The original mission of Voyager 2 was a grand tour that would take it past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Launched on August 20, 1977, its instrumentation included cameras to image the outer planets, a magnetometer, ultraviolet, infrared and plasma spectrometers, plasma waves, charged particles and planetary radio astronomy experiments, a cosmic ray telescope and a radio system to stay in touch with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Today, both Voyagers have left the heliosphere (Voyager 2 in 2012) which is the Sun’s domain and serves to protect us here in the Solar System from interstellar radiation and charged particles. As the two Voyagers age, JPL keeps in touch with Linda Spilker, a project scientist, in charge.
Both Voyagers have three radioisotope thermoelectric generators on board that convert heat from a decaying plutonium-238 core to generate electricity. Now, almost 45 years later, the generators continue to power the onboard scientific instrumentation. But each year, however, the energy yield is declining as the plutonium decays further. So JPL makes choices. Which instruments can still provide the best bang for the buck, and which can be switched off to conserve the spacecraft’s remaining power source?
Spilker in a JPL press release from yesterday notes that the data from the Voyagers “gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go.” That’s why keeping as many instruments running is so important.
Recently, JPL faced a decision on whether to turn off one of the instruments that are still sending data back to Earth, a trip that takes 22 hours each way. The decline in electricity being generated within the spacecraft meant the JPL team had to determine whether to continue keeping all of the science going while turning off the remaining non-essential physical systems that draw power.
Do you turn off the heaters? Do you turn off one or more instrumentation packages? If the latter, which ones would least diminish the value of the continuing mission science?
A workaround was proposed, to hack the Voyager 2’s control systems to steal power from onboard safety systems that protect the spacecraft from voltage spikes. It means voltage will not be regulated as tightly on board. Should a spike occur which would be seen in the data being received, the JPL team can respond manually. At least the 5 remaining instrument packages will continue to send data back to Earth. A mission that was originally only to last four years just keeps on going and going.
It is a testament to the engineering of the Voyager 2 and to the continuous monitoring of its health that four years have stretched to 45 and will go on likely for several more years before both Voyagers go silent. On board, they will still have a gold disk that should an alien intelligence encounter them in the future, the spacecraft will still be able to deliver a message from us here on Earth.
The long-awaited debut of SpaceX’s Starship suborbital flight has come and gone with a giant roar followed by a colossal explosion and enough collateral damage to Lower Texas to make you wonder how the company could declare this launch a success.
Back in the late 1950s and early 60s, launch failures were a normal occurrence with rockets blowing up on the pad, veering off course, or even failing to light. But the success we have witnessed since has spoiled us until SpaceX started testing the Starship. We’ve witnessed this giant experiment from the beginning with explosions and fires. We have forgotten that before the Falcon 9 and the arrival of the Dragon capsule, SpaceX went through a similar experience with that now very successful rocket system.
So maybe we need to cut SpaceX some slack for not getting it 100% right the first time off the launch pad. One SpaceX engineer stated that if it cleared the launch tower it could have been called a success.
The only issue I have is why didn’t SpaceX put in place launch infrastructure similar to what NASA deployed for the Saturn 5 and the Space Launch System (SLS) so that sand and dust didn’t get spread for miles, and pieces of the launch tower and pad infrastructure didn’t end up raining down on nearby cars and homes. This was a corner that should not have been cut considering the proximity of SpaceX Texas facilities to the people living nearby. Fortunately, nobody was injured or killed by the debris.
Since then the nations who were signatories to the treaty, and those who were not have gone about using hardware in outer space for military purposes. Surveillance and spy satellites have been around almost from the dawn of the modern Space Age. Under President Ronald Reagan, the Strategic Defence Initiative, known as Star Wars was launched in the 1980s. Donald Trump created the United States Space Force, a fifth arm of the American military. China and Russia have both fired on their own satellites in weapons tests. And cosmonauts have even brought along shotguns on space missions not to defend themselves from each other or aliens, but rather to use should they land in an area of the Siberian steppe and encounter a bear or other threat.
But now, USTRANSCOM, the transportation and logistics arm of the US military is working with SpaceX to use rockets to deliver not only supplies to anywhere on the planet in 60 minutes but also personnel to serve as a rapid reaction force. Starship is seen as the platform to achieve both goals.
