A prototype jet independently developed by Boom Supersonic made its first flight on Friday, the company said.
The XB-1 vehicle flew from Mojave Air & Space Port in California, reaching an altitude of 7,120 feet (2.2 km) and a maximum speed of 273 mph (439 kph). In a news release, Boom Supersonic said the initial test flight of the XB-1 aircraft met all of its objectives.
“The experience we have gained in reaching this milestone will be invaluable to Boom’s revival of supersonic travel,” said Bill “Doc” Shoemaker, Chief Test Pilot for Boom Supersonic.
The XB-1 aircraft is a demonstrator intended to test materials and the aerodynamics of a larger commercial supersonic aircraft the company is calling Overture.
Boom is one of a handful of companies attempting to revive supersonic commercial air travel since the Concorde’s final flight in 2003. Its planes are intended to carry between 64 and 80 passengers at about twice the speed of conventional commercial jets in service today. Boom says it has received 130 orders and pre-orders from American Airlines, United Airlines, and Japan Airlines for the Overture vehicle, which it plans to deliver later this decade.
A lot of milestones to go
Boom Supersonic was founded a decade ago, in 2014. It rolled out the XB-1 prototype for the first time in October 2020. At the time, the company said it planned to begin a flight test campaign during the third quarter of 2021. It is not clear why Boom missed that timeline by two and a half years.
The company plans to fly the XB-1 to learn the lessons of supersonic flight with a lower-cost vehicle and incorporate these findings into Overture’s final design. There is only so much technology that can be tested on the ground, and in wind tunnels, so the company needs to fly now to mature its design.
After Friday’s flight, the company said the aircraft’s development team will continue to expand the flight envelope to confirm its performance and handling qualities through and beyond Mach 1.
One key element of the Overture aircraft that the XB-1 prototype is not testing is the engines. The XB-1 is powered by three GE J85-15 engines, a turbojet engine that has been in service for several decades. Boom Supersonic is developing a new engine, a medium-bypass turbofan engine Symphony, for the Overture aircraft.
Previously, the company showcased a one-third scale design model of Symphony, but it has not released information about developmental tests of the hardware. The additively manufactured engine is advertised as having 35,000 pounds of thrust.
Enlarge/ Behold, the star-forming region of NGC 604.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
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 March 12, and today’s photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Astronomers have long been fascinated by a nebula, NGC 604, in the relatively nearby Triangulum Galaxy. That’s because this nebula contains about 200 of the hottest and largest types of stars, most of which are in the early stages of their lives. Some of these stars are 100 times or more massive than the Sun. Astronomers know of no other region in the Universe so densely packed with large stars as this nebula.
In this image, captured by the Near-Infrared Camera on the Webb telescope, there are brilliant reds and oranges. Here’s the explanation from astronomers for these colors:
The most noticeable features are tendrils and clumps of emission that appear bright red, extending out from areas that look like clearings, or large bubbles in the nebula. Stellar winds from the brightest and hottest young stars have carved out these cavities, while ultraviolet radiation ionizes the surrounding gas. This ionized hydrogen appears as a white and blue ghostly glow. The bright orange streaks in the Webb near-infrared image signify the presence of carbon-based molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
Enlarge/ NASA Administrator Bill Nelson is putting a positive spin on NASA’s budget.
It’s budget-palooza, NASA nerds. For the first time in more than a decade, the US space agency is grappling with budget cuts. Be forewarned, there will be a lot of numbers in this story, but we’ll do our best to make sense of them.
First of all, the space agency only just received its budget for the current fiscal year (October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2024) last Friday. If it seems weird that a federal agency should find out how much money it has to spend nearly halfway through that budget year, well, it is. But this is the world we live in, with a fractious Congress unable to agree on much of anything, including budgets.
In any case, NASA’s budget for fiscal year 2024 came to $24.9 billion. This represents an approximately 2 percent cut in the space agency’s funding relative to the final budget for fiscal year 2023. It’s worth noting that the last time NASA’s budget decreased from year to year came more than a decade ago, from fiscal year 2012 to 2013. This was due, in large part, to the end of the Space Shuttle program.
