All My (Space) X’s Live In Texas
SpaceX announces its exodus to the Lone Star State, Ariane 6 rockets to orbit, and Missy Elliot goes to Venus.
Hello Celestial Citizens and Continuum readers,
For those living in the U.S., you might find yourself experiencing the all too familiar pangs of political anxiety with the election inching closer and closer each day. Investors may find themselves offering up the old “let’s wait and see what happens” with evermore frequency, stock performance seems to already believe the election has happened, and the GOP space plank gets finalized with an emphasis on in-space manufacturing, continuation of moon to Mars rhetoric, and expansion of commercial partnerships. Dems have also recently released a draft of their 2024 party platform - focusing their NASA support on climate research, the ISS, and continuing efforts to get humans to the moon.
And now, the space beat you came here for…
This edition of Continuum is brought to you by the Space Resources program at the Colorado School of Mines.
Top Headlines
Ariane 6 – Ten years after its inception and one (long) year after its predecessor’s retirement, ESA’s Ariane 6 rocket finally made its debut on July 9th, ringing in a huge milestone for European space travel. The expendable launch vehicle, built by French aerospace company ArianeGroup with an estimated 4 billion euros, carried out its stage separations and deployed nine small satellites in orbit, with an auxiliary power anomaly cutting the mission only slightly short. Despite the few payloads that didn’t get their day in the sun in orbit, the mission was indisputably deemed a success – and thank the lucky stars for that. There was only, you know, a mild amount of pressure on the rocket to do well, with ESA’s director general Josef Aschbacher positing pre-launch that "Ariane 6 will power Europe into space. Ariane 6 will make history." The achievement means that Europe has officially ended its rocket-less hiatus, which began after the final launch of Ariane 5. With it, Europe also concludes its reliance on international partners like SpaceX. Of course, a shoo-in customer for the powerful Ariane 6 is SpaceX competitor Amazon, who has 18 launches contracted for Project Kuiper satellites over the course of the next few years. We’ll have to see how launch prices stack up between the tried-and-true, reusable Falcon 9 and an expendable newcomer like Ariane 6, but it’s always great to see more fish in the pond.
In a R.U.D. – Perhaps in an act of divine balance, SpaceX’s workhorse, the Falcon 9, suffered a rare setback on July 11th. The rocket experienced a liquid oxygen leak during a Starlink mission, resulting in a “rapid unscheduled disassembly,” or “R.U.D.,” essentially deploying 20 Starlink satellites too early. The loose spacecraft will eventually fall back into Earth’s atmosphere but “do not pose a threat to other satellites in orbit or to public safety,” according to the company. This is the Falcon 9’s first failure since 2016, which still makes for an impressive track record, but does serve as a reminder that nothing is infallible. On that note, the anomaly forces NASA to evaluate their next astronaut launch, Crew 9, which is set to fly on a Falcon 9 rocket to the ISS in mid-August to relieve Crew 8.
Europa Clipper – Similarly fallible is NASA’s Europa Clipper, a spacecraft destined for Jupiter’s moon that goes by the same name. The agency recently announced that they are conducting new tests of the vehicle’s transistors, which have shown concerning results related to their resistance to radiation. This factor is, well, a pretty big deal when we’re talking about a region with over 50 times more radiation than what we have here on Earth. While the agency will complete a full analysis of the transistors by late July, the uncertainty makes the mission’s October launch window a question mark. A launch delay would not be simple to rectify. To get to the faraway Jovian system by 2030, the spacecraft would need to harness the power of other planets’ gravitation, a.k.a. gravitational assists. These boosts are based on orbital patterns, so changing the trajectory could necessitate additional flybys, altering the arrival timeline exponentially. Hence, NASA won’t be keen to confirm a delay, even if the Clipper’s launch vendor, SpaceX, is also facing potential vehicle delays. In fact, the agency’s associate administrator for science has confirmed that the agency is still “marching towards that Oct. 10 launch window.”
VIPER – Whether or not the Europa Clipper will go on, it’s now official that NASA’s VIPER, or Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, will not. The agency announced the cancellation of the lunar mission on July 17th, citing cost overruns and schedule delays. The $433.5 million CLPS mission was designed to investigate the presence of water ice in the Moon’s south polar region, and was set to launch as early as 2025. Canceling now, before making inevitable vehicle adjustments informed by environmental testing, will save at least $84 million for the agency. NASA still plans to use Griffin, a lunar lander they contracted from Astrobotic to be the rover’s ride, in delivering a simulator payload to the Moon. However, all hope is not lost for the canceled VIPER rover, as the agency is accepting proposals until August 1st from anyone interested in sniping the vehicle for their own projects. Otherwise, this little guy will be destroyed for parts.
Texas Hold 'Em – After California governor Gavin Newsom signed a law this week protecting LGBTQ+ students from a requirement forcing teachers to disclose details about their gender identity (read: out them) without their permission, the famously sensible Elon Musk announced he would be moving the headquarters of his two California-based companies to Texas. Of course, this includes SpaceX, which Musk plans to relocate from Hawthorne, California to the company’s rocket facility called Starbase, near Brownsville, Texas. The timeline of this transition is anyone’s guess, as the announcement came informally via X, but this isn’t the first notion of relocating to the Lone Star State. Musk, along with Kanye West and Grimes, have plans to establish an Austin-based hellscape town known as Snailbrook, revealed last year by the Wall Street Journal. If you’ve watched Severance, you know the type of corporate town we’re talking about here. Ultimately, the dramatic reaction is based on Musks’ belief that Newsom’s law and others like it are “attacking both families and companies'' who will now have to “leave California to protect their children.”
