Enlarge/ The Flame and Horsehead nebulae in Orion.
Andrew Desrosiers
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It’s March 1, and today’s image showcases two nebulae within the Orion constellation.
On the left of the image you can see the Flame Nebula, named as such because it’s an emoticon often used in gaming chats—just kidding. Rather, it’s an emission nebula about 1,000 light-years from Earth. To the right of the image is the rather iconic Horsehead Nebula, which really does resemble the head of a horse. It’s a little less than 1,400 light-years from Earth. The darkness in the nebula is mostly due to thick dust blocking the light of the stars behind it.
Andrew Desrosiers sent in this image, which he took from his home in Ashby, Massachusetts. It’s the product of about 60 hours of observing the same location of the night sky.
“This is part of a project I started early this winter to keep my telescope just trained on this part of the sky all winter,” he told me. “So far I have captured 60 hours of exposure data.” He hopes to get to 100 before the end of the season.
Enlarge/ Static fire test of the Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the Crew 8 mission in early March.
SpaceX
Welcome to Edition 6.33 of the Rocket Report! If you check the “next three launches” list below you’ll see that all three are for Falcon 9 rockets. That’s not the first time this has happened this year, nor will it likely be the last. It’s starting to look like SpaceX might actually come close to its target of 150 launches this year—a remarkable cadence.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
India building a second spaceport. The Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, has received the go-ahead to construct a new spaceport in Tamil Nadu, with which it aims to help private players launch small rockets, Tech Crunch reports. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for the spaceport, located on an island named Kulasekharapatnam off the southern state of Tamil Nadu. This will be the country’s second spaceport after the space agency’s existing Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
Easier path to the poles … The spaceport will be dedicated to launching smaller launch vehicles and will be ready in about two years. Spread over 2,350 acres, the Kulasekharapatnam spaceport will help save propellant for small rocket launches, as the port can launch rockets directly south over the Indian Ocean without requiring crossing landmasses. This is unlike the existing launch site at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, which adds more fuel requirement for launching into a polar orbit as rockets need to follow a curved path to the south to avoid Sri Lanka’s landmass. (submitted by Joey S-IVB)
Astra founders warn of “imminent bankruptcy.” The founders of satellite propulsion and launch vehicle company Astra have sharply cut their offer to take the company private, warning of “imminent bankruptcy” if the company doesn’t accept their new proposal, Space News reports. In a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Tuesday, Astra released a letter sent three days earlier to a special committee of the company’s board of directors from Chris Kemp and Adam London, the chief executive and chief technology officer, slashing by two-thirds their offer to buy outstanding shares of the publicly traded company.
Pray I don’t alter it further … In November, Kemp and London proposed to buy Astra shares at $1.50, approximately double their price at the time they announced the deal. In the new proposal, they are offering only $0.50 per share. Kemp and London cited several reasons for cutting the share price. They included continued cash burn by the company since they tendered the original offer and higher “non-operating expenses” as the company used multiple third-party advisers to assess options. Under the revised proposal, Kemp and London said they anticipated raising $45 million overall to take Astra private, of which $7.7 million would go to shareholders. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.
RFA reveals plans for SaxaVord spaceport. An environmental report published by the UK Civil Aviation Authority has provided greater insight into Rocket Factory Augsburg’s proposed operations at SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, European Spaceflight reports. The report details a plan for RFA to conduct up to 10 launches per year from SaxaVord, which would account for one-third of the spaceport’s total budget of 30 orbital launches per year.
More engines, please … Because of the local bird population, RFA will be unable to conduct launches or static fire tests between mid-May and the end of June. The company will also be limited to a maximum of two launches per month. The rocket’s design is also changing. Significantly, the 21-meter first stage will now be equipped with 13 Helix engines producing 1,300 kilonewtons of thrust instead of just nine engines, as previously stated by the company. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Enlarge / Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity rocket plane ignites its rocket motor moments after release from a jet-powered carrier aircraft high above New Mexico.
Last year, Virgin Galactic seemed to finally be hitting a stride toward making commercial suborbital spaceflight. The company flew its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane to the edge of space six times in six months, giving a few Virgin Galactic customers a taste of spaceflight after waiting more than a decade.
Finally, it appeared that Virgin Galactic turned a corner, moving past the setbacks and course corrections that delayed founder Sir Richard Branson’s aim of bringing spaceflight to a wider population. Virgin Galactic officials wouldn’t describe the company’s next step as a setback or a course correction. It’s part of an intentional business strategy to make Branson’s dream a reality.