This budget cut does not reflect congressional displeasure with NASA’s performance. Rather, to avert a debt limit crisis in June 2023, the US Congress and President Biden agreed to budget caps for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
“We’re not going to get out of this hole until you finish both fiscal years, 24 and 25,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Monday during a teleconference with reporters. “NASA makes do with whatever we’re given. This is an agency where the impossible becomes possible.”
FY 2025 request
On Monday, mere hours after finally learning its final budget for the current year, NASA released its budget request for the coming fiscal year, 2025. All of the federal agencies did so on Monday in conjunction with the rollout of the president’s budget request for FY 2025.
Such budget requests are part of the political theater of Washington, DC. The White House has the power to appoint the leaders of federal agencies, such as NASA. However, Congress authorizes funding, so the final budget will be subject to negotiations among the House, Senate, and the White House.
The blueprint clearly outlines the White House’s priorities regarding NASA’s direction. The space agency’s budget request can be found here. The Planetary Society has published a useful comparison here that delineates the NASA budget for 2023, the president’s budget request for 2024, and the final budget enacted last week.
NASA is asking for $25.4 billion for the coming fiscal year. This is more than the agency will receive in fiscal year 2024 but significantly less than the $27.2 billion NASA asked for in last year’s budget request. Put another way, NASA has recognized the real-world constraints and is asking for 7 percent less funding this year than it did in 2023.
“Naturally, we have to make hard choices,” Nelson said.
About those hard choices
There are no significant changes in NASA’s proposed budget for the Artemis program, which seeks to return humans to the Moon later this decade. There remains broad support in Congress for this program, at least for the initial lunar landings. Funding for the Artemis landings, which have a mix of cost-plus and fixed-price contracts, should more or less continue.
The harder choices will have to be made in the science portion of NASA’s budget, which covers planetary missions as well as deep space observatories. In particular, NASA requested $2.7 billion for planetary science missions in fiscal year 2025, virtually the same amount received this fiscal year.
But there’s a catch: This funding level includes no allocation for the Mars Sample Return mission, a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar program to return rock samples from Mars to Earth for scientific study. This mission is a high priority for NASA and the scientific community, but the overall plans were recently declared to be “unrealistic” by an independent review board.
A NASA committee is studying alternative mission designs to bring Mars samples back to Earth with better cost and schedule estimates. It will release its findings later this month. After that time, NASA may reformulate plans and allocate funding for the Mars Sample Return. The catch is that it would not seek new funding but rather pull money from other planetary science missions.
“We don’t expect that the planetary top line will go up,” said Nicky Fox, chief of science for NASA, during the press call.
Enlarge/ The world’s largest aircraft takes off with the Talon A vehicle on Saturday.
Stratolaunch/Matt Hartman
Built and flown by Stratolaunch, the massive Roc aircraft took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California on Saturday. The airplane flew out over the Pacific Ocean, where it deployed the Talon-A vehicle, which looks something like a mini space shuttle.
This marked the first time this gargantuan airplane released an honest-to-goodness payload, the first Talon-A vehicle, TA-1, which is intended to fly at hypersonic speed. During the flight, TA-1 didn’t quite reach hypersonic velocity, which begins at Mach 5, or five times greater than the speed of sound.
“While I can’t share the specific altitude and speed TA-1 reached due to proprietary agreements with our customers, we are pleased to share that in addition to meeting all primary and customer objectives of the flight, we reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers,” said Zachary Krevor, chief executive of Stratolaunch, in a statement.
In essence, the TA-1 vehicle is a pathfinder for subsequent versions of the vehicle that will be both reusable and capable of reaching hypersonic speeds. The flight of the company’s next vehicle, TA-2, could come later this year, Krevor said.
A long road
It has been a long, strange road for Stratolaunch to reach this moment. The company was founded in 2011 to build a super-sized carrier aircraft from which rockets would be launched mid-air. It was bankrolled by Microsoft cofounder and airplane enthusiast Paul Allen, who put at least hundreds of millions of dollars into the private project.
As the design of the vehicle evolved, its wingspan grew to 117 meters, nearly double the size of a Boeing 747 aircraft. It far exceeded the wingspan of the Spruce Goose, built by Howard Hughes in the 1940s, which had a wingspan of 97.5 meters. The Roc aircraft was so large that it seemed impractical to fly on a regular basis.
