Now a whopping 6 Falcon Heavy launches scheduled for 2022! Not that I expect all of them to happen on time, but it should still be quite a year. SpaceX may actually make their money back on FH development.
Another day, another damning article about Blue Origin:
The notes come from a management consultant agency, which perhaps should be viewed with some skepticism. However, their findings pretty much match what everyone can see.
They don’t seem to have done anything with the findings. However, even if they had I’m not sure it would have worked. They are just as likely to apply a cargo cult approach–copying the superficial differences without actually understanding where they come from. For instance:
We should “develop a campaign that gets the public and industry on our side much like SpaceX has done with their transparency in mission failure which has been an effective customer relations tactic to get the industry, customers, and public behind them, rooting for their success," an executive suggested. “They are effectively saying it’s okay to fail because that is how you innovate. Develop a strategy that focuses on highlighting our innovations and failures, and how we are learning from that.”
Is it likely that they would really emulate SpaceX here? Elon released the “how not to land” video for shits and giggles. The enthusiasm it generated is a side effect of SpaceX’s overall attitude toward failure. I can’t see it ever working for BO. They would release some carefully-curated failures which aren’t too bad and some bland corporate verbiage to go with it.
To not-so-boldly go where lots of people have gone before.
William Shatner is going to be one of 4 people on the next New Shepard launch on October 12. Prepare yourselves for lots of Star Trek jokes.
If this happens the entire original Starliner demo crew will have been reassigned or replaced. And it demonstrates how far ahead SpaceX have drawn ahead of the competition.
In retrospect, I really wish Dream Chaser had been chosen rather than Starliner. It might still have been late, but at least we’d have gotten a different type of vehicle out of it. Even ignoring the fact that it isn’t flying, Starliner just seems worse than Crew Dragon in every way.
It’s like the baby of Starship and shuttle. Though shuttle should feel ashamed of itself - surely that’s illegal.
The European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft has sent back its first images of Mercury !
A company is implementing an idea I have thought about – using high altitude balloons for “space” tourism. Cheaper (OK, still $50k) and a longer flight (12 hours), and still get to 100k feet (well short of any definition of space, but still pretty high)
Brian
William “Captain Kirk” Shatner’s flight was delayed, but went OK. For sure marketing, but pretty cool marketing IMHO.
Brian
Blue Origin announces a space station, “Orbital Reef”:
Every new thing they do is more embarrassing than the last. Next week they’ll announce a mission to Alpha Centauri, and after that they’ll reveal the AmazonBasics Dyson Sphere.
I don’t normally ‘rofl’, ever, but ROFL. That was exactly my reaction to the announcement.
What’s sorta weird, from my perspective:
30 years ago I would have been amazed and wide-eyed by this announcement. 15 years ago it would have been eye-rolling, but mostly due to cynicism and disillusionment about how space development was going. Today, it’s still eye-rolling, but only because SpaceX really is driving space development forward, proving that it’s actually possible to do new things at a rapid pace, while Blue Origin is still 95% press releases and CG renders.
Space development is about as exciting as its ever been, and not just due to SpaceX but also Rocket Lab and a bunch of other upstarts (which will mostly fail, but at least fail in an exciting way). Blue Origin and Boeing are harshing my vibe, though.
That’s pretty neat. The exoplanet doesn’t sound like a very pleasant place to be, though, if it’s orbiting a neutron star or black hole.
In more mundane news, there are some extra details about the toilet issues on the Inspiration4 flight:
SpaceX’s Bill Gerst says Crew Dragon’s toilet mechanics were redesigned after the toilet issues on the Inspiration4 mission. A tube that sends urine into a container broke off during the mission and leaked into a fan which sprayed the urine in an area beneath the capsule floor.
Gerst says the crew didn’t notice anything during flight; it only affected the internal section under the floor. Redesign involves a fully welded system with no joints that could come “unglued” like the faulty Inspiration4 system did.
SpaceX, concerned that the same toilet issues are plaguing its other vehicles, had astronauts use a borescope to investigate the Crew Dragon currently docked to the ISS. They confirmed SpaceX’s suspicions and indeed found similar contamination under the floor, Gerst said
Astronaut pee is mixed with a compound called Oxon, and SpaceX worried that might corrode hardware on Crew Dragon if pools around the system unchecked for months. So SpaceX did “extensive tests” on the ground that involved soaking aluminum parts in an Oxon-pee mixture
For “an extended period of time,” the Oxon-pee-soaked aluminum parts were placed in a chamber that mimicked the humidity conditions on the ISS. SpaceX found “that corrosion growth” caused by Oxon pee “limits itself in the low-humidity environment onboard station.”
typo correction - I’ve been told that the correct spelling of the ammonia-removing compound in the astronaut pee is oxone, not “oxon”
So anyway, Crew Dragon appears to be resilient to piss. Gerst: “Luckily, or, on purpose, we chose an aluminum alloy that is very insensitive to corrosion.” The study is ongoing — “We got a couple more samples we’ll pull out of the chamber”
This was a really good example of how a engineering problem was detected, studied and fixed. Gotta commend Gerst’s transparency here.
Good to see that even a tourist mission can contribute design lessons that help NASA. And that they were able to identify and fix the issue so quickly.
Is it over? I think it’s over:
Not that SpaceX slowed down at all. Looking forward to their Starship orbital test, as it’s been a while since they’ve flown any test articles.
This does free up NASA funding for SpaceX I think so we could see some exciting activity at Starbase.
So, apparently this is a thing. A company is building a spin launcher which will put things into orbit by spinning whatever it is really fast on earth and then letting it go and flinging it into space. Really.
Seems absolutely mad but they have built a demonstrator as proof of concept and it has legitimate backing from large companies. Seems insane but…people are really working on it.
Seems totally practical on the moon or even on Mars, anywhere with low gravity and a thin atmosphere - but how does it work on Earth? I’ll have to watch the video, consider me intrigued!
Certainly not going to be useful for any sort of manned launches.
And even unmanned equipement is going to have to be pretty hardy as well.
Yeah…no way anything living could survive such a launch to space but then the vast majority of things sent to space do not include anything living.
I think this will also have to have a size limit on what gets sent up. Really big payloads will still need a rocket.