“That dream behind Virgin Galactic came into sharp focus as we repeatedly flew spaceship Unity in 2023,” said Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic’s president and CEO, in a quarterly earnings call this week. “Now, in 2024, we’re poised for even more meaningful accomplishments as we build the fleet of spaceships that will turn the dream into reality and long-term success.”
But to do so, Virgin Galactic needs to give up on the horse that got them here.
On 11 missions, including test flights, the VSS Unity rocket plane has soared higher than 50 miles (80 kilometers)—where space begins, according to the US government’s definition—but it will probably fly just once more. Virgin Galactic is redirecting resources toward completing the development and testing of a new fleet of rocket planes known as Delta-class ships, which the company says will outclass VSS Unity in flight cadence, reusability, and revenue-earning potential.
Colglazier said the first of Virgin Galactic’s Delta ships is on track to begin ground and flight testing next year, with commercial service targeted for 2026 based out of Spaceport America in New Mexico.
One more and done
Late last year, Virgin Galactic announced it would retire VSS Unity by the middle of 2024, following the company’s Galactic 07 or Galactic 08 missions. On Tuesday, a company spokesperson confirmed to Ars that Virgin Galactic will pause flights of VSS Unity after the Galactic 07 mission slated for this spring. That means the rocket plane will fly to space just one more time, taking four customers into suborbital space to experience a few minutes of microgravity before coming back to land on a runway.
Colglazier said this next flight will have a “blended manifest of researchers and private citizens.” The company hasn’t identified any of the passengers, and for the last several flights, hasn’t announced the names of its passengers until after they landed.
Mike Moses, Virgin Galactic’s president of spaceline operations, said the Galactic 07 mission, the final flight of VSS Unity, is scheduled for the second quarter of this year, sometime between the beginning of April and the end of June. He said engineers are looking at a “minor change” to a retention mechanism that malfunctioned on the Galactic 06 flight last month, causing an alignment pin to fall to the ground as the rocket plane separated from its carrier aircraft over New Mexico.
Virgin Galactic reported the anomaly earlier this month, but Moses said the alignment pin performed its function of keeping the VSS Unity spacecraft properly aligned to its carrier jet through pre-flight procedures until the rocket plane separated from the aircraft to fire its rocket motor and climb to the edge of space. The anomaly “posed no safety threat at all during the flight,” he said, but “clearly we don’t want it to fall.”
The reason for pulling VSS Unity off flight status boils down to money, not any technical limitation. In August, Moses told Ars that VSS Unity could be capable of 500 to 1,000 flights.
Enlarge / A photo of Odysseus the moment before it gently toppled over.
Intuitive Machines
After six days and the public release of new images, engineers have finally pieced together the moments before, during, and after the Odysseus lander touched down on the Moon.
During a news conference on Wednesday, the chief executive of Intuitive Machines, Steve Altemus, described what his company has learned about what happened last Thursday evening as Odysseus made its powered descent down to the Moon.
From their control room in Houston, the mission operators watched with fraying nerves, as their range finders had failed. A last-minute effort to use altitude data from a NASA payload on board failed because the flight computer on board Odysseus could not ingest it in time. So the lander was, in essence, coming down to the Moon without any real-time altimetry data.
The last communication the operators received appeared to show that Odysseus had touched down on the Moon and was upright. But then, to their horror, all telemetry from the spacecraft ceased. The data on the flight controllers’ consoles in Houston froze. They feared the worst.
Skidding down to the Moon
About 10 minutes later, the lander sent a weak signal back. In that initial trickle of data, based on the lander’s inertial measurement unit, it appeared that Odysseus was partly on its side. But there were confusing signals.
On Wednesday, Altemus explained what the team has since pieced together. Because of the lack of altimetry data, Odysseus thought it was about 100 meters higher above the lunar surface than it actually was, so as it touched down it was traveling about three times faster than intended, about 3 meters per second. It was also moving laterally, with respect to the ground, at about 1 meter per second.
“We hit harder than expected and skidded along the way,” Altemus explained.
As it impacted and skidded, the spacecraft’s main engine was still firing. Then, just as the spacecraft touched down more firmly, there was a spike in the engine’s combustion chamber. This is consistent with the bell-shaped engine nozzle coming into contact with the lunar surface.
