Minutes before a warm front brought heavy showers to Kennedy Space Center, SpaceX launched Crew Dragon aboard a Falcon 9 for Axiom Space on a chartered flight to the International Space Station at 4:49 PM EST this evening. The all-European crew is expected to dock at ISS in two days time, and stay aboard the station until February 3, 2024.
With about six hours left in the countdown to liftoff, SpaceX announced that they are canceling today’s planned launch of Falcon 9 carrying four astronauts to orbit aboard a Crew Dragon to the International Space Station. The mission on behalf of Axiom Space is dubbed Axiom-3 and will now launch NET Thursday, January 18, 2024 at 4:47 PM EST.
The 45th Weather Squadron has released its official Launch Mission Execution Forecast for tomorrow’s planned crewed launch of Axiom-3 by SpaceX. According to forecasters, there is less than a 5% Probability of Violation of weather conditions, meaning the weather is expected to be almost perfect, especially by Florida standards: they expect a 95% or greater chance of acceptable weather conditions. The launch is planned for 5:11 PM EST. Once in orbit, the astronauts will travel to the International Space Station for an anticipated 14-day stay.
SpaceX sent another batch of 23 Starlink satellites for their orbital-based Internet service tonight from Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 booster. The mission was designated Starlink 6-37, part of Group 6 of Starlink satellites providing global Internet connectivity to the company’s customers.
SpaceX sent another batch of 23 Starlink satellites for their orbital-based Internet service tonight from Cape Canaveral aboard a Falcon 9 booster. The mission was designated Starlink 6-37, part of Group 6 of Starlink satellites providing global Internet connectivity to the company’s customers.
Liftoff was shortly after 8:52 pm EST from Pad SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Tonight’s re-useable booster was B1071 making its 12th flight. Roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff, B1071 touched down safely near the Bahamas on a droneship in the Atlantic Ocean.
The second stage continued to carry the company’s payload to orbit, which it achieved successfully at about the same time the first stage booster was touching down. Shortly afterward, the Starlink satellites were deployed and the launch was deemed a success by mission managers.
Tonight’s launch was to the southeast, as has been customary with other launches of the Group 6 batch of Starlink satellites.
This was the 12th flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission is B1071. The booster previously launched SES-22, ispace’s HAKUTO-R Mission 1, Hispasat Amazonas Nexus mission, CRS-27, and seven Starlink missions.
Following stage separation, the first stage landed on the autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of the Bahamas.
The booster will be returned to Port Canaveral and then transferred to SpaceX’s Hangar X facility at Kennedy Space Center for inspection and ostensibly refurbishment for another flight on a future mission.
Axiom-3, a crewed launch planned to ferry four astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a Falcon 9.
The mission will be the first to carry and all-European crew to the International Space Station. It will be the third crewed mission to the International Space Station coordinated by Axiom Space.
Ax-3 will be the first all-European commercial astronaut mission to the ISS. It will also be the first commercial spaceflight mission made up of government and European Space Agency-sponsored astronauts flying on behalf of their nation.
The launch date is NET Wednesday January 17, 2024 at 5:11 PM EST from Pad LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center.
SpaceX called off its launch attempt of Falcon 9 from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station early this evening, around 7:18pm. The company did not share a reason for their decision, but it made the call early, with about ninety minutes left on the countdown clock.
Later on, SpaceX announced that announced on their website that they are now
“SpaceX is targeting Sunday, January 14 for a Falcon 9 launch of 23 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is targeted for 7:27 p.m. ET with backup opportunities available until 11:25 p.m. ET.”
SpaceX Starlink 6-37 information page. Note: dates and times may be changed on the SpaceX website without notice. Click the link for currently up-to-date information.
The 45th Weather Squadron’s forecast looks good tomorrow, with conditions deteriorating if there is another 24 hour delay.
As always, launch times are fluid and can change quickly.
