Meeting Notes from November 8, 2024

This was our 88th meeting and it couldn’t have come at a better time. The down feeling from the recent election was over-shadowed by the great turn out of friends. Dean, Laura, Keith, Hank, Phil, Dave, Harry and Beth all joined in for over 3 hours of great conversation about ourselves and all the great things happening in space and astronomy. Thank you all for coming. I kidded the group that we might have to start having meetings every 2 weeks after the inauguration this coming January. Time will tell…

Intro

I first asked the group if they had any sightings of aurora or the comet. Dean said he saw the aurora from his backyard in Naperville and Phil saw it in Michigan. I sadly said no sightings for me although I tried both seeing the aurora and the comet. I shared the sunspot number chart from the Space Weather Prediction Center. It shows the Sun’s activity is trending much higher than predicted and that the Solar Maximum should last thru 2025. After that we’ll be headed down in activity following the Sun’s 11 year cycle.

I told the group that we are headed for a new record for “people-days” in space in 2024. My calculations show that we will finish the year with 4222 days spent in space. That beats the previous record in 2023 of 3827 days by almost 400 days. It sure helps having a constant 7 people on ISS and 3 on Tiangong. This year was also was boosted by 2 private Dragon flights for Axiom Space and Polaris Dawn. Plus the Starliner CFT mission increased the ISS inhabitants by an extra 2 astronauts for an unplanned 80 days.

Beth made mention of my tracking of people in space when we had out MASS Prize contest in 2021 and here is my summary for 2024 and the previous 3 years. You can see that the last 2 years (52 this year 2024 and 57 last year), beat the number 49 that was in our contest year of 2021. We still have a way to go to beat the all time record of 63, set in 1985 when the Space Shuttle was in its prime. Those 63 were all orbital space flights, sub-orbital jaunts by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic didn’t exist yet.

My spreadsheet shows 2024 will probably finish with 52 total people with 28 being on orbital missions and 24 sub-orbital ones. That is a little less than last year when we have 57 total people with 21 orbital and 36 sub-orbital. The fact that Virgin Galactic was not as prolific in 2024 kept the total lower but orbital people was greater due to the 2 private Dragon missions, Axiom-3 and Polaris Dawn.

I told the group that PBS had a great 5 part series about the Solar System that premiered on October 2.

I also shared Fraser Cain trying out his new virtual star party capability using a remote telescope in Texas. We only watched from were he initially have the M13 globular cluster in Hercules up on the screen and thru his imaging of the current bright comet and the Andromeda galaxy. (start video at 2:45 then end at 12:15) The telescope is only a 6 inch diameter Celestron Origin. This is a relatively small telescope but it must have a great camera on it because it can quickly take amazing images. This images are great but I still fondly remember the satisfaction of light photons directly hitting my eyeball. As a 16 year old with a new 8 inch telescope, I’d spend long hours trying to find faint fuzzies of dim galaxies. Some were so faint you would have to use “averted” vision to get the image to land on the more sensitive part of your retina. You’d always have a little doubt whether you truly saw it, but I remember having over 400 objects in my “seen” catalogue. The search and detection provided an immense sense of accomplishment.

I wanted to add this post-meeting addition. On Sunday morning, I saw this deep-dive on the telescope Fraser Cain was using, the Celestron Origin. I thought some of you would like more information. It is a 6 inch diameter F/2 of Schmitt-Cassegrain design. I was surprised that the camera is mounted at the front of the telescope tube and blocks a lot of the light but it still has fantastic performance. With that camera placement the telescope can’t be used for visual observing thru an eyepiece. The entire assembly with mount weighs 40 lbs and has a Raspberry Pi computer built into it. The price is $4000. I thought it would cost more. If I was younger, I know want I’d like Santa to bring me.

Good Overview on Vera Rubin Telescope – 15 minute video by Dr. Becky Smethurst. The current estimate for “first light” is now January 2025. Amazing to think this 8.4 m (27 ft) mirror telescope will image the entire southern sky every 3 days. It will detect 20 billion objects over its 10 year life and collect 60 petabytes of data (peta is a trillion, so that is 60,000 billion bytes of data). The video goes on to describe the career of Vera Rubin, she should have gotten a Nobel Prize for helping to discover dark matter, but as a women, she was overlooked. Also answered in the video is the new technologies used, what are the science goals of the telescope, and how it differs from ESA’s Euclid Telescope. After watching Frasier Cain control the 6 inch telescope in Texas, there may be a chance for use to do “citizen science” with this 27 ft (324 inch) telescope. I think they plan to post the data on the Internet and we will have our choice of 10 million objects of interest that have changed each night. The plan is for a 10 year survey of the entire southern sky using a 3.2 gigapixel camera. With a entire image every 3 days, you will be able to make of movie of objects in the southern sky.

