Space – Page 4

The key moment came 38 minutes after Starship roared off the launch pad

Donald Trump, elon musk, Features, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, Starship Flight 6, super heavy, texas, US Space Force / Tim Belzer / November 20, 2024

SpaceX wasn’t able to catch the Super Heavy booster, but Starship is on the cusp of orbital flight.

The sixth flight of Starship lifts off from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at Boca Chica Beach, Texas. Credit: SpaceX.

SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger, upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight.

The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13. The Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world, reaching an altitude of 118 miles (190 kilometers) before plunging through the atmosphere for a pinpoint slow-speed splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The sixth flight of the world’s largest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—began with a lumbering liftoff from SpaceX’s Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border at 4 pm CST (22: 00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico, propelled by 33 Raptor engines clustered on the bottom of its Super Heavy first stage.

A few miles away, President-elect Donald Trump joined SpaceX founder Elon Musk to witness the launch. The SpaceX boss became one of Trump’s closest allies in this year’s presidential election, giving the world’s richest man extraordinary influence in US space policy. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was there, too, among other lawmakers. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top commander in the US Space Force, stood nearby, chatting with Trump and other VIPs.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, President-elect Donald Trump, and Gen. Chance Saltzman of the US Space Force watch the sixth launch of Starship Tuesday. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

From their viewing platform, they watched Starship climb into a clear autumn sky. At full power, the 33 Raptors chugged more than 40,000 pounds of super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen per second. The engines generated 16.7 million pounds of thrust, 60 percent more than the Soviet N1, the second-largest rocket in history.

Eight minutes later, the rocket’s upper stage, itself also known as Starship, was in space, completing the program’s fourth straight near-flawless launch. The first two test flights faltered before reaching their planned trajectory.

A brief but crucial demo

As exciting as it was, we’ve seen all that before. One of the most important new things engineers wanted to test on this flight occurred about 38 minutes after liftoff.

That’s when Starship reignited one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn to make a slight adjustment to its flight path. The burn lasted only a few seconds, and the impulse was small—just a 48 mph (77 km/hour) change in velocity, or delta-V—but it demonstrated that the ship can safely deorbit itself on future missions.

With this achievement, Starship will likely soon be cleared to travel into orbit around Earth and deploy Starlink Internet satellites or conduct in-space refueling experiments, two of the near-term objectives on SpaceX’s Starship development roadmap.

Launching Starlinks aboard Starship will allow SpaceX to expand the capacity and reach of its commercial consumer broadband network, which, in turn, provides revenue for Musk to reinvest into Starship. Orbital refueling enables Starship voyages beyond low-Earth orbit, fulfilling SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract with NASA to provide a human-rated Moon lander for the agency’s Artemis program. Likewise, transferring cryogenic propellants in orbit is a prerequisite for sending Starships to Mars, making real Musk’s dream of creating a settlement on the red planet.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

Until now, SpaceX has intentionally launched Starships to speeds just shy of the blistering velocities needed to maintain orbit. Engineers wanted to test the Raptor’s ability to reignite in space on the third Starship test flight in March, but the ship lost control of its orientation, and SpaceX canceled the engine firing.

Before going for a full orbital flight, officials needed to confirm that Starship could steer itself back into the atmosphere for reentry, ensuring it wouldn’t present any risk to the public with an unguided descent over a populated area. After Tuesday, SpaceX can check this off its to-do list.

“Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X. “Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight. Starship’s success is Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”

While it lacks the pizzazz of a fiery launch or landing, the engine relight unlocks a new phase of Starship development. SpaceX has now proven that the rocket is capable of reaching space with a fair measure of reliability. Next, engineers will fine-tune how to reliably recover the booster and the ship and learn how to use them.

Acid test

SpaceX appears well on its way to doing this. While SpaceX didn’t catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower’s mechanical arms Tuesday, engineers have shown they can do it. The challenge of catching Starship itself back at the launch pad is more daunting. The ship starts its reentry thousands of miles from Starbase, traveling approximately 17,000 mph (27,000 km/hour), and must thread the gap between the tower’s catch arms within a matter of inches.

The good news is that SpaceX has now twice proven it can bring Starship back to a precision splashdown in the Indian Ocean. In October, the ship settled into the sea in darkness. SpaceX moved the launch time for Tuesday’s flight to the late afternoon, setting up for splashdown shortly after sunrise northwest of Australia.

The shift in time paid off with some stunning new visuals. Cameras mounted on the outside of Starship beamed dazzling live views back to SpaceX through the Starlink network, showing a now-familiar glow of plasma encasing the spacecraft as it plowed deeper into the atmosphere. But this time, daylight revealed the ship’s flaps moving to control its belly-first descent toward the ocean. After passing through a deck of low clouds, Starship reignited its Raptor engines and tilted from horizontal to vertical, making contact with the water tail-first within view of a floating buoy and a nearby aircraft in position to observe the moment.

Here’s a replay of the spacecraft’s splashdown around 65 minutes after launch.

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting sixth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/bf98Va9qmL

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 19, 2024

The ship made it through reentry despite flying with a substandard heat shield. Starship’s thermal protection system is made up of thousands of ceramic tiles to protect the ship from temperatures as high as 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).

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

“Don’t be surprised if we see some wackadoodle stuff happen here,” Tice said. There was nothing of the sort. One of the ship’s flaps appeared to suffer some heating damage, but it remained intact and functional, and the harm looked to be less substantial than damage seen on previous flights.

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

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

Musk wrote on his social media platform X that SpaceX could try to bring Starship back to Starbase for a catch on the eighth test flight, which is likely to occur in the first half of 2025.

“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk said. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”

The heat shield, Musk added, is a focal point of SpaceX’s attention. The delicate heat-absorbing tiles used on the belly of the space shuttle proved vexing to NASA technicians. Early in the shuttle’s development, NASA had trouble keeping tiles adhered to the shuttle’s aluminum skin. Each of the shuttle tiles was custom-machined to fit on a specific location on the orbiter, complicating refurbishment between flights. Starship’s tiles are all hexagonal in shape and agnostic to where technicians place them on the vehicle.

“The biggest technology challenge remaining for Starship is a fully & immediately reusable heat shield,” Musk wrote on X. “Being able to land the ship, refill propellant & launch right away with no refurbishment or laborious inspection. That is the acid test.”

This photo of the Starship vehicle for Flight 6, numbered Ship 31, shows exposed portions of the vehicle’s stainless steel skin after tile removal. Credit: SpaceX

There were no details available Tuesday night on what caused the Super Heavy booster to divert from its planned catch on the launch tower. After detaching from the Starship upper stage less than three minutes into the flight, the booster reversed course to begin the journey back to Starbase.