Back in October 2020, USTRANSCOM presented an idea to deliver cargo payloads equivalent to a C-17 cargo plane anywhere on Earth or to low-Earth orbit using reusable rockets. The idea was based on the desire to deliver time-sensitive humanitarian assistance.
In 2021, the idea further evolved to a fleet of militarized Starships for point-to-point space transportation. Using Starships payload capacity, USTRANSCOM could deliver to orbit 100 metric tons. For suborbital flights where less fuel would be required, payload capacity could be even larger.
Starships have been designed for both cargo and passengers. A single Starship can move a payload of cargo and crew anywhere on the planet within 60 minutes. USTRANSCOM considered putting a fleet of Starships on standby equipped with shelters, ground vehicles, construction equipment, and military gear for deployment wherever and whenever needed.
It is the rapid reaction force that would be the most controversial of USTRANSCOM’s proposed capabilities. It would involve moving a small armed force to support an American embassy or other strategic interests anywhere on Earth.
Is this pie in the sky or a near-future reality? A spokesperson for USTRANSCOM told The Intercept recently that “it’s possible within the next five to ten years.”
I have written about the work being done by Chris Smedley, Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of Toronto-based Digital Habitats. Chris envisions a rocket network of Earth and ocean-based Starports that would be launching sites for cargo and passengers on suborbital flights anywhere on the planet. He would use a fleet of reusable rockets that in the future could replace commercial aircraft. His Starports would be the equivalent of airports today.
To my mind, this is where USTRANSCOM’s idea runs into a bit of a problem. Dropping a Starship anywhere unannounced without logistical support like a Starport won’t work. Without refuelling and maintenance infrastructure how would the Starship relaunch with passengers in a rescue mission scenario? And if the flight is suborbital, once the Starship’s parabolic flight entered outer space as a military mission it would violate the UN Outer Space Treaty, and when it entered the atmosphere it would violate a sovereign country’s airspace.
Nonetheless, military minds from the US, China and Russia are likely thinking along these same lines because the ability to go anywhere on the planet and deliver military presence seems mighty appealing to those who are in the fighting business.
]]>The story noted that this would make Upper Michigan the next U.S. spaceport joining thirteen others in existence. The author got the number wrong. Today in the United States there are twenty spaceports already operating. The list includes one in Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico and Oklahoma, two in Virginia, three in California, four in Texas, and six in Florida. In addition to the Michigan proposal, there are applications to the FDA from Alabama and Maine in what is being described as a “space gold rush.” Some of these facilities are designated for vertical launches only, while others can handle rockets mated to aircraft launching from runways.
Chris Smedley is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of Toronto-based Digital Habitats. He describes himself as a combination of technologist and futurist and has worked on Elon Musk’s Carbon XPrize, a four-year contest to create and demonstrate solutions to pull carbon dioxide (CO2) directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently.
Chris’s ambition is to build Aquacities, Starports and Stargates. He wants to launch cargo and passengers on suborbital flights in a bid to replace conventional air travel taking hours with rockets taking minutes. His Earth Starport Network would use offshore sites for his Starports and Stargates. The latter would be refurbished oil-and-gas exploration platforms that should become more abundant as the global economy moves away from its reliance on fossil fuels for energy.
His vision includes a fleet of reusable rockets fueled with methane captured from natural carbon sinks including lakes, and oceans, as well as from industrial capture technologies. The terms he uses to describe the vision come right out of science fiction but are surprisingly realizable in the near future.
The end result would be a Global Starport Network to deliver point-to-point travel at distances starting from as little as 1,000 kilometres, a 10-minute flight, to cargo and passenger delivery anywhere on the planet in less than an hour.
One of the keys to realizing the Global Starport Network is reusability. That’s where Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Starship enter the picture. SpaceX is building its next-generation rocket, the Starship, with 100% reusability in mind. Sometime this year, if all goes well, it will make a maiden orbital test flight. The current SpaceX rocket, the Falcon-9, has demonstrated partial reusability. But the Starship along with its heavy booster autonomous launch vehicle is 100% reusable and designed for quick refuelling and turnarounds when it arrives at a destination. In the upcoming test flight, the heavy booster will return to its Texas launch base while the Starship will reach orbit, then deorbit, and finally make a controlled splashdown in the Pacific near Hawaii. Future flights will have it land at a launchpad.
Another key to the advent of global rocket travel is reconfigurability. A reconfigurable rocket can be used for multiple purposes. How reconfigurable is Starship? When NASA selected it to be the first Artemis Program commercial lunar landing system, the HLS, although the cost was a big factor in awarding the decision to SpaceX, so was the potential of reconfigurability. Starship from the get-go has been designed for multiple purposes.
