The Space Thread

I brought up the white dwarf study in this post. Still fascinating, though.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Dropping a few news tidbits for the week, since things have been quiet on the launch front.

SpaceX monopoly concerns

The launch of the Bandwagon-1 mission by SpaceX has generated renewed concerns in the launch services industry about monopoly power. The Washington Post published an article titled "SpaceX could finally face competition. It may be too late."

I can't read the full content without subscribing, which I won't do. But it did stir a lot of conversation on X about some of the industry comments quoted within it. I'll retype one such passage by hand:

By "that", they mean SpaceX's pricing on Transporter and Bandwagon rideshare missions, which comes to around $6,000/kg of payload. By contrast, the cheapest dedicated small launch service costs around $20,000/kg. The reason this particular mission came up is that it was significantly underloaded for the capacity of Falcon 9 (even RTLS), and therefore SpaceX likely only generated about $10 million of revenue on a vehicle that normally prices at over $60 million. The implication is that SpaceX is deliberately undercutting its competition.

Now, there are quite a few counterarguments here. For one, the Pentagon is under no obligation to pay more for services than the market offers, jokes about million-dollar pens aside. For another, SpaceX publishes its rideshare prices and thus there is no chicanery involved.

Additionally, even if a given mission is undersold, SpaceX made promises to the customers that it is launching, so it can't just scrap the mission like an airline that doesn't sell enough tickets for a flight. These missions are often compared to a bus ride to orbit. The bus comes and goes at the designated times even if it's not full of passengers.

SpaceX can do this because of its aggressive measures to cut its internal costs, plus sheer volume. Its competitors can't, because they haven't gotten to that point yet. As I've said many times before, it's only an illegal monopoly if the company is using unfair methods to restrain competition.

These folks are complaining because SpaceX started the race while they were still in the locker room.

Mars Sample Return

NASA: NASA Sets Path to Return Mars Samples, Seeks Innovative Designs

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson gave a presentation yesterday to discuss the new plan for Mars Sample Return, the ambitious mission that intends to fly a spacecraft to Mars to pick up the sample canisters collected by the Perseverance rover and launch them back to Earth.

An internal audit called into question the cost and timeline of that mission, which had ballooned to $11 billion with a 2040 return date. So the agency had to sit down and rethink everything.

Reading the article, they don't actually have a plan to accomplish it. Rather, they have a plan to make a plan. NASA will solicit "architecture proposals" from industry to do the job faster, cheaper, and with less risk. Once these proposals are evaluated, a single-source contract may be awarded.

The old plans for MSR involved two separate spacecraft and several helicopters. It would have been amazing and really complicated. Here's hoping we get something workable, else it will be preempted by actual human landings.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 11:10:05 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The way bureaucracy works, if you pursue "a plan to create a plan" badly, it ends up a hopeless mess, but if you do it well, it can genuinely save time and money while producing a superior outcome. By contrast, just generating the plan in committee is pretty much guaranteed to produce something mediocre. Not a disaster, necessarily, but mediocre. NASA is going for a homerun, let's hope they can hit the ball.

Well, like I said, time is a crucial factor in Mars Sample Return. If it is delayed too long, it will become irrelevant, since we'll be landing humans who are perfectly capable of collecting their own samples and bringing them home. Heck, uncrewed Starships could be landing on Mars by 2030.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 12:16:34 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

And those cutting costs is where they often cross the line of being ethical, for example requiring employees to work overtime for no pay, preventing them from unionizing, etc. While I love the results SpaceX can pursue, this bit is a huge fly in the soup. The even worse news? Their competitors are doing the same and yet unable to produce nearly as much results.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

This is an incomplete narrative at best. Yes, SpaceX is not unionized, but it has an extremely attractive stock-ownership program. Most importantly, it has developed a culture designed to attract motivated, brilliant, young people and give them the tools they need to thrive doing things they love. It and Tesla remain at the top of career choices for graduates in STEM fields.

If we get stuck on points like working conditions, we completely miss the actual reasons why SpaceX is so successful at what it does. It’s because it lets engineers be creative without bogging them down under layers of management. It’s because it’s not structurally indebted to a mountain of legacy contractors, each of which has its own finger in the political pie. It hasn’t been taken over by profit-seeking management like Boeing has.