Then SpaceX’s flight director announced the rocket would fly itself into the Gulf rather than back to the launch site: “Booster offshore divert.”

The booster finished its descent with a seemingly perfect landing burn using a subset of its Raptor engines. As expected after the water landing, the booster—itself 233 feet (71 meters) tall—toppled and broke apart in a dramatic fireball visible to onshore spectators.

In an update posted to its website after the launch, SpaceX said automated health checks of hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered the aborted catch attempt. The company did not say what system failed the health check. As a safety measure, SpaceX must send a manual command for the booster to come back to land in order to prevent a malfunction from endangering people or property.

Turning it up to 11

There will be plenty more opportunities for more booster catches in the coming months as SpaceX ramps up its launch cadence at Starbase. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, hinted at the scale of the company’s ambitions last week.

“We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” she said at the Barron Investment Conference.

The next batch of test flights will use an improved version of Starship designated Block 2, or V2. Starship Block 2 comes with larger propellant tanks, redesigned forward flaps, and a better heat shield.

The new-generation Starship will hold more than 11 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer, about a million pounds more than the capacity of Starship Block 1. The booster and ship will produce more thrust, and Block 2 will measure 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, stretching the height of the full stack by a little more than 10 feet.

Put together, these modifications should give Starship the ability to heave a payload of up to 220,000 pounds (100 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit, about twice the carrying capacity of the first-generation ship. Further down the line, SpaceX plans to introduce Starship Block 3 to again double the ship’s payload capacity.

Just as importantly, these changes are designed to make it easier for SpaceX to recover and reuse the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage. SpaceX’s goal of fielding a fully reusable launcher builds on the partial reuse SpaceX pioneered with its Falcon 9 rocket. This should dramatically bring down launch costs, according to SpaceX’s vision.

With Tuesday’s flight, it’s clear Starship works. Now it’s time to see what it can do.

Updated with additional details, quotes, and images.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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The ISS has been leaking air for 5 years, and engineers still don’t know why

human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, roscosmos, russia, Science, Space / Mike M. / November 18, 2024

“The station is not young,” said Michael Barratt, a NASA astronaut who returned from the space station last month. “It’s been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we’re seeing that.”

“The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are,” said Cabana, who was the senior civil servant at NASA until his retirement in 2023. “And the US believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove that to the Russian satisfaction that that’s the case.

“So while the Russian team continues to search for and seal the leaks, it does not believe catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic,” Cabana said. “And NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure.”

Closing the PrK hatch permanently would eliminate the use of one of the space station’s four Russian docking ports.

NASA has chartered a team of independent experts to assess the cracks and leaks and help determine the root cause, Cabana said. “This is an engineering problem, and good engineers should be able to agree on it.”

As a precaution, Barratt said space station crews are also closing the hatch separating the US and Russian sections of the space station when cosmonauts are working in the PrK.

“The way it’s affected us, mostly, is as they go in and open that to unload a cargo vehicle that’s docked to it, they’ve also taken time to inspect and try to repair when they can,” Barratt said. “We’ve taken a very conservative approach to closing the hatch between the US side and the Russian side for those time periods.

“It’s not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides, and it’s something that we as a crew live with and adapt.”

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A lot of people are mistaking Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites for UAPs

elon musk, military space, Science, Space, spacex, starlink, UAP / Kris Guyer / November 15, 2024

That’s just Elon

But many UAP cases have verifiable explanations as airplanes, drones, or satellites, and lawmakers argue AARO might be able to solve more of the cases with more funding.

Airspace is busier than ever with air travel and consumer drones. More satellites are zooming around the planet as government agencies and companies like SpaceX deploy their constellations for Internet connectivity and surveillance. There’s more stuff up there to see.

“AARO increasingly receives cases that it is able to resolve to the Starlink satellite constellation,” the office said in this year’s annual report.

“For example, a commercial pilot reported white flashing lights in the night sky,” AARO said. “The pilot did not report an altitude or speed, and no data or imagery was recorded. AARO assessed that this sighting of flashing lights correlated with a Starlink satellite launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the same evening about one hour prior to the sighting.”

Jon Kosloski, director of AARO, said officials compared the parameters of these sightings with Starlink launches. When SpaceX releases Starlink satellites in orbit, the spacecraft are initially clustered together and reflect more sunlight down to Earth. This makes the satellites easier to see during twilight hours before they raise their orbits and become dimmer.

“We found some of those correlations in time, the direction that they were looking, and the location,” Kosloski said. “And we were able to assess that they were all in those cases looking at Starlink flares.”

SpaceX has more than 6,600 Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit, more than half of all active spacecraft. Thousands more satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper broadband constellation and Chinese Internet network are slated to launch in the next few years.

“AARO is investigating if other unresolved cases may be attributed to the expansion of the Starlink and other mega-constellations in low-Earth orbit,” the report said.

The Starlink network is still relatively new. SpaceX launched the first Starlinks five years ago. Kosloski said he expects the number of erroneous UAP reports caused by satellites to go down as pilots and others understand what the Starlinks look like.

“It looks interesting and potentially anomalous. But we can model that, and we can show pilots what that anomaly looks like, so that that doesn’t get reported to us necessarily,” Kosloski said.

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As ABL Space departs launch, the 1-ton rocket wars have a clear winner

Science, Space / Tim Belzer / November 15, 2024

“Take a look around,” Piemont wrote. “US rockets fly every couple of days, with perfect success. It’s revolutionary. While there is still a need for more providers in certain market segments, those opportunities are decreasing. To succeed in such a demanding effort as scaling up an orbital launch program, you need deep motivation around your mission and potential impact, from many stakeholders. As the launch market matured, those motivations thinned and our path to making a big contribution as a commercial launch company narrowed considerably.”

Over the last half decade or so, three US companies have credibly vied to develop rockets in the 1-ton class in terms of lift capacity. ABL has been competing alongside Relativity Space and Firefly to bring its rockets to market. ABL never took off. In March 2023, Relativity reached space with the Terran 1 rocket, but, due to second-stage issues, failed to reach orbit. Within weeks, Relativity announced it was shifting its focus to a medium-lift rocket, Terran R. Since then, the California-based launch company has moved along, but there are persistent rumors that it faces a cash crunch.

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

Focusing on defense

Just as Relativity pivoted away from this class of rocket, ABL will now also shift its focus—this time in an even more radical direction.

US Defense spending on missile production and defense has skyrocketed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and ABL will now seek to tap into this potentially lucrative market.

“We have made the decision to focus our efforts on national defense, and specifically on missile defense technologies,” Piemont said. “We’ll have more to share soon on our roadmap and traction in this area. For now, suffice to say we see considerable opportunity to leverage RS1, GS0, the E2 engine, and the rest of the technology we’ve developed to date to enable a new type of research effort around missile defense technologies.”

