Monday, March 18, 2024

The US Fed.gov Wants to Grow a Lunar Economy

Ars Technica is reporting today that more than just NASA is interested in making the moon more available to industry.  

It appears to have started at NASA, which is using part of its work on Artemis to seek a lunar economy (pdf warning) that they're not the only customers for. That makes sense, because the more infrastructure that gets developed, the lower the costs can be for everyone that wants to use it.  It's as close to an "iron law" as it gets in manufacturing and production: the more you make, the lower the cost per item.  Typically, as quantity doubles, the price decreases by 25 to 35%.  

A whole host of conditions must be met for a lunar economy to thrive. There must be something there that can be sold, be it resources, a unique environment for scientific research, low-gravity manufacturing, tourism, or another source of value. Reliable transportation to the Moon must be available. And there needs to be a host of services, such as power and communications for machines and people on the lunar surface. So yeah, it's a lot.

Enter DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  DARPA has a long track record of backing and funding new technologies going back decades - they even paid for the the first Falcon 1 launch. Last year, they announced a new study, called LunA-10, to understand how best to facilitate a thriving lunar economy by 2035. The program manager for the study is Major Michael "Orbit" Nayak. You've got to be serious when your nickname is Orbit.

In December, DARPA announced that it was working with 14 different companies under LunA-10, including major space players such as Northrop Grumman and SpaceX, as well as non-space firms such as Nokia. These companies are assessing how services such as power and communications could be established on the Moon, and they're due to provide a final report by June.

While the final report is due by June, Major Navak issued a preliminary report earlier this month 

"Based on technical work and development conducted under the LunA-10 study, I have identified six hypotheses where, if revolutionary improvements in technology can be made, I assess that a direct acceleration to the fielding of a lunar economy is likely to occur," Nayak said in the paper.

Last Thursday, based on the ideas elucidated in Nayak's paper, DARPA issued a "Request for Information" for technological capabilities that could scale up lunar exploration and commerce. This federal solicitation makes for interesting reading and suggests that Nayak and DARPA have thought things through.

A Request For Information or RFI is the very preliminary first step in the government procurement process.  The RFI is published where any interested contractor can read it and respond with an equally preliminary summary of how they think they can provide the solutions the RFI is asking about.  Neither the Fed.gov or the respondents are committing to anything.  They aren't paying the companies for the response and aren't committing to actually paying anyone for anything.  The companies aren't committing to produce whatever they respond about nor committing to a price. 

The six areas are: 

  • Centralized heating and cooling: The moon has a day/night cycle that lasts 28 days which alternates between extremely hot and extremely cold. Could there be a centralized thermal system that provides cooling during the day and heating during the night?  Perhaps one that new industries could pay for like our electrical utilities?  
  • Lunar prospecting:  What minerals are there on the moon that are close enough to the surface to be collected and what could be done with them? 
  • Silicon wafer manufacturing: Remember Blue Origin's talk about manufacturing solar cells on the moon?  The cells they showed were small, perhaps 75mm (~3 inches) in diameter.  The emphasis here is >400 mm wafers (~15.75"). "Silicon crystal growth occurs at 1425 deg Celsius, which is approximately the temperature at which multiple ISRU pilot plants intend to operate, e.g., for carbothermal reduction of oxygen from regolith," the solicitation states.
  • Microbial biomanufacturing:  Microorganisms are involved in many critical processes here on Earth (besides making wine and cheese).  The goal is to combine local materials, such as lunar regolith, with biotechnology to create structures, industrial fuels, or lubricants.
  • Low-gravity resource extraction: There appears to be a lot of valuable minerals on the moon, but they seem to be in low concentrations.  DARPA seeks proposals on how to deal with that. 
  • A lunar GPS system. A real lunar GPS constellation is probably out of the question, but with a handful of settlements clustered in areas of high resource availability, some way of distributing time signals other than getting them from the Earth seems to be useful. 

While it's early to jump to conclusions, DARPA has the reputation, the "chops", to attract serious interest. Another thing to bear in mind is that while DARPA's budget for 2023 was $4.1 Billion; NASA's budget was more than six times that, $25.3 Billion.  Perhaps DARPA could fund some things that are harder to justify for NASA, but they're not going to make a major contribution to NASA's budget.

A map of the area near the south pole where the IM-1 lander was headed, coded for elevations: blue are lowest through greens and reds to the highest in brown and then gray at Mons Mouton, bottom left.  Areas like this with craters in perma-shadows are of interest for the resources they might harbor. Image credit, Intuitive Machines. 



Sunday, March 17, 2024

Got Away From Me Again

It has been a hard day to concentrate and get things done for reasons I'll get to some other time.  So some attempts to lighten the mood and miscellaneous stuff.  

I don't have anything big enough to cook that.  Or prepare it.  Or even lift it onto that table to prepare it.


An unusual way to think about inflation...


Much like The Face on Mars, there's clearly intelligence on at least one side of the image. It's just on the side interpreting what they see, not the side that created the image.


Since it's St. Patrick's Day:


and some Irish wisdom...


As for the miscellaneous, I hope nobody is trying to replicate the ham shack mod I've posted about a few times.  I've gone back to the drawing board for a way to get around the LNA problem I mentioned last week.  I can see a way around the troubles with something older and lower tech, but for the moment I've replaced it with a $5 amplifier module I lucked into finding at the Orlando Hamcation last month.  It's just that the chances someone else will find one aren't very good.  



Saturday, March 16, 2024

SpaceX Releases Some Flight Data

The post to their Launches web site is date-tagged Thursday, so probably well after the test flight, and while not complete, it does cover some things we've been talking about.  Just a couple of points out of the eight they covered. 

  • Super Heavy successfully lit several engines for its first ever landing burn before the vehicle experienced a RUD (that’s SpaceX-speak for “rapid unscheduled disassembly”). The booster’s flight concluded at approximately 462 meters in altitude and just under seven minutes into the mission. 
  • While coasting, Starship accomplished several of the flight test’s additional objectives, including the opening and closing of its payload door (aka the pez dispenser,) and initiating a propellant transfer demonstration. Starship did not attempt its planned on-orbit relight of a single Raptor engine due to vehicle roll rates during coast. Results from these demonstrations will come after postflight data review is complete.
  • The flight test’s conclusion came during entry, with the last telemetry signals received via Starlink from Starship at approximately 49 minutes into the mission. 