Honorable Mentions
Our final notable nuggets.
Bang Bang – If you live in the New York City area, the large “boom” reported by your neighbor on Nextdoor this week was actually not, famously, a car backfire. NASA believes that a “daylight fireball,” or a meteor invisible during the daytime, may have caused the recent bang that shook the Big Apple and parts of New Jersey.
New Name, Who Dis? – Now that it’s graduated to geostationary orbit, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-U satellite thinks it’s cool enough to go by a new name, GOES-19.
Supa Dupa Fly To Venus – Missy Elliot’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” was transmitted to Venus last week via a radio dish in California. It’s fitting, because we can’t, in fact, “stand the rain” on the hot planet…because it’s made of sulfuric acid.
ISSolated – Our favorite Crew Flight Test astronauts Suni and Butch remain at the ISS with no return date in sight. We have to wonder if they’re asking themselves, is this gonna be forever?
Leaving on a
Jet PlaneBarge – NASA’s SLS core stage, which will be used for Artemis 2 next year, is officially starting its journey from NOLA to Florida.Do You Want to Build a Snowman? – Even Percy rover can’t resist the siren song of Disney executives…kidding. However, a dusty little rock snowman did make for an exciting cameo on Mastcam-Z on Sol 1208.
The JWST Download
A NIRCam and MIRI image captures the “Penguin and the Egg” galaxies located in the Beta Pictoris system. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
A birthday celebration is in order for the JWST, which just hit the two-year anniversary of its first imagery release.
As though it still had something to prove, Webb served up some brand-new imagery this week of two (civilly) interacting galaxies located in the Beta Pictoris system. And we have to say, even though the nicknames for these captured galaxies are sometimes a stretch (no offense, Crab Nebula), in this case, “Penguin and the Egg” is spot on.
The JWST has spotted a young but surprisingly evolved black hole-powered quasar, as well as its two colliding satellite galaxies. In its observations, Webb shows off its talents to see “redshift,” or light after it’s been “stretched” over the 12 billion years it took to reach the observatory.
Thanks to Webb, we now have “weather maps” of some relatively nearby brown dwarfs. Spoiler alert, they’re super hot, with temperatures of 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (925 degrees Celsius) at the top of their cloud cover. While these dwarfs may not be the most inviting celestial bodies, astronomers can use the same weather mapping techniques on other exoplanets.
In fact, astronomers have already used the JWST to examine the weather on WASP-39 b, an exoplanet tidally locked to its parent star. Hence, the planet enjoys a surprisingly breezy eternal morning. Our question is, who will be directing the Eternal Sunrise of the Spotless Exoplanet?
A Global Space
ESA – Europe continues to dunk on NASA this week with their Earth Return Orbiter (ERO), ESA’s contribution to the Mars Sample Return mission, which just passed a critical design review. The milestone means ESA can commence manufacturing of ERO, a spacecraft with the ability to catch a basketball-sized capsule of Martian dust in space, then bring it home to Earth. If you’re wondering how this all plays into potential MSR restructuring teased recently, well, ESA isn’t worried. The agency has remained in step with NASA, claiming that “the Earth Return Orbiter works for what was planned to do and more, whatever the alternatives are.” Following this good news, ESA announced a new mission to asteroid Apophis during its close Earth flyby in 2029, in hopes of gathering valuable data to improve our asteroid defense systems. In a similar vein, ESA set a 2027 launch date for its other planetary defense-focused mission, LUMIO, the agency’s lunar meteoroid-observing CubeSat.
China – Also focused on planetary defense is China, which just moved its own asteroid mission to 2029. Although China plans to change the orbit of asteroid 2015 XF261 – through a high-velocity impact – the mission will now fall in close (time) proximity with the Apophis flyby, making 2029 the year of “asteroid awareness and planetary defense,” as titled by the National Space Science Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In addition to protecting Earth, China is invested in protecting its space station. On the heels of Russia’s recent satellite annihilation, two Chinese astronauts conducted a spacewalk outside of Tiangong to add protective “armor” to the space station, in the case of debris collisions. Perhaps, this armor will also protect China from itself – as new data from a Swiss space surveillance company suggests that the nation’s Long March 6A rocket might actually be leaving a trail of small debris.
South Korea – Deciding to come out and say what we’re all thinking, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) recently raised the alarm about spacecraft collision risks in our increasingly crowded lunar orbit. During last week’s Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability, KARI’s senior researcher Soyoung Chung urged that the voluntary coordination between ISRO, NASA and KARI – which has worked so far in avoiding collisions between lunar spacecraft like NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter and ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 – will not be sustainable as more countries and companies launch their own lunar vehicles into orbit. As it stands, “not all actors are involved in this process,” according to Chung. Read: China.
Kazakhstan – While China may not be playing in the same lunar sandbox as KARI, NASA and ISRO, the nation is inviting more friends into its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) initiative. This month, Kazakhstan was the latest country to sign on as an ILRS collaborator, which is good news for China, as the “mutually beneficial” agreement will also likely give China access to Kazakhstan’s launch pads, like its Sary Shagan Test Site, and maybe even Baikonur Cosmodrome – if they can navigate its lease of the site to Russia until 2050.
And that’s a wrap on this week in space news! A big thank you to Tess Ryan for writing this edition with me and for keeping up with the cosmos! We hope you enjoyed reading Continuum this week. And if you really, really like us, then consider making it official and becoming a paid subscriber or spreading the space gospel and gifting a subscription.
Keep it celestial people,
Britt
CEO of Celestial Citizen & Creator of Continuum
Re: the poll - my top of mind topic is SPACE DEBRIS.