At the same time, the company was struggling to identify a rocket that could be deployed from the aircraft. At various times, Stratolaunch worked with SpaceX and Orbital ATK to develop a launch vehicle. But both of those partnerships fell through, and eventually, the company said it would develop its own line of rockets.
Allen would never see his large plane fly, dying of septic shock in October 2018 due to his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Roc did finally take flight for the first time in April 2019, but it seemed like a Pyrrhic victory. Following the death of Allen, for whom Stratolaunch was a passion project, the company’s financial future was in doubt. Later in 2019, Allen’s family put the company’s assets up for sale and said it would cease to exist.
However, Stratolaunch did not die. Rather, the aircraft was acquired by the private equity firm Cerberus, and in 2020, the revitalized Stratolaunch changed course. Instead of orbital rockets, it would now launch hypersonic vehicles to test the technology—a priority for the US military. China, Russia, and the United States are all racing to develop hypersonic missiles, as well as new countermeasure technology as high-speed missiles threaten to penetrate most existing defenses.
Featuring a new engine
This weekend’s flight also marked an important moment for another US aerospace company, Ursa Major Technologies. The TA-1 vehicle was powered by the Hadley rocket engine designed and built by Ursa Major, which specializes in the development of rocket propulsion engines.
Hadley is a 5,000-lb-thrust liquid oxygen and kerosene, oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle rocket engine for small vehicles. Its known customers include Stratolaunch and a vertical launch company, Phantom Space, which is developing a small orbital rocket.
Founded in 2015, Ursa Major seeks to provide off-the-shelf propulsion solutions to launch customers. While Ursa Major started small, the company is already well into the development of its much larger Ripley engine. With 50,000 pounds of thrust, Ripley is aimed at the medium-launch market. The company completed a hot-fire test campaign of Ripley last year. For Ursa Major, it must feel pretty good to finally see an engine in flight.
Enlarge/ In March 2021, the International Space Station’s robotic arm released a cargo pallet with nine expended batteries.
NASA
A bundle of depleted batteries from the International Space Station careened around Earth for almost three years before falling out of orbit and plunging back into the atmosphere Friday. Most of the trash likely burned up during reentry, but it’s possible some fragments may have reached Earth’s surface intact.
Larger pieces of space junk regularly fall to Earth on unguided trajectories, but they’re usually derelict satellites or spent rocket stages. This involved a pallet of batteries from the space station with a mass of more than 2.6 metric tons (5,800 pounds). NASA intentionally sent the space junk on a path toward an unguided reentry.
Naturally self-cleaning
Sandra Jones, a NASA spokesperson, said the agency “conducted a thorough debris analysis assessment on the pallet and has determined it will harmlessly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.” This was, by far, the most massive object ever tossed overboard from the International Space Station.
The batteries reentered the atmosphere at 2: 29 pm EST (1929 UTC), according to US Space Command. At that time, the pallet would have been flying between Mexico and Cuba. “We do not expect any portion to have survived reentry,” Jones told Ars.
The European Space Agency (ESA) also monitored the trajectory of the battery pallet. In a statement this week, the ESA said the risk of a person being hit by a piece of the pallet was “very low” but said “some parts may reach the ground.” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who closely tracks spaceflight activity, estimated about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of debris would hit the Earth’s surface.
“The general rule of thumb is that 20 to 40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground, though it depends on the design of the object,” the Aerospace Corporation says.
A dead ESA satellite reentered the atmosphere in a similar uncontrolled manner February 21. At 2.3 metric tons, this satellite was similar in mass to the discarded battery pallet. ESA, which has positioned itself as a global leader in space sustainability, set up a website that provided daily tracking updates on the satellite’s deteriorating orbit.
Enlarge/ This map shows the track of the unguided cargo pallet around the Earth over the course of six hours Friday. It reentered the atmosphere near Cuba on southwest-to-northeast heading.
As NASA and ESA officials have said, the risk of injury or death from a spacecraft reentry is quite low. Falling space debris has never killed anyone. According to ESA, the risk of a person getting hit by a piece of space junk is about 65,000 times lower than the risk of being struck by lightning.
This circumstance is unique in the type and origin of the space debris, which is why NASA purposely cast it away on an uncontrolled trajectory back to Earth.