What NASA wanted was a lunar lander capable of delivering a crew of two and equipment with an Earth-weight payload equivalent of 865 kilograms (1,900 pounds). What they got in a reconfigured Starship HLS isn’t a pickup truck but rather a tractor-trailer in comparison.
Program Manager for SpaceX, Aarti Matthews recently told a space conference audience in Houston, “Starship can land 100 tons on the lunar surface…it’s really hard to think about what that means in a tangible way. One hundred tons is four fire trucks. It’s 100 Moon rovers. My favourite way to explain this to my kids is that it’s the weight of more than 11 elephants.”
He went on to describe the Starship HLS configuration, a lunar lander of “infinite volume” at a cost “in an order of magnitude lower” than any previous technology contracted by NASA for a mission.
Starship is the first rocket technology that eliminates the weight and mass problem that made every kilogram count when the Apollo Program was trying to land a human crew on the Moon. The lunar module was designed without seats and with a skin so thin you could poke a finger through it.
The Starship is steel framed and has an interior capacity that can be reconfigured for multiple purposes: room for passengers, cargo, lunar transportation, equipment for building of a permanent lunar base, and more.
Will the Starship remain the only reusable and reconfigurable choice in the new “space gold rush?” Blue Origin, Rocket Labs, ESA Arianespace, Roscosmos, ISRO, and China’s National Space Administration all are watching what SpaceX is doing and no doubt will make the play to be second to market, and surpass SpaceX in the long term. So it is only a matter of time before the Global Starport Network moves off Chris Smedley’s drawing board to become a reality.
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But the goal of a successful rocket suborbital service would be similar to what is achieved today by commercial jets, that is, launch, land, refuel, reload and go, and do it in an hour. That is currently the U.S. Transportation Command’s (TRANSCOM) dream for cargo suborbital flights to deliver supplies anywhere on the planet in an hour. SpaceX, xArc, (Exploration Architecture Corporation), and TRANSCOM have budgets in place for a military program called Rocket Cargo. The goal is to develop the infrastructure and capacity to provide rocket cargo services to anywhere on the planet
What would it entail? A network of spaceports for launches and landings that would be the equivalent of the freight terminals found at commercial airports today. But instead of long runways, each spaceport would need a much smaller footprint. The biggest space requirement will be for fuel storage, a maintenance hangar, and the launch and recovery pad. The control tower wouldn’t need human operators. After fueling and cargo loading, the rockets would operate autonomously.
Back in 2018, at a TED Talk held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO of SpaceX, talked about the company’s vision for a rocket transportation network capable of delivering cargo and passengers or both anywhere on the planet within an hour. It seemed a bit fanciful at the time since the Starship, then referred to irreverently as the BFR, a rocket designed to bring this dream to reality, was a work in progress and early iterations looked more like flying silos than a futuristic means of suborbital-space transportation. Now four years later, SpaceX plans a test flight from its facility in South Texas with plans to fly to Hawaii in the first test of what may become the 21st century’s contribution to the evolution of mechanized transportation.
In sending rockets into space, to overcome the gravity well of Earth, the fuel and oxidizer represent almost the entire bulk and weight of the system. Payload is only a small component. But suborbital flight doesn’t need as much fuel and oxidizer allowing for bigger payloads. A thousand kilometre (620 miles) suborbital flight can deliver a hundred tons or more of cargo in 10 minutes. Compare that to a commercial jet which would take well over an hour, not including runway time at takeoff and landing. How cool would it be to step into a rocket, strap yourself in, and fly from New York to Shanghai in 40 minutes? That’s the future being envisioned.
Dr. Greg Spanjers is Chief Scientist of the Air Force Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation (SDPE) Directorate and heads up the Rocket Cargo program for the U.S. Department of Defence. He told AviationWeek recently that he “envisions fixed point-to-point transport to established sites.” The goal he stated is “the ability to deliver the cargo anywhere on Earth to support humanitarian aid and disaster relief.” But where disasters occur there may not be a suitable spaceport upon which to land and launch. Spanjers notes, therefore, that Rocket Cargo is looking beyond spaceports at “a wider range of novel trajectories to mitigate overflight issues, exploring a broad range of landing options for austere sites, researching human factors when landing near populations, and integrating a broader range of cargo including medical supplies.”
