Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

So on top of its aircraft troubles, and its spaceship trouble, oh - did you hear they have an on-going strike, now they have had a satellite explode in space! (the strike is in its sixth week and workers (jet assembly line) voted to reject Boing's most recent offer) Boing just announced a $6 billion quarterly loss last week

So. The satellite. The Intelsat 33e was launched in 2016 and experienced "an anomaly" Saturday, and is now in 20 trackable pieces, and who knows how many smaller ones according to Space Command, Roscomos says they're tracking 80, and the major debris does not represent a threat to other satellites. These huge satellites are normally in much higher geostationary orbits so the debris is a very different field than if they were in lower orbits.

Its job was to provide communications across Europe, Asia, and Africa. Boing is working with other satellite vendors to reestablish services for its customers.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-satellite-intelsat-33e-explodes-space-anamoly/

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/10/24/0142204/boeing-made-satellite-explodes-in-space

Strike news:
https://apnews.com/article/boeing-earnings-strike-vote-new-ceo-af6c6dab8747d5b8189df97a55e6b8d9

This is not just pretty cool, but quite awesome!

There have been 3D printers on the ISS for about a decade now. Earlier this year, the European Space Agency sent up a METAL 3D printer and have been working with it for a few hours a day, to see what's possible in the microgravity environment of the ISS. The printer is limited, of course, to objects about the size of a can of soda. This is, after all, an experiment. They'll print a layer, do all sorts of analysis on it, then print another. Once they're done with their experiment, the samples will be returned to Earth for all sorts of additional analysis.

The objective? Circular recycling! The ultimate concept is to be able to capture and reuse some of the satellites in space. Figuring out if they can successfully print new parts is one aspect of this program. To some degree, capturing space objects has been demonstrated. The thing that bothers me is the labor involved in safely dismantling a whatever and then the energy costs to reduce it into whatever is needed to feed an industrial-sized 3D metal printer.

The emphasis on safety because the USA and Russia are careful to vent fuel and discharge batteries on rocket boosters after they have completed their missions. Currently, the Chinese do not. I do not know about other nations that have entered the NEO industrial age.

SpaceX, of course, tries to take their empties home with 'em. And I give 'em big props for that.

There's a photo in The Register article that shows the objects they have printed thus far. They look like decent amateur lathe work. Then you realize they're not screwed to the base plate, they're BUILT THERE.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/06/esa_metal_3d_printing/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/09/06/2225225/esa-prints-3d-metal-shape-in-space-for-first-time

The noise is described as like a sonar ping. Clearly it has reverted to P-3C Orion mode and is hunting for Nazi submarines from a better vantage point. What it's going to attack with if it finds any, I'm not sure.

The cause is most likely benign, however, with Boing these days, you can't be too careful. Spacecraft have a history of odd, benign noises. From the article: "Astronauts notice such oddities in space from time to time. For example, during China's first human spaceflight int 2003, astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard what sounded like an iron bucket being knocked by a wooden hammer while in orbit. Later, scientists realized the noise was due to small deformations in the spacecraft due to a difference in pressure between its inner and outer walls."

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/09/starliners-speaker-began-emitting-strange-sonar-noises-on-saturday/

I could spew an absolute ton of invective right now.

That shitshow of a capsule called the Starliner should not have launched. They knew there were problems with those thrusters, and they had problems docking.

And the problems have gotten worse.

The two astronauts were supposed to be up there for two weeks, then return home. They've been up there for TWO MONTHS. And now there's some very hard problems, and they could potentially result in fatalities.

Here's the basic problem. A spaceship contains batteries. The batteries have a fixed lifespan. The batteries in the Starliner are rated through the end of August. That's not much time.

NASA is not 100% confident that the thruster problem is resolved. But Boeing is. Everybody raise your hands and jump up and down if you trust Boeing's answer.

Now, the previous successful mission of the Starliner worked great. Unmanned, it was launched, flew up to the ISS, docked itself, then later uncoupled, de-orbited, and landed in the ocean and was recovered. So the obvious answer is, why can't they do that, and the two astronauts be returned on a later flight?

BECAUSE BOEING REMOVED THE FUCKING SOFTWARE THAT PERFORMED THAT FUNCTION.

They updated software that worked. The big question is whether or not NASA and the two astronauts were notified of this change. Now someone, or some two, will have to be in that capsule, with potentially twitchy thrusters, to decouple it from the ISS and attempt to fly it back home.

The thrusters are needed twice. To move the capsule away from the ISS - SAFELY - and to reorient the capsule for its de-orbit burn. If the de-orbit burn is not performed correctly, it can mean quite literal death for the capsule occupants. And the thrusters are not 100% reliable.

I am absolutely flaming furious at Boeing!

Yes, space is hard. That's why engineers are careful and try to make sure everything is done right BEFORE any vehicle is classed as flight capable. This damn Starliner should never have been launched, it was scrubbed once because the thrusters were leaking, they should have scrubbed it again until they thoroughly understood what the problem was and it was absolutely fixed.