The space station’s robotic arm released the battery cargo pallet on March 11, 2021. Since then, the batteries have been adrift in orbit, circling the planet about every 90 minutes. Over a span of months and years, low-Earth orbit is self-cleaning thanks to the influence of aerodynamic drag. The resistance of rarefied air molecules in low-Earth orbit gradually slowed the pallet’s velocity until, finally, gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere Friday.
The cargo pallet, which launched inside a Japanese HTV cargo ship in 2020, carried six new lithium-ion batteries to the International Space Station. The station’s two-armed Dextre robot, assisted by astronauts on spacewalks, swapped out aging nickel-hydrogen batteries for the upgraded units. Nine of the old batteries were installed on the HTV cargo pallet before its release from the station’s robotic arm.
Enlarge/ This satellite view of SpaceX’s Starbase facility shows a fully-stacked Starship rocket on the launch pad, just inland from the Gulf of Mexico.
Welcome to Edition 6.34 of the Rocket Report! It’s Starship season again. Yes, SpaceX appears to be about a week away from launching the third full-scale Starship test flight from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas, pending final regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. Ars will be there. SpaceX plans to build a second Starship launch pad at Starbase, and the company’s footprint there is also about to get a little bigger, with the expected acquisition of 43 acres of Texas state park land.
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.
Astra’s founders take the company private. Astra’s three-year run as a public company is over. Chris Kemp and Adam London, Astra’s co-founders, are taking the company private after a string of rocket failures and funding shortfalls, Ars reports. Kemp and London bought the company for 50 cents a share. Astra’s board approved the transaction, the company announced Thursday, as the only alternative to bankruptcy. Kemp and London founded Astra in 2016. After emerging from stealth mode in 2020, Astra launched its light-class launcher, called Rocket 3, seven times, but five of those flights were failures. Astra went public via a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC) in 2021, reaching a valuation of more than $2 billion. Today, its market cap sits at approximately $13 million.
What’s next for Astra? … Where Astra goes from here is anyone’s guess. The company abandoned its unreliable Rocket 3 vehicle in 2022 to focus on the larger Rocket 4 vehicle. But Rocket 4 is likely months or years from the launch pad. It faces stiff competition not just from established small launch players such as Rocket Lab and Firefly but also from new entrants as well, including ABL Space and Stoke Space. Additionally, all of these small launch companies have been undercut in price by SpaceX’s Transporter missions, which launch dozens of satellites at a time on the Falcon 9 booster. Additionally, Astra’s spacecraft engine business—acquired previously from Apollo Fusion—may or may not be profitable now, but there are questions about its long-term viability as well.
Virgin Galactic is retiring its only operational spaceship. Over the last year, Virgin Galactic has proven it has the technical acumen to pull off monthly flights of its VSS Unity rocket plane, each carrying six people on a suborbital climb to the edge of space. But VSS Unity has never been profitable. It costs too much and takes too much time to reconfigure between flights. Virgin Galactic plans to fly the suborbital spaceship one more time before taking a hiatus from flight operations, Ars reports. This, along with layoffs announced last year, will allow the company to preserve cash while focusing on the development of a new generation of rocket planes, called Delta-class ships, designed to fly more often and with more people. Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic’s president and CEO, says the first of the Delta ships is on track to begin ground and flight testing next year, with commercial service targeted for 2026 based out of Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Bigger and faster… The Delta ships will each carry six customers in the spacecraft’s pressurized passenger cabin, compared to a maximum of four passengers on each VSS Unity flight. Virgin Galactic’s goal is to fly each Delta ship eight times per month, and the company will do this by eliminating many of the inspections required between each VSS Unity flight. The company is building a Delta ship structural test article to put through extensive checks on the ground, validating component life and cycle limits for major components of the vehicle. This will give engineers enough confidence to forego many inspections, according to Mike Moses, president of Virgin Galactic’s spaceline operations. Virgin Galactic has nearly $1 billion in cash or cash equivalents on its balance sheet, so it’s not in any immediate financial trouble. But the company reported just $7 million in revenue last year, with a net loss of $502 million. So, there’s an obvious motivation to make a change.
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.