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Firefly Aerospace rakes in more cash as competitors struggle for footing

alpha, Commercial space, Firefly Aerospace, launch, medium launch vehicle, Science, Space / Paul Patrick / November 13, 2024

More than just one thing

Firefly’s majority owner is the private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, and the Series D funding round was led by Michigan-based RPM Ventures.

“Few companies can say they’ve defined a new category in their industry—Firefly is one of those,” said Marc Weiser, a managing director at RPM Ventures. “They have captured their niche in the market as a full service provider for responsive space missions and have become the pinnacle of what a modern space and defense technology company looks like.”

This descriptor—a full service provider—is what differentiates Firefly from most other space companies. Firefly’s crosscutting work in small and medium launch vehicles, rocket engines, lunar landers, and in-space propulsion propels it into a club of wide-ranging commercial space companies that, arguably, only includes SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab.

NASA has awarded Firefly three task orders under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Firefly will soon ship its first Blue Ghost lunar lander to Florida for final preparations to launch to the Moon and deliver 10 NASA-sponsored scientific instruments and tech demo experiments to the lunar surface. NASA has a contract with Firefly for a second Blue Ghost mission, plus an agreement for Firefly to transport a European data relay satellite to lunar orbit.

Firefly also boasts a healthy backlog of missions on its Alpha rocket. In June, Lockheed Martin announced a deal for as many as 25 Alpha launches through 2029. Two months later, L3Harris inked a contract with Firefly for up to 20 Alpha launches. Firefly has also signed Alpha launch contracts with NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Space Force, and the National Reconnaissance Office. One of these Alpha launches will deploy Firefly’s first orbital transfer vehicle, named Elytra, designed to host customer payloads and transport them to different orbits following separation from the launcher’s upper stage.

And there’s the Medium Launch Vehicle, a rocket Firefly and Northrop Grumman hope to launch as soon as 2026. But first, the companies will fly an MLV booster stage with seven kerosene-fueled Miranda engines on a new version of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket for cargo deliveries to the International Space Station. Northrop Grumman has retired the previous version of Antares after losing access to Russian rocket engines in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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For the second time this year, NASA’s JPL center cuts its workforce

Science, Space / Mike M. / November 12, 2024

“This reduction is spread across essentially all areas of the Lab including our technical, project, business, and support areas,” Leshin wrote. “We have taken seriously the need to re-size our workforce, whether direct-funded (project) or funded on overhead (burden). With lower budgets and based on the forecasted work ahead, we had to tighten our belts across the board, and you will see that reflected in the layoff impacts.”

This year’s employee cuts came after NASA decided to consider alternatives to a multibillion-dollar plan to return samples from Mars to Earth, which had been led by JPL. In September 2023 an independent review team found that the JPL plan was unworkable and would cost $8 billion to $11 billion to be successful.

A changing environment

While NASA considers alternatives from other field centers, as well as private companies such as SpaceX and Rocket Lab, the budget for Mars Sample Return was slashed from nearly $1 billion for this fiscal year to less than $300 million. Additionally, there is no guarantee that JPL will be given leadership of a revamped Mars Sample Return mission.

The staffing cuts reflect the fact that after the recent launch of the $5 billion Europa Clipper mission, JPL is not managing another flagship deep-space mission at present. Another sizable mission, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, is almost ready for a launch next year from India. The California laboratory has smaller projects, but nothing on the order of a flagship mission to command a large budget and support a very large staff.

JPL has a long and storied history, including the management of most of NASA’s highest-profile planetary probes, including the Voyagers, Mars landers, and Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. However in recent years other spaceflight centers, such as Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and private companies such as Lockheed have competed for projects and delivered results.

The job of Leshin and others at NASA is to ensure that JPL has a bright future in a changing world of planetary exploration. This week’s cuts will ensure such a future, Leshin wrote, adding: “We are an incredibly strong organization—our dazzling history, current achievements, and relentless commitment to exploration and discovery position us well for the future.”

For the second time this year, NASA’s JPL center cuts its workforce Read More »

There are some things the Crew-8 astronauts aren’t ready to talk about

astronauts, Crew-8, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, spacex / Tim Belzer / November 11, 2024

“I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it. I said we’re not going to talk about it.”

NASA astronaut Michael Barratt works with a spacesuit inside the Quest airlock of the International Space Station on May 31. Credit: NASA

The astronauts who came home from the International Space Station last month experienced some drama on the high frontier, and some of it accompanied them back to Earth.

In orbit, the astronauts aborted two spacewalks, both under unusual circumstances. Then, on October 25, one of the astronauts was hospitalized due to what NASA called an unspecified “medical issue” after splashdown aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that concluded the 235-day mission. After an overnight stay in a hospital in Florida, NASA said the astronaut was released “in good health” and returned to their home base in Houston to resume normal post-flight activities.

The space agency did not identify the astronaut or any details about their condition, citing medical privacy concerns. The three NASA astronauts on the Dragon spacecraft included commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, and mission specialist Jeanette Epps. Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin accompanied the three NASA crew members. Russia’s space agency confirmed he was not hospitalized after returning to Earth.

Dominick, Barratt, and Epps answered media questions in a post-flight press conference Friday, but they did not offer more information on the medical issue or say who experienced it. NASA initially sent all four crew members to the hospital in Pensacola, Florida, for evaluation, but Grebenkin and two of the NASA astronauts were quickly released and cleared to return to Houston. One astronaut remained behind until the next day.

“Spaceflight is still something we don’t fully understand,” said Barratt, a medical doctor and flight surgeon. “We’re finding things that we don’t expect sometimes. This was one of those times, and we’re still piecing things together on this, and so to maintain medical privacy and to let our processes go forward in an orderly manner, this is all we’re going to say about that event at this time.”

NASA typically makes astronaut health data available to outside researchers, who regularly publish papers while withholding identifying information about crew members. NASA officials often tout gaining knowledge about the human body’s response to spaceflight as one of the main purposes of the International Space Station. The agency is subject to federal laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, restricting the release of private medical information.

“I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it,” Barratt said. “I said we’re not going to talk about it. I’m a medical doctor. Space medicine is my passion … and how we adapt, how we experience human spaceflight is something that we all take very seriously.”

Maybe some day

Barratt said NASA will release more information about the astronaut’s post-flight medical issue “in the fullness of time.” This was Barratt’s third trip to space and the first spaceflight for Dominick and Epps.

One of the most famous incidents involving hospitalized astronauts was in 1975, before the passage of the HIPAA medical privacy law, when NASA astronauts Thomas Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand stayed at a military hospital in Hawaii nearly two weeks after inhaling toxic propellant fumes that accidentally entered their spacecraft’s internal cabin as it descended under parachutes. They were returning to Earth at the end of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, in which they docked their Apollo command module to a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit.