SpaceX plans to launch another batch of Starlink satellites aboard a Falcon 9 to its LEO Internet service constellation on Saturday, January 13, 2024. The launch window opens at 7:52 PM EST and closes early Sunday at 12:23 AM. The launch will be from Pad SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Weather is a slight concern for the launch as a warm front pushes storms through the area today.
Southeast, as has been customary for Starlink’s Group 6 launches.
One day before launch, the 45th Space Wing forecasts a 70% chance of acceptable weather, with a 30% Probability of Violation that would force a scrub.
As always, it bears keeping in mind that a rocket launch can be scrubbed (canceled) up to and including the final minute of the countdown. Those scrubs may result from weather violations, intrusion into the excluded areas beneath the planned flight path or technical issues that arise during the countdown. Stay tuned to launch coverage for up-to-date information.
SpaceX will begin live-streaming the launch on their X account about five minutes before liftoff.
Spaceflight Now usually begins their live coverage about one hour prior to liftoff on their YouTube channel.
It sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie: a space mission to visit another star to find out if life or the potential of it exists there. While such a mission is many years away from reality, a Titusville-based company has been selected by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Innovations Concepts award to study the potential of building a system of micro-probes powered by lasers being sent to the closest star system to Earth, Proxima Centauri.
Space Initiatives, Inc. recently applied for and received a grant by NASA to gather more understanding of a novel solution they are proposing to send a set up un-crewed probes the Alpha Centauri system, about 4.2465 light-years from the Earth. One light year is approximately 5.88 trillion miles — quite a long way.
Talk of Titusville asked Space Initiatives for more information about their grant, and Chief Scientist Marshall Eubanks told us that “we won a Phase 1 NIAC, and a Phase 1 NIAC is a 9 month contract to pay for a study of our proposed solution. Our next steps will thus focus on setting up a software package to simulate the behavior of swarms of tiny spacecraft in space, both in general, and specifically for Proxima Centauri missions.
Eubanks is an MIT-educated scientist who has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the US Naval Observatory. He has an asteroid named for him (Asteroid 6696) and has worked on asteroid prospecting among other things in a distinguished career. He is a co-founder of Space Initiatives.
Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, Luna (the moon), is a mere hop across the street in comparison to our nearest star. On average, Luna is about 238,900 miles from the Earth, or about 1.3 light seconds. Sol, our sun, is about 499 light-seconds away, meaning it takes sunlight about 8.32 minutes to travel from Sol to the Earth. Those distances are relatively trivial compared to Proxima Centauri: it’s about 4.2465 light-years away from the Earth.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Writer Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
According to MIT Technology Review magazine, it would take 6,300 years to travel to the Alpha Centauri system (where Proxima Centauri is located) using current technology. By comparison, the farthest space probe humanity has launched so far is Voyager 1, launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977. Traveling at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, it is in interstellar space, about 15 billion miles from Earth — or about 0.00255 light-years away.\
Space Initiatives has a novel idea to change all of that. They think that by the year 2075, it would be possible to send thousands of tiny probes to Proxima b in the Alpha Centauri system that collectively could perform the exploration functions of many of our current space probes and then some.
Instead of powering these probes with traditional rockets or fictional warp drives, they’d be powered to about 20% of the speed of light (0.2c) by a LASER system in our solar system. At that rate, it would take roughly 20 years for the probes to arrive, and, of course, another 4.2465 years to receive their information back here on Earth.
According to Eubanks, “[It] depends on the development of technology, and in particular in the development of laser beaming. I think that the first launches of laser beamed missions could happen in the early 2030s, and the first launch towards to Proxima Centauri and other nearby stars by the end of that decade.”
Their study for NIAC will give further understanding of what is needed to make such a mission a reality.
Well-read science fiction fans may recognize the idea of sending pico-probes to the Alpha Centauri system. Physicist and writer Brandon Q. Morris uses it as a central plot device in “Proxima Trilogy” series. Morris is well-known for writing “hard sci-fi” — a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes scientific accuracy and technical details.
