by Duncan Lunan

In the last month big things have happened on the political side of the US space programme, particularly the appointment of Jared Isaacman as the new Director of NASA.  There’s no question about his commitment to space, with his private Innovation4 and Polaris Dawn missions already flown, but it’s not clear whether his future plans and his close ties to Elon Musk’s SpaceX will generate conflicts of interest.  We already have a situation in which the backbone of crewed lunar missions will be the SpaceX Starship, with occupants wearing spacesuits from Isaacman’s Axiom Space.  The Starships will rendezvous with the astronauts at the Lunar Gateway space station, coming to it by NASA’s very expensive Orion capsule, launched by the incredibly expensive Space Launch System.  Artemis 2, the first crewed mission to the Moon, is to be flown by SLS and Orion, but has just been postponed yet again due to problems with the Orion heat shield, among others.  

Many critics are saying that it would be simpler, cheaper and probably faster to entrust the entire return to the Moon to Starship.  With Elon Musk now appointed to cut out waste in US government spending, that makes sense at first sight.  But the problem is that the US Constitution requires all government spending to be first authorised, and then re-authorised annually, by both Senate and Congress.  It requires gaining the support of a majority of Senators and Congressman, while the rest do their utmost to prevent anything that doesn’t benefit their own states, normally by the allocation of work to companies located there.  At the launch of the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission, the NASA Director proudly announced that components for the spacecraft and booster had come from every state of the Union.  But an SLS booster cost $4.1 billion, and it’s been estimated that Musk’s Falcon boosters would have cost as much, had they been developed using NASA’s procurement methods.  There’s not another developed nation that finances its science spending that way, and back in 1984, Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Space said that something had to give.  Dr. David Webb, one of the participants, said, “It’s not a matter of deciding what to do with NASA, but deciding what to do with the United States”.  But proposing any kind of change to the Constitution was too controversial to be contemplated.  If Musk tries it 40 years later, with the obvious conflicts of interest that would involve, “There may be trouble ahead…”

For another view of these issues, see Eric Berger, ‘How might NASA change under Trump? Here’s what is being discussed’, ars technica, online, 23^rd December 2024. 

Meanwhile Musk’s development of Starship is continuing, financed by private money and particularly by the proceeds from his ever-growing constellation of Starlink satellites.  As an experiment, ten ‘Starlink simulators’ are to be launched from the Starship during the next test of the Starship/Superheavy combination.  Having the go-ahead for 25 more flights, Musk has now announced his intention to go for 175 of them.  After the Superheavy static firing on 9^th December  (Figs. 1-3), the Starship upper stage was rolled out two days later.  New heat-shield tiles are being tried on it, as well as modifying and repositioning the forward fins nearer to the nose, and in addition the new model has 25% more fuel capacity.  Another major new element is the substitution of an all-new avionics package, including much more accurate position-finding. 

At first sight the rear fins looked really different  (Fig. 4), harking back to the 1950s style of the first Starship prototype  (Fig. 5), but that was due to the paint job on the building behind it  (cp. Figs. 6 & 7). 

Though there was a delay in announcing the launch date, NASA had announced the intention to film the vehicle in flight from its Gulfstream aircraft  (presumably the same one previously used for Space Shuttle training?)  and that was booked for January 11^th.  As that was a Saturday, probably it would have been after the final deadline for Orkney News.  In the old days we might have had alternative headlines set up in metallic type, like the ‘World Doomed/World Saved’ choices at the end of The Day the Earth Caught Fire  (1961, filmed on the premises of the Daily Express, Fig. 8).  But the launch was rescheduled to Friday 10^th January, and then to 10 p.m. our time, on Monday 13^th.    

Another cliffhanger has been the first launch of the Blue Origin New Glenn booster, (Fig. 9), named after John Glenn, the first US astronaut in orbit  (Fig. 10), who gave permission for use of his name in his last letter before he died. 