NASA’s view—and perhaps the public’s, too—of medical privacy has changed in the nearly 50 years since. On that occasion, NASA disclosed that the astronauts suffered from lung irritation, and officials said Brand briefly passed out from the fumes after splashdown, remaining unconscious until his crewmates fitted an oxygen mask tightly over his face. NASA and the military also made doctors available to answer media questions about their condition.

The medical concern after splashdown last month was not the only part of the Crew-8 mission that remains shrouded in mystery. Dominick and NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson were supposed to go outside the International Space Station for a spacewalk June 13, but NASA called off the excursion, citing a “spacesuit discomfort issue.” NASA replaced Dominick with Barratt and rescheduled the spacewalk for June 24 to retrieve a faulty electronics box and collect microbial samples from the exterior of the space station. But that excursion ended after just 31 minutes, when Dyson reported a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of her spacesuit.

While Barratt discussed the water leak in some detail Friday, Dominick declined to answer a question from Ars regarding the suit discomfort issue. “We’re still reviewing and trying to figure all the details,” he said.

Aging suits

Regarding the water leak, Barratt said he and Dyson noticed her suit had a “spewing umbilical, which was quite dramatic, actually.” The decision to abandon the spacewalk was a “no-brainer,” he said.

“It was not a trivial leak, and we’ve got footage,” Barratt said. “Anybody who was watching NASA TV at the time could see there was basically a snowstorm, a blizzard, spewing from the airlock because we already had the hatch open. So we were seeing flakes of ice in the airlock, and Tracy was seeing a lot of them on her helmet, on her gloves, and whatnot. Dramatic is the right word, to be real honest.”

Dyson, who came back to Earth in September on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, reconnected the leaking umbilical with her gloves and helmet covered with ice, with restricted vision. “Tracy’s actions were nowhere short of heroic,” Barratt said.

Once the leak stabilized, the astronauts closed the hatch and began repressurizing the airlock.

“Getting the airlock closed was kind of me grabbing her legs and using her as an end effector to lever that thing closed, and she just made it happen,” Barratt said. “So, yeah, there was this drama. Everything worked out fine. Again, normal processes and procedures saved our bacon.”

Barratt said the leak wasn’t caused by any procedural error as the astronauts prepared their suits for the spacewalk.

“It was definitely a hardware issue,” he said. “There was a little poppet valve on the interface that didn’t quite seat, so really, the question became why didn’t that seat? We solved that problem by changing out the whole umbilical.”

By then, NASA’s attention on the space station had turned to other tasks, such as experiments, the arrival of a new cargo ship, and testing of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule docked at the complex, before it ultimately departed and left its crew behind. The spacewalk wasn’t urgent, so it had to wait. NASA now plans to attempt the spacewalk again as soon as January with a different set of astronauts.

Barratt thinks the spacesuits on the space station are good to go for the next spacewalk. However, the suits are decades old, and their original designs date back more than 40 years, when NASA developed the units for use on the space shuttle. Efforts to develop a replacement suit for use in low-Earth orbit have stalled. In June, Collins Aerospace dropped out of a NASA contract to build new spacesuits for servicing the International Space Station and future orbiting research outposts.

“None of our spacesuits are spring chickens, so we will expect to see some hardware issues with repeated use and not really upgrading,” Barratt said.

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Russia: Fine, I guess we should have a Grasshopper rocket project, too

Science, Space, Uncategorized / Tim Belzer / November 11, 2024

Like a lot of competitors in the global launch industry, Russia for a long time dismissed the prospects of a reusable first stage for a rocket.

As late as 2016, an official with the Russian agency that develops strategy for the country’s main space corporation, Roscosmos, concluded, “The economic feasibility of reusable launch systems is not obvious.” In the dismissal of the landing prospects of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, Russian officials were not alone. Throughout the 2010s, competitors including space agencies in Europe and Japan, and US-based United Launch Alliance, all decided to develop expendable rockets.

However, by 2017, when SpaceX re-flew a Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, the writing was on the wall. “This is a very important step, we sincerely congratulate our colleague on this achievement,” then-Roscosmos CEO Igor Komarov said at the time. He even spoke of developing reusable components, such as rocket engines capable of multiple firings.

A Russian Grasshopper

That was more than seven years ago, however, and not much has happened in Russia since then to foster the development of a reusable rocket vehicle. Yes, Roscosmos unveiled plans for the “Amur” rocket in 2020, which was intended to have a reusable first stage and methane-fueled engines and land like the Falcon 9. But its debut has slipped year for year—originally intended to fly in 2026, its first launch is now expected no earlier than 2030.

Now, however, there is some interesting news from Moscow about plans to develop a prototype vehicle to test the ability to land the Amur rocket’s first stage vertically.

According to the state-run news agency, TASS, construction of this test vehicle will enable the space corporation to solve key challenges. “Next year preparation of an experimental stage of the (Amur) rocket, which everyone is calling ‘Grasshopper,’ will begin,” said Igor Pshenichnikov, the Roscosmos deputy director of the department of future programs. The Russian news article was translated for Ars by Rob Mitchell.

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Rocket Report: Australia says yes to the launch; Russia delivers for Iran

australia, china, dragon, european space agency, falcon 9, Gilmour space, h3 rocket, international space station, launch, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, soyuz, Space, spacex, starship, Themis / Paul Patrick / November 9, 2024

The world’s first wooden satellite arrived at the International Space Station this week.

A Falcon 9 booster fires its engines on SpaceX’s “tripod” test stand in McGregor, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.19 of the Rocket Report! Okay, we get it. We received more submissions from our readers on Australia’s approval of a launch permit for Gilmour Space than we’ve received on any other news story in recent memory. Thank you for your submissions as global rocket activity continues apace. We’ll cover Gilmour in more detail as they get closer to launch. There will be no Rocket Report next week as Eric and I join the rest of the Ars team for our 2024 Technicon in New York.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.

Gilmour Space has a permit to fly. Gilmour Space Technologies has been granted a permit to launch its 82-foot-tall (25-meter) orbital rocket from a spaceport in Queensland, Australia. The space company, founded in 2012, had initially planned to lift off in March but was unable to do so without approval from the Australian Space Agency, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. The government approved Gilmour’s launch permit Monday, although the company is still weeks away from flying its three-stage Eris rocket.