In a June 2021 article in Air Force Magazine, Spanjers stated that the timing for Rocket Cargo seems propitious. Why? He noted that “it looks like the technology may have caught up with a good idea” referring to SpaceX’s demonstrable ability to launch and land Falcon 9 rockets with high reliability, and the development of Starship with similar capability and large payload capacity. As a result, in January 2022, SpaceX was awarded a five-year $102 million contract to demonstrate the technology to transport cargo around the world using its rocket systems. Rocket Cargo sees SpaceX as the leading contender for the moment to demonstrate launch, landing, and relaunch capabilities with a short turnaround. But other commercial rocket companies are vying for the business including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.
What is TRANSCOM’s role? It involves looking at ways to adapt current intermodal containers to make them compatible with rocket payload specifications. Ideally, the existing intermodal containers you see on trucks and container ships can be adapted to handle the G-force stresses associated with rocket flights.
But there is more to the story than just a rocket transportation system aimed at military provisioning. Toronto-based Digital Habitats President and CEO, Chris Smedley, has been developing plans for starports and a transportation network to connect the world for cargo and passengers. He calls this the Earth Starport Network.
What is this new network? Smedley describes it as a network “to deliver space transportation as part of our Planetary Mobility Services solution.” The network will allow for the delivery of cargo and people halfway around the world in under an hour with suborbital starflights. “The Earth Starport Network will disrupt all current forms of transportation by feeding our need for speed and addressing the scarcity of time,” says Smedley. The target date for the first cargo flights is 2025 with passengers to follow by 2028.
]]>Venus Aerospace claims that no one has built an engine to make one-hour global transport cost-effective. This gave me pause since I have been writing about SpaceX’s plans to offer a suborbital rocket point-to-point travel service for several years since announcing the Starship (formerly the BFR). The differences are interesting. SpaceX wants to use rockets. Venus Aerospace wants to use a spaceplane.
Venus Aerospace is Houston, Texas-based. In the last week, it made headlines revealing it had raised $20 million US in funding for its zero-carbon emission spaceplane featuring next-generation rocket engine technology, an innovative aircraft shape (see image above), and a design that would allow it to takeoff and land using existing airports.
Supersonic refers to being able to travel faster than the speed of sound travelling through the atmosphere at sea level which is 1,235 kilometers (767 miles) per hour in temperature conditions of 20 Celsius (68 Fahrenheit).
The first aircraft to surpass the speed of sound was the rocket plane known as the Bell X-1 which flew in 1946. Since then surpassing the speed of sound, known as Mach 1, has become common for military aircraft, but not commercial airplanes with the exception of the European Concorde.
NASA, currently, is building a supersonic commercial demonstrator aircraft that follows in the footsteps of the Concorde that flew from 1976 to 2003. The Concorde could attain speeds of better than Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound) and carry up to 128 passengers. It was restricted from flying at supersonic speeds when over land because of the sonic boom it created as it passed. I remember being in Reston, Virginia, the first time I witnessed the Concorde as it flew into Washington, DC. Even at subsonic speeds it was a pretty noisy plane.
In reviving the idea of supersonic flight, NASA’s X-59 QueSST is designed with what the Agency calls quiet supersonic technology, which means a much reduced sonic boom. Testing is to begin later this year over select overland routes to gauge consumer acceptance.
Hypersonic is supersonic on steroids. Instead of Mach 2, hypersonic aircraft fly at speeds greater than Mach 5. The U.S. Airforce’s experimental X-15 was the first spaceplane to achieve hypersonic speeds. It flew in the 1960s and was air-launched strapped to a B-52 bomber and used a rocket engine. The Space Shuttle during re-entry achieved hypersonic speeds.
Now Venus Aerospace wants to achieve hypersonic speeds using its unique technological innovations allowing it to fly at speeds of up to Mach 9 (over 11,000 kilometres or more than 6,900 miles per hour) at altitudes exceeding 51 kilometres (over 32 miles). Its hypersonic spaceplane would take off from airports like a conventional jet. But once over water, the rocket would fire taking passengers not quite to the edge of space and not to a level where weightlessness would be experienced.
Venus co-founder and CEO, Sassi Duggleby, stated in a radio interview this week some of the benefits of hypersonic flight. Duggleby served as a systems engineer at Virgin Orbit, Sir Richard Branson’s company.