It is perhaps worth pausing a moment here to consider that this spacecraft, launched a week earlier, had just made an autonomous landing without knowing precisely where it was. But now it found itself on the Moon. Upon impact, one or more of the landing legs snapped as it came down hard. Then, at that very moment, with the engine still burning, an onboard camera snapped an image of the scene. Intuitive Machines published this photo on Wednesday. It’s spectacular.
“We sat upright, with the engine firing for a period of time,” Altemus said. “Then as it wound down, the vehicle just gently tipped over.”
Based on the gravity of the Moon, Intuitive Machines and NASA calculated that it took about two seconds to tip over. The lander fell on its side, with a helium tank or radio shelf contacting the Moon. This protrusion, combined with the 12-degree slope of the terrain, means that Odysseus is now gently leaning on the lunar surface at about a 30-degree angle. On Tuesday, the spacecraft returned an image that verified these conclusions.
“We have that photo now to confirm that’s the orientation,” Altemus said.
Sleepy time
As Intuitive Machines has better understood the situation and the status of its vehicle, it has been able to download a torrent of data. NASA has gotten valuable information from all six of its payloads on board, said a project scientist for the space agency, Sue Lederer. As of Wednesday, NASA had been able to download about 50MB of data. The baseline for success was a single bit of data.
But time is running out as the Sun dips toward the horizon. Odysseus will run out of power as soon as Wednesday evening, entering the long lunar night. In about three weeks, as sunlight starts to hit the spacecraft’s solar panels again, Intuitive Machines will try to wake up the spacecraft. The odds are fairly long. The chemistry of its lithium-ion batteries doesn’t like cold, and temperatures will plummet to minus-280° Fahrenheit (minus-173° Celsius) in a few days. That may wreck the batteries or crack the electronics in the flight computer.
Yet hope remains eternal for a spacecraft its operators have taken to affectionately calling Odie. It has defied the odds so far. “He’s a scrappy little dude,” Lederer said. “I have confidence in Odie at this point.”
Enlarge / Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander is shown shortly before touching down on the Moon.
Intuitive Machines
HOUSTON—Steve Altemus beamed with pride on Tuesday morning as he led me into Mission Control for the Odysseus lander, which is currently operating on the Moon and returning valuable scientific data to Earth. A team of about a dozen operators sat behind consoles, attempting to reset a visual processing unit onboard the lunar lander, one of their last, best chances to deploy a small camera that would snap a photo of Odysseus in action.
“I just wanted you to see the team,” he said.
The founder and chief executive of Intuitive Machines, which for a few days this month has been the epicenter of the spaceflight universe after landing the first commercial vehicle on the Moon, invited me to the company’s nerve center in Houston to set some things straight.
“You can say whatever you want to say,” Altemus said. “But from my perspective, this is an absolute success of a mission. Holy crap. The things that you go through to fly to the Moon. The learning, just every step of the way, is tremendous.”
Altemus will participate in a news conference on Wednesday at Johnson Space Center to provide a fuller perspective of the journey of Odysseus to the Moon and all those learnings. But I got the sense he invited me to the company’s offices Tuesday because he was itching to tell someone—to tell the world—that although Odysseus had toppled over after touching down, the mission was, in his words, an absolute success.
After more than an hour of speaking with Altemus, I believe him.
Odysseus is a beastly machine, and the team flying it isn’t shabby, either. They have certainly busted their asses. The offices in south Houston were littered with the remains of junk food, coffee, and other elixirs of long nights and wracked brains. It’s all been a whirlwind, no doubt. Next to a bag of tortilla chips, there was a bottle of Ibuprofen.
Coming in blind
As has been previously reported, Intuitive Machines discovered that the range finders on Odysseus were inoperable a couple of hours before it was due to attempt to land on the Moon last Thursday. This was later revealed to be due to the failure to install a pencil-sized pin and a wire harness that enabled the laser to be turned on and off. As a result, the company scrambled to rewrite its software to take advantage of three telescopes on a NASA payload, the Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing, for altimetry purposes.
While this software patch mostly worked, Altemus said Tuesday that the flight computer onboard Odysseus was unable to process data from the NASA payload in real time. Therefore, the last accurate altitude reading the lander received came when it was 15 kilometers above the lunar surface—and still more than 12 minutes from touchdown.
That left the spacecraft, which was flying autonomously, to rely on its optical navigation cameras. By comparing imagery data frame by frame, the flight computer could determine how fast it was moving relative to the lunar surface. Knowing its initial velocity and altitude prior to initiating powered descent and using data from the inertial measurement unit (IMU) on board Odysseus, it could get a rough idea of altitude. But that only went so far.
