TJSW-4 launches on a CZ-3B from Xichang 17 Oct 2019 (Weibo)
A CZ-3B launched the TJSW-4 satellite from Xichang 17 October 2019, at about 1520 UT. Other satellites in the TJSW series were built by CAST, operate in geostationary orbit, and are speculated to have military or surveillance missions.
Electron “As The Crow Flies” launches from Māhia 17 October 2019 0122 UT. (Rocket Lab)
An Electron rocket took off from Māhia 17 October 2019 0122 UT, carrying the Palisade 16U satellite to 1200 km. It was the ninth mission for the Electron rocket, dubbed “As The Crow Flies” in reference to launch customer Astro Digital, a satellite lab in California which has branded its mix-and-match satellite bus offerings as the Corvus platform.
The oft-delayed Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) is finally flying! On 11 October 2019 at 0159 UT, Northrop Grumman’s Lockheed L1011 TriStar, named Stargazer, loosed the rocket into the air, which promptly lit and hurled the 300-kg payload into a 27-degree, 600 km circular orbit.
A Pegasus rocket with the ICON ionosphere probe falls from the Stargazer L1011 carrier aircraft moments before ignition, off the coast of Florida, 11 October 2019 0159 UT (NASA TV)
It was the second try on the second day of its 2019 launch campaign. Just the day before, rain had scrubbed the launch. A previous attempt to fly the payload from Kwajalein Atoll in 2017, had been called off due to payload issues. Another two attempts were made in 2018, even shifting to Cape Canaveral, but these were also called off.
Even so, an abort on Pegasus doesn’t necessarily end the launch day; the initial abort being called just moments after other controllers deemed the lost radio channel non-essential. The plane, however, does need to be at a very specific speed, heading, and attitude, so the L1011 lumbered back around into the predetermined flight pattern, or “racetrack”, for a second pass. The flight made it back into the launch zone, or “box”, just before 10pm local time, and sent the probe to the top of the ionosphere.
Stargazer’s flight to and from the launch zone, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, 11 Oct 2019 (FlightAware)
The mission will now collect data for two years using its plasma sensor from the University of Texas-Dallas, a Michelson interferometer from the US Naval Research Laboratory, and two ultraviolet imagers from the University of California-Berkeley, which also hosts mission control.
The Pegasus strategy of using an airplane as a first stage will soon be matched by Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl 747 and LauncherOne rocket, due to complete its first mission in the next few months.
Michelle Brekke of Boeing Crew Space Transportation serves as Grand Marshall of the University of Minnesota homecoming parade (University of Minnesota/GopherSports)
A Proton-M rocket launches from Baikonur 08 October 2019 1017 UT, with Eutelsat 5 West B commsat and the MEV-1 mission extension robot aboard (Credit: Roscosmos)
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.
This image of the Florida Keys was collected by Landsat 8 in 10.60-11.19 µm infrared on 07 May 2013, and was one of the first datasets released for Landsat Collection 2, on 30 September 2019. (Credit: USGS / The Fargo Orbit)
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
Base specs for Starship
Orbital fuel transfer
Landing simulation
One side of Starship is covered in heat shielding (SpaceX)
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
Super Heavy Booster specs
How it all stacks up (SpaceX)
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
Elon Musk presents details on Starship at Boca Chica spaceport, 29 Sep 2019 0127 UT
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.
CZ-2D launch from Jiuquan, 25 Sep 2019 0054 UT, with Yunhai-1-02 ionosphere experiment (Credit: Weibo via Rocket Rundown on YouTube)
25 Sep 2019 0054 UT Jiuquan CZ2D Yunhai-1-02
Soyuz MS-15 launches from Baikonur, 25 Sep 2019 1357 UT (Credit: Roscosmos)
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
Soyuz-2.1b launch from Plesetsk 26 Sep 2019 0746 UT with EKS-3 military satellite. (Credit: ROSCOSMOS / VKS via YouTube SciNews)
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.
H2B launches from Tanegashima with the Kounotori 8 HTV, 24 Sep 2019 (JAXA)
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.
Bridenstein speaks to members of the Diet, 24 Sep 2019 1900 UT.
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.