Besides flying across the Pacific in an hour for a meeting and returning in time for dinner at home, Duggleby points out: “If a factory is down and needs a part, you could literally have it anywhere in the world in an hour…Even global organ transport suddenly opens up to the market.”
When will Duggleby’s hypersonic plane fly? Ten years from now.
In a TED Talk with Gwynne Shotwell, COO and President of SpaceX, in 2018, she told an eager audience that her company plans to offer interplanetary point-to-point rocket travel to anywhere on the planet in 30 minutes. At the time, SpaceX was beginning to develop the Starship. To deal with the noise issue, SpaceX planned to launch its Starships from offshore platforms with a fleet of rapidly reusable rockets capable of moving passengers and freight.
SpaceX has built the Starship not just for sub-orbital use. It is the platform upon which they are building a fleet of orbital and Deep Space vehicles including a lunar lander for the first NASA Artemis return-to-the-moon missions.
It should be noted that Venus Aerospace isn’t the only company seeking to offer hypersonic commercial flight. Hermeus Aerospace, an Atlanta, Georgia-based company has plans to launch its own hypersonic aircraft by 2029. Another company, Florida-based IO Aircraft, features on its website a number of hypersonic models including business and commercial passenger aircraft. And Russia, China and the US Airforce are working on hypersonic scramjets as weapon and reconnaissance systems.
]]>Space Adventures is a space tourism company founded in 2009. This week it announced that its planned space trip booked on SpaceX, a five-day planned orbital mission for four paying customers, is cancelled. Why? Nobody wants to go.
It’s not because SpaceX can’t make the date. Elon Musk’s company announced recently that it was doubling the number of reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft in its fleet from two to four, two reserved to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), and two for tourism. And with SpaceX’s Starship soon to be launched into orbit, there is no doubt that the company intends to be ferrying tourists to orbit in the very near future.
The question remains, however, where is the demand?
Virgin Galactic headed by Sir Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, owned by former Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, are offering sub-orbital rides to millionaires and billionaires who want to go to the edge of space. The former offers rides on its spaceplane, VSS Unity. A waiting list of celebrity riders has signed up to pay fares between $200 and $450,000 USD for what is essentially a big carnival ride that leads to a few minutes’ view of Earth from the edge of space and the experience of microgravity.
Blue Origin recently launched its first passenger suborbital flight auctioning the first commercial passenger seat for a sum of $28 million. Bezos announced that the money raised would be distributed to worthy projects and causes. And in the latest publicity stunt, Bezos invited William Shatner of Star Trek fame to ride New Shepard (see image above). The likely fare for future flights will probably be comparable to Virgin Galactic’s price.
Space tourism didn’t start with two billionaire entrepreneurs. Its origins lie in the former Soviet Union where Russia’s MirCorp was established during the period when the country was operating the MIR space station. MirCorp’s purpose was to deliver tourists to space. The first one was Dennis Tito but when he finally flew MIR no longer existed, so the ISS became the alternate destination in April of 2001 Tito’s trip, a seven-day adventure, cost him $20 million (just under $3 million per day).
Recently, SpaceX’s Inspiration 4 tourist flight flew into an orbit well above that of the ISS where passengers could view Earth and space from a specially installed cupola. A billionaire purchased the flight including fare for his three companions. The total cost, $200 million. That’s $50 million for each passenger or more than $16.6 million per day. For that, these SpaceX paying customers had to put up with sickness and a clogged toilet that made the environment in the capsule less than ideal.
Without looking at the quality of that experience but rather just the price, I’m reminded of a story about a shoe store owner who exhibited one gigantic shoe in his window. When asked why one big shoe, his reply was “I only have to sell one.” So Space Adventures has found no one to buy one of their big shoes. Despite that, it remains in business with a billionaire booking by a Japanese passenger who will ride a Russian Soyuz capsule to the ISS in December of this year.
Axiom Space is another company in the tourism business with plans to use SpaceX to take four tourists to the ISS early in 2022. Cost per passenger amounts to $50 million. NASA hosting fees come to $35,000 per night per passenger including $11,250 per day for life support and toilet use, and $22,500 daily for food, air, use of the exercise equipment and other crew supplies. NASA is also charging the passengers $17,500 per hour for astronaut time.
Axiom plans include two future flights annually to the ISS. The company has been contracted by NASA to design a module to attach to the station. It will include crew quarters for up to seven, and a cupola for viewing Earth and surrounding space. There is no timeline on delivery and no ticket price per passenger announced as of yet.