“So we’re coming down to our landing site with no altimeter,” Altemus said.
Unfortunately, as it neared the lunar surface, the lander believed it was about 100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was. So instead of touching down with a vertical velocity of just 1 meter per second and no lateral movement, Odysseus was coming down three times faster and with a lateral speed of 2 meters per second.
“That little geometry made us hit a little harder than we wanted to,” he said.
But all was not lost. Based upon data downloaded from the spacecraft and imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flew over the landing site, Intuitive Machines has determined that the lander came down to the surface and likely skidded. This force caused one of its six landing legs to snap. Then, for a couple of seconds, the lander stood upright before toppling over due to the failed leg.
The company has an incredible photo of this moment showing the lander upright, with the snapped leg and the engine still firing. Altemus plans to publicly release this photo Wednesday.
Enlarge/ Varda’s reentry capsule soon after landing at the Utah Test and Training Range.
Varda Space Industries is finally able to celebrate. For nearly eight months, the in-space manufacturing company’s first mission was essentially stranded in low-Earth orbit, but not because of any technical malfunction or a restriction imposed by the laws of physics.
Instead, the spacecraft couldn’t return to Earth until Varda and three government entities—the US military, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization—all got on the same page. This was far more complicated than anyone envisioned, and Varda had to bypass landing opportunities in July and September because it couldn’t secure governmental approvals.
Finally, earlier this month, the FAA approved a commercial reentry license for Varda’s space capsule, which was somewhat larger than a mini-fridge, to fall back into the atmosphere and parachute to a landing in the remote Utah desert southwest of Salt Lake City. Varda’s landing zone was at the Utah Test and Training Range, a sprawling military facility primarily used for weapons testing.
Varda’s capsule landed in the Utah desert at around 4: 40 pm EST (2140 UTC) last Wednesday. Approaching from the north, the craft’s heat shield protected it from scorching temperatures during reentry. Then, the capsule deployed a 6.2-foot-diameter (2.1-meter) parachute to slow its velocity for a relatively gentle landing.
A recovery team went out to retrieve the nearly 200-pound capsule and connect it to a helicopter line for a short flight to a nearby processing facility, where engineers would prepare the spacecraft for transport back to Varda’s headquarters in El Segundo, California.
The mood at Varda following the successful landing was “as cheerful as it gets,” said Delian Asparouhov, who co-founded the company in 2020 with former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey and scientist Daniel Marshall.
“I always felt confidence in our team’s ability to accomplish this,” Asparouhov told Ars. “It was just a question of time.”
Waiting game
Varda achieved several firsts with this mission. The Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) has some experience in supporting spacecraft landings, but this was the first time a commercial spacecraft landed at a military test range, adding another layer of regulatory and bureaucratic oversight. In September, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission deposited a cache of asteroid samples at UTTR.
Varda was the first company to secure a commercial FAA reentry license under streamlined commercial spaceflight regulations known as Part 450. This licensing paradigm is regularly used for commercial launches (there were 117 FAA-licensed launches last year), but this was the first time any company went through this process for a reentry.
Only two companies received commercial FAA reentry licenses before Varda—Lockheed Martin for a single test flight of the Orion spacecraft in 2014 and SpaceX for more than 40 commercial flights of its Dragon crew and cargo spacecraft. Both companies have operated under previous licensing regimes before the FAA introduced the revised Part 450 protocol in 2020.
The FAA’s commercial space office is responsible for licensing commercial launch and reentry operations, with a primary interest in ensuring that these activities don’t endanger the public. But FAA air traffic controllers had to find a time to clear a broad swath of airspace around the trajectory of Varda’s descending space capsule. The FAA’s temporary flight restriction for Varda’s reentry was unusually large, particularly for such a small spacecraft, stretching more than 400 miles (700 kilometers) long and 60 miles (100 kilometers) wide from southern Montana to western Utah.
The timing of Varda’s reentry, along with Varda’s access to the secure military facility, also had to be coordinated with the test range’s busy schedule of military exercises.
Enlarge/ Starship launches on its second flight on November 18, 2023.
SpaceX
A little more than three months after the most recent launch of a Starship vehicle, which ended with both the booster and upper stage being lost in flight, the Federal Aviation Administration has closed its investigation of the mishap.
“SpaceX identified, and the FAA accepts, the root causes and 17 corrective actions documented in SpaceX’s mishap report,” the federal agency said in a statement issued Monday. “Prior to the next launch, SpaceX must implement all corrective actions and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements.”
