Looks like a successful flight all around for Vulcan:
And they’ve made contact with the Peregrine lander:
Astrobotic has established communications with Peregrine and is receiving telemetry, so another important milestone reached as the spacecraft makes its way to the moon. So far, this mission is off to a very good start.
Last I heard the spacecraft had run into difficulties with its solar panels unable to stably point at the sun. Hopefully they can fix it.
Good to hear. But this is still rather last-century: non-reusable (SMART notwithstanding; there doesn’t seem to be any indication that this is much more than a publicity puff)?
And solid-fuel boosters fer heavens sake! (Side note: geez, are they really going to put humans on top of what is essentially a big firework on SLS)???
As LSLGuy said, ‘ULA is simply a defense contractor in civvies’.
Still, good to see any new launch capability.
Bad news from Astrobotic:
In a fourth update, the company appeared to rule out the ability of the spacecraft to land on the moon. “Unfortunately, it appears the failure within the propulsion system is causing a critical loss of propellant,” it stated. “The team is working to try and stabilize this loss, but given the situation, we have prioritized maximizing the science and data we can capture.”
Is it going to miss the moon entirely or still land with extreme prejudice?
I don’t think that analysis has been announced yet. But trans-lunar trajectory injection is pretty demanding of delta-vee, I think, so if they’re propellant-constrained, I would be shocked if they could do that much.
Well, reading more, there’s a range of TLI plans with differing acceleration budgets, but I suspect all the “cheaper” ones trade time for energy, and if the spacecraft has a propellant leak time isn’t on their side either.
It won’t hit the moon. In fact, it wasn’t even aimed at the moon just yet–it’s on a phasing orbit, and was only intended to orbit the moon after one pass around the Earth. It probably won’t last the required 15 days to make a loop.
I guess it’s possible that it could hit the moon completely passively, but it seems unlikely.
An impact might happen after all!
I suspect there’s a fair amount of uncertainty here. So let’s just say that it’s not yet shown to be impossible.
Regolithobraking. Bummer.
Latest twit from Astrobotics has an Earth collision coming up. Trajectories are complicated by the propellant loss not being uniform.
Well, if you’re having a hard time steering your spaceship due to random propellant venting, it only makes sense to aim for the largest nearby body. Much easier to hit something big than something small. 
Latest update:
They’re intentionally aiming for Earth’s atmosphere for disposal now. They have some limited propulsion capability, but aren’t going to use it to aim for the Moon due to the chance of it failing and leaving debris. Seems reasonable, if slightly disappointing.
They’re hoping for the slim chance of hitting Buu Nygren.
Their press release sounds a lot like relabeling a necessity as a virtue. Worrying about polluting cis-lunar space can’t be taken seriously for a vehicle of that size.
Let’s hope they can successfully deorbit the thing rather than having the engine running at a weird oxidizer/fuel ratio perform a spontaneous disassembly during reentry burn(s) and add debris not in the vast wastelands of cislunar space but in crowded and valuable MEO or LEO where it might do some real harm.
This is interesting:
For 1.2 million SpaceX comes to your town/facility and install an entire high bandwidth ground station. Then you can run fiber to,customers from there to sell high speed internet.
Thismcould be a real boon for remote towns that do not have fiber connections, resource communities in remote areas, military bases, the developing world where personal income is rising but infrastructure is scarce, etc.
There are a lot of remote towns in northern Canada that cannot get fiber internet and rely on DSL and satellite. This opens the door to rapidly building out intermet infrastructure in remote places at scale.
One of the locations using Starlink already, Unalaska, did have a fiber connection. Except… it got severed when an iceberg scraped along the seabed:
It took a few months to repair. Starlink serves an an effective backup in these cases. You know mother nature is trying to kill you when satellites are more reliable than cables…
Yeah, that had to suck going to all that effort to get fiber out there, only to have an iceberg sever it. Glad there was a ready backup.
McMurdo only has a 20Mbs satellite connection for data and voice. There’s 1500 people there. That’s $50/mo per resident, plus installation. I wonder if the SpaceX gear can handle the conditions.
Satellite is very antifragile - right up until it isn’t. My worry is that LEO satellite internet will be so superior to many alternatives that we letbour old infrastructure wither away, then we will be absolutely dependent on one transmission mode. Enter Kessler system, a Carrington-level solar storm, etc.
So it goes:
September is a ways off, but I’ve been looking forward to this book since Eric Berger announced he was working on it:
Liftoff–the previous book, about the Falcon 1 development–was an excellent read. I expect this to be just as interesting. There’s been a sort of strange gap in SpaceX history between the Falcon 1 and 9. It felt almost like once the F1 got to orbit, everything sort of fell into place and the F9 just appeared out of nowhere. Obviously not, but it seems like that period isn’t that well-documented.
Mike Griffin rises from the dead:
His position is just completely divorced from reality. Or exactly the opposite of reality. Like:
“The fundamental flaw in the Artemis acquisition approach is the assumption that the US government can and should leverage so-called ‘commercial space’ for national purposes and that this paradigm is applicable to human spaceflight,” he wrote in his prepared statement.
Uh, did he simply not notice that SpaceX is now the world leader in safe human spaceflight? That they’re saving the US tons of money–and better yet, ensuring that said money doesn’t go to Russia? Because we’d still be paying them hundreds of millions (maybe billions) of dollars a year if not for them.
And it worked out basically exactly as described–SpaceX kept to their fixed costs, and has “skin in the game” in that they’re selling rides to private parties. That keeps NASA’s costs down, and furthermore every flight of every kind helps all the others, by continuously teasing bugs out of the system.
What’s weird is that he wasn’t like this 20 years ago. He went on that trip to Russia with Musk to buy ICBMs! Which is what led to their creation in the first place. And he pushed for the commercial cargo/crew programs that allowed SpaceX and others to compete on ISS missions.
Is he going senile? Angling for a Trump admin job? In league with the establishment military-industrial complex and basically acting the part of a lobbyist?