That said, Morris is well-informed on LASER-thrusted pico-probes. Talk of Titusville asked him about his thoughts on the basic idea and if there is a real possibility of such a mission happening. He told us, “I see pico spacecraft as the driving force that will allow us to chart our cosmic neighborhood. The tiny probes can be built with today’s technology, and given the trends in miniaturization, a gram of electronics will be as powerful as today’s smartphones in about twenty years already.”
Regarding the LASER system, Morris makes a very interesting point: “The larger problem is the investment in the strong lasers that we will need. They need to be placed outside the Earth’s atmosphere. The far side of the Moon would be ideal also for political reasons (think military use): A giant laser device in Earth orbit might look dangerous to the nations that do not control it. From the far side of the Moon though Earth is always safe.”
We asked Morris to describe the Proxima series for anyone who hasn’t read it, and he said that it centers around “the secret of a dying planet: Two humans and a robot on an involuntary trip to our nearest star neighbour.” It’s fair to say that the stories he tells are that and much more, and moreover, are well worth reading. If you are interested in more information about Brandon Q. Morris and the Proxima trilogy, you can find it here.
Before heading to our nearest interstellar neighbor, testing would need to be done, probably close to Earth to start, then possibly with missions to neighboring planets. “We think that there is a huge potential for what we call precursor missions,” said Eubanks. “A velocity of “only” 100 miles per second would enable rapid exploration of the entire solar system – we could get to Pluto in only one year!”
According to the Institute of Space Sciences, “Proxima b is a 1.3 Earth mass planet orbiting its star at about 1/20th of the Sun-Earth distance, which places it well within the so-called Habitable (Goldilocks) Zone.” It would be the first exoplanet studied up close by humanity, and would give us much more information about the planet, such as whether or not it supports life or possibly could support life. Along the way, we could observe and gain more understanding of another star system, one that consists of three stars: Rigil Kentaurus (Alpha Centauri A), Toliman (B) and Proxima Centauri (C).
The idea of LASER propulsion is not a new one, it was first proposed in 2016 by Philip Lubin of the University of California at Santa Barbara in his ground-breaking paper “A Roadmap To Interstellar Flight.”
Space Initiatives takes that idea and adds to it. In their proposal, they suggest using a long “string” of small probes weighing a few grams where an “initial boost is modulated so the tail of the string catches up with the head (“time on target”).” They add that “exploiting drag imparted by the interstellar medium (“velocity on target”) over the 20-year cruise keeps the group together once assembled.”
To turn the string of probes into a useful array Space Initiatives thinks an “initial string 100s to 1000s of AU long dynamically coalesces itself over time into a lens-shaped mesh network [around] 100,000 km across, sufficient to account for ephemeris errors at Proxima, ensuring at least some probes pass close to the target.” In their plan, probes would fly by Proxima b and later return useful data to scientists back here on Earth.
That would likely come in the form of an array of LASERs that combined to create the necessary power — something that scientists have already built at the National Ignition Facility in California at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At NIF, the LASER system is used to ignite a fusion reaction, with its peak power being stated as something close to ~500 Terawatts, more than Space Initiatives thinks they would need to propel the pico-probes to the Alpha Centauri system.
NIF’s high-powered LASER system is of short duration, and improvements to the cycling time needed to shorten the cycling time would be necessary for a space-based LASER system powering the probes and send them on their way towards the Alpha Centauri system.
NIF itself is working on those improvements as part of their fusion research, and scientists in universities and other institutions are working on this problem as well. SSI says that they presuppose these LASER systems becoming available — a not unreasonable assumption given that research in this field is already ongoing in multiple nations and that it has been producing results, as we are seeing at NIF and elsewhere.
High-energy LASER systems have enormous destructive power — enough to fuse atoms at close range — and to make that power useful as a propulsion method, the spacecraft would need to be able to withstand the photons blasting it from the LASER. SSI says that “lasersails robust enough to survive launch, and terrestrial light buckets (~1-sq.km) big enough to catch our optical signals” would be required.
Those materials would need to be light enough to launch via conventional spacecraft, and on top of that, affordable enough to produce en-masse for the number of probes needed for the mission.