A first for Australia … Australia hosted a handful of satellite launches with US and British rockets from 1967 through 1971, but Gilmour’s Eris rocket would become the first all-Australian launch vehicle to reach orbit. The Eris rocket is capable of delivering about 670 pounds (305 kilograms) of payload mass into a Sun-synchronous orbit. Eris will be powered by hybrid rocket engines burning a solid fuel mixed with a liquid oxidizer, making it unique among orbital-class rockets. Gilmour completed a wet dress rehearsal, or practice countdown, with the Eris rocket on the launch pad in Queensland in September. The launch permit becomes active after 30 days, or the first week of December. “We do think we’ve got a good chance of launching at the end of the 30-day period, and we’re going to give it a red hot go,” said Adam Gilmour, the company’s co-founder and CEO. (submitted by Marzipan, mryall, ZygP, Ken the Bin, Spencer Willis, MarkW98, and EllPeaTea)

North Korea tests new missile. North Korea apparently completed a successful test of its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile on October 31, lofting it nearly 4,800 miles (7,700 kilometers) into space before the projectile fell back to Earth, Ars reports. This solid-fueled, multi-stage missile, named the Hwasong-19, is a new tool in North Korea’s increasingly sophisticated arsenal of weapons. It has enough range—perhaps as much as 9,320 miles (15,000 kilometers), according to Japan’s government—to strike targets anywhere in the United States. It also happens to be one of the largest ICBMs in the world, rivaling the missiles fielded by the world’s more established nuclear powers.

Quid pro quo? … The Hwasong-19 missile test comes as North Korea deploys some 10,000 troops inside Russia to support the country’s war against Ukraine. The budding partnership between Russia and North Korea has evolved for several years. Russian President Vladimir Putin has met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on multiple occasions, most recently in Pyongyang in June. This has fueled speculation about what Russia is offering North Korea in exchange for the troops deployed on Russian soil. US and South Korean officials have some thoughts. They said North Korea is likely to ask for technology transfers in diverse areas related to tactical nuclear weapons, ICBMs, and reconnaissance satellites.

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Virgin Galactic is on the hunt for cash. Virgin Galactic is proposing to raise $300 million in additional capital to accelerate production of suborbital spaceplanes and a mothership aircraft the company says can fuel its long-term growth, Space News reports. The company, founded by billionaire Richard Branson, suspended operations of its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane earlier this year. VSS Unity hit a monthly flight cadence carrying small groups of space tourists and researchers to the edge of space, but it just wasn’t profitable. Now, Virgin Galactic is developing larger Delta-class spaceplanes it says will be easier and cheaper to turn around between flights.

All-in with Delta … Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic’s CEO, announced the company’s appetite for fundraising in a quarterly earnings call with investment analysts Wednesday. He said manufacturing of components for Virgin Galactic’s first two Delta-class ships, which the company says it can fund with existing cash, is proceeding on schedule at a factory in Arizona. Virgin Galactic previously said it would use revenue from paying passengers on its first two Delta-class ships to pay for development of future vehicles. Instead, Virgin Galactic now says it wants to raise money to speed up work on the third and fourth Delta-class vehicles, along with a second airplane mothership to carry the spaceplanes aloft before they release and fire into space. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

ESA breaks its silence on Themis. The European Space Agency has provided a rare update on the progress of its Themis reusable booster demonstrator project, European Spaceflight reports. ESA is developing the Themis test vehicle for atmospheric flights to fine-tune technologies for a future European reusable rocket capable of vertical takeoffs and vertical landings. Themis started out as a project led by CNES, the French space agency, in 2018. ESA member states signed up to help fund the project in 2019, and the agency awarded ArianeGroup a contract to move forward with Themis in 2020. At the time, the first low-altitude hop test was expected to take place in 2022.

Some slow progress … Now, the first low-altitude hop is scheduled for 2025 from Esrange Space Centre in Sweden, a three-year delay. This week, ESA said engineers have completed testing of the Themis vehicle’s main systems, and assembly of the demonstrator is underway in France. A single methane-fueled Prometheus engine, also developed by ArianeGroup, has been installed on the rocket. Teams are currently adding avionics, computers, electrical systems, and cable harnesses. Themis’ stainless steel propellant tanks have been manufactured, tested, and cleaned and are now ready to be installed on the Themis demonstrator. Then, the rocket will travel by road from France to the test site in Sweden for its initial low-altitude hops. After those flights are complete, officials plan to add two more Prometheus engines to the rocket and ship it to French Guiana for high-altitude test flights. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

SpaceX will give the ISS a boost. A Cargo Dragon spacecraft docked to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning, less than a day after lifting off from Florida. As space missions go, this one is fairly routine, ferrying about 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of cargo and science experiments to the space station. One thing that’s different about this mission is that it delivered to the station a tiny 2 lb (900 g) satellite named LignoSat, the first spacecraft made of wood, for later release outside the research complex. There is one more characteristic of this flight that may prove significant for NASA and the future of the space station, Ars reports. As early as Friday, NASA and SpaceX have scheduled a “reboost and attitude control demonstration,” during which the Dragon spacecraft will use some of the thrusters at the base of the capsule. This is the first time the Dragon spacecraft will be used to move the space station.

Dragon’s breath … Dragon will fire a subset of its 16 Draco thrusters, each with about 90 pounds of thrust, for approximately 12.5 minutes to make a slight adjustment to the orbital trajectory of the roughly 450-ton space station. SpaceX and NASA engineers will analyze the results from the demonstration to determine if Dragon could be used for future space station reboost opportunities. The data will also inform the design of the US Deorbit Vehicle, which SpaceX is developing to perform the maneuvers required to bring the space station back to Earth for a controlled, destructive reentry in the early 2030s. For NASA, demonstrating Dragon’s ability to move the space station will be another step toward breaking free of reliance on Russia, which is currently responsible for providing propulsion to maneuver the orbiting outpost. Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus supply ship also previously demonstrated a reboost capability. (submitted by Ken the Bin and N35t0r)

Russia launches Soyuz in service of Iran. Russia launched a Soyuz rocket Monday carrying two satellites designed to monitor the space weather around Earth and 53 small satellites, including two Iranian ones, Reuters reports. The primary payloads aboard the Soyuz-2.1b rocket were two Ionosfera-M satellites to probe the ionosphere, an outer layer of the atmosphere near the edge of space. Solar activity can alter conditions in the ionosphere, impacting communications and navigation. The two Iranian satellites on this mission were named Kowsar and Hodhod. They will collect high-resolution reconnaissance imagery and support communications for Iran.

