The Orbital Index

Flight 6. Starship Flight 6 went off without a huge amount of fanfare, paving the way for a coming year where flights will likely become much more commonplace (cf. our recent coverage). An upgraded Ship, carrying a payload of a Banana for Scale™, took off from Boca Chica in the afternoon (the first afternoon flight for Starship). No catch attempt happened on this flight as a “booster offshore divert” was called shortly after stage separation, possibly due to comms tower damage. The upper stage relit a Raptor in space for the first time, taking one more step toward full orbital insertion. Starship S31, the last of the Block 1 design, still sustained some flap burn-through (perhaps due to its more aggressive angle of attack or intentionally-removed tiles) but still performed a successful daytime soft landing in the Indian Ocean.   

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IM-2. Intuitive Machines’ second CLPS lunar mission, IM-2, carries the Nova-C lander (“Athena”) and is now targeting a launch in February. IM’s first CLPS mission landed, albeit roughly, on the Moon in February 2024, becoming the first soft landing on the Moon by a private company (and the first American landing since Apollo 17 in 1972, and the first methalox engine fired beyond LEO). For IM-2, IM is seriously upping their game, with multiple rovers and hoppers onboard and a target of the Moon’s south pole in an area around 89°S where water ice could be within the range of the lander’s 1 meter Honeybee Robotics TRIDENT drill. In addition to the drill, a mass spectrometer for material analysis, and multiple other science and commercial payloads, the lander also carries IM’s Micro Nova (µNova), a hydrazine-propelled one-meter tall hopper with its own high-resolution cameras, a neutron spectrometer to look for water as it transits permanently shadowed craters, a radiometer, and a Nokia 4G antenna. The lander will also deploy Lunar Outpost’s MAPP rover. MAPP will carry depth cameras, collect soil samples for symbolic transfer to NASA, test a lunar 4G/LTE network for Nokia & NASA, and even carry its own tiny rover from MIT for self-inspection called AstroAnt. It’s pretty much just rovers all the way down. IM-2’s launch will also contain some hitchhiking rideshares: Lunar Trailblazer (an orbiter designed to map lunar water at high-resolution), a lunar comms satellite, AstroForge’s Odin (a rapidly-built deep space smallsat intended to photograph an undisclosed M-type asteroid), and others.

Sentinel-1C and Vega-C close in on launch. The newest addition to the Sentinel family has been fueled for launch ahead of its December 3rd take-off from Korou, French Guiana. Sentinel-1C will ride to space on Vega-C’s return-to-flight launch. Vega-C suffered a loss of payload during its second flight, grounding Europe’s next-generation low-cost domestic launch option for the past two years. The second stage malfunction was traced to the Zefiro 40 solid rocket engine’s carbon-carbon nozzle throat insert. After a change in supplier to ArianeGroup for the carbon-carbon insert, its recertification test… also failed. This led ESA to require a redesign of the entire engine nozzle. That redesign, while slow and costly, seems to have worked, with both tests successful earlier this year (the first at high pressure/short duration and the most recent one at low pressure/long duration). Assuming next month’s launch goes well, Sentinel-1C will become the newest addition to the EU’s Copernicus program, taking the place of 1B, which unexpectedly stopped functioning, ending its mission in 2022. 1C is offset 180° from Sentinel-1A (due to be replaced by 1D next year) to provide full-Earth observation in C-band SAR for climate/Earth-science applications as well as disaster response. 1C also packs four new nautical AIS receivers for tracking shipping (with the radar helping to track “silent” vessels as well). The program was initially accelerated due to 1B’s untimely demise but had to wait on its launch vehicle while the Vega-C program was on hold.

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• NASA’s updated lunar soil simulant guide User’s Guide.
• A calibrated index for detecting plastic debris on beaches from space.
• Last week we discussed ispace’s upcoming M2 lunar mission. It’s now scheduled for NET January.
• Voyager 2’s discovery that Uranus has unexpectedly strong radiation belts and a low-plasma magnetosphere may have been due to unusually strong solar winds compressing its magnetosphere during the brief window when the craft, the only one to visit the planet so far, flew by in 1986 (paper).
• A Starship launch and landing produces the same amount of noise as ~10 Falcon 9 launches, according to a study done during Launch 5. Starship produces 74.2 MN of thrust at lift-off while Falcon 9 produces 7.6 MN, so this kind of stands to reason and might even point to Starship being a bit quieter than Falcon 9, given that this research includes return and catch in the case of Starship.
• An article on how oil and gas companies disguise their methane emissions to avoid being detected by satellites, ​​despite this being one of the lowest-hanging climate change mitigations available.
• How much bigger could Earth be before rockets wouldn't work?
• Failure Analysis of the Arecibo Observatory 305-Meter Telescope Collapse: the venerable observatory collapsed due to long-term zinc creep-induced failure in cable sockets and damage from Hurricane Maria. Zinc creep occurs when zinc deforms over time when under load. The report also suggests that electrical currents induced in the cables from the telescope’s transmitters may have caused “long-term, low-current electroplasticity,” increasing metal plasticity as well as the zinc’s creep. 😞