” is where the current problems are occurring. It was built by the European Space Agency and is intended to power the other two components of the spacecraft until October 2025. It is essential for positioning the spacecraft for entry into orbit around Mercury. The other two elements of the mission are a European orbiter, MPO, and a Japanese orbiter, Mio. After their planned arrival in orbit around Mercury in December 2025, the two orbiters will separate and make at least one year’s worth of observations, including the characterization of the small planet’s magnetic field.

The news release is ambiguous about the fate of BepiColombo if full power cannot be restored to its propulsion system.

Ars reached out to the European Space Agency and asked whether BepiColombo can still reach orbit around Mercury in this state. The response, a statement from Elsa Montagnon, the head of mission operations at the space agency, is not entirely clear.

“Thanks for your legitimate questions on the current uncertainty,” Montagnon said. “We are working hard on resolving these uncertainties.”

Gotta have that delta-V

What is clear, she said, is that the current thrust level can support the next critical milestone, BepiColombo’s fourth Mercury swing-by, which is due to occur on September 5 of this year. This is the first of three swing-bys scheduled to happen in rapid succession from September to January that will slow the spacecraft down relative to Mercury.

“This swing-by sequence provides a braking delta-V of 2.4 km/s and provides a change of velocity vector direction with respect to the Sun as required for the trajectory end game in 2025,” Montagnon said.

At present, a team of experts is working on the implications of reduced thrusters for the other two parts of this swing-by sequence and other propulsion needs in 2025.

This transfer module is scheduled to be jettisoned from the rest of the stack in October 2025, and after that the remaining Mercury approach and orbit insertion maneuvers will be carried out with the chemical propulsion subsystem of the European MPO spacecraft.

Europe is uncertain whether its ambitious Mercury probe can reach the planet Read More »

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Daily Telescope: I spy, with my little eye, the ISS

daily telescope, Science, Space / /

living long and prospering —

What is black and white and constantly in flight?

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The International Space Station as seen from 69 km away.

Enlarge / The International Space Station as seen from 69 km away.

HEO on X

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s May 16, and today’s image comes from an on-demand satellite imagery company named HEO. Only this image is not of the Earth, but rather the International Space Station.

According to the company, which is headquartered in Australia, one of its cameras imaged the space station at a distance of 69.06 km away, over the Indian Ocean. HEO flies its sensors as hosted payloads on satellites in Earth orbit. However, HEO’s focus is not on Earth; it’s on other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit to assess their status and identify anomalous behavior.

As for the space station, it remains in good health after a quarter of a century of operations. NASA is currently working with its international partners to extend the station’s operations through 2030. After that, the space agency would like to retire the vehicle and transition to commercially operated space stations.

Source: HEO on X.

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Daily Telescope: I spy, with my little eye, the ISS Read More »

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Smashing into an asteroid shows researchers how to better protect Earth

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Connecting with a fastball —

Slowing down an asteroid by just one-tenth of a second makes all the difference.

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Riding atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft sets off to collide with an asteroid in the world’s first full-scale planetary defense test mission in November 2021.

Enlarge / Riding atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft sets off to collide with an asteroid in the world’s first full-scale planetary defense test mission in November 2021.

On a fall evening in 2022, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory were busy with the final stages of a planetary defense mission. As Andy Rivkin, one of the team leaders, was getting ready to appear in NASA’s live broadcast of the experiment, a colleague posted a photo of a pair of asteroids: the half-mile-wide Didymos and, orbiting around it, a smaller one called Dimorphos, taken about 7 million miles from Earth.

“We were able to see Didymos and this little dot in the right spot where we expected Dimorphos to be,” Rivkin recalled.

After the interview, Rivkin joined a crowd of scientists and guests to watch the mission’s finale on several big screens: As part of an asteroid deflection mission called DART, a spacecraft was closing in on Dimorphos and photographing its rocky surface in increasing detail.