A distant third … This was only the 13th orbital launch by Russia this year, trailing far behind the United States and China. We know of two more Soyuz flights planned for later this month, but no more, barring a surprise military launch (which is possible). The projected launch rate puts Russia on pace for its quietest year of launch activity since 1961, the year Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space. A major reason for this decline in launches is the decisions of Western governments and companies to move their payloads off of Russian rockets after the invasion of Ukraine. For example, OneWeb stopped launching on Soyuz in 2022, and the European Space Agency suspended its partnership with Russia to launch Soyuz rockets from French Guiana. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

H3 deploys Japanese national security satellite. Japan launched a defense satellite Monday aimed at speedier military operations and communication on an H3 rocket and successfully placed it into orbit, the Associated Press reports. The Kirameki 3 satellite will use high-speed X-band communication to support Japan’s defense ministry with information and data sharing, and command and control services. The satellite will serve Japanese land, air, and naval forces from its perch in geostationary orbit alongside two other Kirameki communications satellites.

Gaining trust … The H3 is Japan’s new flagship rocket, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) and funded by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The launch of Kirameki 3 marked the third consecutive successful launch of the H3 rocket, following a debut flight in March 2023 that failed to reach orbit. This was the first time Japan’s defense ministry put one of its satellites on the H3 rocket. The first two Kirameki satellites launched on a European Ariane 5 and a Japanese H-IIA rocket, which the H3 will replace. (submitted by Ken the Bin, tsunam, and EllPeaTea)

Rocket Lab enters the race for military contracts. Rocket Lab is aiming to chip away at SpaceX’s dominance in military space launch, confirming its bid to compete for Pentagon contracts with its new medium-lift rocket, Neutron, Space News reports. Last month, the Space Force released a request for proposals from launch companies seeking to join the military’s roster of launch providers in the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. The Space Force will accept bids for launch providers to “on-ramp” to the NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract, which doles out task orders to launch companies for individual missions. In order to win a task order, a launch provider must be on the Phase 3 Lane 1 contract. Currently, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin are the only rocket companies eligible. SpaceX won all of the first round of Lane 1 task orders last month.

Joining the club … The Space Force is accepting additional risk for Lane 1 missions, which largely comprise repeat launches deploying a constellation of missile-tracking and data-relay satellites for the Space Development Agency. A separate class of heavy-lift missions, known as Lane 2, will require rockets to undergo a thorough certification by the Space Force to ensure their reliability. In order for a launch company to join the Lane 1 roster, the Space Force requires bidders to be ready for a first launch by December 2025. Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, said he thinks the Neutron rocket will be ready for its first launch by then. Other new medium-lift rockets, such as Firefly Aerospace’s MLV and Relativity’s Terran-R, almost certainly won’t be ready to launch by the end of next year, leaving Rocket Lab as the only company that will potentially join incumbents SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Next Starship flight is just around the corner. Less than a month has passed since the historic fifth flight of SpaceX’s Starship, during which the company caught the booster with mechanical arms back at the launch pad in Texas. Now, another test flight could come as soon as November 18, Ars reports. The improbable but successful recovery of the Starship first stage with “chopsticks” last month, and the on-target splashdown of the Starship upper stage halfway around the world, allowed SpaceX to avoid an anomaly investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Thus, the company was able to press ahead on a sixth test flight if it flew a similar profile. And that’s what SpaceX plans to do, albeit with some notable additions to the flight plan.

Around the edges … Perhaps the most significant change to the profile for Flight 6 will be an attempt to reignite a Raptor engine on Starship while it is in space. SpaceX tried to do this on a test flight in March but aborted the burn because the ship’s rolling motion exceeded limits. A successful demonstration of a Raptor engine relight could pave the way for SpaceX to launch Starship into a higher stable orbit around Earth on future test flights. This is required for SpaceX to begin using Starship to launch Starlink Internet satellites and perform in-orbit refueling experiments with two ships docked together. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China’s version of Starship. China has updated the design of its next-generation heavy-lift rocket, the Long March 9, and it looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, Ars reports. The Long March 9 started out as a conventional-looking expendable rocket, then morphed into a launcher with a reusable first stage. Now, the rocket will have a reusable booster and upper stage. The booster will have 30 methane-fueled engines, similar to the number of engines on SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster. The upper stage looks remarkably like Starship, with flaps in similar locations. China intends to fly this vehicle for the first time in 2033, nearly a decade from now.

A vehicle for the Moon … The reusable Long March 9 is intended to unlock robust lunar operations for China, similar to the way Starship, and to some extent Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander, promises to support sustained astronaut stays on the Moon’s surface. China says it plans to land its astronauts on the Moon by 2030, initially using a more conventional architecture with an expendable rocket named the Long March 10, and a lander reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo lunar lander. These will allow Chinese astronauts to remain on the Moon for a matter of days. With Long March 9, China could deliver massive loads of cargo and life support resources to sustain astronauts for much longer stays.

Ta-ta to the tripod. The large three-legged vertical test stand at SpaceX’s engine test site in McGregor, Texas, is being decommissioned, NASA Spaceflight reports. Cranes have started removing propellant tanks from the test stand, nicknamed the tripod, towering above the Central Texas prairie. McGregor is home to SpaceX’s propulsion test team and has 16 test cells to support firings of Merlin, Raptor, and Draco engines multiple times per day for the Falcon 9 rocket, Starship, and Dragon spacecraft.

Some history … The tripod might have been one of SpaceX’s most important assets in the company’s early years. It was built by Beal Aerospace for liquid-fueled rocket engine tests in the late 1990s. Beal Aerospace folded, and SpaceX took over the site in 2003. After some modifications, SpaceX installed the first qualification version of its Falcon 9 rocket on the tripod for a series of nine-engine test-firings leading up to the rocket’s inaugural flight in 2010. SpaceX test-fired numerous new Falcon 9 boosters on the tripod before shipping them to launch sites in Florida or California. Most recently, the tripod was used for testing of Raptor engines destined to fly on Starship and the Super Heavy booster.

Next three launches

Nov. 9: Long March 2C | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 03: 40 UTC

Nov. 9: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 06: 14 UTC

Nov. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-69 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21: 28 UTC

Rocket Report: Australia says yes to the launch; Russia delivers for Iran Read More »

Space policy is about to get pretty wild, y’all

Features, Science, Space / Tim Belzer / November 8, 2024

Saddle up, space cowboys. It may get bumpy for a while.

President Donald Trump steps on the stage at Kennedy Space Center after the successful launch of the Demo-2 crew mission in May 2020. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

The global space community awoke to a new reality on Wednesday morning.

The founder of this century’s most innovative space company, Elon Musk, successfully used his fortune, time, and energy to help elect Donald Trump to president of the United States. Already, Musk was the dominant Western player in space. SpaceX launches national security satellites and NASA astronauts and operates a megaconstellation. He controls the machines that provide essential space services to NASA and the US military. And now, thanks to his gamble on backing Trump, Musk has strong-armed himself into Trump’s inner circle.