Polaris Dawn – 5 day mission (September 10 thru 15) with a 2 hour EVA. The Polaris program is planned to be a three mission program with the third and final mission on SpaceX’s Starship. Polaris Dawn set an altitude record for earth orbit with a 1400 km high apogee on flight day1. They flew right thru the Van Allen radiation belts and probably picked up a hefty dose of radiation. On flight day 3, at a lower altitude, they performed the EVA. All four astronauts had to be in space suits because the Dragon capsule does not have an air lock and the entire capsule had to be put in full vacuum. They also performed an experiment with laser communication with Starlink satellites. Laser communications is the wave of the future with tremendous bandwidth compared to radio communication. The 4 astronauts were Jared Issacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon. Jared is the billionaire funding the missions. He had his own air force with a MIG jet as one of his planes. He is a good guy, has a great family and performs a lot of good fund raising for Saint Jude’s Hospital with each of his missions. Sarah and Anna are 2 SpaceX employees who support the manned Dragon missions and were asked to participate.

New Administration

I had to add this late item to the meeting’s agenda, Scott Manley posted a 20 minute video with his take on what the election’s impact would be on space and NASA. I apologize for his phallic reference to Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard rocket. I agree with much of what Scott had to say and will be interested in who the next NASA administrator will be. It also will be interesting the role Elon Musk plays. I think he would have to sell off much of his assets to be inside the administration. But even in an advisor capacity he could really influence Trump. NASA is already almost too dependent on SpaceX. There is Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon to the ISS, the ISS deorbit in 2030 contract, human lander for Artemis 3 and 4 and numerous space launches.

SpaceX

Now this is the topic that I thought would be the lead for the night, the flight of IFT5 Starship and the catch of the Super Heavy booster in the chop-sticks of the launch pad. It occurred on a Sunday morning on Oct 13, 2024 at 7:30 AM. Keith and I were watching when the booster launched with all 33 engines firing away and I never imagined that SpaceX could pull off the catch on the first attempt.

Here is the full flight video, with the Super Heavy catch back at Boca Chica in Texas and the controlled splashdown of the Starship in the Indian Ocean with a SpaceX buoy watching. I think the explosion of the Starship when it fell over in the ocean, is just residual propellant exploding after the fuel tanks ruptured.

As momentous as the accomplishments of IFT5 are, that booster won’t be flying again and Starship is far from being recovered and reusable. Nevertheless, SpaceX is making great progress. Marcus House had a good video on post IFT5 developments at Starbase. We only watched to the 6:30 mark. He also mentioned that Elon Musk, while playing video games online, said that the IFT5 catch was only 1 second away from being aborted because the fire location on the booster was near single point failure valves.

If SpaceX retains the flight profile for IFT5, they should be able to perform IFT6 without much FAA involvement. Today I heard that IFT6 could occur as early as November 18. Conjecture is that SpaceX will try to relight their Raptor engines on Starship in space as it does a sub-orbital path around the earth. If they can demonstrate the re-light, they can assure the FAA that they can control Starship’s re-entry. That sets them up for a propellant transfer test in March 2025 were 2 Starships in orbit will dock and perform a propellant transfer. Remember, for Starship to perform a landing on the moon, up to 15 propellant transfers might be required to send Starship off to the moon. What a complication to a successful Artemis mission! A Starship in orbit will also open the gate for SpaceX launching more Starlink satellites. Falcon 9 now takes 23 satellites into orbit with each mission, imagine how many Starlinks they can put on a Starship.

I mentioned that the Super Heavy booster didn’t look that good after its catch. The Super Heavy enters the atmosphere much faster than the Falcon 9 booster which performs an entry burn to slow down. At 34 km altitude, Falcon 9 slows down to 2800 kmhr but Super Heavy comes in at a whopping 4280 kmhr (53% faster). Because the heating effect goes up with the cube of the entry velocity, that is why Super Heavy’s engines were glowing even before they re-lit them for the landing burn. A lot of details have to be worked out before Starship will be fully reusable.