These confirm that both the booster and Starship itself were victims of a RUD, and the middle one confirms Starship had improper roll rates, which could have led to the heat shield tiles not facing in the right direction.  That said, they achieved more and got farther than the first two test flights. A rumor I heard was that the booster didn't have enough fuel left to land. That would probably be a simple error that should be easy to find and fix.

Eric Berger at Ars Technica does a "big picture" summary of the test, saying, “After Thursday’s flight, Starship is already the most revolutionary rocket ever built.”  It's full of good stuff and worth your time to read. In approach, it reminds me of the things that first got me to link to Casey Handmer's blog.  Those were his October '19 post that the SpaceX Starship is a Very Big Deal and his October '21 piece called Starship is Still Not Understood.

Berger talks about watching the mission Thursday and rhetorically asks, "was that sci-fi?" 

The moment of true amazement came about 45 minutes into the flight, as Starship descended an altitude of 100 km and began entering a thicker atmosphere. For a couple of minutes, we were treated to unprecedented views of atmospheric heating acting on a spacecraft. It's one thing to know about the perils of plasma and compression as a spacecraft falls back to Earth at 27,000 km/hour into thickening air. It's another thing to see it. 

He then goes on to talk about just what was involved in getting those incredible images to us.  

To accomplish this, SpaceX had to build a reusable rocket, the Falcon 9, which is capable of reflying many times. This enabled the company to launch more than 5,500 Starlink satellites and create a global network. (SpaceX operates, by a factor of 10, more satellites than any other company or country in the world). Because of this, it was able to produce unprecedented data and video of Starship's turbulent reentry. 

The journey to reach this capability has produced many of those dazzling moments. There was that first land-based landing of the Falcon 9 rocket days before Christmas in 2015. It was followed a few months later by the first landing of a booster on a drone ship. (For me, this CRS-8 booster landing on a boat felt like the first actual sci-fi thing I'd ever seen in my life). There was Starman in orbit and the dual booster landing with the first Falcon Heavy launch. And so on.

Eric spends the last handful of paragraphs presenting some truly mind-blowing details about the base-level economics of Starship. To butcher them a little too much:

Because of a relentless focus on costs and cheap building materials, such as stainless steel, SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch – for a mere 3 launches.  

This means that, within a year or so, SpaceX will have a rocket that costs about $30 million and lifts 100 to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

Last night we watched another Falcon 9 do its 19th flight. Divide that $100 million by 19 instead of three.

Bluntly, this is absurd.

Then he goes on to compare costs of Starship vs. other systems avialable now.

NASA's Space Launch System, for example, can lift up to 95 tons to low-Earth orbit, nearly as much cargo. But it costs $2.2 billion per launch, plus additional ground systems fees. So it's almost a factor of 100 times more expensive for less throw weight. And it can fly once per year at most.

The European Space Agency's Vega costs about the same as Starship, but carries 1.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. About 1/100 the payload of Starship for the same cost. 

The goal for Starship is to be rapidly reusable, and there has been the talk about flying air travelers between continents - meaning it will be reusable a few times per day.  Right now there's very likely a Starship and booster that are in line to fly next.  Probably three or four. 

Screen capture from the SpaceX coverage. Image credit: SpaceX 

Final thoughts to Eric Berger. 

We have already seen SpaceX's proficiency with the Falcon 9 rocket. Does anyone doubt we'll see double-digit Starship launches in 2025 and many dozens per year during the second half of this decade? Access to space used to be a rare commodity. What happens to our species and its commerce in space when access is not rare or expensive?

This is the future into which we got a glimpse this week.



Friday, March 15, 2024

Voyager 1 Finally Returns a Clue to How to Restore It

It was back in early December when NASA/JPL released some grim news on the status of Voyager 1, now well beyond the solar system and in interstellar space. The last update I saw was in mid-February and the condition was still grim.  Susan Dodd, Voyager Project Manager had said, "it would be the biggest miracle if we get it back. We certainly haven't given up. There are other things we can try. But this is, by far, the most serious since I’ve been project manager."  

Finally, on March 3rd, the JPL ground team received a downlink from Voyager that was different from every communication since November when the problem first surfaced.  

On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream. The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team wasn’t initially sure what to make of it. But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory. 

The team has suspected that a piece of corrupted memory inside the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of three main computers on the spacecraft, is the most likely culprit for the interruption in normal communication. They suspect the FDS because the overall communications system seems to be working.  It's transmitting to Earth, pointing this way and essentially doing what it's supposed to, it's just that there's no usable information - no actual Flight Data - being sent back.

On March 1st, controllers sent a new command to Voyager. 

Called a “poke” by the team, the command is meant to gently prompt the FDS to try different sequences in its software package in case the issue could be resolved by going around a corrupted section.

With the one way radio travel time to Voyager 1 takes over 22-1/2 hours, the reply was received on March 3rd. 

On March 7, engineers began working to decode the data, and on March 10, they determined that it contains a memory readout.

The team is working through the memory bit by bit, comparing it to a similar download sent when things were working properly. They hope this will allow them to find the root of the problem. But going through "bit by bit" and being sure of how to fix the problem could well take weeks or months before the Voyager team can make the next step or next test. The adage that I've heard called the first law of medicine applies here, too: "first, do no harm." 

Artist’s illustration of one of the Voyager spacecraft. Credit: Caltech/NASA-JPL 



Thursday, March 14, 2024

Grading IFT-3

Not perfect.  Not an "A plus plus." Maybe an A minus or a B plus.  Merely my opinion.  As everyone knows, Starship 28 and SuperHeavy booster 10 were launched on Integrated Flight Test 3 this morning

SpaceX's third towering Starship rocket, standing some 397 feet (121 meters) tall and wider than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet, lifted off at 8:25 am CDT (13:25 UTC) Thursday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville. SpaceX delayed the liftoff time by nearly an hour and a half to wait for boats to clear out of restricted waters near the launch base.

Much better than IFT-2 in November, Ship 28 achieved orbital altitudes and traveled across the Indian Ocean toward the western shores of Australia, exactly as planned.  The booster didn't RUD after MECO and stage separation. S28 didn't vent oxygen onto hot engines and RUD. S28 tested transfer of liquid oxygen in zero G, tested the gross operation of the "Pez dispenser" they plan to use to deploy Starlink satellites Really Soon Now (and sooner than it seemed to be yesterday), and more, but somewhere along the way, they decided not to reignite one or more of S28's Raptor engines in orbit to reduce velocity.   

Starship and its Super Heavy booster climb off the launch pad at Starbase, Texas. Part of the Orbital Launch Mount visible at the left. That massive Mach diamond gets repeated once the booster is far enough up. Image Credit: SpaceX. 

The bad point is that they lost both halves - like both flight tests before this one.  They just achieved much more.

"Starship reached orbital velocity!" wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, on his social media platform X. "Congratulations SpaceX team!!"

While the Starship and booster platforms are intended to be rapidly reusable, Booster 10 made it closer to splashdown than the previous two missions, it plunged into the Gulf of Mexico uncontrolled. It was supposed to have reignited some number of engines and softly dropped into the Gulf of Mexico. I was captivated watching the video of the grid fins gyrating and didn't look at the lower left of the video screen until after it was said the booster was lost.  At that point, one of the 33 engines showed as being on by their telemetry.  I don't know if more engines were ever on, if they were on at the right times and so on. 

My suspicion is that booster landing and recovery are going to take a while to perfect.  After all, they're the only company in the world doing it consistently and perfecting it. To every other entity in the world, a booster is garbage once it's dropped. It can be forgiven if they throw a few away getting it to work; I mean, they lost a bunch of Falcon 9s and now they're at something like 280 consecutive successful landings.

Beginning around 46 minutes after launch, Starship beamed down what might have been the most spectacular imagery from the flight. At this point in the mission, the 165-foot-long (50-meter) ship was speeding across the Indian Ocean and rapidly falling as Earth's gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

Starship's flaps, there to provide aerodynamic control during the final phase of descent, folded up against the ship's main body. Then, black ceramic tiles attached to the ship started glowing orange as a sheath of plasma enveloped the vehicle. Temperatures outside Starship climbed higher than 2,500° Fahrenheit, and the ship appeared to be under control during the first moments of reentry.

This was absolutely riveting to watch. I'm not going to say nobody alive has ever seen the plasma forming on surfaces during re-entry, but I bet the number people that have seen it went up a million-fold today.

Beginning around 46 minutes after launch, Starship beamed down what might have been the most spectacular imagery from the flight. At this point in the mission, the 165-foot-long (50-meter) ship was speeding across the Indian Ocean and rapidly falling as Earth's gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

Starship's flaps, there to provide aerodynamic control during the final phase of descent, folded up against the ship's main body. Then, black ceramic tiles attached to the ship started glowing orange as a sheath of plasma enveloped the vehicle. Temperatures outside Starship climbed higher than 2,500° Fahrenheit, and the ship appeared to be under control during the first moments of reentry.

This rear-facing camera, mounted inside one of the forward flaps on Starship, shows plasma building up around the underside and rear flaps during reentry over the Indian Ocean.  Image credit: SpaceX 

Not too long after pictures like this started getting interrupted and interfered with, the Starship went into a radio blackout.  Not a surprise, re-entry is known for that.  The excellent downlink of video they got was because of using their own Starlink system and antennas on the cooler side of S28.  At some point, that video went away and the onscreen telemetry stopped updating.  Around five minutes later, they announced that they had lost all telemetry from the ship; both Starlink and NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) at the same time.  They had to conclude they had lost the ship. 

What's next?  I don't think they're ready to start flying Starlink satellites in Starships or any other operational things; more test flights are definitely in the offering.  They most likely will focus on the things like the cryogenic fueling experiments, although a transfer between Starships can't happen until there's a second Starship launch pad, whether there in Boca Chica or here at the Kennedy Space Center. 

Bear in mind that Musk set the target for six Starship flights by the end of this year in a post to X.

I don't know how long this will be there, but if you didn't watch the flight and want to, SpaceX still has the video of this morning's launch here on their Launches website. It's the full 1 hour 43 minute video stream.  The lift off isn't until about 34 minutes on the timer.  The booster separation about 3 minutes later and booster loss about T+7 minutes.  Starship engine cutoff at T+8:25 and 8:35.  The really dramatic re-entry video starts around T+45 minutes. 



Wednesday, March 13, 2024

It's Official. Thursday Morning is Show Time!

This afternoon, SpaceX was granted their launch license by the FAA.  The 110-minute test window opens at 7:00 a.m. CT, 8:00 AM ET, 5:00 AM Pacific.  The only questionable aspect as of about 5PM EDT is weather.  The Weather Underground forecast is calling for high amounts of cloud cover, in the 70 to 90% range, but more problematic is potential for wind shear.  Unlike launches from the Cape, we apparently don't have a site that tells us the chances of acceptable weather.

SpaceX says:

A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to stay tuned to our X account for updates.

You have your choice of lots of ways to watch it.

When I went to the FAA site, I saw something interesting about the notice the license had been issued.  Take a look at this, especially the expiration date on the right. 

Today's launch license expires in 2028?  Does that mean SpaceX can launch more than once on this license, like the hoped for nine launches this year

Over on the left hand edge, right of the big buttons, note the text that says, "VOL 23-129 (Rev 1)." When you hover your mouse over it, you'll see it's a download, so I downloaded that to read it.  Short answer: no, not yet.  Longer answer, at the bottom of page 3, top of page 4, there are some "Authorizations" listed.  I'll just quote them:

4. Authorization: In accordance with the representations in the Space Exploration Technologies, Corp. application as of the date of this license, and any amendments to the license application or waivers  approved by the FAA, in writing, Space Exploration Technologies, Corp. is authorized to conduct:
     a. Pre flight ground operations
        i. Using the Starship Super Heavy vehicle.
        ii. At SpaceX Boca Chica Launch Complex, Boca Chica, Texas.
    b. Flights:
        i. Using the Starship Super Heavy vehicle.
        ii. From SpaceX Boca Chica Launch Complex, Boca Chica, Texas.
        iii. To Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean locations specified in its application,                          excluding Starship entry contingency landing locations .
        iv. For the Flight 3 mission only, unless this license is modified to remove this term.

Note the line in blue.  That says that only one mission is covered, unless they remove that line.  

A 110 minute launch window is 10 minutes short of two hours.  With the projected launch time of 8:00 AM ET, that stretches to almost 10:00 AM.  I'll be glued to this computer. 



Tuesday, March 12, 2024

European Eutelsat 36D Flown to Florida for a SpaceX Ride

Monday, March 11, the Airbus-built Eutelsat 36D Geostationary Communications Satellite arrived in Sanford, Florida after flying from Toulouse, France aboard an Airbus BelugaST transport aircraft.  The 5000 kg satellite was then driven by truck from Sanford (just north of Orlando) to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for a launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 by the end of the month.

Eutelsat 36D had set off Saturday on an Airbus BelugaST (Super Transporter) from France where the satellite maker is based. It is the third time the manufacturer’s alternative to Ukrainian Antonov aircraft has flown a large satellite across the Atlantic since Airbus started offering an outsized freight transportation service two years ago.

This is a routine replacement for a satellite currently in service called Eutelsat 36B, stationed at 36 degrees East longitude, where it has been providing TV broadcast and government services across Africa, Russia, and Europe for more than 14 years.  It's expected to run out of repositioning fuel in 2026.  Eutelsat ordered the replacement in 2021.  

Eutelsat 36D has 70 Ku-band transponders and is based on the Airbus Eurostar Neo platform with all-electric propulsion, meaning it would take five to six months post-launch to reach its orbital slot and enter service. 

While not specified in the source article, chances are the satellite is going to Airbus' recently purchased satellite construction facility on the Cape for checkout before being handed off to SpaceX.  

SpaceNews simply captioned this as "A Beluga aircraft departures from Toulouse, France" without specifying if it was carrying this satellite. And, yes, leaving that "s" on departures. Image Credit: Airbus

Also not specified in the source article, but I'm pretty confident saying this, is that it's coming to Florida for a SpaceX ride due to the European Space Agency's Ariane 6 being several years late.  The last date I saw was that it would fly this year, after being originally scheduled for 2020 and repeatedly delayed.  I would assume they have a backlog but a mission like this one, replacement for a satellite running out of fuel, is not as flexible in schedule as the ESA might want.

 


Monday, March 11, 2024

An Essential For Deep Space Manned Missions

An essential need to for deep space missions, like Mars or long term habitats on the moon, is protection from the radiation environment.  For travel, a possible alternative is a much faster way to get there, a different essential need.  For habitats there's more freedom - perhaps burying the colony could be an alternative if the planet doesn't have a good magnetic field. 

Ars Technica has a long, deep article on the radiation issue, far too involved for me to get into here, so I really want to recommend anyone interested read or at least skim the piece.  

The radiation problems start with the sun, and with the current tendency to blame everything from the AT&T update issue a couple of weeks ago to an unexpected pimple on solar flares, I think everyone's aware that can be a problem.  Ars author Jacek Krywko starts off with some interesting background.

On October 19, 1989, at 12:29 UT, a monstrous X13 class solar flare triggered a geomagnetic storm so strong that auroras lit up the skies in Japan, America, Australia, and even Germany the following day. Had you been flying around the Moon at that time, you would have absorbed well over 6 Sieverts of radiation—a dose that would most likely kill you within a month or so.

X13 is not the biggest flare observed since satellites started monitoring the sun, and is still considerably weaker than the Carrington event of the 1850s. Back in November of  2003, toward the end of cycle 23, there was a super flare that was genuinely scary and the kind of flare to worry about.  It was classed as X28 afterwards - only because it saturated the X-ray detectors on the satellites and they couldn't measure it properly. 

This is why the Orion spacecraft, which will be in space for longer times than the Apollo missions, has a built in, heavily shielded, storm shelter for the crew.  Something important to remember about radiation doses is that they're cumulative.  The Orion shielded retreat is cramped and uncomfortable if they need to use it, and only rated for 30 days. 

Radiation problems start with the sun, but don't end there by far.  Deep space is also the domain of cosmic radiation from faraway sources.  The majority of solar particle events flux is between 30 Million electron Volts to 100 MeV which is what the Orion shelter is designed for.  Cosmic rays and energetic particles from other star systems are relatively rare but some are coming at you all the time from all directions. They also can have higher energies, starting at 200 MeV and going to several Billion electron Volts (they use Giga here; GeV), which makes them extremely penetrating.  The most extreme cosmic rays have an energy measured in exa-electron volt (EeV), or 1 billion billion (1018) electron volts of energy, which is around a million times more energetic than the fastest particles from human-made particle accelerators. They are rare, but energetic. The most energetic particle ever detected had an energy of 320 EeV and traveled at more than 99.9% the speed of light.

On Earth, we're protected by the earth's magnetic field, which is weak but huge so it operates over long distances.

Anything that makes it through the magnetic field runs into the atmosphere, which, when it comes to shielding, is the equivalent of an aluminum wall that's 3 meters thick. Finally, there is the planet itself, which essentially cuts the radiation in half since you always have 6.5 billion trillion tons of rock shielding you from the bottom.

To put that in perspective, the Apollo crew module had on average 5 grams of mass per square centimeter standing between the crew and radiation. A typical ISS module has twice that, about 10 g/cm2. The Orion shelter has 35–45 g/cm2, depending on where you sit exactly, and it weighs 36 tons. On Earth, the atmosphere alone gives you 810 g/cm2—roughly 20 times more than our best shielded spaceships.  

How can a craft be shielded better?  These are charged particles and that points to three possible implementations of electromagnetic protection:  

In the 1960s, NASA funded multiple studies looking into three active shielding concepts: plasma shields (PDF), electrostatic shields, and magnetic shields (PDF). In 1967, Richard H. Levy and Francis W. French delivered a report saying that plasma and electrostatic shields were promising, but they both needed 60 million volts to work—even by today’s standards, that number is ridiculous.

Magnetic shields looked more enticing. The 1950s brought the discovery of type II superconductors—materials that had virtually no electrical resistance at very low temperatures and could be used to build extremely strong magnetic coils. In 1966, P.F. McDonald and T.J. Buntyn of Research Laboratories Brown Engineering Company reported that there were no magnets strong enough to shield a spacecraft, but “rapid advances in superconducting magnets technology indicate that it will soon be possible to produce necessary high fields with very modest power consumption.”

And that's where I'll refer you to the long article on Ars Technica.  As is the usual routine in the 21st century, I've told people interested in exploring deep space that you have a problem and now I leave it to you to solve your problem.  

Artist's conceptual drawing of NASA's CREW HaT.  CREW HaT stands for Cosmic Radiation Extended Warding Halbach Torus, a way of creating a toroidal magnetic shield around a vehicle to protect it without wrapping it in miles of wire (a solenoid).   Image credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | NASA

Final words to Ars Author Jacek Krywko:

ESA’s career radiation dose limit for astronauts is 1,000 mSv [milliSieverts - SiG]. Reference Mars mission scenarios estimate a total dose at a bit below 1,200 mSv. That’s not that much of a difference—nothing you couldn’t fix by throwing a little more mass here and there in your spaceship. NASA had career limits dependent on sex and age, but you could probably get away with just picking old men for the job.

But then, on January 5, 2022, NASA revised Section 4.8.2 of the Spaceflight Human-System Standard and set the astronauts’ career radiation dose limit to a flat 600 mSv. Active shields offer a roughly 50 percent dose reduction at a cost of huge mass penalty and development efforts. They have always ended up shelved because they were overkill. We just didn’t need that much protection. With NASA’s new standards, we ultimately might.

 


Sunday, March 10, 2024

Catch as Catch Can on a Slow News Sunday

While we had a SpaceX Starlink launch this evening at 7:05 PM (long video - but you can scroll around in it if you want), it has been a "slow news day" at all the sources I go to most often to see what's going on.  There have been a couple of stories I've tried to get actual details on, beyond headlines, but haven't found out if there's anything real to the YouTube headlines yet. One example is that apparently the rest of the world is starting to find out about Voyager 1's problems and is spreading the news.

YouTube headlines are too often like the one I got in my "chosen for you" selections during the week. I really should have saved a screen capture.  The title was something about NASA reveals something they found on Mars, and the picture to tease the video was a background that could well have been Mars, but plopped into the photo somehow was a very obvious car, truck or maybe even large boat engine that I swear I'd seen before.  Think of something like a straight six cylinder engine, only not painted, just looking like unfinished metal.  I guarantee that's click bait and NASA found nothing of the sort on Mars.

The various sources are all still reporting Starship IFT-3 this Thursday, but NextSpacelight shows the time NET 8:00 AM ET which is 7:00 AM CDT.  I maintain my expectation that they're not going to launch that far before sunrise, which ought to be around 7:40 AM out there. There have been major changes to this flight as if they're expecting to make their suborbital flight and want to test several things while they're in the microgravity.  The biggest change seems to be instead of going almost once around the world and splashing Starship near Hawaii, this one is going to end in the Indian Ocean.  Maybe they'll find that MH370. 

My big ham project has proceeded and while progress has been made, I'm still not done.  I've found some things that I'm looking at changing already.  The SDRConsole software is running fine, it's allowing me to monitor more than I comfortably can with the station transceiver itself.  The next big step I'm working toward is having the digital sub-bands I've defined drive the software used to demodulate those signals, so if (when) I see things in those bands I can turn on the demodulation software tell if I want to change over to a different sub-band.  The rest is getting used to the whole setup and finding optimum settings for everything, which has a large element of personal preference to it.  

This is the hardware block diagram as it's put together.  

In the handful of boxes on the middle of the right side, there's a little box with LNA written on it (Low Noise Amplifier) that's there to set the system's noise figure so that it isn't ruined after going through the Splitter just below it.  I've discovered that the LNA kit I chose and built is fine in the band it's designed for (50-54 MHz or six meters), but seems to actually have substantial loss in the HF ham bands.  By jumpering the LNA out (just connecting the IN and OUT cables) signals improved substantially on the low bands - I mean like maybe 20 to 30 dB better.

Since the company made no claims about the LNA's performance down at lower frequencies, I wrote them to see what I should expect. If it's just not going to work well, I could replace it with something different or find a way to maybe just switch it out. 



Saturday, March 9, 2024

The Department of Redundancy Department

Stop me if you've heard all this before - and you have.  It's Redundancy Weekend - two old stories.  

Only one is remotely like news.  At the last minute, the congress approved some spending bills to avoid a government shutdown. Coverage by Reuters.  

By a bipartisan vote of 75-22, the Senate approved a $467.5 billion spending package that will fund agriculture, transportation, housing, energy, veterans and other programs through the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

Let me use a cartoon I've been using since the blog was old enough to walk.  First use I can find easily was 2015 although the cartoon itself is dated 2011.  The website in the bottom left corner is long gone.  (Tonight something tried to load but it was acting strange and I didn't have the nerve to let it continue. It didn't say www.virtual...  it said w01.virtual...)


The key is the last line in the bottom right.  "Yes yes R2.  We'll raise it. Just leave him helpless a little longer and then raise it at the last second so we look like heroes." Paraphrasing to fit the situation  "Just sit on the spending bill a bit longer so we look like heroes."  

Let's be honest about this.  The other way of saying "government shutdown" is "paid vacation" for the lucky Fed.gov 's nonessential workers.  The longest government shutdown ever was 35 days between December of '18 and January of '19, under President Trump.  True, the essential workers had to work without pay until the deal was made before their pay could be issued and that could have been tough.  The nonessential workers were free to get a replacement job to get some additional income but had to wait for the shutdown to be over to get their back pay, too.  

There's no such thing as a debt ceiling because the ceiling has been raised Every Time It Was Ever Hit.  That's not a ceiling.  It's as much a publicity stunt as "sit on the spending bill a bit longer so we look like heroes."  

The story has been going around that the national debt is going up another $1 Trillion every 100 days.  Play with that on your calculator.  That's $416.67 Million per hour, or $115,741 per second.  That's not government spending that's just the deficit.

That which can't go on forever won't.

The other great redundancy story is that it's the weekend when the collective decides everybody gets up an hour earlier and goes to bed an hour earlier until the first Sunday in November.  So that we can go to work an hour earlier, and come home an hour earlier, so that we have more sunlight after work even though we still go to bed earlier.  They call it Daylight Saving Time, but that's an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.  We can't affect the length of the day any more than we can affect how long the tides run.  All we can do is change what we call the hours.  

The thing is, we're supposed to be done with this in Florida.  In March of 2018, the Florida legislature passed a law halting the twice-yearly shifting of the clocks.  Unlike some other states that have plotted an exit strategy from Daylight Saving Time, Florida was going to stay on DST all year round.  Why not stay on standard time?  Apparently the tourist industry thought that shifting the time to put sunrises and sunsets later on the clocks would sell better to people coming down here in mid-Winter.  Staying on DST was opposed by PTA groups who are concerned about it putting kids en route to school during dark winter mornings.  Still, the law was passed and signed by governor Rick Scott (at the time, now one of our Senators).  

I've read stories that say around the country some states want to stay on DST all year long, and some want to stay on Standard time all year long.  The Fed.gov will only allow states to stay on Standard time.  Which implies staying on DST is somehow wrong. 

It seems a bit melodramatic to say the clocks are killing people, but there are some well-documented side effects of the time shift and the kind of "jet lag" some people get: more car accidents, more accidents at work, higher rates of heart attacks and strokes, and other stuff. 



Friday, March 8, 2024

SpaceX Expansion at Boca Chica Just Got More Likely

The Texas Tribune reports that at Monday's meeting of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission they voted unanimously to pursue an exchange that would give 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park in Cameron County, Texas, to SpaceX.  In exchange, the state park land would be swapped for 477 acres adjacent to Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge, an area the agency has been interested in for many years because it’s “one of the most biologically diverse regions in North America” and provides habitat for endangered species and migratory birds. It's also reportedly an excellent area for fishing, kayaking, hiking, camping, and birding.

SpaceX appears to be swapping the 477-acre plot through an affiliate company.

SpaceX hasn't said how it will use the 43 acres it will receive in the deal, but the land is located near existing launch and rocket manufacturing infrastructure at Starbase. TPWD will now begin negotiations with SpaceX for the land swap, including environmental assessments that could take up to 18 months.

It shouldn't be a surprise that the people who oppose any sort of development would be out in protest about this.  According to the Texas Tribune story, people want to swim at that beach in Boca Chica without interruption or having to share the area in any way, so the opposition to this move has been big despite the gain of 11 acres at Atascosa for every acre given up at Boca Chica. 

At Monday’s TPWD meeting in Austin — the last opportunity for people to give feedback on the land swap — almost all chairs were occupied and people stood in the back. During nearly four hours of public testimony, most speakers opposed the exchange, including some who drove more than 300 miles to Austin from Brownsville in three minivans.

“Boca Chica Beach is the first place that my little brother went to a beach. I went there the day my sister was born and most recently I spread my uncle’s ashes there. Please do not give SpaceX an inch because they will take a mile,” said Emma Guevara, who grew up in Brownsville and is now a member of South Texas Environmental Justice Network and a field organizer in Brownsville for the Sierra Club.

TPWD spokesperson Stephanie Garcia said that public access to the public beach through the park or along State Highway 4 would remain as it is now, only interrupted for tests or launches that might endanger travelers along the road. She went on to say the 477 acres the state would receive is located along the Lower Laguna Madre — the shallow bay between the coast and South Padre Island — and would increase public water access.

Kathy Lueders, SpaceX's general manager at Starbase, spoke at Monday's meeting. "Those launches are exciting the young minds that are watching them … children become what they see," Lueders said as people booed behind her, according to the Texas Tribune. "Today it is not an aspiration to be a rocket scientist and work in the Rio Grande Valley. It is a reality. And one day we hope those kids that are following the launches are seeing themselves and a future spacecraft launching."

I was interested in the size and placement of the Laguna Atascosa NWR, so I asked Bing maps to show me and then did a screen capture.  The NWR is getting is the white outlined area at the top and the little ellipse in the lower right is the entire area of SpaceX Starbase, Boca Chica Village and everything else.  The white outlined area is the entire NWR, not just the 477 acres they're trading, and the oval is far more than just the 23 acres.  Just to see where they are on a satellite picture. 



Thursday, March 7, 2024

Astra Goes Private - Off the Stock Markets

In last Saturday's (Mar. 2) post we talked about Astra's founders offering to buy up all shares of the company's stock, at a price below the current market price.  On Thursday (today, as I write), they announced the deal was complete. 

"Astra Space, Inc. announced today that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement pursuant to which the acquiring entity has agreed, subject to customary closing conditions, to acquire all shares of Astra common stock not already owned by it for $0.50 per share in cash," the company stated. The acquiring entity consists of Kemp, London, and other long-term investors.

Kemp and London are the co-founders of Astra.  

Does Astra have a future or is it over?  It's hard to say for sure but it doesn't look very bright.  Recall that back in August of '22, they announced they were dropping everything they'd done and starting development of a new rocket capable of putting bigger payloads in orbit, Rocket 4.0.  Before that announcement they had seven launches of their much smaller payload-rated Rocket 3.0 through 3.3 and only two were successful. 

It's almost a dead certainty that Rocket 4 isn't going to launch this year, and '25 isn't looking like a sure thing, either. On top of that, they're facing fierce competition from companies well in front of them, like Rocket Lab (working on their own bigger launch vehicle, Neutron), smaller companies like Firefly along with new entrants like ABL Space and Stoke Space.  All of them are facing tough competition from SpaceX, of course, with their Transporter missions that put up dozens of small satellites on the workhorse Falcon 9.  The last cost numbers I saw for a ride on a Transporter mission (October '23) were $5500 per kilogram or $2500/lb.  The only number I had for Rocket 3 was $70,000 per kilogram.

Then there's Starship, which will carry an unprecedented amount of payload to Low Earth Orbit.  It's an old estimate (2019) but Casey Handmer had calculated the cost to orbit for Starship/Super Heavy to be $35 per kilogram.

Astra's Rocket 3 launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  Image credit Astra.  I'm unable to find a date for this launch or coverage here, so I'm guessing it failed.



Wednesday, March 6, 2024

We Have an Announced Date for Starship IFT-3

I expect most of you will have heard this by now, since it has been headline news in space media, as well as other places.  

In a post on the social media site X, the company posted a link to watch "Starship's third flight test" at 7:30 am ET (11:30 UTC) on March 14. Published on Tuesday morning, the social media post was 'hidden,' but somehow discovered late Tuesday night.

This opening is from Ars Technica's coverage and saying "7:30 am ET (11:30 UTC) on March 14" is a surprise.  First off, I would think SpaceX Boca Chica would give the time in Central Time, but the oddity here is this Sunday is the start of Daylight Saving Time (7:30 AM is 12:30 UTC this week, so saying 11:30 is right). In turn, DST means sunrise is an hour later next week. It will be 7:30 EDT here in Florida next Thursday - so it will be close to 7:30 AM CDT there.  Coverage is starting at 6:30 AM CDT - an hour before sunrise.  SpaceX's Launches website says coverage starts 30 minutes before launch, which is still a half hour before sunrise. 

Does it matter if the sun is up with today's cameras, and what you're photographing is as bright as 33 Raptor engines?  Depends on what you're trying to see.  I wouldn't be at all surprised if that time is revised later or if they launch closer to or after their sunrise.

The obvious warning here is the FAA has not yet granted the launch license, although there are claims it's close to doing that.  There's still a small but dedicated group of haters that don't want SpaceX to launch from Boca Chica making noises and trying to come up with new ways to interfere. The County's Road Closures Website has nothing for next Thursday at the moment, but looks to be busy through next Wednesday.

Screen capture from the Cameron County website

Based upon learnings from these first two flights, this next mission, with upgraded hardware and flight software, likely has a reasonable chance of success. Among the milestones SpaceX will seek to complete during this test flight are:

  • Nominal first-stage performance, followed by a controlled descent of the Super Heavy booster into the Gulf of Mexico
  • Starship separation from the first stage using "hot staging," meaning engine ignition while the first stage is still firing its engines
  • Starship reaching an orbital velocity and engine shutdown
  • Early-stage testing of in-space refueling technology inside the propellant tanks of Starship
  • Controlled splashdown of Starship in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX is seeking to demonstrate the basic flight capabilities of Starship so that it can move into a more operational phase with the big rocket. The company wants to begin deploying larger Starlink satellites from the vehicle this year, which will enable direct-to-cell phone Internet connectivity.

Moving to a higher cadence is necessary for SpaceX to start working more on in-space refueling - as mentioned. Without in-space storage of propellants and fueling on orbit, Artemis isn't happening, and neither are other deep-space missions in the planning stages. 



Tuesday, March 5, 2024

The Part of Sunday Through Monday I Didn't Mention

Yesterday, I said, (Sunday) "night, while the company's efforts appeared to be focused on the Crew 8 launch to the ISS, Starbase was focused on achieving a full wet dress rehearsal on the stack of Booster 10 and Ship 28."  The thing I didn't mention was that it was followed up with two Falcon 9 launches Monday evening: one from Vandenberg SFB in California and one from Cape Canaveral SFS here in Florida.  

That means between Sunday night at nearly 11 PM (eastern) when Crew 8 launched and Monday night there were three Falcon 9 launches and the Wet Dress Rehearsal of Starship.  These missions were at Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral again and Starbase Boca Chica in order.  You want to know how much SpaceX dominates the US launch industry?  You just read of three SpaceX launches in 24 hours.  In 2023, the entire year, ULA launched three times.

Author Stephen Clark at Ars Technica says "We've reported on this before, but it's worth reinforcing that no launch provider, commercial or government, has ever operated at this cadence."

Sunday night's Crew 8 launch, time exposure through booster separation, second stage ignition and the booster's boostback burn to the Cape for landing.  I'm not 100% sure, but it appears to be from Titusville, on the west side of the Indian River Lagoon.  Image credit: Joshua Conti/US Space Force

On Sunday night at the Starbase facility in South Texas, teams loaded more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) Starship rocket slated to lift off as soon as this month on the third full-scale test flight of SpaceX's next-generation launcher.

This was likely the final major test before SpaceX launches the third Starship test flight. The countdown rehearsal of the fully stacked rocket ended as planned at T-minus 10 seconds, just before the booster's Raptor engines were ignited; SpaceX then drained the vehicle of propellant. SpaceX previously test-fired the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage separately.

Last week there was a test of ship 28, what they refer to as a Spin Prime test. They've static fired 28 before and did some work on 28 that preceded the spin prime and then restacking.  My belief is that there will probably be one more major test before launch; a static fire test of the stacked Booster 10/Ship 28 combination.  It'll be soon, but otherwise, as he reports, they're close to being ready to launch.   

The Falcon 9 launch of NASA's Crew-8 mission Sunday night was the first of three Falcon 9 launches over the next 20 hours. Next in line was a launch at 5:05 pm EST (2205 UTC) Monday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with 53 small payloads on SpaceX's 10th Transporter rideshare mission. The customer payloads on this Falcon 9 launch included MethaneSAT, an $88 million satellite funded primarily by philanthropic donations to monitor methane greenhouse gas missions around the world.

Then, less than two hours later, at 6:56 pm EST (2356 UTC), a Falcon 9 rocket took off from SpaceX's most active launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This mission delivered 23 more Starlink broadband satellites into orbit for SpaceX's commercial Internet network. At 1 hour and 51 minutes, this was the shortest time separation to date between two SpaceX launches.

So far this year, SpaceX has launched once every 3 days on average.  They're aiming for around 140 launches for '24, and this will require them be a bit faster than that, more like launches once every 2.6 days.  Most long time space watchers are surprised to learn that the issue slowing them down is generally launch pad availability - including turnaround time between missions. 

"Could you imagine if I had walked up to you five years ago and said our constraint to launch is launch pad availability?" said Matthew Dominick, the NASA commander of the Crew-8 mission. "You would have thought I was crazy, but we’re at a cool spot in spaceflight right now. We’ve got rockets competing for launch pads, so you’re not waiting on payloads. You’re not waiting on rockets. You’re waiting on launch pads now."

We've mentioned before that they were modifying Cape Canaveral's busiest launch pad, SLC-40, to handle Crew and Cargo Dragon capsules, which can currently only be launched from Pad 39A.  The hardware modifications to SLC-40 are complete and it looks like the pad will be ready for the launch of SpaceX's next Cargo Dragon resupply mission to the space station later this month. Once verified, it could be used for SpaceX's next commercial crew mission this summer.  I've also read that the Polaris Dawn mission - the first privately funded and run spacewalk - could fly by this summer as well.  

Remember the mention of "at least nine" Starship flights this year?  A second Starship launch pad is in process at Boca Chica, a third pad is already in Florida at Pad-39A, and a second Florida Starship launch pad is being talked about now, too. 

Remember when Elon Musk said an indicator of success would be if SpaceX makes launches boring?  Do they make news where you are?  I find I forget more launches these days - I forgot last night's Starlink launch from SLC-40 until we heard the rumble.  That sound gets here so long after the launch that by the time you hear the sound you don't see anything. 



Monday, March 4, 2024

SpaceX Preps Starship for Flight Test 3

It can be hard to keep up with exactly what's going on at Starbase Boca Chica - and that's even though they're much more open about what they're doing than any other launch service provider.  Last night, while the company's efforts appeared to be focused on the Crew 8 launch to the ISS, Starbase was focused on achieving a full wet dress rehearsal on the stack of Booster 10 and Ship 28.  This is the stack that's going to be used for the next Integrated Flight Test, IFT-3. 

Overnight WDRs produce some dramatic imagery.  Image from SpaceX on X.  The photo posted on X loses its time tag in the process so I can't tell exactly when it was taken.  Elon Musk tweeted the same four pictures a few minutes later. 

Many will remember from last Monday (Feb. 26) that the FAA closed its investigation of November's IFT-2 and I guessed that IFT-3 could launch in the second half of March, between the 17th and 31st (coincidentally: St. Patrick's Day and Easter). 

"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.

I heard or read somewhere that the last flight was three weeks after the equivalent approval for that one, so we can figure two weeks later for this one.  Which is how the two week window I mentioned at the top was derived.

"SpaceX has implemented hardware changes on upcoming Starship vehicles to improve leak reduction, fire protection, and refined operations associated with the propellant vent to increase reliability," SpaceX wrote in its statement. "The previously planned move from a hydraulic steering system for the vehicle's Raptor engines to an entirely electric system also removes potential sources of flammability."

I'd really like to see the launch as soon as they're ready, but I'm not really optimistic we'll see IFT-3 before the end of the month.  They're still waiting on the FAA to grant a launch license.  Nothing will enhance the chances of getting the next launch license quicker than successfully completing the test flight.  

Musk is known for saying, "the best part is no part and the best manufacturing process is not to manufacture".  I'm completely onboard with those statements.  It's just that spending another week of preparation on the ground wouldn't be bad, IFF (math speak for If and Only If) that gets the test flight to complete successfully.  Because that means no time spent in things like the investigation that just sucked up three months.  Spending time to increase the chance of success would be a positive use of time. It's just not really possible to know until after the test, pass or fail. 



Sunday, March 3, 2024

Upgrade to the Ham Station is Much Closer to Done

As you can probably tell by that lead-in, the rest of that phrase is "but not fully Done done."

I'm down to getting the software running that will allow me to monitor several places across any ham band simultaneously.  The software, called SDR Console, is a very full featured application that has to connect to various pieces of hardware and software in your computer; "down to the metal" as they say (or used to say).  There's about 109 things I need to mess with. My last update to this project was two weeks ago, Sunday Feb. 24th and I hadn't even installed the software until I finished getting all the hardware in place. That was this Friday, March 1.

In that article, and the one I started out with in December, I showed a screen capture of SDR Console running seven receivers across the 6 meter ham band.  After watching an hour long video and going over parts of it a few more times, this is mine.   I deliberately settled for six.  I was going to start with three and look at how much it loaded my computer, but decided to go with six and measure that. 

The problem I'm having is that while all the receivers seem to be working - I can see the noise fluctuating in each receiver and I can listen to that noise - I never see any signals on the computer. I've experimented by removing everything else from the SDR and connecting it directly to my outdoor antenna. Parts of the HF spectrum with a ton of signals easily audible on my station transceiver show nothing on the SDRPlay. 

The experimenting will continue.  Next is to pull the SDR out here, where I tested it when I first bought it, and assuming the radio works, it's a software configuration thing. 



Saturday, March 2, 2024

Small Space News Story Roundup 30

Astra on the Verge of Bankruptcy  

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised it has taken this long.  In August of '22, they announced a change to a new rocket capable of putting bigger payloads in orbit, Rocket 4.0.  Before that announcement they had seven launches of their much smaller payload-rated Rocket 3.0 through 3.3 and only two of seven were successful - 29%. 

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.

The Tuesday referred to here is last Tuesday, Feb. 27.  In November, Kemp and London proposed to buy Astra shares at $1.50.  On Tuesday they dropped that offer to $0.50.  For comparison, the market price for their shares on Monday the 26th was $1.76/share. Typically (and in November) an attempt to buy shares like this to take over the company is done at a premium over the open market price, not less than 30% of it. 

Astra has disclosed few details about its financial status since the original offer. The company canceled plans for a quarterly earnings call immediately after the publication of the offer, but reported a net loss of $29.7 million in the third quarter. The company has since reported a few minor funding deals, including a Jan. 19 agreement that generated net proceeds of $5.85 million.

Now, I'll forever remember Astra as the company that had the most interesting launch abort ever.

Firefly expanding rapidly in Central Texas

In contrast, Firefly more than doubled its production space, hosting a celebration of opening it Wednesday, Feb. 28, in Briggs, Texas.  According to the Payload newsletter:

In the heart of Texas ranch country, Firefly Aerospace is embracing the pioneering and do-it-all spirit of the frontier. 

The company held a ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday celebrating the expansion of its rocket production facility from 92,000 to 207,000 sq ft to support its “launch, land, orbit” initiatives. Firefly—which is best known for its Alpha rocket—plans to introduce three next-gen vehicles over the next 24 months to cover the three facets of space travel.

Switching sources to Ars Technica's Rocket Report:

Of most interest to a newsletter about rockets is the new rocket. The Medium Launch Vehicle will incorporate a new first stage built by Firefly, with seven Miranda engines. It will be capable of lifting 16 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. And reuse is in the cards—eventually. "Anyone who comes into this market that doesn’t have reusability on their roadmap is a doomed program," said Adam Oakes, Firefly’s VP of launch vehicles. A debut launch is possible as early as 2025.

They have more going on than the MLV.  They're building the Antares 330 under contact to Northrop Grumman - to carry their Cygnus cargo vehicles to the ISS - which will use the MLV as its first stage.  Plus, they're a NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract recipient, contracted to deliver two Blue Ghost lunar landers.  The first should fly later this year.  

NASA, SpaceX Have Begun Testing Starship Docking System

Put this under the "they slipped this by me" category, but it's good to hear.  An important part of the first Artemis missions to the Moon is that SpaceX's Starship rocket will need to dock with NASA's Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit.  

The space agency said this week that NASA and SpaceX recently performed qualification testing for the docking system that will help make that possible. The docking system tests for Starship were conducted at the Johnson Space Center over 10 days using a system that simulates contact dynamics between two spacecraft in orbit.

The testing included more than 200 docking scenarios, with various approach angles and speeds. These real-world results using full-scale hardware will validate computer models of the Moon lander’s docking system.  Based on SpaceX’s flight-proven Dragon 2 docking system used on missions to the ISS, the Starship docking system can be configured to connect the lander to Orion or Gateway.

NASA's article went on to say:

Since being selected as the lander to return humans to the surface of the Moon for the first time since Apollo, SpaceX has completed more than 30 HLS specific milestones by defining and testing hardware needed for power generation, communications, guidance and navigation, propulsion, life support, and space environments protection.

I would have liked to know of that "more than 30 HLS specific milestones" completed, how many is that out of? Is it 30 out of around 50 or more like around 500?

The test stand used for the docking simulations.  SpaceX Photo