It’s been postponed from November but is still scheduled to launch NASA’s twin ESCAPADE probes to Mars, in February.  New Glenn has been granted a Federal Aviation Authority license for the next five years, using barge landings in the Atlantic  (Fig. 11);  its prelaunch static firing on December 27^th was successful  (Figs. 12 & 13), and each reusable booster is intended to fly up to 25 times. 

The vehicle has a much larger payload fairing  (7 metres)  than its current competitors’ 5 metres, and will be able to launch 13 metric tons to geosynchronous orbit, 45 metric tons to Low Earth Orbit, outdone only by the SpaceX Falcon Heavy  (see ‘Launch Costs per Vehicle’, ON, November 12^th 2023)  and comparable with the new United Launch Alliance Vulcan-Centaur, whose first stage uses the same Blue Origin BE-4 engines as New Glenn.  The first launcher’s window opened on Monday 6^th January, and it’s been named So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, quoting Dumb and Dumber.  It too was scheduled for launch on the 10^th, but on Thursday evening, the launch was postponed till Sunday 12^th.   

According to Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s chief executive officer, the BE-4 engines are the most powerful in existence.  One of them could fit in a car boot, and all seven of them could drive an aircraft carrier the size of the USS Nimitz.  It recalls an article in New Scientist, back in the 1960s:  criticising the safety issues of the supertankers then coming into service, it remarked that to stop one in its own length would require a Saturn V Apollo booster mounted in the bows.

On the first mission, NG-1will be carry Blue Ring Pathfinder  (Fig. 14), a demonstrator for Blue Origin’s multi-mission space mobility platform, to deliver payloads from Low Earth Orbit to geostationary orbit (GEO), cislunar and interplanetary destinations.  In the 1960s, as part of the Post-Apollo programme, it was intended that Space Tugs and Nuclear Tugs would do the latter for payloads launched by Saturn V  (Figs. 15-20), and there was a time in the mid-80s when similar vehicles were to have plied in Earth orbit along with the Space Shuttle. 

In 1984 I was briefed at NASA Ames Research Centre on alternative USAF and NASA plans for Orbital Transfer Vehicles, to be developed from the Centaur booster and refuelled at the Space Station  (Fig. 21), changing orbits using aerogravity manoeuvres  (Fig. 22), which still featured in long-term mission concepts as late as 1986. 

But only the less ambitious Orbital Manoeuvring Vehicle got the go-ahead  (Fig. 23), and when I visited the Johnson Space Centre that year it had just been scrapped in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster, along with the Shuttle-compatible Centaur.  The wooden training models for both were discarded outside, bound for the scrapyard  (Figs. 24 & 25), and the space programme has been waiting for replacements ever since.

Assuming a successful first flight, Blue Origin is poised to begin New Glenn launches for NASA, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, AST SpaceMobile, several telecommunications providers and a mix of U.S. government customers. The company is also certifying New Glenn with the U.S. Space Force for Department of Defence payloads.

From some angles it looks as if the NG-1 upper stage has a diagonal stripe on it  (Fig. 26), like the ones on Britain’s Blue Streak boosters, at Woomera in the 1960s  (Fig. 27), which were used to check for any unwanted rotation during ascent.  But Fig. 12 reveals that it’s actually a feather, the Blue Origin logo  (Fig. 28).  

One cliffhanger which is over is the wait for the Parker Solar Probe’s final close pass, only 3.8 million miles above the surface  (Fig. 29).  Contact with the spacecraft was renewed on Boxing Day, and the data gathered in the flyby will continue to be downloaded through January.  Over the last year I’ve been wondering what would happen after that, and eventually it was announced that there would be further encounters at the same distance, on March 19^th and June 22^nd this year.  The probe’s entire orbit is now within that of Venus, and no further gravity slingshots are possible to take it closer.

Harking back to the issues at the beginning of this article, I was going to query whether it would then be switched off when it was still working and still had thruster fuel.  Continuing observation would be useful, given that there’s nothing else that close to the Sun:  Europe’s Solar Orbiter will go no closer than 5.2 million miles, though the mission will continue with more Venus flybys until 2030, working up to ever-higher solar latitudes.  The BepiColombo probe is slowly working up to orbit around Mercury, and Japan’s Akatsui probe gamely soldiers on around Venus, but the next closest solar observers are at the Earth’s orbital distance  (Fig. 30), or a million miles closer at the Sun-Earth L1 point  (Fig. 31). 