Then, at 7: 14 pm, a roughly 1,300-pound spacecraft slammed head-on into the asteroid.

Within a few minutes, members of the mission team in Kenya and South Africa posted images from their telescopes, showing a bright plume of debris.

In the days that followed, researchers continued to observe the dust cloud and discovered it had morphed into a variety of shapes, including clumps, spirals, and two comet-like tails. They also calculated that the impact slowed Dimorphos’ orbit by about a tenth of an inch per second, proof-of-concept that a spacecraft—also called a kinetic impactor—could target and deflect an asteroid far from Earth.

The final five-and-a-half minutes of images from the DART spacecraft as it approached and then intentionally collided with asteroid Dimorphos. The video is 10 times faster than reality, except for the last six images.

NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/YouTube

Ron Ballouz, a planetary scientist at the lab, commented that what is often seen in the movies is a “sort of last-ditch-effort, what we like to call a final-stage of planetary defense.” But if hazardous objects can be detected years in advance, other techniques like a kinetic impactor can be used, he added.

If a deflection were necessary, scientists would need to change the speed of a hazardous object, such as an asteroid or comet, enough that it doesn’t end up at the same place and time as Earth as they orbit the Sun. Rivkin said this translates into at least a seven-minute change in the arrival time: If a Dimorphos-sized object were predicted to collide with Earth 67 years from now, for instance, the slow-down that DART imparted would be just enough to add up to the seven minutes, he added.

With less lead time, researchers could use a combination of multiple deflections, larger spacecrafts, or boosts in speed, depending on the hazardous object. “DART was designed to validate a technique, and specific situations would inevitably require adapting things,” said Rivkin.

Researchers use data from DART and smaller-scale experiments to predict the amount of deflection using computer simulations.

Scientists are also focusing on the type of asteroid that Dimorphos appears to be: a “rubble pile,” as they call it, because objects of this kind are thought to be made of clumps of many rocks.

In fact, scientists think that most asteroids the size of Dimorphos and larger are rubble piles. As scientists continue to learn more about rubble piles, they will be able to make better predictions about deflecting asteroids or comets. And in 2026, a new mission will arrive at Didymos and Dimorphos to collect more data to fine-tune the computer models.

In the meantime, researchers are trying to learn as much as possible in the unwelcome case an asteroid or comet is discovered to be a threat to Earth and a more rapid response is necessary.

Scientists first suspected that many asteroids are rubble piles about 50 years ago. Their models showed that when larger asteroids smashed into one another, the collisions could throw off fragments that would then reassemble to form new objects.

It wasn’t until 2005, though, that scientists saw their first rubble pile: asteroid Itokawa, when a spacecraft visited it and photographed it. Then, in 2018, they saw another called Ryugu, and later that year, one more, asteroid Bennu. DART’s camera also showed Didymos and Dimorphos are likely of the same variety.

“It’s one thing to talk about rubble piles, but another to see what looks like a bunch of rocks dumped off a truck up close,” said William Bottke, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Smashing into an asteroid shows researchers how to better protect Earth Read More »

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Air Force is “growing concerned” about the pace of Vulcan rocket launches

Science, Space / /

Where are my rockets? —

US military seeks an “independent review” to determine if Vulcan can scale.

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The business end of the Vulcan rocket performed flawlessly during its debut launch in January 2024.

Enlarge / The business end of the Vulcan rocket performed flawlessly during its debut launch in January 2024.

United Launch Alliance

It has been nearly four years since the US Air Force made its selections for companies to launch military payloads during the mid-2020s. The military chose United Launch Alliance, and its Vulcan rocket, to launch 60 percent of these missions; and it chose SpaceX, with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, to launch 40 percent.

Although the large Vulcan rocket was still in development at the time, it was expected to take flight within the next year or so. Upon making the award, an Air Force official said the military believed Vulcan would soon be ready to take flight. United Launch Alliance was developing the Vulcan rocket in order to no longer be reliant on RD-180 engines that are built in Russia and used by its Atlas V rocket.