SpaceX must still submit additional information to the FAA, which is responsible for the safety of people and property on the ground, before the agency completes its review of an application to launch Starship for a third time. The administrator for Commercial Space Transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, Kelvin Coleman, said last week that early to mid-March is a reasonable timeline for the regulatory process to conclude.
A launch attempt is likely to follow soon after.
What went wrong
In conjunction with Monday’s announcement, SpaceX released details for the first time of what happened to cause the November 18 launch to go awry.
In this update, SpaceX noted that the Super Heavy first stage of the rocket performed nominally, with all 33 Raptor engines on this massive rocket igniting successfully. The booster then performed a full-duration burn to reach stage separation. At this point, the upper stage executed a successful “hot staging” maneuver in which the Starship stage separated from the booster while some of the booster’s engines were still firing.
For the Super Heavy booster, the next step was to perform a series of burns to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico. As part of the initial burn, 13 of the rocket’s engines were intended to fire.
“During this burn, several engines began shutting down before one engine failed energetically, quickly cascading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the booster,” SpaceX said. “The vehicle breakup occurred more than three and a half minutes into the flight at an altitude of ~90 km over the Gulf of Mexico.”
The problem was subsequently linked to a problem with supplying liquid oxygen to the Raptor engines.
“The most likely root cause for the booster RUD was determined to be filter blockage where liquid oxygen is supplied to the engines, leading to a loss of inlet pressure in engine oxidizer turbopumps that eventually resulted in one engine failing in a way that resulted in loss of the vehicle,” the company stated. “SpaceX has since implemented hardware changes inside future booster oxidizer tanks to improve propellant filtration capabilities and refined operations to increase reliability.”
Starship vents
As Super Heavy was experiencing these problems, the six Raptor engines on the Starship upper stage were burning nominally and pushing the vehicle along a flight path intended to take it nearly two-thirds of the way around Earth before splashing down near Hawaii. However, at about seven minutes after liftoff, a large vent of liquid oxygen occurred. There was excess liquid oxygen on the vehicle, SpaceX said, to gather data representative of future payload deployment missions. It needed to be released before Starship splashed down.
“A leak in the aft section of the spacecraft that developed when the liquid oxygen vent was initiated resulted in a combustion event and subsequent fires that led to a loss of communication between the spacecraft’s flight computers,” the company said. “This resulted in a commanded shut down of all six engines prior to completion of the ascent burn, followed by the Autonomous Flight Safety System detecting a mission rule violation and activating the flight termination system, leading to vehicle breakup.”
At the time, the vehicle had reached an altitude of 150 km, well into outer space, and had achieved a velocity of about 24,000 km/h. This is just short of orbital velocity, which is 28,000 km/h.
In its statement, SpaceX said it was implementing changes to the Super Heavy and Starship stages to account for these issues. The company is also seeking to improve the overall performance of Starship, with the addition of a new electronic Thrust Vector Control system for Starship’s upper-stage Raptor engines and more rapid propellant loading operations prior to launch.
SpaceX has four Starships in complete, or nearly complete, build stages. Should the next flight go smoothly, the company could begin to launch the world’s largest rocket on a more frequent basis.
Time is running out for the historic Odysseus lander that made a soft touchdown on the Moon last Thursday evening.
In an update posted on Monday morning, the company that built the spacecraft, Intuitive Machines, said, “[W]e believe flight controllers will continue to communicate with Odysseus until Tuesday morning.” This is because the lander, which is tipped over on its side, will only be able to collect solar energy for a limited period of time.
Originally, the company had hoped to operate its privately developed lunar lander on the surface for a week or longer. But now, that will no longer be possible due to the limited ability of Odysseus to gather solar energy and remain powered on. As the Sun dips closer to the horizon, and with the two-week-long lunar night coming, the spacecraft will, effectively, freeze to death.
On its side
The shorter-than-anticipated lifetime is due to the lander’s position on the surface. On Friday, during a news conference, Intuitive Machines’ chief executive, Steve Altemus, said the company believed Odysseus had come down to the lunar surface in a vertical configuration, as anticipated.
However, for reasons that Altemus did not entirely explain, the lander came down a bit faster than anticipated—6 mph (2.7 m/s) instead of 2 mph (0.9 m/s). Still, this pace, about the same as a moderate walk, was within the tolerances of the vehicle’s landing legs and structures to withstand. The problem is that the vehicle also had a lateral motion of about 2 mph, when it was supposed to come straight down.