A new Japanese rocket will launch this weekend. A privately held Japanese company named Space One is set to shoot for orbit with the first flight of its Kairos rocket Friday night (US time), News on Japan reports. Space One will attempt to become the first Japanese private company to launch a rocket into orbit. Japan’s existing launch vehicles, like the H-IIA, the H3, and the Epsilon, were developed with funding from the Japanese space agency. But there is some involvement from the Japanese government on this flight. The Kairos rocket will launch with a small “quick response” spacecraft for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, which is responsible for Japan’s fleet of spy satellites. Kairos, which is the Ancient Greek word for “timeliness,” is made up of three solid-fueled stages and a liquid-fueled upper stage. It can place a payload of up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit.
Winning hearts and minds… The Kairos rocket will take off from Space One’s Space Port Kii, located on a south-facing peninsula on the main Japanese island of Honshu. This new launch site is hundreds of miles away from Japan’s existing spaceports. Local businesses see the arrival of the space industry in this remote part of Japan as a marketing opportunity. A local confectionery store, not wanting to miss the opportunity to attract visitors, is selling manju shaped like rockets. There are two paid viewing areas to watch the launch, and a total of 5,000 seats sold out in just two days, according to News on Japan. (submitted by tsunam)
UK spaceport project to get 10 million pounds from government. The UK government has pledged 10 million pounds in funding to SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, European Spaceflight reports. This funding is sorely needed for SaxaVord, which slowed construction last year after its developer ran into financial trouble. In the last couple of months, SaxaVord raised enough money to resume payments to the contractors building the launch site. The UK government’s pledge of 10 million pounds for SaxaVord apparently is not quite a done deal. The UK’s science minister posted on X that the funding was “subject to due diligence.” SaxaVord will eventually have three launch pads, one of which has been dedicated to German launch startup Rocket Factory Augsburg. This company’s rocket, RFA ONE, is expected to be the first orbital launch from SaxaVord later this year.
The UK spaceport scene… The UK government, local entities, and private industry are making a pretty serious effort to bring orbital launches to the British Isles. Spaceport Cornwall became the first UK facility to host an orbital attempt last year with the failed launch of Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket, which was released from a carrier jet that took off from Cornwall. There are several vertical launch spaceports under construction or in the concept development phase. SaxaVord appears to be among those closest to reality, along with Sutherland spaceport, also in Scotland, to be used by the UK launch startup Orbex Space. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Enlarge/ Liftoff of Astra’s Rocket 3.0 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Astra’s long, strange trip in the space business is taking another turn. The company announced Thursday that it is going private at an extremely low valuation.
Four years ago, the rocket company, based in Alameda, California, emerged from stealth with grand plans to develop a no-frills rocket that could launch frequently. “The theme that really makes this company stand out, which will capture the imagination of our customers, our investors, and our employees, is the idea that every day we will produce and launch a rocket,” Astra co-founder Chris Kemp said during a tour of the factory in February 2020.
Almost exactly a year later, on February 2, 2021, Astra went public via a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC). “The transaction reflects an implied pro-forma enterprise value for Astra of approximately $2.1 billion,” the company stated at the time. For a time, the company’s stock even traded above this valuation.
But then, rockets started failing. Only two of the seven launches of the company’s “Rocket 3” vehicle were successful. In August 2022, the company announced a pivot to the larger Rocket 4 vehicle. It planned to begin conducting test launches in 2023, but that did not happen. Accordingly, the company’s stock price plummeted.
Last November Kemp and the company’s co-founder, Adam London, proposed to buy Astra shares at $1.50, approximately double their price. The company’s board of directors did not accept the deal. Then, in late February, Kemp and London sharply cut their offer to take the company private, warning of “imminent bankruptcy” if the company doesn’t accept their new proposal. They offered $0.50 a share, well below the trading value of approximately $0.80 a share.
On Thursday, Astra said that this deal was being consummated.
“Astra Space, Inc. announced today that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement pursuant to which the acquiring entity has agreed, subject to customary closing conditions, to acquire all shares of Astra common stock not already owned by it for $0.50 per share in cash,” the company stated. The acquiring entity consists of Kemp, London, and other long-term investors.