So who will be the next group of multimillionaires and billionaires to go to space? There are not many takers, and we know one thing for sure, the likelihood is only a handful will make the leap in the foreseeable future. For the vast majority of us here on Earth, suborbital flight let alone orbit or going to the Moon is truly out of reach.
]]>But it is the Chinese leak as reported in the South China Morning Post, which states the military in the People’s Republic is tracking what it calls UACs (Unidentified Air Conditions), its term for UFOs, and applying artificial intelligence (AI) to try and make sense of hundreds of sightings across the country.
Chen Li who serves in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), at the Air Force Early Warning Academy, in a 2019 report notes the frequent occurrence of UACs in recent years. Applying AI to the entire dataset of sightings, he states that China hopes to figure out what is being observed while separating natural and explainable phenomena.
In one notable 2010 incident (see the image at the top of this posting), the Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport reportedly shut down its operations because of an observed UAC which lingered in the area for several hours. At the time locals reported a glowing object that resembled a comet but the picture displayed above doesn’t really fit that description. Could these be the running lights of an airship or other type of lighter-than-air craft?
But it is reports coming from radar stations, pilots, police, weather stations, and science observatories that China is putting into a national database for the AI to analyze. From this, the PLA hopes they can discern consistent patterns including the behaviour of the objects, their shapes, and possibly their make and materials. The end result could be the development of an appropriate threat index to apply to future sightings.
China takes the search for extraterrestrial (ET) intelligence very seriously. The country has invested in the world’s largest radio telescope, even bigger than the recently decommissioned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. One of its projects is to search for ET with it concentrating much of its focus on the dense star fields located at the centre of our galaxy. It is the sheer number of stars in this location that makes it an ideal hunting ground to find ET’s signal.
So what can explain this Chinese fascination? Maybe it’s because China only recently staved off the threat of being dominated by earthly aliens. Of course, I’m referring to the 19th and early 20th-century encroachments by European colonial powers, the British Opium Wars, the establishment of Hong Kong and European and Japanese control of other coastal ports, and the Japanese invasion and occupation prior to and throughout the Second World War.
In the absence of similar reports from Russia other than the one cosmonaut sighting on the ISS, don’t be surprised if the U.S. or China point to Russia as a terrestrial source for many UFO sightings.
A final note: Observations of UFOs are not just a contemporary phenomenon. They go back millennia from ancient Egypt to the present. One might even conjecture that our religious faiths owe much to the inexplicable observed in past night skies.
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In the modern era, UFOs have been with us since 1947. The first report came from an amateur pilot flying over Washington state who described witnessing a number of objects, flying in formation at high speed with flashing lights and maneuvering unlike any known airplane of the time. He called the objects “unidentified” and soon the moniker was extended including the words “flying objects” coined by a reporter. Hence UFOs were born. UFOs soon morphed into “flying saucers” again based on the editorial enthusiasm of the media taking the descriptions given by the pilot of the way the objects flew like a saucer thrown across a water surface, skipping up and down. If he had said like skipping stones, would the press have described UFOs as “flying stones?”
In 1947 alone, there were 853 sightings after the initial story broke. The U.S. Air Force opened an investigation which became Project Blue Book. Blue Book may have been inspired by the report of a “flying saucer” crashing in New Mexico, near the town of Roswell. Blue Book finally ended in 1969 after a University of Colorado study reinforced these conclusions:
And yet regardless of the U.S. Air Force discounting thousands of sightings flying saucers became part of popular culture and extraterrestrial invasions of our planet were glorified in film and books. Probably the most riveting effort, Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” left this writer looking up at the night sky after leaving the theatre.
The origins of UFO-ology are well described in a piece written by Megan Garber, appearing in The Atlantic back in 2014. It’s a great read. But it’s not the origin story that made headlines in the last couple of weeks. Instead, it is a report from The New York Times of an upcoming presentation to the U.S. Congress followed by a government document release on June 25, 2021, that has the media in a new tizzy. A recent segment on “60 Minutes” featured interviews with U.S. Navy pilots describing unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs, the new term being entered into UFO-ology, describing these objects as real and inexplicable.
