Civil Air Patrol and the US Air Force continue to search for the pilot of a missing Cessna 172, N6483B, lost en route to Oakes, North Dakota after departure from Aberdeen Regional Airport at about 10 October 2019 0315 UT, just before a blizzard began to cross the plains. Weather and crop cover has hampered the response effort.
CBC Saskatchewan featured Doug Campbell, a biomedical engineer and astronaut candidate, whose latest achievement is spending an unusual 6-day stay at Jules’ Undersea Lodge in the waters off Key Largo, Florida. Isolation training is a feather in the cap for Campbell, who has not yet been selected by any space agency for official duties, though, in a new age of private astronautics, government training may no longer be necessary.
On 30 September 2019, The US Geological Survey released new samples of Landsat data, leading up to Landsat Collection 2, a global multi-instrument survey of Planet Earth. Data processing will continue all through next year and is expected to be fully available in 2021.
The SpaceX Starship
prototype, dubbed “Mark 1”, was at the forefront during a
major press event at Boca Chica Island, Texas, 29 Sep 2019 0030 UT.
The stainless steel vessel, polished to a mirror sheen and welded in
concentric circles to a Buck Rodgers-esque apex, barely budged in the
face of stiff winds on the sand spit, even as Grasshopper strained at
its tiedowns just behind it.
Musk commented on
the past 11 years in orbit for SpaceX, opening with a recap of key
launches, and providing details of a vessel that will double the
scale of the entire field of spaceflight the moment it reaches orbit.
When it flies to orbit in 2020, Starship will clock in at 120 tons
dry with 150 tons of payload, accelerated by a colossal first stage
booster twice the power of the Saturn V.
Despite the sizzling details and aspirations for Starship and its booster, Musk’s details were notably vague on crew modules and life support systems. With the dearMoon flight date of 2023 looming, Musk offered thanks for Yusaku Maesawa’s investment and a bit of spontaneous speculation.
STARSHIP
The main event
featured the gleaming Starship standing near the stage of the
late-evening, outdoor press conference. The Mark 1 is a test
platform with three sea-level Raptor engines. This vehicle will be
able to make suborbital flights, the next being a flight to 20km
altitude within 2 months’ time.
Later models that
make the leap to orbit, with an extra three Raptor engines, with
their expansive vacuum bells filling the remaining area at the base
of the vessel. While these will provide the most efficient thrust in
outer space, they will be stationary. Motion control can still be
performed by the three gimballed sea-level Raptors, or by hot gas
thrusters, essentially mini-rocket motors, in the RCS packs.
For those who
weren’t already up to speed on his Carnegie-like axe to millions of
dollars worth of carbon fibre production equipment, Musk also resumed
his enthusiastic advocacy of the thermal properties of 301 stainless
steel. The “glass vermicelli” heat shield that is hex
tiled onto the belly of Starship is light and thin with the present
design. A switch to something other than steel would require a much
thicker, heavier heat shield, so much so that it just isn’t worth it.
Though the overall
mass was first estimated at 85 tons (and this dated figure still made
it into the presentation slides), the final mass for Starship is
actually about 120 tons. Iteration may cut that to 110, or in a
possible edge case, 99. A Starship can launch with up to 150 tons of
payload, though it will need upgrades to land with the same amount.
At first, it will only be able to land with 50 tons in the holds.
Starships will be
capable of on-orbit fuel transfer, allowing the unspent fuel from
earlier missions to top up long-distance voyages. Musk claimed that
it was easier to dock two Starships rear-to-rear for fuelling than it
is to dock a crew capsule at the International Space Station,
something SpaceX has already done.
In fact, a single
crewed Starship flight would be in at least one sense, as big as all
previous achievements in spaceflight. Each Starship’s thousand cubic
meters of pressurized habitation space is about the the same as what
exists in the entire International Space Station. And Musk is not
talking about building just a handful of Starships in some sort of
modern take on the Space Shuttle program, but a fleet of 20 or more
providing useful, even excess capacity, to reduce the hurdles to
access space.
STARSHIP BOOSTER
The first stage for any orbital flight of Starship will require the largest rocket ever built, with up to double the thrust of the Saturn V. The Starship’s Super Heavy booster, which has gone by many names over the course of its development, is a reusable first-stage rocket of immense size, made from the same stainless steel as Starship, its smooth cylindrical shape punctuated only by its landing gear and diamond-shaped grid fins, and outputting 7500 tons-force of thrust.
The Starship Booster
will have a variable engine loadout centred around a central core of
seven gimballed Raptor engines. The thirty remaining engine mounts
are stationary: four under each of six fin-legs, and an additional
six mount points in the remaining space between the exterior and the
central core. Though it supports a maximum count of 37, Musk
suggested that early orbital tests of Starship Booster might use as
few as 31 Raptors. In service, the exact number of engines could be
customized to the launch need.
RACE TO MARS
The Starship program
will feature two spaceports – Boca Chica and Cape Canaveral. Both
facilities will have full-plant construction capacity and will
compete in a race to the first interplanetary crewed mission. As
such, Musk’s onetime suggestion that Boca Chica “could” be
the site of that mission remains a distinct possibility, though
equally shared with Cape Canaveral. Ultimately it will be decided
not by neither fiat nor chance, but rather, a fair scrimmage in an
engineering competition.
The race to Mars
will require leaps in production capacity, and SpaceX is scaling to
meet the demand. Presently capable of turning out a new Raptor
engine in just over a week, Musk’s goal is to cut that in short order
to one every three days, then one a day as Starship nears normal
operations. 100 Raptor engines will be needed just to get Starship
and Starship Booster through orbital testing.