Where Astra goes from here is anyone’s guess. Rocket 4 is likely months or years from the launch pad. It faces stiff competition not just from established small launch players such as Rocket Lab and Firefly but also from new entrants as well, including ABL Space and Stoke Space. Additionally, all of these small launch companies have been undercut in price by SpaceX’s Transporter missions, which launch dozens of satellites at a time on the Falcon 9 booster.
Additionally, Astra’s spacecraft engine business—acquired previously from Apollo Fusion—may or may not be profitable now, but there are questions about its long-term viability as well.
“I don’t fault management for seizing the opportunity to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by SPAC’ing, but a pre-revenue launch company without a proven rocket was probably never a good match for the public markets,” said Case Taylor, investor and author of the Case Closed newsletter.
Taylor added that he hopes that Astra spacecraft engines find a way to thrive in the new Astra, as the space industry values their performance. “I hope to see that diamond survive and thrive,” he said.
Enlarge/ Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks and the great Andromeda Galaxy.
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 March 7, and today’s photo features a Halley-type comet that is currently approaching the Sun. It will reach perihelion on April 21.
The comet, named 12P/Pons–Brooks, features a brilliant ion tail, and its nucleus is estimated to be around 30 km in diameter. The comet should brighten further as it nears the Sun in the coming weeks. However, at an apparent magnitude of 4.5, it is unlikely to be visible to the naked eye—that’s why we have telescopes.
12P/Pons–Brooks was imaged here by the Virtual Telescope Project facility in Manciano, Italy. The covered field of view is about 16×11 square degrees, and there is a bonus photobombing by the Andromeda Galaxy.
Enlarge/ Technicians assemble an Angara A5 rocket at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East.
Roscosmos
By some measures, Russia’s next-generation flagship rocket program—the Angara—is now three decades old. The Russian government approved the development of the Angara rocket in 1992, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union ushered in a prolonged economic recession.
It has been nearly 10 years since Russia launched the first Angara test flights. The heaviest version of the Angara rocket family—the Angara A5—is about to make its fourth flight, and like the three launches before, this mission won’t carry a real satellite.
This next launch will be a milestone for the beleaguered Angara rocket program because it will be the first Angara flight from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia’s newest launch site in the country’s far east. The previous Angara launches were based out of the military-run Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.
All dressed up and nowhere to go
On Wednesday, Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said technicians at Vostochny have fueled the Angara A5’s Orion upper stage and will soon install it on the rest of the rocket. The Angara A5 will roll to its launch pad a few days before liftoff, currently scheduled for next month.
The Angara A5 rocket is supposed to replace Russia’s Proton launch vehicle, which uses toxic propellant and only launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Angara’s launch pads are on Russian territory. Until a few years ago, the Proton was a competitor in the global commercial launch market, but the rocket lost its position due to reliability problems, competitive pressure from SpaceX, and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russian officials once touted Angara as a successor to Proton on the commercial market. Now, Angara will solely serve the Russian government, but it’s doubtful the government has enough demand to fill the Angara A5’s heavy launch capacity on a regular basis. According to RussianSpaceWeb.com, a website run by veteran Russian space reporter Anatoly Zak, the Russian government didn’t have any functional satellites ready to fly on the upcoming Angara A5 launch from Vostochny.
Eventually, the Angara A5 could take over the launch responsibility of the handful of large satellites that require the capacity of the Proton rocket. But this is a small number of flights. The Proton has launched three times in the last two years, and there are roughly a dozen Proton launch vehicles remaining in Russia’s inventory.
Russia plans a next-generation crew spacecraft, Orel, that officials claim will begin launching on the Angara A5 rocket in 2028. There’s no evidence Orel could be ready for test flights within four years. So, while the Angara rocket is finally flying, albeit at an anemic rate, there aren’t many payloads for Russia to put on it.
Enlarge/ North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin visited the Angara rocket’s launch pad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome last year.
Russia’s economic woes might explain some of the delays that have befallen the Angara program since 1992, but Russia’s space program has long suffered from chronic underfunding, mismanagement, and corruption. Angara is the only rocket Russia has developed from scratch since the 1980s, and the Russian government selected Khrunichev, one of the country’s oldest space companies, to oversee the Angara program.