“I am very confident with the selection that we have made today,” William Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said at the time. “We have a very low-risk path to get off the RD-180 engines.”

As part of the announcement, Roper disclosed the first two missions that would fly on Vulcan. The USSF-51 mission was scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2022, and the USSF-106 mission was scheduled for launch in the third quarter of 2022.

“I am growing concerned”

It turned out to not be such a low-risk path. The Vulcan rocket’s development, of course, has since been delayed. It did not make its debut in 2020 or 2021 and only finally took flight in January of this year. The mission was completely successful—an impressive feat for a new rocket with new engines—but United Launch Alliance still must complete a second flight before the US military certifies Vulcan for its payloads.

Due to these delays, the USSF-51 mission was ultimately moved off of Vulcan and onto an Atlas V rocket. It is scheduled to launch no earlier than next month. The USSF-106 mission remains manifested on a Vulcan as that rocket’s first national security mission, but its launch date is uncertain.

For several years there have been rumblings about Air Force and Space Force officials being unhappy with the delays by United Launch Alliance, as well as with Blue Origin, which is building the BE-4 rocket engines that power Vulcan’s first stage. However, these concerns have rarely broken into public view.

That changed Monday when The Washington Post reported on a letter from Air Force Assistant Secretary Frank Calvelli to the co-owners of United Launch Alliance, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. In the letter sent on May 10, a copy of which was obtained by Ars, Calvelli urges the two large aerospace contractors to get moving on certification and production of the Vulcan rocket.

“I am growing concerned with ULA’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rocket and scale its launch cadence to meet our needs,” Calvelli wrote. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays. ULA has a backlog of 25 National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 Vulcan launches on contract.”

These 25 launches, Calvelli notes, are due to be completed by the end of 2027. He asked Boeing and Lockheed to complete an “independent review” of United Launch Alliance’s ability to scale manufacturing of its Vulcan rockets and meet its commitments to the military. Calvelli also noted that Vulcan has made commitments to launch dozens of satellites for others over that period, a reference to a contract between United Launch Alliance and Amazon for Project Kuiper satellites.

It’s difficult to scale

Calvelli’s letter comes at a dynamic moment for United Launch Alliance. This week the company is set to launch the most critical mission in its 20-year history: two astronauts flying inside Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. This mission may take place as early as Friday evening from Florida on an Atlas V vehicle.

In addition, the company is for sale. Ars reported in February that Blue Origin, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, is the leading candidate to buy United Launch Alliance. It is plausible that Calvelli’s letter was written with the intent of signaling to a buyer that the government would not object to a sale in the best interests of furthering Vulcan’s development.

But the message here is unequivocally that the government wants United Launch Alliance to remain competitive and get Vulcan flying safely and frequently.

That may be easier said than done. Vulcan’s second certification mission was supposed to be the launch of the Dream Chaser spacecraft this summer. However, as Ars reported last month, that mission will no longer fly before at least September, if not later, because the spacecraft is not ready for its debut. As a result, Space News reported on Monday that United Launch Alliance is increasingly likely to fly a mass simulator on the rocket’s second flight later this year.

According to this analysis, some recent rockets launched an average of 2.75 times a year during their first five years.

According to this analysis, some recent rockets launched an average of 2.75 times a year during their first five years.

Quilty Space

After certification, United Launch Alliance can begin to fly military missions. However, it is one thing to build one or two rockets, it is quite another to build them at scale. The company’s goal is to reach a cadence of two Vulcan launches a month by the end of 2025. In his letter, Calvelli mentioned that United Launch Alliance has averaged fewer than six launches a year during the last five years. This indicates a concern that such a goal may be unreasonable.

“History shows that new rockets struggle to scale their launch cadence in their early years,” Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, told Ars. “Based on the number of missions the Department of Defense requires of ULA between now and 2027, precedent says Calvelli’s concerns are justified.”