So what does the report that will be released on June 25th contain? An examination of 120 incidents spanning over two decades describes a number of objects exhibiting hypersonic capabilities. That is, the UAPs fly at speeds no current known aircraft can achieve. Nor do these objects maneuver in a manner similar to any existing aircraft. And finally, many of the reports suggest there are no visible means of propulsion powering them. In one observed report aired on “60 Minutes,” two Navy pilots in 2019 described witnessing their own close encounter with a spherical object hovering over the ocean in midair, moving back and forth like a game of Pong, and then diving into the water, all of it captured on video.
As one Pentagon investigator of UAPs described the phenomena: what U.S. military personnel were witnessing was technology capable of withstanding up to 700 G-forces (astronauts experience 3 to 4 Gs during ascent and re-entry), speeds of more than 21,000 kilometres (13,000 miles) per hour (the fastest aircraft today is the Lockheed SR-71 which clocks at 3,500 kilometres (2,100 miles) per hour), with the ability to hover, change direction instantaneously horizontally or vertically, evade radar, and fly in the air, water, and probably space, and do all of this with no visible engine, no wings, and no avionic controls.
When the U.S. Senate convenes on June 25th to hear the report they supposedly will get the whole picture. What gets released to the public will be redacted (lots of black ink hiding whole sections).
I cannot even speculate on what UFOs or UAPs are. Could they be experimental technology from some military skunkworks either domestic or foreign? Could they be natural phenomena? Could our planet harbour a species we have never met that has advanced technology and is generally shy? The June 25th reveal has science-fiction aficionados salivating.
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In a second announcement, NASA extended the stay of the astronauts who flew to the ISS on Crew Dragon from two weeks to as much as 119 days. Crew Dragon will remain attached to ISS throughout the astronauts’ extended stay and will be further evaluated while mated to the station.
Originally, SpaceX intended to reuse Crew Dragon capsules for non-NASA crewed flights beginning as early as next year. These would be private flights for commercial customers. But now it appears that NASA will hog the show with Crew Dragons becoming the primary space taxi for American astronauts. SpaceX believes that the existing design sill have a shelf life of six missions before major refits or retirement. That would be a remarkable achievement in reusability considering the challenging environment of space and atmospheric re-entry.
Falcon 9 first stages have been reflown as many as five times by SpaceX for a variety of missions, but not for human crews until earlier this month. The current Falcon 9 which will eventually be replaced by the SpaceX Starship, has been designed to withstand launch and return for as many as ten missions. Starship, on the other hand, will be designed for 100% reusability.
Why is it that the first stage can manage up to ten missions while Crew Dragon is rated for six? The answer is in the re-entry which for the latter puts much more stress on the vehicle. You’ll get to see exactly how much when Crew Dragon returns in three months or so from the Demo-2 Mission.
Falcon 9’s return is comparatively a piece of cake. The first stage as it falls back into the atmosphere begins a reentry burn which slows it down and ensures it is oriented to produce minimum stress on the rocket during descent. Stabilizing fins deploy to maintain the rocket’s orientation and increase drag. At the end, the Falcon 9 does a speed-slowing landing burn and deploys retractable legs before touchdown.
Crew Dragon missions for the moment land on water just like in the days of Apollo. Crew Dragon, however, has something Apollo never had, onboard rockets which in the future could be used for soft landings on hard surfaces.
A new Crew Dragon spacecraft is expected to be on top of a Falcon 9 in late August for the next crewed mission to the ISS. Modified Crew Dragons will take over the supply missions to the ISS with almost double the payload capacity of the original Dragon capsule.
Of course, SpaceX has considered how to achieve 100% reusability with its current Falcon rockets. It has started to capture the space farings that sit atop the second stage to protect satellites during launches. It has even toyed with bringing the second stage back to Earth for a soft landing. But to do this SpaceX would have to redesign the stage to give it similar attributes to Falcon 9’s first stage. The company briefly considered a demo smaller-scale Starship could replace the second stage and be used to ferry crews and deploy satellites into near-Earth orbit. But that idea has been shelved as the company has continued to perfect Dragon, and to build test versions of the future Starship.
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The initial Russian reaction to the launch can be described in the phrase “what’s the big deal?” After all, the Russians had been flying humans to the International Space Station (ISS) including Americans since the hiatus caused by the ending of the Space Shuttle program in 2012. The big deal not mentioned by the Russians will be the loss of revenue from booking American astronauts on future Soyuz flights. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency will need to make up the budget shortfall, and that may happen through military investment by the Russian government because of what later ensued in Trump’s speech.