Edit: I almost forgot to note that it has a big, hairy, audacious goal: colonizing other planets. "Make money" may be a type of motivation, but you don't get the best and brightest engineers with it. (You get the best and brightest accountants.)

It also has the good fortune to have been a first-mover. Rocket Lab, Stoke, Firefly, and others are by no means slacking in their rate of innovation, but they are emerging into a market that SpaceX has already claimed. They have a higher bar to clear. And Blue Origin doesn’t even have that excuse: it started around the same time and still hasn’t sent anything to orbit, much less landed and reflown hundreds of orbital rockets.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 4:16:00 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yeah Space "X"’s competitive advantage isn’t due to poor working conditions, that’s standard across most US industries (and also actually tends to be harmful to a company due to the costs associated with high churn). Space "X" has a competitive advantage because it was an earlier mover, because of economies of scale, because it has significant financial reserves and because for a long time the competition were basically just a bunch of cooperate welfare programs that wern’t expected to actually produce much of value.

Edited by Silasw on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:46:56 PM

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

There's also the problem that the demand for orbital launch is fairly inelastic. One of the reasons that the legacy industry could get away with its stagnation is that launch costs are only part of the equation. Spacecraft designs are based on the rockets that are available to launch them and can take years (or decades) to design and build. Rockets, in turn, are designed based on the payloads they will carry. It's a reinforcement loop.

When SpaceX was young, United Launch Alliance put out some infographics pooh-poohing its reuse goals, saying that it could never be economically feasible given the level of demand in the industry. Indeed, it would have been correct if Western nations had continued the current pace of launches.

What SpaceX accomplished, that nobody else had managed at the time, was to generate its own demand. Just as reuse started to become mature, it started launching Starlink. It had the deep pockets needed to support the initial massive capital investment, but it also had incredibly cheap launch costs. Now Starlink is such a strong source of cash flow that the company has stopped conducting new funding rounds.

The trick to breaking through in an industry is "simple": find something that people say is impossible and do it. Of course, that's also very hard, and it's a big draw for fraudsters, so the success rate is very low. SpaceX is a unicorn in more ways than one. I don't know that it's possible to repeat it, at least not within this industry.

As an aside, there is a profuse disinformation campaign on the Internet claiming all sorts of bullshit about SpaceX, led by such notables as "Common Sense Skeptic" and "thunderf00t". Anything they say can be ignored, but sadly a lot of media outlets don't realize that, and thus a lot of people buy into their lies and misrepresentations.

Edited to add: The small launch market — cubesats, nanosats, and the like — has a great deal of pent-up demand because of high launch costs relative to manufacturing costs. That's where companies like Astra, Rocket Lab, Firefly, etc. tried to break in, but it turned that SpaceX could leverage its much lower launch costs to take a massive bite out of the market. Hence the "anti-competitive" claims in the article I cited.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 17th 2024 at 10:05:05 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Well, it had to happen some day...

A chunk of metal that tore through a Florida home definitely came from the ISS: "I don't think I've seen or heard, after my own research, any of these events occurring."

No one was hurt, but it does raise the question of who would be liable for damages or injuries.

Optimism is a duty.

"that part was a Russian segment"

I reported the debris strike in this post; at the time, they hadn't identified it. NASA announced the identification on April 15. NASA is going to use the object, which is made of inconel (a material specifically designed to resist high temperatures) and was part of a stanchion used to support a battery pallet, to perform additional demisability studies to ensure that it doesn't happen in the future.

The batteries themselves are supplied by JAXA. As I mentioned earlier, the old ones were supposed to be disposed of in Japanese HTV supply vehicles but when a Soyuz launch failed the schedule got thrown off.

Boeing Starliner CFT-1

Speaking of the International Space Station, NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test Begins Stacking Operations. On April 16, Starliner's crewed flight test (CFT-1) vehicle moved out of the hangar to be lifted atop its Atlas V rocket. The mission is currently scheduled for Tuesday, May 7 at 02:34 UTC (May 6 10:34 PM EDT) and will take two astronauts on a test ride to the station.