People's lives depend on it, you don't fuck around.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/08/nasa-likely-to-significantly-delay-the-launch-of-crew-9-due-to-starliner-issues/

Of the over 8,100 objects in low Earth orbit, 6,000+ are STARLINK SATELLITES. WITH AN ESTIMATED LIFE OF APPROX FIVE YEARS BEFORE THEY DEORBIT AND BURN UP IN THE ATMOSPHERE.

And what happens when they burn? Well, they're composed of lots of aluminum oxide, and aluminum oxide when it burns in the upper atmosphere, say, during reentry, causes a chemical reaction that destroys ozone.

*facepalm*

So Mister 'Colonize Mars Because We Need To Get Off The Earth' is hastening the rate at which the Earth is getting damaged! YAAAAY!

And the Muskbrat has permission to launch another 12,000 satellites with something like 41,000 planned. And Amazon has to have IT'S OWN satellite cloud.

I'm sure the greatly increased pace of rocket launches is also doing all sorts of good to the atmosphere.

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-satellite-megaconstellations-jeopardize-recovery-ozone.html

https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/06/18/2142237/satellite-megaconstellations-may-jeopardize-recovery-of-ozone-hole

The Japanese probe, named Akatsuki, has gone dark. Mission control thinks that the craft may have lost its pointing with Earth and are working to reestablish contact.

The probe got off to a slippery start. It launched on a Japanese rocket in 2010, then a burn to lower its orbit fired for only three minutes instead of twelve. This put it in an orbit around the Sun, instead of Venus. After much research and study, they were able to get it into the orbit of Venus by venting a large quantity of fuel oxidizer. The orbiter began "taking data in 2016 about the planet and its atmosphere. In 2018, the mission's lifetime was extended, and it has continued to collect data until this spring."

There are two solar probes that occasionally slingshot around Venus for a gravity assist to boost their orbits, but their scientific gazing is focused on the Sun.

As it happens, a woman on Russet's crew is a specialist and somewhat of a noted expert on Venus and studies it frequently. It's a difficult planet to study as the window that it's above the horizon is very small.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/our-only-mission-at-venus-may-have-just-gone-dark/

First up, the Varda orbital drug lab finally secured a re-entry permit and landed in Utah!

This is a curious thing. Varda makes pharmaceuticals. Okay, cool. Lots of drugs start their lives out as powders. Okay. Powders are, at their basic level, derived from crystals. Now's the cool part: crystals grow differently in microgravity than they do in full gravity on the Earth's surface. Varda secured funding to build this self-contained orbital crystal-growing facility and got it launched into space, where they grew crystals!

Nice!

It went into orbit on June 12 of '22. It was supposed to be in orbit for a month. And therein is the tale.

I am unclear what happened, but the FAA denied them a permit to "application for a commercial reentry license", and then the U.S. Air Force denied them permission to land at their facility. So this capsule has been humming along over our heads for an additional 6+ months, hopefully generating more crystals. Alternative landing sites in Australia and elsewhere were explored, but nothing became of it, I think the USA was exerting some sort of eminent domain authority since it was an American company. Eventually the reentry was authorized and the capsule landed in Utah and was recovered, it's now on its way to L.A. to see what new configurations the crystals achieved.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/varda-space-rocket-lab-nail-first-of-its-kind-spacecraft-landing-in-utah/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/02/22/1545243/varda-space-rocket-lab-nail-first-of-its-kind-spacecraft-landing-in-utah


Next up, an American unmanned lander touched down on the moon for the first time in 50 years, and it landed mostly intact!

The lander, Odysseus, is from a private company - an absolute first! All other lunar landers have been government projects. This one received a lot of gov't money, it's part of a NASA program to encourage private industry investment in space projects. The lander carries six scientific payloads and was launched last week on a SpaceX Falcon 9. It landed about 180 miles from the Lunar South Pole.

The location is important for three big reasons. First, it's likely to be a future landing site for manned missions because (2) there's a crater there whose rim is in sunlight like 80% of the lunar month. That makes for much more desirable conditions to live in. And (3), conversely the crater itself appears to have frozen ice, possibly on the order of two miles deep! That's a lot of frozen water! Now, we have no idea what the contaminant situation is, so you can't just go out with an ice pick and chip off some pieces and plop it in your drink.

The lander has one big problem, though: it fell over. The second lander in recent history to do so. Communications was lost in its final landing stage, and while the autonomous landing system worked remarkably well, you just can't beat an experienced pilot behind the controls. It appears that it probably clipped a boulder with one of its landing legs and fell over. The issue is that the communications mast is now lying in the lunar regolith rather than pointing straight up, so its signal is pretty weak. There's also a question as to whether this will impair the ability of the experiments to deploy.

Time will tell. And time is limited because the approaching lunar night is at -250 degrees Celsius, which will freeze the lander and that will be the end of that. I think they have something on the order of eight days to get everything done.