I foresaw that there might be issues about continuation, since the original mission has been fulfilled and we’re already going to get a bonus, and since NASA’s science budget is already under pressure, as I’ve been pointing out in regard to the threat to the Chandra x-ray space telescope.  However, either it hasn’t much fuel left, or there is still money in the Parker budget, because it’s now announced that tracking will continue till fuel is exhausted, whereupon, rather than switching it off,  the instruments will be exposed to the Sun for the first time, to see what happens.  It will be a case of hanging on till the last moment, as happened with the Rosetta comet probe and Cassini Saturn Orbiter, rather than a deliberate switch-off as was supposed to happen with the International Comet Explorer in 1986 – but didn’t.  (See ‘Beginners’ Astronomy: Comets, Part 4, Comets and Spacecraft’, ON, January 2^nd, 2022.) 

My friend Del Cotter of the London Group has sent me two interesting videos.  The first shows the launch sequence of a Progress MS-10 cargo ship on a Soyuz booster in 2018, filmed from the International Space Station.  I’ve seen stills and even short videos of launches seen from there, and the December Space Notes had a photo by Don Pettit of the separation of Starship FT-6, seen from above  (ON, 1^st December 2024).  But this is much the most complete sequence I’ve ever seen, showing most of the first stage burn, separation, and the complete second stage burn, during which the first stage burns out in the atmosphere below  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1R3dTdcpSU).  The second one is an ESA training video with a complete simulation of a Soyuz launch, but it also includes preflight film of Yuri Gagarin on 12^th April 1961, a test of the Soyuz escape system, and the one time it’s been used to date, when a fuel leak led to a pad fire on 26^th September 1983.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVvgpKt5uCA).  There have been two other occasions on which the Soyuz was ejected from the booster, but both were at high altitude after the escape tower had been jettisoned.  It’s never happened to date in the US space programme, although an uncrewed capsule had to be ejected from a suborbital New Shepard flight in September 2022, resulting in a ban on crewed flights until 19^th December 2023.

And finally… strictly this belongs in ‘The Sky Above You’, but as it may be done and dusted by the end of January, this is a reminder that we’re expecting a recurrent nova, an explosion in a double star system, to erupt in the constellation Corona Borealis, any time now.  Last seen in 1946, it was expected in September  (see ‘Space Notes 47 – June 2024’, ON, 9^th June 2024), and when it does happen, it will last a week to 10 days. 

Corona Borealis, the Northern Crown, is a circlet of stars between Hercules and Boötes, the Herdsman  (Fig. 32), so it’s best seen in spring, but on January 8^th  it rose at about 1.30 a.m..  I happened to be awake then and I could see a star through the trees, so I watched until 2 a.m., by when it was clear that the star I’d glimpsed 20 minutes earlier wasn’t the T Cor Bor nova but Alphecca, the brightest star in the constellation.  If the nova had flared I’d have seen both  (Fig. 33), but there was only one, in Alphecca’s position, once I had a clear view.

I’ve never seen a nova, so I’ll be looking when possible from now on.  There was one in Cygnus in 1975, but up-to-date news was harder to come by then, and I didn’t know about it till it was over.  The late Ian F. Downie, an accomplished astrophotographer, took a very interesting slide of it with a prism replacing the eyepiece of his telescope.  By allowing the rotation of the Earth to carry them part-way across the field, he obtained short spectra of all the brighter stars in view, including the nova.  Before there was an opportunity to compare it with standard spectra and see what elements were present,.somebody stole the slide and as no copies had been made, it was gone for good.  We had a pretty good idea who took it because a sworn enemy of mine told Ian that I had it, which of course I didn’t.  But I’m really hoping to see one with my own eyes this time.