Air Force is “growing concerned” about the pace of Vulcan rocket launches Read More »

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In the race for space metals, companies hope to cash in

Science, Space / /

space truckin’ —

Mining asteroids could reduce the burden on Earth’s resources. Will it live up to its promise?

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An illustration depicts a NASA spacecraft approaching the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. Though there are no plans to mine Psyche, such asteroids are being eyed for their valuable resources

Enlarge / An illustration depicts a NASA spacecraft approaching the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. Though there are no plans to mine Psyche, such asteroids are being eyed for their valuable resources

In April 2023, a satellite the size of a microwave launched to space. Its goal: to get ready to mine asteroids. While the mission, courtesy of a company called AstroForge, ran into problems, it’s part of a new wave of would-be asteroid miners hoping to cash in on cosmic resources.

Potential applications of space-mined material abound: Asteroids contain metals like platinum and cobalt, which are used in electronics and electric vehicle batteries, respectively. Although there are plenty of these materials on Earth, they can be more concentrated on asteroids than mountainsides, making them easier to scrape out. And scraping in space, advocates say, could cut down on the damaging impacts that mining has on this planet. Space-resource advocates also want to explore the potential of other substances. What if space ice could be used for spacecraft and rocket propellant? Space dirt for housing structures for astronauts and radiation shielding?

Previous companies have rocketed toward similar goals before but went bust about a half-decade ago. In the years since that first cohort left the stage, though, “the field has exploded in interest,” said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.

A lot of the attention has focused on the Moon, since nations plan to set up outposts there and will need supplies. NASA, for instance, has ambitions to build astronaut base camps within the next decade. China, meanwhile, hopes to found an international lunar research station.

Still, the pull of space rocks remains powerful and the new crop of companies hopeful. The economic picture has improved with the cost of rocket launches decreasing, as has the regulatory environment, with countries creating laws specifically allowing space mining. But only time will tell if this decade’s prospectors will cash in where others have drilled into the red or be buried by their business plans.

An asteroid-mining company needs one major ingredient to get started: optimism. A hope that they could start a new industry, one not of this world. “Not a lot of humans are built to work like that,” said Matt Gialich, co-founder and CEO of AstroForge. Since the company’s April 2023 demo mission, it has yet to come close to mining anything.

What he and colleagues hope to extract, though, are platinum-group metals, some of which are used in devices like catalytic converters, which reduce gas emissions. Substances like platinum and iridium, meanwhile, are used in electronics. There are also opportunities in green technology, and new pushes to produce platinum-based batteries with better storage that could end up in electric vehicles and energy storage systems.

To further the company’s goals, AstroForge’s initial mission was loaded with simulated asteroid material and a refinery system designed to extract platinum from the simulant, to show that metal-processing could happen in space.

Things didn’t go exactly as planned. After the small craft got to orbit, it was hard to identify and communicate with among the dozens of other newly launched satellites. The solar panels, which provide the spacecraft with power, wouldn’t deploy at first. And the satellite was initially beset with a wobble that prevented communication. They have not been able to do the simulated extraction.

The company will soon embark on a second mission, with a different goal: to slingshot to an asteroid and take a picture — a surveying project which may help the company understand which valuable materials exist on a particular asteroid.

Another company, called TransAstra, is selling a telescope and software designed to detect objects like asteroids moving through the sky; Chinese corporation Origin Space has an asteroid-observing satellite in orbit around Earth, and is testing out its mining-relevant technology there. Meanwhile, Colorado company Karman+ plans to go straight to an asteroid in 2026 and test out excavation equipment.

To achieve the ultimate goal of pulling metals from space rocks, TransAstra, Karman+, and AstroForge have received a combined tens of millions of dollars in venture-capital funding to date.