Finally, in 2014, Russia launched the first two Angara test flights, one with a single-booster lightweight version of the rocket, called the Angara 1.2, and another with the heavy-lift Angara A5, made up of five Angara rocket cores combined into one rocket.
The Angara A5 can place up to 24.5 metric tons (about 54,000 pounds) into low-Earth orbit, according to Khrunichev. The expendable rocket has enough power to launch modules for a space station or deploy the Russian military’s largest spy satellites, but in 2020, each Angara A5 reportedly cost more than $100 million, significantly more than the Proton.
The smaller Angara 1.2 has flown twice since 2014, but both missions delivered functional satellites into orbit for the Russian military. The much larger Angara A5 has launched three times, all with dummy payloads. The most recent Angara A5 launch in 2021 failed due to a problem with the rocket’s Persei upper stage. The Orion upper stage set to fly on the next Angara A5 mission is a modified version of the Persei, which is itself modeled on the Block-DM upper stage, a design with its roots in the 1960s.
Essentially, the Angara A5 flight will allow engineers to test out changes to the upper stage and allow Russia to activate a second launch pad at Vostochny, which itself has been mired in corruption and delays. Medium-lift Soyuz rockets have been flying from Vostochny since 2016.
Enlarge/ SpaceX’s Starship rocket completes a fueling test on Sunday night.
SpaceX
After SpaceX completed a fueling test of its third full Starship stack on Sunday night, successfully loading more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellant onto the rocket, it was only a matter of time before the world’s largest rocket took flight.
Now, we have a tentative date. In a post on the social media site X, the company posted a link to watch “Starship’s third flight test” at 7: 30 am ET (11: 30 UTC) on March 14. Published on Tuesday morning, the social media post was ‘hidden,’ but somehow discovered late Tuesday night.
Nevertheless, this is a credible date that the company is working toward. Following the fueling test on Sunday night at the company’s Starbase site in South Texas, the hardware appears to be in good shape. Although SpaceX has yet to receive its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency recently announced that it has closed its investigation into the second Starship test flight in November. So a mid-March launch date is plausible from a regulatory standpoint.
The first two Starship flights in April and November last year ultimately failed, but each of the experimental launches provided valuable data. On the second mission four months ago, the first-stage Super Heavy booster performed a nominal flight before it separated from the Starship upper stage. The Starship vehicle exploded a few minutes into its flight due to a leak during a liquid oxygen vent.
Based upon learnings from these first two flights, this next mission, with upgraded hardware and flight software, likely has a reasonable chance of success. Among the milestones SpaceX will seek to complete during this test flight are:
Nominal first-stage performance, followed by a controlled descent of the Super Heavy booster into the Gulf of Mexico
Starship separation from the first stage using “hot staging,” meaning engine ignition while the first stage is still firing its engines
Starship reaching an orbital velocity and engine shutdown
Early-stage testing of in-space refueling technology inside the propellant tanks of Starship
Controlled splashdown of Starship near the Hawaiian islands after flying around two-thirds of the planet.
SpaceX is seeking to demonstrate the basic flight capabilities of Starship so that it can move into a more operational phase with the big rocket. The company wants to begin deploying larger Starlink satellites from the vehicle this year, which will enable direct-to-cell phone Internet connectivity.
Additionally, a higher cadence of missions will allow the company to begin developing the technology and procedures needed for the in-space storage and transfer of propellant for deep-space missions. This is a necessary step for SpaceX to fulfill its obligations to NASA for the Artemis program, which seeks to return humans to the Moon later this decade.
In a recent update, the company said more Starships are ready for flight, so a higher cadence is possible if this month’s flight is a success. Recently, the Federal Aviation Administration disclosed that SpaceX is seeking to launch Starship at least nine times this year.
Enlarge/ A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket streaks into orbit Sunday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, ferrying a crew of four to the International Space Station.
Between Sunday night and Monday night, SpaceX teams in Texas, Florida, and California supervised three Falcon 9 rocket launches and completed a full dress rehearsal ahead of the next flight of the company’s giant Starship launch vehicle.
This was a remarkable sequence of events, even for SpaceX, which has launched a mission at an average rate of once every three days since the start of the year. We’ve reported on this before, but it’s worth reinforcing that no launch provider, commercial or government, has ever operated at this cadence.