Fingers crossed that all of the issues have been worked out and that it'll be a successful test.

Ingenuity's Goodbye

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Team Says Goodbye … for Now

The Little Helicopter That Could is now alone and will live out the rest of its days in silence. The Perseverance rover has gone out of range and, with its rotors crippled, Ingenuity will never fly again. According to NASA, its last programming was to perform daily system checkouts and capture images, even though there's nobody to see them.

Farewell, Ginny. Maybe, someday, someone will come to retrieve you.

Virgin Galactic's Struggles

Bloomberg: Richard Branson’s Space Empire Is a Waning Dream

Virgin Galactic's share price dropped below $1 this week amidst job cuts and the impending final flight of its first operational spaceplane, VSS Unity. Its next vehicle isn't expected to enter service until 2026 and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, may not have the cash (or desire) to rescue the company if it can't find a funding lifeline.

Branson's other space venture, Virgin Orbit, closed its doors last year after a failed mission killed any hope of getting bailed out by the markets. If Virgin Galactic goes down, it would leave Blue Origin standing as the only active suborbital tourism provider.

New Shepard Crewed Return to Flight

Speaking of Blue Origin, its New Shepard NS-25 mission is scheduled to take off sometime this month, carrying passengers for the first time since August, 2022. In September, 2022 it experienced a failure on an uncrewed mission and only resumed launching science payloads last December.

Unlike Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin isn't counting on revenue from New Shepard to keep it afloat, which is good since it's unlikely to have made any money off of the project. Suborbital tourism remains purely a vanity business for the time being.

Starlink Profitable?

Bloomberg: Musk's Undisclosed Starlink Costs Undercut Profitability Claims

This article has been noised around lately, and I'm posting it mainly for awareness. Since SpaceX does not publicly disclose its finances, we can't know for sure which of the competing claims is true. Some say that Starlink is still losing money overall and its "cash-flow positive" status is a bit of a white lie by Elon Musk. Others say it's doing great.

What is known, as I mentioned above, is that SpaceX hasn't had to open any new funding rounds in a while, and with its current private valuation sitting at $180 billion it's not going to run out of money any time soon. Rumors of a Starlink spinoff and IPO persist.

I learned separately that SpaceX is working to open service in India. If that happens, it'll be a huge revenue stream, and here's why.

A crucial factor in satellite connectivity, especially in low Earth orbit, is that any given satellite only generates revenue for a portion of its orbit. If it's over water (and not transmitting to a ship/airplane), or over a country that it's not licensed to provide service in, it's dead mass. Maximizing the ratio of revenue-generating time in orbit per satellite is key to making the business successful.

In simpler terms, it costs nothing to expand service to India (other than SG&A and possibly some ground stations), so the gross margin on that revenue stream is nearly 100%. This is true of any new geographical region. By contrast, adding new subscribers in a saturated region requires launching more satellites, whose cost has to be amortized.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 19th 2024 at 8:53:21 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Did NASA ever say why Ingenuity broke down? Ground strike or material fatigue?

I thought it was Martian sand being coarse and rough and getting everywhere.

Secret Signature

Har, har.

It was definitely a ground strike. It was traversing some very soft, sandy terrain and the engineers believe that its optical navigation system became confused because there wasn't enough detail to determine its course and altitude. As a safeguard, it performs an emergency descent and landing in such cases, and when it did so the last time, its rotors struck a dune surface and broke.

One piece of a rotor landed about fifteen meters away, and we have images of it from Perseverance. The others were all damaged to some extent. Even if it could still generate enough lift to get off the ground, which it can't, it would be too unstable and shake itself to pieces.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 19th 2024 at 8:44:40 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Pluto is now Arizona's 'official planet' — whether a 'dwarf' or not

Arizona is feeling like being an astronomy rebel, it seems.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 20th 2024 at 9:41:01 PM

Optimism is a duty.

Good for them, I guess? Pluto doesn't care what we call it; categorization is a human addiction, but it is important for understanding the universe. We call it a dwarf planet because, if we make it a full planet, then about fifty other objects in the solar system would also be planets.

Artemis III Mission Profile Changes?