Thus, as the vehicle descended to the Moon, it is possible that one or more landing legs may have been snagged by the lunar surface before the vehicle touched down. “It might have fractured that landing gear and tipped over,” Altemus said.
Based on the information available, the vehicle is lying horizontal but somewhat elevated off the ground. Intuitive Machines knew this, Altemus said, because the solar panels on the sides of the vehicle were able to gather solar power. This meant the body of the vehicle had to be somewhat raised above the surface. It’s possible, therefore, that the top of the vehicle tipped over onto a small boulder.
Enlarge/ The Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, has solar panels on its sides as well as at the top of the vehicle.
Lee Hutchinson
Altemus said on Friday that the company was attempting to orient a solar array at the top of the vehicle to gather sunlight in addition to the panels on its side.
It seems like this operation was unsuccessful, as the lander’s solar arrays will only be able to gather enough energy to operate through Tuesday morning.
Data desired
Intuitive Machines received a valuable assist from a NASA spacecraft orbiting the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which flew over the landing site this weekend. From this imagery, NASA was able to determine a precise landing spot for the vehicle: 80.13 degrees south latitude, 1.44 degrees east longitude, at an elevation of 8,461 feet (2,579 meters).
Notably, the spacecraft landed in a crater where the terrain was sloped at 12 degrees, which may have contributed to its tipping over.
During the news conference on Friday, Altemus and the company’s chief technology officer, Tim Crain, said they expected to be able to conduct most of the science missions on board the lander despite its sideways configuration. “Best guess, we expect to get most of the mission data down once we stabilize our configuration,” Crain said.
However, at the time, the company was still planning to operate the lander through this week. It is unclear that there will be enough time to get all of that data down between now and Tuesday morning. The company did not provide any updates on this on Monday.
A success, or no?
Another critical question is whether operators will be able to download images of Odysseus on the surface of the Moon. To date, Intuitive Machines has not published photos from the Moon’s surface. There remains some hope, however, that a CubeSat camera developed by students at Embry Riddle, EagleCam, will be deployed and activated before Odysseus‘ power runs out.
So what are we to make of this? Is Odysseus a success or a failure?
The mission has achieved some notable firsts. No privately developed spacecraft has ever made a soft landing on the Moon before, and it is important that Intuitive Machines has been able to maintain contact with the lander for several days. And at 80 degrees south, no spacecraft has ever made a soft landing so close to a lunar pole.
Although Intuitive Machines is not going to achieve all of the mission’s objectives, getting down to the Moon in one piece was, unquestionably, the achievement by which Odysseus and its builders should be judged.
Enlarge/ Webb has observed the best evidence yet for emission from a neutron star at the site of Supernova 1987A.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It’s February 26, and today’s image highlights the core of a (relatively) nearby supernova.
In the astronomy community, SN 1987A has somewhat legendary status. The first observable light from this exploding star in the Large Magellanic Cloud reached Earth in February, almost 37 years ago to the day. It was the first supernova that astronomers were able to observe and study with modern telescopes. It was still discussed in reverent terms a few years later when I was an undergraduate student studying astronomy at the University of Texas.
One of the enduring mysteries of the supernova is that astronomers have been unable to find its collapsed core, where they would expect to see a neutron star—an ultra-dense object that results from the supernova explosion of a massive star. In recent years, ground-based telescopes have found hints of this collapsed core, but now the James Webb Space Telescope has found emission lines that almost certainly must come from a newly born neutron star.
The astronomical details can be found here. It’s a nice validation of our understanding about supernovae.
I would also like to acknowledge that the Daily Telescope has been anything but “daily” of late. This is due to a confluence of several factors, including a lot of travel and work on other projects, including four features in the last month or so. I’ve had to put some things on the back-burner. I don’t want to stop producing these articles, but I also can’t commit to writing one every day. Maybe it should be renamed? For now, I’m just going to try to do my best. I appreciate those who have written to ask where the Daily Telescope has been—well, all of you but the person who wrote a nasty note.
Enlarge/ The first stage of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket was lifted onto its launch platform this week in preparation for an April liftoff with two NASA astronauts on Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test.
