Rocket Lab is narrowing down the details for its first Moon launch. The private spaceflight firm has revealed that its CAPSTONE mission will lift off from the company's original launch complex in New Zealand sometime in the fourth quarter of 2021. The mission was originally slated to launch in early 2021 from NASA's Wallops facility in Virginia.
The CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) cubesat will serve as a vanguard for NASA's Artemis program. It will verify the propulsion needs for a highly elliptical lunar orbit, test spacecraft-to-spacecraft navigation systems and show the potential for private support in future missions. A successful mission would help NASA's future Gateway spacecraft safely approach and orbit the Moon.
The launch should also represent a technical breakthrough for Rocket Lab. While the Electron rocket will serve a familiar role in carrying the mission into space, this will be the first time the company uses its Photon platform to put a satellite on a lunar trajectory.
CAPSTONE could serve as redemption for the company. Rocket Lab has dealt with two prominent rocket failures, and only recently resumed launches following its May incident. A successful Moon launch would both reinforce that return to form and show that Rocket Lab can handle particularly ambitious projects.
NASA's Perseverance rover just had a rare misstep. The space agency has revealed that the robotic vehicle failed to collect Mars rock samples during its first attempt. While the percussive drill, coring bit and sample tube processing worked "as intended," a probe indicated that the tube was empty — not exactly what scientists were expecting when everything else checked out.
Scientists are still investigating what happened and may not have an answer for a few days. Perseverance project manager Jennifer Trosper said the team suspected the rock might have reacted in an unexpected way during the coring process. The equipment is likely fine, in other words.
The Martian surface has created problems more than once. The Phoenix Lander had trouble gathering "sticky" soil in 2008, for instance, while Curiosity and InSight have also had trouble cracking into rocks and the surface itself.
This initial setback won't necessarily jeopardize Perseverance's mission. However, NASA will want to keep incidents like this to a minimum. The rover was sent to Mars in no small part to collect samples that would eventually return to Earth and help scientists look for signs of past life. The fewer samples NASA gets, the fewer chances it will have to explore Mars' history.
When Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first all-civilian flight, takes off next month, Netflix will chronicle the historic mission with a documentary series. Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space will stream in five parts, with the first two episodes debuting on September 6th. In that way, it will be the first docuseries from the streaming giant to chronicle an event in near real-time.
Early episodes will detail, among other things, the astronaut training Inspiration4 commander Jared Isaacman and his crewmates had to undertake ahead of the flight. Meanwhile, the final feature-length episode will recount the mission’s flight to space and eventual return to Earth and include footage from inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The finale doesn’t have a release date yet, but Netflix expects to start streaming it sometime in late September.
The production involves parts of the team behind ESPN’s The Last DanceMichael Jordan documentary, including director Jason Hehir. Alongside the series, Netflix will release A StoryBots Space Adventure, a hybrid live-action and animation special that will feature the Inspiration4 crew answering questions from kids about their flight. The special will debut on September 14th, one day before the Inspiration4 mission is scheduled to lift off.
Boeing will have to wait yet again to prove the worth of its Starliner spacecraft. The company and NASA had planned to launch the capsule on Tuesday on top of an Atlas V rocket at 1:20PM ET, but that's not happening anymore.
"We're standing down from today's #Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 launch," Boeing said on Twitter. The company attributed the delay to "unexpected valve position indications in the propulsion system" engineers spotted during pre-launch preparations. It's currently unclear if the issue is related to Starliner or the Atlas V rocket that was supposed to carry the vessel to space. Boeing and NASA said they will provide an update on the situation on Wednesday, August 4th.
We're standing down from today's #Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 launch.
During pre-launch preparations, our engineers detected unexpected valve position indications in the propulsion system.
“We’re disappointed with today’s outcome and the need to reschedule our Starliner launch,” John Vollmer, vice president and program manager for Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, said. “Human spaceflight is a complex, precise and unforgiving endeavor, and Boeing and NASA teams will take the time they need to ensure the safety and integrity of the spacecraft and the achievement of our mission objectives.”
After its first test flight went awry, Starliner was supposed to return to space on July 30th. However, NASA delayed the flight after the new Russian ISS Nauka module unexpectedly fired its thrusters, tiling the station outside of its typical orientation.
Boeing finally has a chance to redeem itself after its first Starliner test flight went awry, and you can watch as it happens. NASA is launching Starliner Orbital Flight Test-2 from Cape Canaveral today (August 3rd) at 1:20PM Eastern, with a livestream available from NASA's YouTube channel (below) starting at 12:30PM ET. If successful, the unoccupied spacecraft will deliver over 400lbs of cargo to the International Space Station before returning to Earth with 550lbs of material.
Starliner will start an orbital insertion burn about 30 minutes after launch. You'll have to be patient after that, though. The capsule isn't expected expected to dock with the ISS until August 4th at 1:37PM ET, and will touch down in the western US after its "daylong" mission.
The vessel was originally supposed to launch on July 30th, but was delayed after the new Russian ISS module Nauka accidentally activated and forced a correction.
Much depends on a successful flight. Boeing and NASA will follow a successful test with six crew rotation missions. For Boeing, this is also about pride. SpaceX beat Boeing to the punch by successfully launching a crewed capsule in 2020, and is already performing crewed operational flights. The sooner Starliner is cleared to launch with people aboard, the sooner Boeing can catch up and play a key role in the privatization of spaceflight.
In a short span of time, astronomers have taken us closer to black holes than ever with unprecedentedimages of the cosmic giants. Now, for the first time, scientists have seen the phenomena that takes place behind them. As part of the breakthrough, researchers witnessed and captured the light from the back of a supermassive black hole 800 million light years away.
The latest breakthrough is a "key part of the puzzle to understanding" how the universe came to be, according to Stanford astrophysicist Dan Wilkins. What's more, it appears to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity from over a century ago.
While studying the bright flares of x-rays emanating from the black hole, a feature known as the corona, researchers also witnessed fainter flashes of light. These were the "luminous echoes" of of the flares bouncing off the gas behind the black hole. This phenomena was first predicted by Einstein in his theory of relativity published in 1916.
ESA
“Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything that’s behind the black hole," Wilkins explained. “The reason we can see that is because that black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself.”
The supermassive black hole is 10 million times as massive as our Sun and located in the centre of a nearby spiral galaxy called I Zwicky 1. An international group of scientists witnessed the echoes using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR space telescopes. Their findings were published in the journal Nature.
"The color of these flashes, the color of those echoes as well as the time that they were delayed after the original flare told us that these were the echoes coming from the gas that's hidden from our view behind the black hole," Wilkins noted. "Some of it will shine back down onto the gas that's falling into the black hole, and this gives us really quite a unique view of this material in its final moments before it's lost into the black hole."
NASA just celebrated another major moment in the history of Moon exploration. The New York Timesnoted that July 31st, 2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the Lunar Roving Vehicle's first outing — and the first time people drove on the Moon. Apollo 15 astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin took the car on a stint to collect samples and explore the lunar surface more effectively than they could on foot.
Scott and Irwin would eventually drive the rover two more times (for a total of three hours) before returning to Earth. The Apollo 16 and 17 missions each had an LRV of their own. There was also a fourth rover, but it was used for spare parts after the cancellation of Apollo 18 and further missions. All three serving models remained on the Moon.
Early development was problematic, in no small part due to the lack of real-world testing conditions. They couldn't exactly conduct a real-world test drive, after all. The team eventually settled on a collapsible design with steel mesh wheels that could safely handle the Moon's low gravity, lack of atmosphere, extreme temperatures and soft soil.
The LRV was modest, with a 57-mile range, four 0.19kW motors and an official top speed of 8MPH. It was also expensive, with cost overruns bringing the price of four rovers to $38 million (about $249 million in 2021 dollars). It was key to improved scientific exploration during the later stages of the Apollo program, though, and it was also an early example of a practical electric vehicle — humans were using a battery-powered ride on the Moon decades before the technology became mainstream on Earth.
We wouldn't count on humans driving on the Moon any time soon, although that reflects the progress made in the 50 years since. NASA and other space agencies are now focused on robotic rovers that can explore the Moon without worries about crew safety. Those humans that do go on rides will likely use autonomous vehicles. Think of this anniversary as celebrating a first step toward the technology you see today.
You've all seen the iconic picture of the US astronaut riding gracefully upon his NASA-built MODOK chair. That astronaut was Bruce McCandless II, Houston’s capsule communicator during the moon landing mission, Challenger crew member, and the driving force behind America's ability to conduct operations outside of the stuffy confines of space shuttles and international stations. Without McCandless, there's no guarantee the US would have EVA capabilities today. Wonders All Around, exhaustively researched and written by McCandless's son, Bruce III, explores McCandless the elder's trials and tribulations during NASA's formative years and his laser-focus on enabling astronauts to zip through space unencumbered by the mass of their ships.
Greenleaf Book Group
Copyright @ 20201 Bruce McCandless III. Published by Greenleaf Book Group Press. Distributed by Greenleaf Book Group. Design and composition by Greenleaf Book Group and Kimberly Lance. Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group, Shaun Venish, and Kimberly Lance. Cover image courtesy of NASA, photographed by Robert L. "Hoot" Gibson
In his long leaden days of waiting for a spaceflight, my dad found the route to redemption on the back of an aging cartoon character. From the afternoon in December 1966 that he first tried out the Manned Maneuvering Unit in a Martin Marietta simulator, he was hooked on a vision of a gas-propelled jetpack that would allow astronauts to operate outside their spacecraft. This vision had an obvious pop-culture antecedent. In the 1920s a comic-strip character named Buck Rogers — a rock-jawed, All-American World War I veteran — succumbed to the effects of a mysterious gas he encountered while working as a mine inspector. He fell into a deep sleep and woke after five centuries of slumber to a strange new world of spaceships, ray guns, and Asian over-lords. Though he initially traveled this new world via an antigravity belt, a device that allowed him and his best gal, Wilma, to leap great distances at a time, Buck eventually acquired a svelte and evidently omnidirectional jetpack. He eventually ventured into space in an adventure called Tiger Men from Mars, and his exploits in the cosmos changed America’s vision of the future forever. Millions followed Buck’s adventures in the funnies, on radio, and in movie serials. Among Buck’s imitators and spiritual heirs are Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, John Carter of Mars, and Han Solo.
A host of talented men and women spent significant amounts of time and money to wrestle that jetpack out of the funny papers and into the space shuttle. None worked harder, though, than Bruce McCandless and his chief collaborator, an Auburn-educated engineer and Air Force officer named Charles Edward (“Ed”) Whitsett, Jr. Whitsett was a pale, bespectacled individual, mild-mannered but tenacious. He had a head start on my father. He’d been thinking and writing about jetpack technology as early as 1962. In a sense, he was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist yet: Namely, how could an astronaut venture outside his or her spaceship and perform constructive tasks in an environment with no oxygen, with extreme temperature fluctuations, and in an orbital “free fall” that would leave the spacefarer lolling in the practical equivalent of zero gravity? Alexei Leonov of the Soviet Union and American Ed White had proven that extravehicular activity was possible, that men could survive outside of their space capsule, but basically all they’d done was float. How could a man move from one part of a spaceship to another, or from one spacecraft to another craft, or from a spacecraft to a satellite, in order to make inspections or repairs? None of these needs really existed in the early sixties, when the programs of both nations were still just trying to fire tin cans into low Earth orbit and predict, more or less, where they would come back down. But clearly the needs would eventually arise, and various methods were proposed to address them.
In the mid-sixties, the Air Force assigned Whitsett to NASA to supervise development of the Air Force’s Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. Gene Cernan’s failed test flight of the AMU on Gemini 9 in 1966 — the “space-walk from hell,” as Cernan called it — set the jetpack project back, but it never went away. McCandless, Whitsett, and a NASA engineer named Dave Schultz worked quietly but assiduously to keep the dream alive. They enlarged and improved the AMU all through the latter half of the decade and into the seventies. In the “Forgotten Astronauts” wire story that portrayed him as a washout in 1973, my dad mentioned the reason why he wanted to stay in the manned space program despite not having won a crew assignment on either Apollo or Skylab. “McCandless,” said the article, “has helped develop the M509 experimental maneuvering unit. The Skylab astronauts strap it on like a backpack and propel themselves Buck Rogers — like around the Skylab interior. [He] wants to build a larger operational unit to perform space chores outside the shuttle.” And that’s exactly what he did.
Though the Skylab M509 tests in 1973 and 1974 were a resounding success, resulting in the triumph of the jetpack concept over both rocket boots and the handheld maneuvering unit, Whitsett and McCandless didn’t rest on their laurels. Over the next several years, using whatever time and funding they could scrape together, the team made multiple upgrades — eleven, by one count — to what was now being called the “manned maneuvering unit,” or MMU. The bulbous nitrogen-gas fuel tank of the ASMU was replaced with two streamlined aluminum tanks in the rear of the unit, each of which was wrapped in Kevlar. The number of propulsion nozzles was increased from fourteen to twenty-four, positioned around the jetpack to allow for six-degrees-of-freedom precision maneuvering. Smaller gyroscopes replaced those used on the ASMU, and, as space historian Andrew Chaikin has noted, the ASMU’s “pistol-grip hand controllers, which were tiring to operate in pressurized space suit gloves, were replaced by small T-handles that needed just a nudge of the fingertips.” The MMU’s new arm units were made to be adjustable, to accommodate astronauts of all sizes. Painted white for maximum reflectivity, the unit was built to survive the 500-degree fluctuation in temperatures (from a high of 250 degrees F to a low of minus 250 F!) that an astronaut might encounter in space.
By 1980 the machine weighed in at 326 pounds. Like the AMU and the ASMU before it, the MMU was designed to fit with or “over” the astronaut’s pressure suit. Shuttle astronauts wore a newly designed suit called the Extravehicular Maneuvering Unit, or EMU, a two-piece marvel of textile engineering made up of fourteen layers of Nylon ripstop, Gore-Tex, Kevlar, Mylar, and other substances. Power for the jetpack’s electronics was supplied by two 16.8-volt silver-zinc batteries. Two motion-control handles — the translational hand controller and the rotational hand controller — were mounted on the unit’s left and right armrests, respectively, and a button activated an “attitude-hold mode,” which used motion-sensing gyroscopes to direct the firing of the thrusters to maintain an astronaut’s position in space.
The machine had been tested in every way its designers could imagine. A representative of a local gun club visited Martin Marietta and shot the MMU’s nitrogen fuel tank with a .50 caliber bullet to ascertain whether the tank would explode if pierced. (It didn't.) The jetpack was run through hundreds of hours of simulations. At my father’s urging, a gifted and intense Martin Marietta project manager named Bill Bollendonk subjected the device to space-like conditions in the company’s thermal vacuum facility. The MMU was no longer a “far out” experiment, as Mike Collins once called it. It was now a promising space tool. Unfortunately, for the moment, it was still an unused space tool. American astronauts remained on Earth, as NASA struggled to produce its next-generation orbital workhorse, the space shuttle.
Rocket Lab has successfully launched a US military satellite in its first mission since its 20th Electron launch ended up in failure back in May. The company's Electron rocket made its way to space from its New Zealand launch site, carrying a small demonstration satellite from the US Space Force called the Monolith. Peter Beck, Rocket Lab founder and CEO, tweeted shortly after the event that the payload was deployed and praised the team for a "flawless" launch.
Monolith's target location is in low-Earth orbit around 370 miles above our planet. The satellite will demonstrate the use of a deployable sensor, "where the sensor's mass is a substantial fraction of the total mass of the spacecraft, changing the spacecraft’s dynamic properties and testing ability to maintain spacecraft attitude control," Rocket Lab explained in the official mission webpage. The results from the demonstration will help companies build more affordable satellites within shorter timeframes.
Rocket Lab's 20th mission failed in May when it suffered an "anomaly" after the second stage ignition. The company lost both its Electron rocket and BlackSky's Earth observation satellite payloads as a result of its second launch failure within the span of a year. After investigating the issue, Rocket Lab determined that the root cause was a problem with the second stage engine igniter system that "induced a corruption of signals within the engine computer." The company says it has since implemented fixes "to prevent any future reoccurrence."
The US Space Force is gearing up to launch a research and development satellite on Thursday with the help of Rocket Lab. The company's Electron rocket is scheduled to launch from a site in New Zealand sometime between 2AM and 4AM ET (6PM-8PM local time) to take the Monolith satellite into low Earth orbit.
The aim of the mission, which is called "It's a Little Chile Up Here" (a reference to the green chile from the Space Test Program's New Mexico home), is to test small satellites for the Department of Defense. Monolith will help determine whether it's large deployable sensors are feasible. Such sensors account for a significant proportion of a spacecraft's total mass. Since the sensor may alter the spacecraft’s dynamic properties, the mission will examine whether it's possible to maintain altitude control after the sensor has been deployed.
"Analysis from the use of a deployable sensor aims to enable the use of smaller satellite buses when building future deployable sensors such as weather satellites, thereby reducing the cost, complexity, and development timelines," Rocket Lab wrote in a statement. "The satellite will also provide a platform to test future space protection capabilities."