Ars Technica: NASA may alter Artemis III to have Starship and Orion dock in low-Earth orbit

NASA is looking seriously at the Artemis program and its goals for the third mission, which plans to land humans on the Moon. Unfortunately, the goals and the reality are having a difficult time lining up.

Lest we get too fixated, it's not just Starship. While HLS readiness is indeed one of the pacing items, there are other players in the game. The EVA suits are another. Designed by Axiom and Collins, they have only had a few years to work since the program was revised, and it is by no means certain they'll be ready by 2026.

The Orion capsule itself is a third problem, specifically its heat shield. After greater than expected ablation during Artemis I, NASA has some concerns about its margins on a crewed return from lunar orbit. (Artemis II will be doing a lunar flyby, so should have the same risk. I don't quite understand that part.)

There are some more specific concerns as well. Artemis III will be the first time that Orion and Starship will dock with each other, and that will happen in lunar orbit, far from any possible rescue if things go south. They'd love to demonstrate it (and Starship's life support systems) a little closer to Earth.

A proposed way to buy down some of this risk is to have a mission between Artemis II and III in which an Orion capsule docks with Starship in low Earth orbit. Of course, if we do this, it calls into question the necessity of SLS and Orion in the first place, since such a mission could just as easily be achieved by Falcon 9 and Dragon, with Starship itself completing the lunar transit and return. (Don't tell Congress!)

There's also the idea of having Artemis III go to the Lunar Gateway instead of docking with Starship and landing on the surface. This would push the actual landing out to Artemis IV, but it runs into a second problem: there are no more Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stages (ICPS) available.

ULA was contracted to build three of them, and since they are a variant of the Delta Cryogenic Second Stage (DCSS) and Delta IV production lines are shut down, making a fourth would be very challenging. Its replacement, the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS), isn't planned to debut until 2028. So we would need to wait quite a bit longer to get that landing in.

Jim Free of NASA, when asked about the situation in January, pooh-poohed concerns a little. He said that the agency is always evaluating alternative plans but it has contracted with a bunch of companies to deliver products on a timeline, and it expects them to deliver what they promised.

Starship Capacity Concerns?

Earlier this month, Elon Musk gave a presentation at Starbase, Texas on the progress of the Starship program. The full thing can be watched on X.

Savvy analysts looked past the ambitious language and saw some things that concerned them, specifically that "Version 1" of Starship — the one that has flown three test flights so far — is well below the payload capacity that was originally promised.

In the update, Musk discusses a "Version 2" that will have the expected 100 ton capacity, followed by a Version 3 that will get to 200 tons. Both of these numbers are for reusable configurations, and the tons are metric. These upgrades will include stretching of the stages for additional propellant capacity. Starship will get three additional Raptor Vacuum engines in its final version, and the engines will get more powerful.

The problem is that a lot of the math doesn't add up. The figures published for Starship V1 can only be reconciled against the advertised performance of the Raptor 2 engine if it was operating at around 90 percent of rated thrust for the flights we've seen so far. Moreover, they indicate that the dry mass of Starship and Super Heavy are much higher than was believed.

A nervous part of me wonders if making a super-heavy rocket out of stainless steel might prove to be more of a challenge than Musk was expecting. I remind myself that most rockets start out overengineered and find ways to trim down over time. Raptor 3 will be a big part of that, as it is supposed to be robust enough not to need external shielding.

Regardless, it's clear that the Starship we see today is only a shadow of what the final version will look like. Falcon 9 went through a similar evolution, so let's not get out the pitchforks just yet.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 20th 2024 at 2:26:54 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Even Starship V1 is a huge improvement over any other rocket that currently exists, especially if we add the in-orbit refueling capability. With full reusability and increased payload volume capacity (it's not just mass that matters) it will still be a revolutionary spacecraft.

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

I have no doubt that they'll get it right, but a lot of people are going to be looking at this information and getting their knickers in a twist.

---

Breaking over to a fun bit of science, Don Pettit just posted a short video on X taken on the ISS in 2012. In this experiment a water sphere with an air bubble inside is placed on a speaker cone, then varying tones are played from the speaker.

You can clearly see the standing waves generated by the sound. This sort of thing is only possible in microgravity.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

HELL YEAH!