SpaceX has previously had rockets on all four of its active launch pads. But what SpaceX accomplished over a 24-hour period was noteworthy. Engineers inside at least four control centers were actively overseeing spacecraft and rocket operations simultaneously.
The sprawl of SpaceX
On Sunday night at the Starbase facility in South Texas, teams loaded more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) Starship rocket slated to lift off as soon as this month on the third full-scale test flight of SpaceX’s next-generation launcher.
This was likely the final major test before SpaceX launches the third Starship test flight. The countdown rehearsal of the fully stacked rocket ended as planned at T-minus 10 seconds, just before the booster’s Raptor engines were ignited; SpaceX then drained the vehicle of propellant. SpaceX previously test-fired the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage separately.
The schedule for the next Starship launch hinges on approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is reviewing SpaceX’s actions to correct the malfunctions that occurred on the second Starship test flight in November. Last week, the FAA announced it closed its investigation into the second Starship test flight, which was largely successful in demonstrating significant progress on SpaceX’s privately funded rocket program. But the test flight ended with explosions of the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, prompting an FAA investigation.
On the next Starship flight, SpaceX wants to perform some early-stage testing of the in-space refueling technology it will need for later Starship flights, such as missions to the Moon for NASA.
Enlarge/ SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket undergo a countdown rehearsal Sunday night in South Texas.
At the same time that SpaceX’s team in Texas managed the Starship countdown rehearsal, another group of engineers and technicians on Florida’s Space Coast stepped through a Falcon 9 launch countdown Sunday night. Three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut strapped into their seats on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on top of the Falcon 9 rocket, then waited for liftoff from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 10: 53 pm EST Sunday (03: 53 UTC Monday).
The Falcon 9 launch of NASA’s Crew-8 mission Sunday night was the first of three Falcon 9 launches over the next 20 hours. Next in line was a launch at 5: 05 pm EST (2205 UTC) Monday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with 53 small payloads on SpaceX’s 10th Transporter rideshare mission. The customer payloads on this Falcon 9 launch included MethaneSAT, an $88 million satellite funded primarily by philanthropic donations to monitor methane greenhouse gas emissions around the world.
Then, less than two hours later, at 6: 56 pm EST (2356 UTC), a Falcon 9 rocket took off from SpaceX’s most active launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This mission delivered 23 more Starlink broadband satellites into orbit for SpaceX’s commercial Internet network. At 1 hour and 51 minutes, this was the shortest time separation to date between two SpaceX launches.
All three Falcon 9 launches ended with landings of the rockets’ first-stage boosters.
Enlarge/ A view of 53 small satellite payloads before encapsulation into the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing, ahead of liftoff on the Transporter 10 rideshare mission.
While controllers at Starbase, Cape Canaveral, and Vandenberg looked after these three Falcon 9 launches, SpaceX engineers at the company’s headquarters near Los Angeles tracked the performance and progress of the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station, where it docked early Tuesday. Next week, another SpaceX capsule, Crew Dragon Endurance, will depart the station to bring a different four-person crew back to Earth.
SpaceX, which now has more than 13,000 employees, pulled off a similar rapid-fire launch cadence in mid-February with three Falcon 9 launches in approximately 23 hours, but this time included the additional complexity of operating a Dragon crew capsule en route to the ISS, plus the Starship countdown in Texas. While all this was going on, a handful of ground controllers also monitored the health of the Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the space station.
Enlarge/ This image from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument shows a portion of the GOODS-North field of galaxies.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.
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 March 5, and today’s image comes from the James Webb Space Telescope.
It’s a new deep-field image from the infrared space telescope, showcasing a portion of the “Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey” region of space that has previously been observed by other space telescopes, including Hubble and Chandra. Almost everything in this image that doesn’t have lines emanating from it is a galaxy.
Such deep field images are poetic in that they’re just showing a tiny fraction of a sky—the width of this image is significantly less than a single degree of the night sky—and yet they reveal a universe teeming with galaxies. We live in a cosmos that is almost incomprehensibly large.
If you click through to the Webb telescope site you will find an annotated image that highlights a galaxy in the far lower-right corner. It is galaxy GN-z11, seen at a time just 430 million years after the Big Bang.