Although he may not have a cabinet-appointed position, Musk will have a broad portfolio in the new administration for as long as his relations with Trump remain positive. This gives Musk extraordinary power over a number of areas, including spaceflight. Already this week, he has been soliciting ideas and input from colleagues. The New York Times reported that Musk has advised Trump to hire key employees from SpaceX into his administration, including at the Department of Defense. This reflects the huge conflict of interest that Musk will face when it comes to space policy. His actions could significantly benefit SpaceX, of which he is the majority owner and has the final say in major decisions.

It will be a hugely weird dynamic. Musk is unquestionably in a position for self-dealing. Normally, such conflicts of interest would be frowned on within a government, but Trump has already shown a brazen disregard for norms, and there’s no reason to believe that will change during his second go at the presidency. One way around this could be to give Musk a “special adviser” tag, which means he would not have to comply with federal conflict-of-interest laws.

So it’s entirely possible that the sitting chief executive of SpaceX could be the nation’s most important adviser on space policy, conflicts be damned. Musk possesses flaws as a leader, but it is difficult to argue against results. His intuitions for the industry, such as pushing hard for reusable launch and broadband Internet from space, have largely been correct. In a vacuum, it is not necessarily bad to have someone like Musk providing a vision for US spaceflight in the 21st century. But while space may be a vacuum, there is plenty of oxygen in Washington, DC.

Being a space journalist got a lot more interesting this week—and a lot more difficult. As I waded through this reality on Wednesday, I began to reach out to sources about what is likely to happen. It’s way too early to have much certainty, but we can begin to draw some broad outlines for what may happen to space policy during a second Trump presidency. Buckle up—it could be a wild ride.

Bringing efficiency to NASA?

Let’s start with NASA and firmly establish what we mean. The US space agency does some pretty great things, but it’s also a bloated bureaucracy. That’s by design. Members of Congress write budgets and inevitably seek to steer more federal dollars to NASA activities in the areas they represent. Two decades ago, an engineer named Mike Griffin—someone Musk sought to hire as SpaceX’s first chief engineer in 2002—became NASA administrator under President George W. Bush.

Griffin recognized NASA’s bloat. For starters, it had too many field centers. NASA simply doesn’t need 10 major outposts across the country, as they end up fighting one another for projects and funding. However, Griffin knew he would face a titanic political struggle to close field centers, on par with federal efforts to close duplicative military bases during the “Base Realignment and Closure” process after the Cold War. So Griffin instead sought to make the best of the situation with his “Ten Healthy Centers” initiative. Work together, he told his teams across the country.

Essentially, then, for the last two decades, NASA programs have sought to leverage expertise across the agency. Consider the development of the Orion spacecraft, which began nearly 20 years ago. The following comment comes from Julie Kramer-White from an oral history interview conducted in 2016. Kramer is a long-time NASA engineer who was chief engineer of Orion at the time.

“I’ll tell you the truth, ten healthy centers is a pain in the butt,” she said. “The engineering team is a big engineering team, and they are spread across 9 of the 10 Centers… Our guys don’t think anything about a phone call that’s got people from six different centers. You’re trying to balance the time zone differences, and of course that’s got its own challenge with Europe as well but even within the United States with the different centers managing the time zone issue. I would say as a net technically, it’s a good thing. From a management perspective, boy, it’s a hassle.”

Space does not get done fast or efficiently by committee. But that’s how NASA operates—committees within committees, reviewed by committees.

Musk has repeatedly said he wants to bring efficiency to the US government and vowed to identify $2 trillion in savings. Well, NASA would certainly be more efficient with fewer centers—each of which has its own management layers, human resources setups, and other extensive overhead. But will the Trump administration really have the stomach to close centers? Certainly the congressional leadership from a state like Ohio would fight tooth and nail for Glenn Research Center. This offers an example of how bringing sweeping change to the US government in general, and NASA in particular, will run into the power of the purse held by Congress.

One tool NASA has used in recent years to increase efficiency is buying commercial services rather than leading the development of systems, such as the Orion spacecraft. This most prominent example is cargo and crew transportation to the International Space Station, but NASA has extended this approach to all manner of areas, from space communications to lunar landers to privately operated space stations. Congress has not always been happy with this transition because it has lessened its influence over steering funding directly to centers. NASA has nonetheless continued to push for this change because it has lowered agency costs, allowing it to do more.

Yet here again we run into conflicts of interest with Musk. The primary reason that NASA’s transition toward buying services has been a success is due to SpaceX. Private companies not named SpaceX have struggled to compete as NASA awards more fixed-price contracts for space services. Given Congress’ love for directing space funds to local centers, it’s unlikely to let Musk overhaul the agency in ways that send huge amounts of new business to SpaceX.

Where art thou, Artemis?

The biggest question is what to do with the Artemis program to return humans to the Moon. Ars wrote extensively about some of the challenges with this program a little more than a month ago, and Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg News, wrote a scathing assessment of Artemis recently under the headline “NASA’s $100 billion Moon mission is going nowhere.”

It is unlikely that outright cancellation of Artemis is on the table—after all, the first Trump administration created Artemis six years ago. However, Musk is clearly focused on sending humans to Mars, and the Moon-first approach of Artemis was championed by former Vice President Mike Pence, who is long gone. Trump loves grand gestures, and Musk has told Trump it will be possible to send humans to Mars before the end of his term. (That would be 2028, and it’s almost impossible to see this happening for a lot of reasons.) The Artemis architecture was developed around a “Moon-then-Mars” philosophy—as in, NASA will send humans to the Moon now, with Mars missions pushed into a nebulous future. Whatever Artemis becomes, it is likely to at least put Mars on equal footing to the Moon.

Notably, Musk despises NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, a central element of Artemis. He sees the rocket as the epitome of government bloat. And it’s not hard to understand why. The Space Launch System is completely expendable and costs about 10 to 100 times as much to launch as his own massive Starship rocket.

The key function the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft currently provide in Artemis is transporting astronauts from Earth to lunar orbit and back. There are ways to address this. Trump could refocus Artemis on using Starship to get humans to Mars. Alternatively, he could direct NASA to kludge together some combination of Orion, Dragon, and Falcon rockets to get astronauts to the Moon. He might also direct NASA to use the SLS for now but cancel further upgrades to it and a lunar space station called Gateway.

“The real question is how far is a NASA landing team and beachhead team are willing to go in destabilizing the program of record,” one policy source told Ars. “I can’t see Trump and Vance being less willing to shake up NASA than they are other public policy zones.”

What does seem clear is that, for the first time in 15 years, canceling the Space Launch System rocket or dramatically reducing its influence is on the table. This will be an acid test for Musk and Trump’s rhetoric on government efficiency, since the base of support for Artemis is in the deep-red South: states like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida.

Will they really cut jobs there in the name of efficiency?