AZ Represent!

... something that just occurred to me.

How much space infrastructure does orbit-to-ground microwave power transmission require? Could it be launched to Mars for the purpose of providing a solar power supply for unmanned rovers without having to worry about the dust buildup that would eat into a ground-based solar panel's output?

Hmm, that's a very complicated set of questions. We already know how to gather solar power in space; that's how all satellites operate. I'm less familiar with transmitting it via microwave laser. A Google search reveals that we've tested it as recently as last year.

Mars is a more suitable environment, of course, because its thinner atmosphere should attenuate the signal less. However, accuracy remains a problem. Those satellites either have to be in stationary orbits or you need a lot of them zipping around and sending beams to specific locations . I'm leery about space lasers constantly aiming at the ground.

Dust buildup would affect the microwave receivers as well, although I couldn't say how much of a difference it would make. There's also the fact that solar intensity at Mars is only 43 percent that of Earth, so you need correspondingly larger collectors to generate equivalent power, but I'll assume we can solve that problem.

Speaking more generally, a large-scale colonization effort of Mars should be supported by communications and power infrastructure, and if we can put some of that in space, that'd be great.

Upcoming Space Activity

As usual, I am omitting Starlink missions and uncrewed launches from Russia and China. Data courtesy of Next Spaceflight.

• Rocket Lab | Electron/Curie | Beginning Of The Swarm | Tue Apr 23, 2024 22:00 UTC | LC-1B, Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand
• SpaceX | Falcon 9 Block 5 | WorldView Legion 1 & 2 | Wed Apr 24, 2024 18:30 UTC | SLC-4E, Vandenberg SFB, California, USA
• CASC | Long March 2F/G | Shenzhou 18 | Thu Apr 25, 2024 12:59 UTC | Site 901 (SLS-1), Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China
• Russian EVA 62 | Thu Apr 25, 2024 14:55 UTC | International Space Station
• Cargo Dragon (CRS-30) Undocking | Fri Apr 26, 2024 17:05 UTC | International Space Station
• SpaceX | Falcon 9 Block 5 | Galileo FOC FM25 & FM27 | NET Apr 28, 2024 | LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA

Potentially queued up for April, but without specific times, are a Minotaur IV launch, ABL's second test flight of the RS1 rocket, the final Virgin Galactic flight of VSS Unity, New Shepard's crewed return to flight, and the second Gaganyaan in-flight abort test by India.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 22nd 2024 at 10:53:48 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Some good news today: NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth (from JPL)

Also: NASA officially greenlights $3.35 billion mission to Saturn’s moon Titan (from Ars Technica)

Really hope they can get Voyager 1 all the way back up; and I've been eagerly anticipating Dragonfly since I first heard of it. It's going to be a robot quadcopter on Titan.

If you thought the visuals from Ingenuity were cool, just wait until Dragonfly starts sending back its data. I am super excited; here's hoping I live to see it happen.

---

A really big science launch coming up later this year is Europa Clipper, scheduled for a window opening October 10 on a fully expendable Falcon Heavy. This is the one that Congress wanted to manifest on SLS, but would have had to wait until... well, they said 2026 but there's no way an SLS Block 1B could possibly be ready sooner than 2028 at this point, and even then it's dedicated to Artemis.

In addition to many years and at least $2 billion in launch costs, the switch to Falcon Heavy saved up to another billion dollars to redesign Clipper to handle SLS's increased vibrations (due to the solid rocket boosters).

If it makes it off the ground successfully, it'll arrive in 2030.

---

Another fun milestone: the next Falcon 9 mission will be its 300th successful booster landing if that goes to plan. Currently it's Starlink Group 6-53, scheduled for 22:17 UTC tomorrow from Florida. If that gets scrubbed, it'll be WorldView Legion 1 & 2 from California.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 22nd 2024 at 11:07:56 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Edited by Risa123 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 4:14:12 PM

The oxygen bottleneck for technospheres because if the atmospheric partial pressure decreases below 18% or so, fire and flames cannot form. Sapient life, maybe, but any technology that requires open flames is SOL.

(The chemist here wonders about the mechanism - is it that at such low oxygen concentrations the other gases carry away too much heat?)

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman