NASA has a tradition of inviting people to have their names added to various robot missions – I’ve mentioned some in this column, and have had both my birth name and my avatar name included on various missions, including both the 2012 Mars Science Laboratory mission and Mars 2020, so they are currently trundling around Mars on the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, for example.
In just under a year from this article’s publication, NASA is set to launch Europa Clipper, a mission to Jupiter with a focus on studying the icy, potentially watery world of Europa, the second innermost of Jupiter’s Galilean moons.
On entering Jupiter’s orbit in April 2030, the mission will use multiple fly-bys of Europa to study its ice crust and probe the mysteries of what lies beneath it so we might better understand what kind of ocean might exist under its protective shell. In addition, the mission will look for places where a future lander mission might safely touch-down for in situ studies of Europa.
As a part of the Europa Clipper mission, and through until the end of 2023, the public have once again been invited to have their names engraved on a microchip and flown to the Jovian system.
This project, which has been appropriately called (given the mission’s links to water) Message in a Bottle, also sees NASA link up with the current US Poet Laureate Ada Limón. Limón has penned a poem highlighting the watery link between Earth and Europa, together with humanity’s insatiable quest for knowledge. Entitled In Praise of Mystery: a Poem for Europa, it is also being flown on the mission.
Water connects Earth and Europa, the two ocean worlds NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft travels between on its journey. The existence of a vast ocean on a moon of Jupiter – which the Europa Clipper mission is equipped to decisively confirm and characterize – is what makes Europa such a promising place to better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond Earth.
– NASA Message in a Bottle
To participate in the project and have your name flown out into the depths of our solar system as a part of the Europa Clipper mission, visit the NASA website Message in a Bottle, and enter your name and requested details. Whilst there, you can also learn more about the mission and also take an interactive tour of Europa Clipper itself, discovering its instruments and their purpose along the way.
If you’d like to know just how names get to be flown on these missions, then the video below should reveal all:
US and European Launch Systems Update
2024 is looking to be a busy year as new US and European launch systems are set to finally (and in some cases, finally finally) debut operationally. Here’s a quick summary of some of the key craft.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, this is the craft intended to join with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in delivering personnel to the International Space Station (ISS) and returning them to US soil, and which had originally been set to start crewed flights to the ISS in 2018. However, the programme has been beset by numerous (and at times embarrassing for Boeing) issues, coupled with COVID-2 related shutdowns, which have repeatedly pushed the flight back.
Currently, the first crewed launch – which is still technically a test flight – is scheduled for April / May 2024, and the latest report issued by NASA and Boeing indicate that the vehicle performing that mission and carry NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS for around an 8-day stay, is now 98% certified as being able to perform the mission.
When the flight does take place – the exact date will be confirmed in the new year – it will chalk up one or perhaps two historical milestones. It will certainly be first crewed U.S. capsule to make a land-based soft landing, rather than splashing down in the ocean. In addition, it might be the first launch of a US crewed space vehicle from Cape Canaveral rather than the Kennedy Space Centre, since Apollo 7 in 1968.
However, the second of these two honours might yet go to SpaceX and Axiom Space. The former is currently converting their Falcon 9 launch facilities at Canaveral’s SLC-40 pad to support crewed launches. If it certified for such use before April 2024, it will likely be used to launch Axiom Space’s third private mission to the ISS, Ax-3, allowing SpaceX to use the fast-fuelling facilities at Kennedy Space Centre’s Pad 39A for the launch of a robotic mission to the Moon.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn heavy lift launch vehicle remains on target for a maiden flight in November 2024, which will see it not only lift-off for the first time, but then head to Mars carrying NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamic Explorers (ESCAPADES) mission, a pair of smallsats that will study the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere of Mars.
A semi-reusable vehicle capable of hauling up to 45 tonnes to low Earth orbit (LEO) or up to 13.6 tonnes to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), New Glenn’s first stage is designed to be flown up to 25 times, and the system has a planned cadence of 8 launches per year once operations commence – and Blue Origin have an initial batch of contracts to meet this target.
Unlike SpaceX, which has (despite claims to the contrary) relied exclusively on a mix of private investment rounds and both NASA and US DoD contracts for the majority of its development funding, New Glenn has – barring a US $500 million US DoD contract that enables it to met the requirements for flying classified payloads – been funded entirely out of company founder Jeff Bezo’s own pocket (to the tune of US $2.5 billion by the end of 2017 alone).
Dream Chaser Cargo, the lifting body space plane designed by Sierra Space to carry up to 5.5 tonnes of payload and supplies to the ISS has passed its latest milestone towards meeting a first planned launch in April 2024. The first operational vehicle – named Tenacity – has been completed, and construction is underway with the second “100 series” craft, built to the same specification as Tenacity. The Tenacity, meanwhile, is now to be transferred to NASA’s Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio for environmental tests, after which it will likely be transferred to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station where it will be readied for its demonstration flight to the ISS.
Sierra Space has itself been in the news this week after laying-off 165 personnel from the project. However, many of the reports failed to mention that the company had “surge hired” contractors over an 8-month period specifically to see Tenacity completed in order to transition company focus to the second vehicle and a “200 series” version of the craft the company indicated in January 2023 it would be developing – although to date, no further information on this vehicle has been supplied.
Some reports on the layoffs also failed to note that the company was also absorbing 150 personnel from parent company Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), as projects requiring staff with requisite security clearances transferred from SNC to Sierra Space.
Europe’s Ariane 6 is working its way towards its maiden flight after a series of technical issues (again coupled with COVID complications) led to a frustrating series of delays, pushing the planned maiden flight back from 2020 to the current target of April 2024.
Capable of lifting up to 21.65 tonnes to LEO, 11.5 tonnes to GTO and 8.6 tonnes to lunar orbit (as well as supporting other orbit types), Ariane 6 will take over from the veritable Ariane V (retired in July 2023) as Europa’s medium-to-heavy launch vehicle; and in a further milestone towards its first flight, on November 24th, 2023, ArianeSpace and ESA carried out a full duration hot-fire test of the vehicle’s powerful core stage Vulcan 2.1 engine.
The 7-minute test saw the engine go through the full range of burn activities it will face in an actual launch, from ignition through to maximum thrust and throttling in respect of differing dynamic stresses the rocket will face during an ascent to orbit, as well as carrying out nozzle gimballing – swinging the rocket’s exhaust nozzle to direct its thrust and counter simulated wind shear and other forces.
Overall, the test was hailed a success, although all of the data has yet to be fully analysed. If the data reveals the engine met all criteria and is undamaged, it will move to a final series of tolerance and fault tests prior to being declared ready for flight.
Starship IFT-2 Update
Following from Space Sunday: Starship Integrated Flight Test 2, it now appears the December 18th test flight of the SpaceX Starship / Super Heavy combination may have been even more qualified in how much of a success it might reasonably be called.
Following that article, I was pointed to the You Tube channel Astronomy Live. The folks running that channel are based in Florida, across the Gulf of Mexico from the SpaceX launch facilities at Boca Chica, Texas. They were therefore were able to film the flight from a different perspective and under very different lighting. In particular, they captured the upper portion of the vehicle (around 30-40% of its hull) comprising the nose, forward canards, payload bay and the upper dome of the methane tank, tumbling through the sky.
The footage was recorded shortly after cameras at Boca Chica appeared to capture the Starship vehicle – Ship 25 – exploding at 8:08 minutes into its ascent from the pad. Whilst this explosion wasn’t caught by the Astronomy Live telescope – they had been tracking the Super Heavy booster’s demise – the shockwave in the sky was, and shortly afterwards the tumbling mass was recorded over the course of roughly a minute, and the footage was later subjected to clean-up process to produce the clips above.
It is important to note that the brightness around one end of this debris is not the exhaust from Ship 25’s engines. It is either a fire in the lower end of the debris, the result of the vehicle’s destruction, or – more probably, sunlight reflecting off the stain steel of the hull, the visible vapour trail following the tumbling wreckage being the remaining propellants from the nose-mounted header tanks escaping through ruptured feed pipes.
Following the release of the footage, an enhancement was made to a single frame, allowing the debris to be overlaid with the outline of an intact Starship, allowing the two to be compared, as shown below.
This raises several points of concern with regards the Starship system, and would likely mean that (as always) Musk’s statement that the next flight would be ready “by Christmas” (2023) was woefully ignorant of the reality of the matter.
In particular, SpaceX maintain the Flight Termination System (FTS) was triggered on Ship 25 as it severely deviated from its flight parameters. The FTS is in intended to completely destroy a malfunctioning vehicle and its payload. So, if it did indeed trigger:
- Why was everyone at flight control, Hawthorn, California, blissfully unaware it had done so for almost 4 minutes after the event? What happened to the telemetry stating the FTS was triggering?
- Why did the FTS allow such a section of the craft with a mass of up to 30 tonnes (an unladen / unfuelled Starship masses some 100 tonnes, including engines and propellant tanks) intact and free to tumble to Earth – a section which, during an operational launch, could be carrying upwards of 100 tonnes of payload (according to SpaceX) within it?
- Where did the wreckage eventually fall and how close might it have come to a populated area in the Florida Keys or in the Caribbean?
Until these questions are addressed, it is unlikely the FAA will grant SpaceX the ability to try another flight.
Also since my previous piece, more information has been released on the state of the launch mount and water deluge / sound suppression system. Selective still images of the latter appear to show it undamaged. However, the launch mount itself did receive a fair degree of damage (if nowhere near as much as it took in the April 2023 test flight), and a fire on what appears to be the upper ring of the mount (which supports the booster) is visible in footage from cameras on the booster.
This fire and damage is consistent with the Super Heavy / Starship crabbing sideways as it ascended away from the launch mount, spraying it in flame despite the water deluge system.
A similar phenomenon had also been in the April 2023 test flight, but at the time was thought to be more to do with the loss of engines at launch delivering an uneven thrust. However, IFT-2 suggests the upwards crabbing is part of the stack’s launch profile; as such, work will be required to further strengthen one side of the launch mount – and SpaceX may need to again reconsider extending the water cooling across the top of the mount to remove the risk of fire, further bringing the launch facilities more into line with conventional (and required) thinking which has marked launch pad designs for more than 50 years.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 