I find it amazing that China is working on a Long March 9 rocket that looks identical to Starship. It even has 30 methane burning engines, but it is not expected to fly until 2033. If nothing else the Chinese are good at mimicking other people’s technology.

SpaceX has been prolific in 2024. So far they have performed 104 Falcon 9 launches, 2 Falcon Heavy launches and 3 Starship launches this year. They have the advantage of being their own customer with Starlink missions which account for over half of the Falcon 9 launches. So far this year, there have been a total of 208 orbital rocket launches, with Russia doing only 13 of them and China 52. That shows how dominant SpaceX is.

I’ve been more than a little disappointed with Elon Musk’s antics with the election. He seems to be going off the deep end a little and getting into a “Howard Hughes” phase in his career. I don’t like him talking to Putin directly and fear a person with his influence might have too much sway over world politics. Buying voters in Pennsylvania and making outlandish claims of “free speech” with his Twitter (aka X) doesn’t help either. I’m glad he has some excellent help with the running of SpaceX from Gwen Shotwell and Bill Gerstenmaier.

NASA

The next topic was the recent launch of NASA’s flagship mission, Europa Clipper. Flagship missions are the top of the line at NASA. This one has a price tag of $4 billion and has been under development for a long time. We have Texas representative, John Culberson (R-TX) to thank for championing it during its early development stages because he chaired an important committee in Congress. Initially, it was to launch on the SLS rocket but NASA saved a few billion dollars by launching it on an expendable Falcon Heavy ($150 million vs $3-4 billion). The downside is that Falcon Heavy doesn’t have the same performance as SLS, so Europa Clipper will have to perform a Mars gravity assist in February 2025 and an Earth gravity assist in December 2026, before being flung out to Jupiter and arriving in April 2030. The probe will undergo about of year of “orbit shaping” before beginning its first of 49 flybys of moon, Europa in Spring of 2031. Clipper will orbit Europa in a very elliptical orbit to minimize the high radiation near Jupiter. The probe will experience the equivalent of few million chest x-rays. Europa’s radiation would kill a person in just a few minutes.

Because Jupiter is 5 times farther from the Sun than Earth, the solar panels have to be 25 times bigger to get the same solar power. Clipper’s solar panels are 14.2m (46.5 ft) by 4.1m (13.5 ft). The 2 panels and the titanium radiation shielding box for the instruments, make the probe over 100 ft in size, longer that a basketball court. The probe is also the heaviest one ever launched out of the Earth-Moon system. It weighs in at 6 tons, half of which is propellant for maneuvering around Jupiter.

JPL has a great video about the mission, at 26:40 mark is a great image of the moon. Europa is also covered with long reddish lines which probably contain organic compounds. Dean thinks there is a very high likelihood that we’ll confirm these organics by sniffing gases emanating from cracks in the ice shell. Europa is the size of our Moon and is thought to be covered with a 10 mile thick ice crust and below that a 60-80 mile deep liquid water ocean. Because the ocean covers the entire moon, scientists estimate that Europa has twice the liquid water of Earth. The probe will have an ice-penetrating radar that could look as deep as 19 miles looking for lakes closer to ice crust’s surface. This video describes the scientific instruments. The previous video link has a great picture of the blocky surface at the 8:14 mark. Those broken up blocks are what makes Europa so interesting to scientists. The probe will get as close as 25km (16mi) of the moon’s surface and map 90% of it at a resolution of less then 100m (330ft) per pixel and some pictures will be at .5m (20in) resolution. At the 10:30 mark of the previous video is a good graphic showing the size of Europa compared to the Moon and the Earth. Note how small Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, and possibly the next best place to search for organics from a sub-surface ocean because the plumes of vapor from its cracks in the ice shell are well documented. I chuckled when the Project Manager said the quote (13:15 mark of JPL video) from Arthur C. Clarke’s sequel to “2001 – A Space Odyssey” titled “2010 – Odyssey Two)”. The book ends with the aliens warning Earth to “make no attempt to land here”. Clipper will only orbit but if it finds an interesting possibly habitable environment, NASA could decide a lander would be the next mission.