United Launch Alliance
Welcome to Edition 6.32 of the Rocket Report! I’m writing the report again this week as Eric Berger is in Washington, DC, to receive a well-earned honor, the 2024 Excellence in Commercial Space Journalism Award from the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Cape Canaveral is the world’s busiest spaceport, and this week, three leading US launch companies were active there. SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 rocket, and a few miles away, Blue Origin raised a New Glenn rocket on its launch pad for long-awaited ground testing. Nearby, United Launch Alliance began assembling an Atlas V rocket for the first crew launch of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in April. 2024 is shaping up to be a truly exciting year for the spaceflight community.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Astroscale inspector satellite launched by Rocket Lab. Astroscale, a well-capitalized Japanese startup, has launched a small satellite to do something that has never been done in space, Ars reports. This new spacecraft, delivered into orbit on February 18 by Rocket Lab, will approach a defunct upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket that has been circling Earth for more than 15 years. Over the next few months, the satellite will try to move within arm’s reach of the rocket, taking pictures and performing complicated maneuvers to move around the bus-size H-IIA upper stage as it moves around the planet at nearly 5 miles per second (7.6 km/s).
This is a first … Astroscale’s ADRAS-J mission is the first satellite designed to approach and inspect a piece of space junk in orbit. This is a public-private partnership between Astroscale and the Japanese space agency. Of course, space agencies and commercial companies have demonstrated rendezvous operations in orbit for decades. The difference here is the H-IIA rocket is uncontrolled, likely spinning and in a slow tumble, and was never designed to accommodate any visitors. Japan left it in orbit in January 2009 following the launch of a climate monitoring satellite and didn’t look back. ADRAS-J is a technology demonstration that could pave the way for a follow-on mission to actually link up with this H-IIA rocket and remove it from orbit. Astroscale eventually wants to use these technologies for satellite servicing, refueling, and further debris removal missions. (submitted by Ken the Bin and Jay500001)
Software error blamed for Firefly launch malfunction. Firefly Aerospace released an update Tuesday on an investigation into an upper stage malfunction on the company’s Alpha rocket in December. The investigation team, consisting of membership from Firefly, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the US Space Force, determined a software error in the rocket’s guidance, navigation, and control software algorithm ultimately caused the Alpha rocket to release its payload into a lower-than-planned orbit following a launch from California.
Upper stage woes… The software error prevented the rocket from sending the “necessary pulse commands” to control thrusters on the upper stage before its main engine was supposed to reignite. This second burn by the upper stage was supposed to circularize the rocket’s orbit, but it didn’t happen as planned. Still, the Alpha rocket safely released its commercial satellite payload for Lockheed Martin. Although the lower orbit caused the satellite to reenter the atmosphere earlier this month, Lockheed Martin said it was able to achieve many of the objectives of the technology demonstration mission, which focused on testing an electronically steered antenna. This was the fourth launch of an Alpha rocket, and two of them have suffered from upper stage malfunctions during engine restart attempts. Firefly says it is preparing the next Alpha rocket to fly “in the coming months.” (submitted by Ken the Bin)
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A good fundraising round for Gilmour Space. Australian startup Gilmour Space Technologies has raised $55 million Australian dollars ($36 million) in a Series D funding round announced Monday, Space News reports. The funding supports the small launch vehicle startup’s campaign to manufacture, test, and begin launching rockets and satellites from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland. Gilmour Space, founded in 2012, is developing a three-stage rocket called Eris. The first Eris test flight is expected “in the coming months, pending launch approvals from the Australian Space Agency,” according to the Gilmour Space news release.
Launching from down under… Gilmour Space is aiming to launch the first Australian-built rocket into orbit later this year. The Eris rocket is powered by hybrid engines, and Gilmour says it is capable of delivering about 670 pounds (305 kilograms) of payload mass into a Sun-synchronous orbit. The $36 million fundraising round announced this week follows a $46 million fundraising round in 2021. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Gilmour Space is aiming for the first flight of Eris in April, and this latest fundraising should give the company enough money to mount four test flights. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Enlarge/ Odysseus passes over the near side of the Moon following lunar orbit insertion on February 21.
Intuitive Machines
For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the Moon.
There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from the south pole of the Moon. About 20 minutes after touchdown, NASA declared success, but some questions remained about the health of the lander and its orientation. Why? Because while Odysseus was phoning home, its signal was weak.
But after what the spacecraft and its developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went through earlier on Thursday, it was a miracle that Odysseus made it at all.
Losing your way
The landing attempt was delayed by about two hours after mission controllers had to send a hastily cobbled together, last-minute software patch up to the lander while it was still in orbit around the Moon. Patching your spacecraft’s software shortly before it makes its most critical move is just about the last thing a vehicle operator wants to do. But Intuitive Machines was desperate.
Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational. These rangefinders are essential for two functions during landing: terrain-relative navigation and hazard-relative navigation. These two modes help the flight computer on Odysseus to determine precisely where it is during descent—by snapping lots of images and comparing them to known Moon topography—and to identify hazards below, such as boulders, in order to find a safe landing site.
Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to faceplant into the Moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.
One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kg package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the Moon.
The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment’s three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So, some software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?
Enlarge/ Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s new CEO, and founder Jeff Bezos observe the New Glenn rocket on its launch pad Wednesday at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
Anyone who has tracked the development of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has been waiting for signs of progress from the usually secretive space company. On Wednesday, engineers rolled a full-scale New Glenn rocket, partially made up of flight hardware, to a launch pad in Florida for ground testing.
The first New Glenn launch is almost certainly at least six months away, and it may not even happen this year. In the last few years, observers inside and outside the space industry have become accustomed to the nearly annual ritual of another New Glenn launch delay. New Glenn’s inaugural flight has been delayed from 2020 until 2021, then 2022, and for now, is slated for later this year.
But it feels different now. Blue Origin is obviously moving closer to finally launching a rocket into orbit.
Scaling up
Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder, was at Cape Canaveral to see his giant new rocket on the launch pad for the first time. “Just incredible to see New Glenn on the pad at LC-36,” Bezos wrote on Instagram. “Big year ahead. Let’s go!”
Starting late last year, Blue Origin officials doubled down on the company’s plans to launch the first New Glenn test flight by the end of 2024. This messaging coincided with the arrival of Dave Limp as Blue Origin’s chief executive, replacing Bob Smith, whose seven-year tenure included the first human suborbital flights on the company’s New Shepard rocket. Smith’s time as CEO was also marked by repeated delays on the New Glenn rocket.
Limp is pushing Blue Origin to move faster, and it seems the company’s employees got the memo. In December, the company rolled elements of the New Glenn rocket from its factory just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to a final assembly hangar located about nine miles away at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Inside that building, technicians connected the first stage booster, which is flight hardware, with an upper stage Blue Origin has set aside for ground testing. The final piece of the rocket to be added was a 23-foot-diameter (7-meter) payload fairing, the uppermost section of New Glenn designed to protect spacecraft during the initial phase of launch.
Last week, Blue Origin lifted a structure simulating the rocket’s empty mass vertical using the transporter-erector arm at Launch Complex 36 (LC-36), a former Atlas launch pad Blue Origin took over in 2015. This was a final validation of the lifting arm at LC-36 before Blue Origin put a real, or mostly real, rocket on the pad.
Enlarge/ The first full-scale New Glenn rocket rolls out at Launch Complex 36.
On Wednesday, ground crews rolled a fully assembled New Glenn rocket out of the hangar at LC-36 and up the ramp to the launch mount. Then, the hydraulic lifting arm raised the two-stage launcher vertically. At more than 320 feet (98 meters) tall, New Glenn is one of the largest rockets ever seen on Florida’s Space Coast, roughly the same height as NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and nearly as tall as the Saturn V used in the Apollo program.
“The upending is one in a series of major manufacturing and integrated test milestones in preparation for New Glenn’s first launch later this year,” Blue Origin officials wrote in an update on Wednesday. “The test campaign enables our teams to practice, validate, and increase proficiency in vehicle integration, transport, ground support, and launch operations.”
New Glenn can haul nearly 100,000 pounds (45 metric tons) of payload into low-Earth orbit. For low-altitude orbits, this is a weight class above the uppermost capability of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket but below SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. Blue Origin also plans to use the New Glenn rocket to launch lunar landers to the Moon for NASA’s Artemis program.
New Glenn’s first stage booster is reusable, and is designed to land on an offshore barge in the Atlantic Ocean, which will bring it back to the coast, similar to the way SpaceX recovers its Falcon 9 booster.
“The fairing is large enough to hold three school buses,” Blue Origin said. “Its reusable first stage aims for a minimum of 25 missions and will land on a sea-based platform located roughly 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange.”
Blue Origin is now 24 years old and employs around 11,000 people at locations around the country, with major locations in Washington, Texas, Florida, and Alabama. While the company has not yet launched anything into orbit, Blue Origin is working on a wide range of projects aside from rockets, including cargo and human-rated lunar landers for NASA and a space tug that could move payloads into different orbits for the US military. New Glenn is crucial for all of these plans.
