¶Starliner will return home crewless. NASA announced on Saturday that, due to safety concerns around ongoing helium leaks and reaction control thruster issues on Boeing’s Starliner, the vehicle will undock and return to Earth uncrewed in September. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will stay on the ISS through February, then fly home as part of Crew-9. That mission’s Crew Dragon can dock once Starliner vacates a port on the station. While NASA has remained positive for the duration of the test, it has become clear over time that there is significant disagreement within the agency on Starliner’s safety, with the agency now admitting that the “uncertainty and lack of expert concurrence does not meet the agency’s safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight.” Nelson said, “We have had mistakes done in the past, we lost two Space Shuttles, as a result of their not being a culture in which information could come forward. So NASA, ever since, has tried very hard to bring about an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to step forward and speak their mind.” We assume that Crew-9 will launch with two extra empty spacesuits, as Starliner’s spacesuits are incompatible with Crew Dragon. Boeing, who received more funding via the Commercial Crew Program than SpaceX, is clearly struggling on all fronts and has now absorbed over $1.5 billion in losses as part of the delayed Starliner program (Boeing’s decline arguably stems from its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in 1997 and the subsequent systematic loss of Boeing’s engineering-first culture). We feel that the US does require multiple vehicles capable of delivering and returning crew from LEO, and it isn’t a good situation for SpaceX to be the only option (Orion, hobbled by low cadence and the incredible expense of SLS, clearly isn’t one). We’re rooting for an eventual booster-agnostic crewed Dreamchaser and, hopefully, clarity before too long on Starliner’s uncertain future. |
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¶China planning exoplanet hunter. China’s planned Earth 2.0 (aka ET, haha) exoplanet observatory, shooting for a 2028 launch, is an ambitious mission designed by the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It will carry six wide-field optical telescopes to L2 (near JWST) where it will observe ~2 million stars for exoplanet transits over four years. The mission’s 28 cm aperture telescopes are designed to be able to detect small, rocky worlds and the long observing window will hopefully let it detect planets with orbital periods that are Earth-like (paper). It also carries a 35 cm telescope designed to watch for rogue planets in the Galactic bulge via microlensing events, something the Roman Space Telescope (2027) will also do. Launching in 2026 before China’s observatory, ESA’s PLATO mission will have a whopping 26 cameras, but will observe for less time and may struggle to find planets in longer period orbits. Further out is NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory (c.f. Issue 237), but that likely won’t launch for more than 20 years. |
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 | Earth 2.0/ET mission graphic. Credit: CAS |
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¶Transporter 11. SpaceX continued their now quarterly cadence of launching a truckload of small payloads to SSO, completing their 11th launch of the Transporter program earlier this month. T11 carried 116 satellites to orbit and was the 11th flight for Falcon 9 in the just under three weeks since its return to flight (after an upper stage failure grounded the rocket for 15 days). The rideshare program has now launched over 1,000 satellites. Highlights of the latest batch include: - Hyperspectral imagers continue to be a dominant trend: Tanager-1 from Planet, which will provide GHG mapping for the Carbon Mapper Coalition; Norwegian HYPSO-2, which will monitor ocean health, Lemu Earth’s Nge; Hyperfield-1 from Kuva Space; and, Kanyini, South Australia’s first state-owned and manufactured satellite.
- SAR feels like it is reaching maturity, with groups of satellites launched from well-known constellation providers (two each from Umbra and Capella, four from ICEYE, and one from iQPS).
- Weather data was also a common application, with an Arctic weather satellite from ESA, two Spire Lemurs fitted with radio occultation sensors (GNSS-RO), PlanetiQ’s GNOMES-5 (also GNSS-RO), and Tomorrow.io’s two 6U microwave sounders.
- A first satellite from Senegal, the tiny 1U GaindéSat-1A.
- PTD-4 from NASA Ames, which will demonstrate the Lightweight Integrated Solar Array and AnTenna (LISA-T) for low-cost power on small spacecraft with deployable thin-film photovoltaics that have embedded antennas.
- An ION Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) from D-Orbit (nice mission updates page!) carrying five satellites for future deployment as well as hosted payloads.
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 | Transporter-11’s slightly updated payload layout with cubesat deployers ringing the bottom of the payload adapter. Credit: SpaceX |
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| ¶News in brief. Chennai-based startup Space Zone India launched its Rhumi-01 suborbital rocket from a mobile launcher ● TrustPoint won two SpaceWERX contracts worth $3.8M for their 300+ satellite GPS alternative—it uses C-band spectrum (instead of L-band) and is supported by 100+ ground nodes ● JAXA awarded Astroscale an $81.1M contract for a mission to remove the upper stage of an H-IIA rocket launched in 2009 from orbit via a satellite with a robotic arm ● Boeing and Lockheed Martin are considering selling ULA (worth $2-3B) to privately-held Sierra Space, although there may still be significant distance between the two sides on price ● Two Chinese spacecraft appear to have reached their intended lunar orbit despite a launch anomaly a few months ago ● Sydney startup Metakosmos raised a pre-seed $2M to develop ‘Kosmosuit’, their integrated multi-environment spacesuit platform ● Starpath Robotics raised $12M to accelerate development of their lunar ice mining rover ● Rocket Factory Augsburg identified a turbopump oxygen fire as the root cause of their explosive test failure on the 19th ● NASA awarded $1.25M to three teams that demonstrated novel food production technology for long-duration human space exploration in their Deep Space Food Challenge finals ● LA-based startup Outpost won a $33.2M Air Force contract to develop their Earth return vehicles: Carryall and Ferryall ● NASA is still investigating the root cause of Orion’s heat shield erosion issues and wants clarity before stacking Artemis II ● Rocket Lab delivered their Mars-bound ESCAPADE spacecraft to Blue Origin in Florida for New Glenn’s inaugural launch—hitting the required October/November window for trans-Mars injection is looking tight. |
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 | The two identical spacecraft for NASA’s ESCAPADE mission were inspected and processed at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility at Kennedy Space Center. |
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¶Etc.- It’s a testament to modern astronomy and computing that we can analyze signals from a pulsar 510 light-years from Earth and determine the object’s precise size (11.4 km across) and mass (1.4x our Sun).
- STS-93: We don’t need any more of those.
- Moon Monday recently covered efforts to characterize lunar plume effects—how regolith is displaced and violently thrown around in the vacuum and low gravity of the lunar surface by rockets. The issue also looks at evidence that (paper, paper) Apollo landings displaced four times more material than previously thought. Flying debris from rockets pose a real problem for future lunar facilities and astronauts, likely necessitating the construction of berms and landing pads. NASA and ESA are studying the problem, with multiple startups working on it as well.
- A database of 1.3 million lunar impact craters.
- NASA’s four Starling cubesats (c.f. Issue 253) successfully demonstrated autonomous navigation solely based on star tracker images during their StarFOX experiment (paper).
- It’s long been known, due to Doppler measurements, that the Andromeda galaxy is heading toward our Milky Way (at about 110 km/s) and will collide in a few billion years (paper). However, a new simulation using updated estimates for the motion and mass of the four largest galaxies in the Local Group now suggests only a 50% chance that this collision will happen, at least within the next 10 billion years. Further out, a collision is, of course, still inevitable: “All the galaxies in the Local Group are bound together gravitationally, and so over tens of billions of years, they will all end up piling on top of each other into a single giant elliptical galaxy.”
- Ethan Siegel looks at the 10 most significant discoveries from JWST’s first two years of operation.
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