Another company with similar aims, simply called Asteroid Mining Corporation Ltd., doesn’t want to rely much on outside investment in the long term. Such reliance, in fact, helped sink earlier companies. Instead, founder and CEO Mitch Hunter-Scullion is focusing his company’s early work on terrestrial applications that pay up immediately so he can fund future work in the broader universe. In 2021, the company partnered with Tohoku University Space Robotics Laboratory, based in Japan, to work on space robots.

Together, they have built a six-legged robot called the Space Capable Asteroid Robotic Explorer, or SCAR-E. Designed to operate in microgravity, it can crawl around a rugged surface and take data on, and samples of, what’s there. In 2026, the company plans to do a demonstration mission analyzing soil on the Moon.

For now, though, SCAR-E will stay on Earth and inspect ship hulls. According to one market research platform, this is a nearly $13 billion dollar market globally — as compared to the asteroid-mining market, currently $0, as no one has yet mined an asteroid.

Such grounded work may give the company a revenue stream before, and during, their time in space. “I think every asteroid-mining company has this realization that money runs out, investors get tired, and you have to do something,” said Hunter-Scullion.

“My opinion is that unless you’ve built something which makes sense on Earth,” he added, “you’re never going to be able to mine an asteroid.”

In the race for space metals, companies hope to cash in Read More »

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NOAA says ‘extreme’ Solar storm will persist through the weekend

aurora, NOAA, Science, solar storm, Space / /

Bright lights —

So far disruptions from the geomagnetic storm appear to be manageable.

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Pink lights appear in the sky above College Station, Texas.

Enlarge / Pink lights appear in the sky above College Station, Texas.

ZoeAnn Bailey

After a night of stunning auroras across much of the United States and Europe on Friday, a severe geomagnetic storm is likely to continue through at least Sunday, forecasters said.

The Space Weather Prediction Center at the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Prediction Center observed that ‘Extreme’ G5 conditions were ongoing as of Saturday morning due to heightened Solar activity.

“The threat of additional strong flares and CMEs (coronal mass ejections) will remain until the large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster rotates out of view over the next several days,” the agency posted in an update on the social media site X on Saturday morning.

Good and bad effects

For many observers on Friday night the heightened Solar activity was welcomed. Large areas of the United States, Europe, and other locations unaccustomed to displays of the aurora borealis saw vivid lights as energetically charged particles from the Solar storm passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. Brilliantly pink skies were observed as far south as Texas. Given the forecast for ongoing Solar activity, another night of extended northern lights is possible again on Saturday.

There were also some harmful effects. According to NOAA, there have been some irregularities in power grid transmissions, and degraded satellite communications and GPS services. Users of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet constellation have reported slower download speeds. Early on Saturday morning, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the company’s Starlink satellites were “under a lot of pressure, but holding up so far.”

This is the most intense Solar storm recorded in more than two decades. The last G5 event—the most extreme category of such storms—occurred in October 2003 when there were electricity issues reported in Sweden and South Africa.

Should this storm intensify over the next day or two, scientists say the major risks include more widespread power blackouts, disabled satellites, and long-term damage of GPS networks.

Cause of these storms

Such storms are triggered when the Sun ejects a significant amount of its magnetic field and plasma into the Solar wind. The underlying causes of these coronal mass ejections, deeper in the Sun, are not fully understood. But it is hoped that data collected by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and other observations will help scientists better understand and predict such phenomena.

When these coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field they change it, and can introduce significant currents into electricity lines and transformers, leading to damages or outages.

The most intense geomagnetic storm occurred in 1859, during the so-called Carrington Event. This produced auroral lights around the world, and caused fires in multiple telegraph stations—at the time there were 125,000 miles of telegraph lines in the world.

According to one research paper on the Carrington Event, “At its height, the aurora was described as a blood or deep crimson red that was so bright that one ‘could read a newspaper by’.”

NOAA says ‘extreme’ Solar storm will persist through the weekend Read More »