UNPRECEDENTED SPEED
With a first orbit
set for as soon as March 2020, Musk also suggested that crew could
fly on Starship “next year”, not long after the first
flight, because the reusability of the system allows its reliability
to be quickly demonstrated. Such a feat would put SpaceX, presently
just a couple months ahead of other space companies on commercial
spaceflight, in a breakaway lead far ahead of every state and private
spaceflight program.
It’s a pace that
just might be plausible, given that, when the design was finally
ready, the Starship Mark 1 was built in less than 5 months. Further
models are scheduled to be built at an accelerated pace. Along the
way, they’ll incorporate improvements – for example, the first two
Starships were built like grain bins out of rectangular plates of
steel. From Mark 3, steel coils will be unspooled to the right
diameter and welded along just three edges, reducing complexity.
In the quest to
accelerate development, building Starship outdoors proved to be the
winning move, another of the advantages steel construction has over
costlier materials. There are still plans to build indoor production
facilities; at Boca Chica specifically, SpaceX has tendered an offer
to buy out the entire village, which would provide development room
as well as reduce the logistical problems of moving residents to
safety during launches.
UNPRECEDENTED SCALE
Musk reiterated the
potential of Starship to completely outscale the existing launch
services market. Musk tossed some back-of-the-napkin numbers, a
fleet of 10-20 Starships orbiting 1.5 to 3 gigagrams per year,
dwarfing the existing space industry by a factor of 1000 or more.
All of that capacity and more would be needed for a serious effort to
settle the Moon and Mars.
Those optimistic
estimates, rely on pretty fast turnaround times – Musk envisions a
booster capable of being flown 20 times a day – that’s more
turnarounds than most regional jets! A particular Starship, on the
other hand, might fly as many as 4 times per day, with returns to
Earth more practically limited by orbital precession and the number
of active spaceports.
EXTRAORDINARY CLAIMS
All of this detail remains for the most part, breathless reporting of Elon Musk’s claims about what the Starship program will look like. It’s a big deal. It’s also a lot of things, all at once, that have never been done before.
No one has ever made
a methane rocket this big.
No one has ever
taken four humans around the Moon.
No one has ever
taken humans to Mars.
SpaceX can easily be
counted among the organizations in the world that can believably take
on these challenges. It has shown a steady and strenuous pace of
increased capabilities, but from time to time, it has needed the
occasional pause to regroup. Still, for now, Starship appears to be
a well-managed program with sophisticated engineers hitting technical
milestones at rates not seen in the space industry since the 1960s.
25 Sep 2019 1357 UT Soyuz-FG Soyuz MS-15 Crew: Jessica Meir of NASA (American, Swedish) Hazza Al Mansouri of the MBRSC (Emirati), Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos (Russian) Spaceflight firsts: First Emirati in space, first Swedish woman in space Spaceflight lasts: Final flight of Soyuz-FG rocket
26 Sep 2019 0746 UT Plesetsk Soyuz-2.1b EKS-3 EKS-3 is part of the Russian military’s missile launch detection system. It uses a Molniya orbit.
Following checkouts and renewed focus on pad safety, Kounotori 8 launched from Tanegashima at 24 Sep 2019 1605 UT; the cargo module will arrive at the ISS on Saturday.
Just hours after the launch, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine spoke to members of the Diet to encourage support for the Lunar Gateway space station project, with special emphasis on Japan’s proven ability to contribute to space exploration through today’s cargo launch as well as the ISS Kibo module and the Hayabusa 2 asteroid probe.
Bridenstein also touted the “open architecture” of the Lunar Gateway, Gateway specifications for docking, life support, avionics, environmental control, data, and communications will be published online, allowing applications to be developed for the gateway or the lunar surface.
A Long March 11 rocket took off from Jiuquan 19 September 2019 0642 UT. The rocket carried 1 visual and 4 hyperspectral Earth imaging satellites for Guangdong-based company Zhuhai Orbita, to a 510km sun-synchronous orbit.
JAXA’s Konotori 8 cargo mission to the International Space Station was scheduled for departure today, though that was postponed. At about 1205 UT 10 Sep 2019, there was an unexpected fire underneath the launch deck at Tanegashima, near two of the H-IIB rocket’s four solid rocket boosters. Response efforts continued over the following three hours.
The fire did not appear to contact the rocket, though water used to suppress the fire did hit the rocket and SRBs, a problem because, though the response effort made the launchpad safe and saved the cargo capsule, the rocket may still be damaged by either the pad fire or the unexpected mechanical stress and corrosion from the fire-fighting water.
An investigation is now underway to determine the state of the H-IIB vehicle. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced that the launch will not take place earlier than 13 Sep 2019; the possibility of being delayed more than a month has not been ruled out.
ESA has announced the results of its independent investigation of the failure of arianespace Vega flight VV15, which appeared to fail just after first stage burnout. The report indicates that the second stage did in fact ignite, and looked good for just under 14 seconds, until a thermo-structural failure in the forward dome of the Z23 second stage motor caused catastrophic failure of the launcher.
A common type of thermo-structural failure in solid rocket motors is the presence of small small grain defects, such as voids or cracks, that can cause localized pockets of fuel to burn through too early. Because the fuel also acts as an ablative shield for the exterior skin of the rocket, burning through the fuel too soon is as bad or worse than using a blowtorch to cut the surrounding structure of the rocket.
A thermo-structural failure in a solid rocket motor was famously the source of the fatal launch failure of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.
The fault is common in hobby rocketry, and is eliminated mainly by procedure and quality control in commercial space activities.