Is the Artemis program going to land on the moon in September 2026? That’s a good question. A lot of separate pieces like an SLS launch with a Orion capsule, a Starship headed to the moon after maybe 15 refueling flights from other Starship launches, a docking with Orion, a decent down to the South Pole of the Moon, an ascent off the moon and docking with the Orion again in lunar orbit, and finally Orion rocketing back to the Earth for a splashdown in the Pacific. One of my favorite YouTubers, Swapna Krishna, who is host for the “Ad Astra” Youtube channel, weighs in with a 22 minute video.

I have to editorialize a little bit about NASA decision making. They recently canceled a lunar rover named VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) that was going to drill down into the moon’s south pole region and search for water ice. The project is projected to exceed its $450 million budget by 30% partially due to delays in its landing vehicle being funded thru the CLPS program. The cancellation is expected to save about $84 million in the already built rover project. It doesn’t seem to make financial sense to effectively mothball a rover you have spent over $450 million on. And then the second mobile launcher for SLS has had its price tag rise from the initial estimate of $383 million to $2.7 billion, about a 700% increase, yet that project continues. SLS seems to be draining all of NASA monetary resources.

NASA announces 9 landing sites for Artemis 3 – the terrain looks awfully rough and mountainous compared to the old Apollo sites. It is hard to imagine the very tall and ungainly Starship landing there for Artemis 3 and 4. Two astronauts will land on the surface and spend a week venturing into permanently shadowed area looking for water ice. Artemis 3 is currently scheduled for September 2026.

Starship propellant transfer scheduled for March 2025. Propellant transfer is a requirement of successfully sending Starship to the moon. Beside showing it can perform propellant transfer, SpaceX will have to demonstrate an unmanned landing on the moon before NASA will certify it for the astronaut landing on Artemis 3. SpaceX might have to perform 15 propellant launches and transfer to fully fuel a Starship for its trip to the moon. Another hurdle is to keep the cryogenic propellants from evaporating in space. That will require a rapid cadence in launches, possibly with more than one every 2 weeks.

Blue Origin

Blue Origin’s (BO) progress on the medium lift New Glenn rocket – Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, is the other billionaire trying to make space travel a common occurrence for people. So far BO has only sent customers like William Shatner, Bezos and his brother, and others on short sub-orbital trips from west Texas on the New Shepard rocket and capsule. New Glenn is a large rocket with a lift capacity to LEO of 45 mt (45,000 kg or 99,200 lbs). This exceeds Falcon 9’s capability but is still behind an expended Falcon Heavy with 64 mt (141,000 lbs) lift. The rocket uses 7 of the new BE-4 methane burning engines developed by BO. Two of those engines are also used on ULA’s new Vulcan rocket. The first stage is intended to land on a drone ship and BO plans to try it on its first flight in Spring 2025. Remember, SpaceX didn’t try landing Falcon 9 until its 23rd launch. New Glenn was to have launched NASA’s Escapade probe to Mars in October 2024 but the rocket wasn’t ready. Planet alignments don’t wait for anyone, so the probe still sits on the ground in Florida

New Glenn is manufactured at Cape Canaveral in a building only a couple of km from its launch pad 36 location. But the first stage of the rocket is so large that its transporter had to travel a 23 km route to make the necessary turns. The rocket still has to demonstrate a “wet rehearsal” and then a “hot-fire” test.

BO also has a contract for NASA’s second HLS moon lander. Its Blue Moon lander is planned to be ready for Artemis 5 in March 2030. The lander is much smaller than the Starship but the trip to the moon will also require about 6 refueling launches before it has enough propellant for the trip to the moon. EveryDay Astronaut had a great walk-thru video with Bezos in the manufacturing facility of the New Glenn. Bezos seems more level-headed than Elon Musk but BO has always been criticized for its secrecy and slow progress.

New Glenn’s second stage will use 2 hydrogen/oxygen burning engines, BE-3U’s. BO touts how the BE-3U is the first new hydrogen burning engine developed in the US in the last decade. The SLS uses hydrogen burning engines on its first stage but they were developed for the Space Shuttle in the 1980s. Using hydrogen, the lightest molecule, gives rocket engines their best fuel efficiency, but it is a notoriously difficult commodity to deal with because it leaks so easily.

Vulcan rocket second launch doesn’t go exactly to plan – Tori Bruno, the ULA CEO, seemed a little disingenuous when he termed the loss of one of solid rocket boosters nozzles during the launch as an “observation”. But I give Vulcan credit for having its second stage provide the necessary margin to get the payload into space. If Vulcan is certified, ULA plans to launch a couple Defense Department satellites before coming back to launching the first Dream Chaser supply mission to the ISS in May 2025. I’m really excited to see that mission.