The Roscosmos spokesperson made a straightforward observation in his comments: “What has happened should have happened long ago. Now it’s not only the Russians flying to the ISS but also the Americans. Well, that’s wonderful! It is very important to have at least two possibilities to reach the station. After all, it’s not enough … you must have at least two transport systems capable of ensuring the presence of crews of different countries onboard the ISS.” And when Boeing sorts out its problems with the Starliner, it will mean three transport systems being able to deliver astronauts to the station.
Trump went on, not just extolling the success of the SpaceX-NASA partnership but talking about the militarization of the U.S. space program through the creation of the Space Force. He stated: “We’ll soon have the greatest weapons ever imagined in history. I’ve already seen designs and even I can’t believe it.”
He went on further to talk about the prestige of the nation stating “You can’t be number one on Earth if you are number two in space. And we are not going to be number two anywhere. Nowhere is this more true than with our military, which we have completely rebuilt. Under my administration, we have invested two and a half-trillion dollars in new planes, ships, submarines, tanks, missiles, rockets, anything you can think of. And last year I signed the law, creating the sixth branch of that already very famous United States Armed Forces, the Space Force.”
Was this the time to talk about the militarization of space?
The Russian reaction was described as worrisome particularly because of the implications for the militarization of space including weapons deployment. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that the Roscosmos spokesperson stated, “We are not going to rest on our laurels either. We will test two new rockets this year, and next year we will resume our lunar program. It will be interesting.”
The truth for Russia is this. Without American passengers, the Soyuz program will be chronically underfunded as Russia’s civilian space budget is drained for expenditures by the state on other pet projects of Vladimir Putin, and on military procurements. The space industry is described as being in bad shape by Roscosmos insiders. The competition from SpaceX which can build faster and cheaper, and China with its own burgeoning human spaceflight program will limit Russian opportunities in low-Earth orbit. For Russia to get back in the game it needs to revive the program for its next-generation spaceship, Federatsiya, which to this date has never been finished or flown.
Trump talked about NASA and space travel as “a test of our values and of our faith.” Meanwhile, Americans in the tens of thousands were out protesting on the streets of U.S. cities precisely because America’s values and faith were under siege by this President’s administration and its racial and socio-economic policies or lack thereof.
The President spent the first nine minutes of his NASA speech talking about the protestors and social justice in relation to the death of a black American, George Floyd, at the hands of police in Minneapolis. He chose to make a passing reference to the COVID-19 pandemic around halfway through the speech that has already taken close to 107,000 American lives and infected more than 1.8 million.
He talked about the importance of “decency, and civility” in American society with a passing reference to the health crisis Americans are facing which he originally belittled as a hoax and then largely ignored until he couldn’t. As of today, more than one-quarter of COVID-19 cases are in the United States and Americans represent 28% of the total worldwide deaths recorded. So much for a new age of American ambition.
I watched the launch last Saturday like millions of others as Falcon 9 and Dragon flew into low-Earth orbit. And on Sunday I tuned in to the rendezvous and docking of Dragon with the ISS. This was all happening while the protestors were on the streets responding to George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police. It brought back memories of 1968 when Americans were equally out on the street and at odds about race, the Vietnam War, and police actions similar in behaviour to what we witnessed on Sunday and yesterday.
In 1968, the year ended with Apollo 8 flying to the Moon and back and with astronauts onboard reading from the Book of Genesis and talking about the “good Earth” and the hope for peace. They did this while showing us a view of our planet rising over the Moon’s horizon. It was a very moving performance.
Not so much on Monday when Trump went biblical. But before waving the good book at the cameras in front of a partially-burned and boarded-up church across from the White House he had police forcibly clear the streets of peaceful protestors using tear gas and flash-bang device. He then went for a stroll with his entourage. So much for striving to meet American “values” and “faith.”
And as for the Russian reaction, Trump’s words may lead to a new space race, and not one aimed at peaceful exploration of other worlds. Trump talks about holding the high ground, a militaristic term to describe the Moon. What was once described by treaty as a place to be explored and used for the benefit of all humanity to advance science, knowledge and international cooperation, maybe forever lost because this President’s values are incompatible with those lofty goals. Trump wants to own the real estate because that’s all he knows. In his Cape Canaveral speech on Saturday he even talked about the Florida Space Coast in realtor’s terms calling it “the finest pieces of real estate on Earth.”