Laser sails have already been tested in space, and in 2020, scientists tested a new sail that can automatically center itself on a laser beam for a few minutes. Further development would be needed, of course, but the idea is not new, and using them is more than a theoretical possiblity.
Every space mission requires command and control, that is, being able to give the spacecraft instructions and to control its activities in space.
Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California still issue commands to Voyager 1, for example, in order to command the spacecraft to perform functions that perform science or change the configuration of the spacecraft. As stated earlier, it takes about two days for a message to be sent to Voyager, then another two days to receive acknowledgement back here on Earth.
Those messages must be extremely concise given the distances involved, again, a “mere” 0.00255 light-years away. That’s due to signal loss (attenuation) and other factors, and is best described as a function of the distances involved.
A swarm traveling to the Alpha Centauri system would not enjoy the same luxuries of relatively quick command and control. That implies that the swarm would need to be autonomous, and that requires enough computing power for the system to be able to solve problems and to formulate and take actions on them.
“The probes would have to be entirely autonomous, at a round trip light travel time of 8.5 years!” Eubanks said. ”We view setting up the massively parallel computing required as a major goal of our proposed research.” He added that “as far as the computational needs, the real answer is always “more,” but that doesn’t mean we can’t start with what’s currently available.”
Massively parallel computing is not new, in fact, it is already commercially available at companies like Google (BigQuery), Microsoft (Azure SQL DW), Redshift (Amazon Web Services) and many others. Undoubtedly some specialization and advancement in those technologies would need to be made for an interstellar swarm, and that’s part of what SSI will be studying.
NASA announced today that the Artemis program has encountered new delays, causing a shift in the timeline of planned launches.
Artemis II is now slated for September 2025, with Artemis III now slated for September 2026 according to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a news conference held this afternoon. Artemis IV, the first mission to the Gateway lunar space station, remains on track for 2028. “As I continue to say, we will launch when are ready,” said NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free. Free is the third highest-ranking executive and highest-ranking civil servant. He is the senior advisor to NASA.
Originally slated for late 2024, Artemis II has been delayed due to technical issues that have cropped up in the program since the Artemis I launch in 2022. Those issues range from problems encountered with batteries for the Orion capsule during testing. Artemis III, the planned landing on the moon has also encountered delays as SpaceX works on its Starship Heavy launcher and with it the human lander needed to touch down on the lunar surface.
Rumors had been floating around in the space industry that NASA might choose to repeat the Artemis I mission with Artemis II, but the agency made it clear today that Artemis II will remain “the first crewed Artemis mission around the Moon.”
“[Artemis I] was so successful that additional tests were added in the course [of the mission],” remarked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. Prior to launching, it must first solve some technical issues that have arisen since Artemis I splashed down in the Pacific Ocean near California on December 11, 2022.
The Orion capsule experienced unexpected loss of char layer pieces during the re-entry phase of the Artemis I mission, prompting NASA and prime Orion contractor Lockheed Martin to open an investigation into the issue to find the root cause of the unexpected material loss, as well as develop plans to fix it.
“From the test flight, we found one item that we need a little more time to work, and that is the thermal protection system on the […] heat shield,” said Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator, Moon to Mars Program, Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate in today’s media conference.
Kshatriya continued that the review is going “quite well” but NASA wants to assemble the data and understand it quite well before the Artemis II flight. “Before we attempty re-entry from a circumlunar mission like we’ll have from Artemis II that we’re 100% confident that we understand under those conditions.”
“During the acceptance of some components for Artemis III we noticed a failure in some motor valve circuitry that was driving valves on the spacecraft itself,” said Kshatriya. “These components passed testing for Artemis II but did not for Artemis III. That gave us pause and caused us to examine that circuit in a more detailed way. When we examined it, we learned that there was a design flaw in that circuit. Those valve electronics affect many parts of the life support system in the spacecraft, in particular the CO2 scrubbing system. Once we recognized the design flaw […] it became very clear to us that it was unacceptable to accept that hardware and we have to replace it in order to guarantee the safety of the crew.”