Atlas V rocket production ending – A real work horse for the US is coming to an end. There are 15 Atlas V rockets left with 6 dedicated to possible Starliner launches, 8 helping Amazon launch its Kuiper communication satellite constellation that will compete with Starlink and a final rocket launching a satellite for ViaSat. The rocket first flew in 2002 and was created under the 1994 Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program to develop affordable and dependable vehicles for the US military. The $3 billion program also created the Delta IV. The use of Russian derived engines doomed Atlas V. High costs also sunk the Delta rocket program. Atlas V had 101 successful missions and was recently certified to launch humans with Starliner CFT test to the ISS. It was assembled in Decatur, Alabama.

Boeing

Starliner status – CFT launched June 5 on an Atlas 5 rocket with 2 astronauts and landed Sept 7 without crew in New Mexico. It took NASA about 80 days to decide to bring Starliner down uncrewed. Starliner is still a cool spacecraft with its air-bag landings in New Mexico.

Boeing was not at the NASA press conference when NASA announced that the capsule would land uncrewed and they are on record that Starliner could have returned crew. The question is, will Starliner be certified for regular ISS missions or will NASA make Boeing fly another test mission. Boeing is hemorrhaging money, they have lost almost $1.85 billion on Starliner so far. In other news, Boeing is trying to sell its space business including the Starliner program, but plans to keep its lucrative cost-plus SLS contracts.

It is interesting to note that if NASA decided to return Starliner without crew due to risk to the astronauts, in earlier years, NASA had computed that Starliner was actually safer than the Dragon capsule. It computed that Starliner had a risk of 1 in 295 for a loss of crew occurrence and Crew Dragon was 1 in 276. NASA criterion in developing Commercial Crew was a 1 in 270 loss of crew chance. As a perspective, early Space Shuttles were considered to be 1 in 9 for a loss of crew.

I’m disappointed that NASA had to bump two astronauts off the CREW9 Dragon mission to accommodate bringing the Two Boeing astronauts down in February of 2025. It is uncertain if Boeing will be able to get 6 operational missions to ISS done before the ISS retires in 2030. The first operational Starliner mission has already been delayed by NASA to no earlier than the Fall of 2025. NASA’s nominal plan is to fly one Dragon and one Starliner mission each year.

The NASA head said no politics involved in the decision to bring Starliner down without crew and that Boeing continuation in the Starliner program is 100% assured. I’m not sure how he can make that statement. Starliner seats are twice as expensive as Dragon ones, at $90 million each.

I still remember that I was the only one who thought Starliner would land with astronauts when we took a vote at the previous MASS meeting.

Boeing announced that they had lost $6.2 billion in the last 3 months due to the strike. Kelly Ortberg is the new CEO and they charged another $250 million against Starliner raising the total to $1.85 billion. So far NASA has only given the ok to proceed with 3 of the 6 promised flights of Starliner and Boeing has not made any response since the capsule landed without astronauts on September 7.

My understanding is that Boeing has not been paid for their 6 operational missions to the ISS. They could earn $2 billion from NASA if they do their 6 crewed missions ($90 million/seat, 4 seats/mission, $360 million/mission, times 6, $1.96 billion. NASA has paid them $2.7 billion of their $4.6 billion contract to develop and fly the test mission. Right now they are penciled in for an operational mission in August 2025, but it is not decided if they will have to fly another test mission and how to fix their thruster issues. SpaceX has been contracted for 14 Dragon missions. CREW9, their 9th operational mission just launched on September 28, 2024, and then they will launch once per year in 2025 thru 2029 (CREW10, 11, 12, 13 & 14 in 2029). The last crewed launch to the ISS is anticipated to be in late 2029 with a 1 year stay before leaving for deorbit.

ISS

Air leak – Ad Astra 19 minutes video – The ISS is trying to make it to its planned 2031 deorbit and dumping into the Pacific Ocean. But NASA hopes this will occur only after Commercial Space Stations are established. The Russia Zvezda is the module with the worst issue. Russia is only committed to ISS until 2028. Russia’s astronaut flight exchange with us, a Russian on Dragon and an American on Soyuz, only goes thru 2025.