The Yahoo article has some nice photos of the launch.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/a-little-us-company-makes-history-by-landing-on-the-moon-but-questions-remain/

https://news.yahoo.com/watch-live-us-moon-landing-how-to-stream-lunar-lander-intuitive-machines-odysseus-houston-apollo-nasa-164032673.html

https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/02/22/1545243/varda-space-rocket-lab-nail-first-of-its-kind-spacecraft-landing-in-utah


And finally, Japan joined the club of countries to land unmanned probes on the moon last month. The lander is named SLIM, standing for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon. And while smart, it proved that space is hard: one of its engines failed in its landing descent and it flipped over and landed on its head.

This caused a bit of a problem with its solar panels generating power, and it took ten days for the spacecraft to power up. SLIM carried a couple of miniature rovers to move about and snap pictures, and here is the extremely cool part of this: one of the rovers was made by a TOY COMPANY! It's a company that specialized in Transformer-like robots, which is really a smart move. It's basically stored as a sphere, but it extends on an eccentric basis so that when it rolls, the two halves are offset, giving it better steering ability on the uneven terrain. Unfortunately the articles that I recovered did not have photos of the rover.

Japan is the fifth country to successfully land on the moon, following the USA, Russia, China, and India.

The CNN article has a really good photo of the lander, pity it landed on its head.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/asia/japan-moon-sniper-lander-resumes-intl-hnk-scn/index.html

The booster, B1058, had two historic high-points in its life. It was the first private space flight to launch people to the International Space Station, which is quite an achievement in and of itself. But the thing that has really made SpaceX's name is the reusability of its boosters: 1058 has made NINETEEN LAUNCHES!

Sadly, its nineteenth recovery was not 100% successful.

It landed on its landing craft, as it was designed to do, but a combination of very rough seas and high winds did it in. It ultimately toppled and broke in half, the top half of the booster falling into the sea.

Part of the problem is that it is an old booster, and the recovery ships are unmanned. A manned ship they could have chained down the landing struts and better secured it, but then you're risking human lives if there's problems in the landing. The other problem with the booster's age is that the new boosters have auto-leveling features in the landing struts: in heavy seas and winds, they can compensate for the booster shifting and rebalance it, at least to a certain degree. And 1058 did not have those features retrofitted.

The recovered parts of 1058 will still be of value as the engines will be recovered and everything else will be studied to see how well it held up over 19 launches. Ultimately it will probably be put on display somewhere.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/a-commanders-lament-on-the-loss-of-a-historic-spacex-rocket/

In the last twelve months, twice Russia has had leaks on Soyuz space craft radiators, resulting in them dumping all of their coolant into space.

Well, it's happened again.

In this case, it's their Nauka science module, and an unused coolant loop. That is to say, a coolant loop that is not currently in use, it's planned for use with future experiments. Something happened and it has or is in the process of dumping all its coolant.

The two Soyuz leaks were blamed on micrometeorite impacts, what will take the blame for the Nauka leak? One micrometeorite? Okay, plausible. Two? When nothing has damaged any of the American equipment in similar fashion? Why don't we instead talk about the terrible state of the Russian space program: the funding cuts, the very low morale, the poor quality control.

I think you might find a lot of micrometeorite accumulation if you looked there.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/for-the-third-time-in-a-year-russian-hardware-on-the-space-station-is-leaking/

It's an interesting problem. Insurance is a pool of shared risk. We all pay to insure our cars, but only a small number of us will have a loss through an accident or theft and need to make a claim, so insurance companies can be overall profitable.

The satellite insurance industry is a bit different. Take, for example, StarLink. Musk launches 30+ satellites in a single throw, expecting some will fail or won't reach orbit or whatever. He doesn't care. They aren't insured, and more will be going up soon enough to make up the coverage of the ones that didn't make it. And lots of people are having him launch lots of small satellites with the same philosophy. And there is the problem: they're not buying insurance, so while the number of satellites being launched is increasing, the pool is kinda static and not growing.

Enter ViaSat.

The launched an insured billion dollar satellite. Actually, they have a few in orbit. And there was a power supply failure on an absolutely critical subsystem. We're talking a subsystem that if it doesn't work, you've got a gigantic paperweight in orbit that can't do what it was launched for. Why said system was not multi-redundant, I do not know. They have another satellite in orbit that developed an antenna problem and is not working nearly up to spec. Also insured. These satellites could represent legitimate claims of over Seven Hundred Million U.S. Dollars.

From the article: "In 2019, the total losses from satellite claims amounted to $788 million, which overwhelmed the total premiums for the year at $500 million." The next year, three big insurers stopped offering satellite insurance.

What happens when insurance carriers stop offering insurance? Well, you can't buy it if they're not selling it. Do you build and launch a billion dollar satellite if you can't get insurance for it? California has a problem right now with car insurance: extremely hard for people entering the market to get it, or to get above bare minimum coverage at high prices as companies have been leaving the California market. So if your car gets totaled and you and the other guy both have bare minimums, you could be on the hook for a lot of money to get your car replaced if you still have a note against it!

Is space the next frontier? This could put a major crimp in the satellite industry.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billion-dollar-satellite-risks-upending-093002573.html

https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/09/04/0149214/how-a-billion-dollar-satellite-risks-upending-the-space-insurance-industry