“The way to replace that given the current configuration of the spacecraft, the access to those components, the access to those bays is going to take us quite a bit of time to get to,” Kshatriya continued. “Every connector that we touch as part of that replacement operation will have to be tested after we’re done and we’ll have to put the vehicle through functional testing afterwards. We know how to fix it,” Kshatriya said. “We just need to make sure that we take the time to do it according to the workmanship standards that we expect for a human-rated vehicle.”
Launch Tower
NASA has a new launch tower that they plan to use for the next Artemis mission. The 380-foot tall (115 meters) tower connects to NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), which is set to launch the Artemis II crew of four astronauts around the moon.
NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems team has been performing tests and applying upgrades for the new tower. They recently conducted a launch day demonstration for the Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
“There are new capabilities being on-ramped for the mission,” said Kshatriya. “We have new facilities at KSC to enable rapid turnaround for propellant loading, as well as [new capabilities] for the loading of the crew and the egress of the crew.”
“For the launch vehicle, we have a new abort system that will be activated in an integrated way across the stack and of course with the spacecraft, we have a new life-support system and its ability to respond to those aborts. Those are all added, and of course those will support the crew and to support crew safety,” Kshatriya said.
“We’ve qualified Orion to survive [the abort environment.] We have, however, as part of that qualification campaign found a few cases where we believe there could be some deficiencies in the performance of the electrical system in particular some of the batteries that we need to make sure we understand how they are enduring those environments.”
“We’re still very early in that investigation. We’ve not yet developed a forward path. Multiple parallel options [exist] to fix this issue,” said Kshatriya. He added that “We also have a lot of options to determine whether or not we believe those environments are accurate and we have a lot of testing to do, and we wanted to make sure we gave ourselves the time to do that. Crew safety is going to drive our decision making there.”
NASA did not comment about any new in-flight abort systems test in today’s teleconference.
While these delays may be frustrating to the public, perhaps NASA Administrator Bill Nelson put it best today when he echoed Jim Free by saying that “we’ll fly when we are ready to fly.”
For the space agency crew safety is the first priority followed by mission assurance. The simple truth is that not many people will remember the delays five years in the future, but no one would ever forget a disaster. NASA has made mistakes rushing launches in the past and it is showing a dogged determination to not the repeat those mistakes again. That’s as it should be, not only for NASA, for America and for space exploration, but also to the crew of the Artemis missions and their families.
At dawn this morning, everything looked to be coming up aces for Astrobotic, the company that built the Peregrine lunar lander, the prime payload for the ULA Vulcan launch that happened shortly after 2:18 am EST this morning. After a picture-perfect launch on a brand-new that ULA CEO called a “bullseye,” the lander was in space and headed towards Earth’s closest neighbor in the heavens.
Safely in orbit, Peregrine was successfully placed on a lunar trajectory by Vulcan, communications from spacecraft to ground was quickly established and everyone involved was looking forward to a bright future for the first American lunar lander since Apollo 17 in 1972. Shortly afterwards, problems began for Peregrine, and at the time of this writing, it appears the primary mission may no longer be possible.
In an update on the X platform at 9:17 am, Astrobotic first let everyone know that something was amiss:
At 11:04am, the company issued a second update:
Roughly ninety minutes later, at 12:03 pm EST, a third Astrobotic post by gave a promising update:
Finally, at 1:03pm, a fourth Astrobiotic update brought disappointing news:
At the time of this writing, it appears that a lunar lander may well be off the table. That surely comes as a major disappointment to Astrobotic and to NASA, given that the space agency was looking forward to utilizing data from Peregrine for the Artemis program.
NASA Deputy Associate Administrator for Exploration (part of the Science Directorate of the agency) made this statement earlier, before Astrobotic fourth update: “Each success and setback are opportunities to grow. We will use this lesson to propel our efforts to advance science and commercial development. The agency also said that Administrator Bill Nelson will have a further statement later today. Talk of Titusville will update this story to include Administrator Nelson’s comments after they are made.
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