Regulatory reform

Reducing government regulations is one area in which the pathway for Musk and Trump is clear. The first Trump administration pushed to reduce regulations on US businesses almost from day one. In spaceflight, this produced Space Policy Directive-2 in 2018. Some progress was made, but it was far from total.

For spaceflight, Musk’s goal is to get faster approval for Starship test flights and licensing for the (literally) hundreds of launches SpaceX is already conducting annually. This will be broadly supported by the second Trump administration. During Trump’s first term, some of the initiatives in Space Policy Directive-2 were slowed or blocked by the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA, but the White House push will be even harder this time.

A looser regulatory environment should theoretically lead to more and more rapid progress in commercial space capabilities.

It’s worth noting here that if you spend any time talking to space startup executives, they all have horror stories about interacting with the FAA or other agencies. Pretty much everyone agrees that regulators could be more efficient but also that they need more resources to process rules in a timely manner. The FAA and Federal Communications Commission have important jobs when it comes to keeping people on the ground safe and keeping orbits sustainable in terms of traffic and space junk.

The second Trump administration will have some important allies on this issue in Congress. Ted Cruz, the US Senator from Texas, will likely chair the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which oversees legislation for space activities. He is one of the senators who has shown the most interest in commercial space, and he will support pro-business legislation—that is, laws that allow companies freer rein and regulatory agencies fewer teeth. How far this gets will depend on whether Republicans keep the House or Democrats take control.

Other areas of change

Over the course of the last seven decades, space has largely been a non-partisan topic.

But Musk’s deepening involvement in US space policy could pose a serious problem to this, as he’s now viewed extremely negatively by many Democrats. It seems probable that many people in Congress will oppose any significant shift of NASA’s focus from the Moon to Mars, particularly because it aligns with Musk’s long-stated goal of making humans a multiplanetary species.

There are likely to be battles in space science, as well. Traditionally, Republican presidents have cut funding for Earth science missions, and Democrats have increased funding to better study and understand climate change. Generally, given the administration’s likely focus on human spaceflight, space science will probably take a back seat and may lose funding.

Another looming issue is Mars Sample Return, which NASA is reconsidering due to budget and schedule issues. Presently, the agency intends to announce a new plan for retrieving rock and soil samples from Mars and returning them to Earth in December.

But if Musk and Trump are bent on sending humans to Mars as soon as possible, there is little sense in the space agency spending billions of dollars on a robotic sample return mission. Astronauts can just bring them back inside Starship.

Finally, at present, NASA has rich partnerships with space agencies around the world. In fact, it was the first Trump administration that created the Artemis Accords a little more than four years ago to develop an international coalition to return to the Moon. Since then, the United States and China have both been signing up partners in their competition to establish a presence at the South Pole of the Moon.

One huge uncertainty is how some of NASA’s long-established partners, especially in Europe, where there is bound to be tension around Ukraine and other issues with the Trump administration, will react at the US space agency’s exploration plans. Europeans are already wary of SpaceX’s prowess in global spaceflight and likely will not want to be on board with any space activities that further Musk’s ambitions.

These are just some of the high-level questions facing NASA and US spaceflight. There are many others. For example, how will Trump’s proposed tariffs on key components impact the national security and civil space supply chain? And there’s the Department of Defense, where the military already has multibillion dollar contracts with SpaceX, and there are bound to be similar conflicts and ethical concerns.

No one can hear you scream in space, but there will be plenty of screaming about space in the coming months.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

Space policy is about to get pretty wild, y’all Read More »

Nearly three years since launch, Webb is a hit among astronomers

astronomy, James Webb Space Telescope, NASA, Science, Space, space telescope / Tim Belzer / November 6, 2024

From its halo-like orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is seeing farther than human eyes have ever seen.

In May, astronomers announced that Webb detected the most distant galaxy found so far, a fuzzy blob of red light that we see as it existed just 290 million years after the Big Bang. Light from this galaxy, several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun, traveled more than 13 billion years until photons fell onto Webb’s gold-coated mirror.

A few months later, in July, scientists released an image Webb captured of a planet circling a star slightly cooler than the Sun nearly 12 light-years from Earth. The alien world is several times the mass of Jupiter and the closest exoplanet to ever be directly imaged. One of Webb’s science instruments has a coronagraph to blot out bright starlight, allowing the telescope to resolve the faint signature of a nearby planet and use spectroscopy to measure its chemical composition.

These are just a taste of the discoveries made by the $10 billion Webb telescope since it began science observations in 2022. Judging by astronomers’ interest in using Webb, there are many more to come.

Breaking records

The Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb on behalf of NASA and its international partners, said last week that it received 2,377 unique proposals from science teams seeking observing time on the observatory. The institute released a call for proposals earlier this year for the so-called “Cycle 4” series of observations with Webb.

This volume of proposals represents around 78,000 hours of observing time with Webb, nine times more than the telescope’s available capacity for scientific observations in this cycle. The previous observing cycle had a similar “oversubscription rate” but had less overall observing time available to the science community.

Nearly three years since launch, Webb is a hit among astronomers Read More »

The next Starship launch may occur in less than two weeks

raptor, Science, Space, starship, test flight / Paul Patrick / November 6, 2024

The company will also use Starship’s next flight to assess new tiles and other elements of the vehicle’s heat shield.

“Several thermal protection experiments and operational changes will test the limits of Starship’s capabilities and generate flight data to inform plans for ship catch and reuse,” the company’s statement said. “The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles. The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles.”

Final flight of the first Starship

The five previous flights of Starship, dating back to April 2023, have all launched near dawn from South Texas. For the upcoming mission, the company will look for a late-afternoon launch window, which will allow the vehicle to reenter during daylight into the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX’s update also confirms that this will be the last flight of the initial version of the Starship vehicle, with the next generation including redesigned forward flaps, larger propellant tanks, and newer tiles and secondary thermal protection layers.

Reaching a near-monthly cadence of Starship flights during only the second year of the vehicle’s operation is impressive, but it’s also essential if SpaceX wants to unlock the full potential of a rocket that needs multiple refueling launches to support Starship missions to the Moon or Mars.

Wednesday’s announcement comes the day after the US presidential election in which Donald Trump was given a second term by American voters, and it is notable that he was assisted in this through an all-out effort by SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Musk’s interventions in politics were highly controversial and alienated a significant segment of the US population and political class. Nevertheless Musk’s gambit paid off, as the election of Trump will now likely accelerate Starship’s development and increase its centrality to the nation’s space exploration endeavors.

However, the timing of this launch announcement is likely coincidental, as SpaceX did not need formal regulatory approval to move ahead with this sixth attempt—it was almost entirely dependent on the readiness of the company’s hardware, software, and ground systems.

The next Starship launch may occur in less than two weeks Read More »