¶Go Artemis! At 1:47 am EST on November 16th, 2022, Artemis I, the first SLS rocket, took off from launch complex 39B and arched into the Florida sky (video). Artemis I completes a development process that was born out of the Shuttle program in 2004. Through Constellation and later the Obama-era SLS program, NASA has invested untold person-hours and 50 billion dollars to bring the Artemis program to this first test flight. Artemis I’s Orion capsule will now proceed to the moon, orbit in a distant retrograde orbit before it returns to Earth in four weeks (mission trajectory). Congrats to all the personnel that worked for years on this project, it is a huge achievement to launch the world’s most powerful rocket to return to the moon. 🚀🌗 |
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¶JPSS-2 is LOFTID. An Atlas V lifted off from Vandenberg on Nov. 10th with two payloads on board: NOAA and NASA’s Joint Polar Satellite System-2 (JPSS-2) and NASA’s succinctly-named Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID). JPSS-2, to be followed by JPSS-3 in ~2027 and JPSS-4 sometime after that, will help forecast extreme weather events and model the climate with a microwave sounder, ozone mapper, infrared sounder, and a visible and infrared radiometer. LOFTID, meanwhile, demonstrated the largest inflatable heat shield ever flown—6 meters in diameter—which could be used to land heavy payloads, such as crewed missions on Mars, Venus probes, returning upper stages, manufactured materials from orbit, or the Vulcan rocket’s two BE-4 engines (which is the initial plan). We’re pretty sure we’ve used one of these already in Kerbal Space Program or on a lazy river somewhere... and indeed, here’s a very Kerbal video of LOFTID separating from the Centaur upper stage, and videos of its real-life successful splashdown and recovery. |
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 | LOFTID after being lofted, but before its eventual fiery de-lofting. |
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¶Starfish unveils Otter Pup. Continuing their plan for marine domination of orbital space, Starfish Space announced their next mission, focused on orbital rendezvous. Otter Pup is a slightly scaled-down version of their future Otter satellite servicing craft (mission overview video). Otter Pup will launch on Transporter 8 next summer, attached to a Launcher Orbiter Transfer Vehicle (OTV). After separation, Otter Pup will move several kilometers away and then perform an autonomous rendezvous with the OTV (with plenty of windows for human intervention). Final docking with the OTV will use Nautilus, an electrostatic docking mechanism developed in partnership with Honeybee Robotics. Nautilus can adhere to many common spacecraft materials—no receiving adapter required, just a relatively smooth surface—with enough strength to maneuver the target craft. Starfish’s rendezvous software (Cephalopod) already has some flight heritage; it flew last year on Orbit Fab’s orbital refueling demonstration. After docking, Otter Pup will detach and depart from the OTV a second time to conduct additional testing. Starfish’s approach to rendezvous will be the first to use electric propulsion, which will hugely decrease the size of servicing vehicles and promises servicing costs of only ~5% of the cost of a large chemical propulsion mission like MEV-2 from Northrop Grumman. |
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 | Otter Pup’s Nautilus electrostatic end effector. |
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¶News in brief. The Cygnus cargo spacecraft, with 20 new science experiments on board, arrived safely at the ISS with only one of its two solar arrays deployed ● JWST’s malfunctioning MIRI instrument mode is back online ● Due to JPL staffing and process issues, brought to light by the delayed-but-now-launching-in-2023 Psyche mission, NASA is pushing back the VERITAS mission to Venus by three years ● Space Shuttle Challenger remnants were discovered underwater by a documentary crew ● China’s expendable super-heavy Long March 9 development plans appear to have been replaced with a reusable design ● A Long March 6A rocket body broke up in orbit, creating 50+ debris ● Astra is laying off 16% of their staff ● BlueWalker 3 deployed successfully in orbit, growing in brightness by 40x ● Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space Technologies completed testing of their hybrid engine (it uses a liquid oxidizer and a proprietary solid fuel), intentionally testing to destruction ● SpaceX performed a full duration 14 Raptor engine test on Booster 7 ● CAPSTONE completed an insertion burn and is now in lunar orbit—the lunar cubesat will perform several more burns to tune its orbit over the rest of this week ● ABL scrubbed the first launch opportunity for the maiden launch of their RS1 orbital rocket from Kodiak, Alaska—the company has daily launch windows available for the rest of the week ● The Space Force’s X-37B returned to Earth after 908 days in orbit, presumably with many long-duration space environment and tech demo tests ready for analysis on the ground. |
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 | The X-37B after 908 days in space. |
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¶Etc. - Probably InSight’s last photo. 😭
- Promoting a fellow space newsletter: The Space Investor is a curated weekly newsletter focused on investing in space, delivering space investment news, research, and analysis across public and private markets every Friday afternoon.
- Due to the structure of Orion’s Stage Adapter and CubeSat charging interfaces (or lack thereof, like LunaH-map), only four (BioSentinel, NEA Scout, EQUULEUS, and OMOTENASHI) of Artemis I’s 10 CubeSats were able to be recharged during maintenance. All share a similar battery and have a nominal discharge of around 2%/month, meaning that most should be good without a recharge through summer 2023, but if discharge rates are higher than expected, the un-recharged satellites may lack sufficient charge to boot and deploy solar arrays.
- A video in ultraviolet of the Sun’s corona during a quiet period, taken by Solar Orbiter in mid-October. This is the highest resolution video of the ‘quiet corona’ ever taken, each pixel is 105 km on the Sun’s surface, so this view is 17-Earths across. (It’d make a nice replacement for a Netflix holiday fireplace…)
- A Guide to Transient Astronomy and to the Electromagnetic Spectrum in Astronomy, both from astrobites.
- Two (rather hypothetical) papers about what would happen if humanity received an alien signal. The first paper imagines that nations would aggressively compete to control access to the signal and any possible resulting technological breakthroughs, suggesting that SETI institutions should implement high-security practices to avoid potential espionage. The second paper calls the first one simplistic and suggests that nations would rather rush to share any analysis for the resulting prestige, soft power, and a place in the history books. They recommend transparency, data sharing, and further development of post-detection protocols. Neither outcome seems particularly likely anytime soon, though. 👽
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 | “[Astronomer peers into telescope] [Jaws theme begins playing]" XKCD #1377 |
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