With Rocket Lab’s Daring Midair Catch, Reusable Rockets Go Mainstream

May 12, 2022 by Tom Nardi 34 Comments

We’ve all marveled at the videos of SpaceX rockets returning to their point of origin and landing on their spindly deployable legs, looking for all the world like something pulled from a 1950s science fiction film. On countless occasions founder Elon Musk and president Gwynne Shotwell have extolled the virtues of reusable rockets, such as lower operating cost and the higher reliability that comes with each booster having a flight heritage. At this point, even NASA feels confident enough to fly their missions and astronauts on reused SpaceX hardware.

Even so, SpaceX’s reusability program has remained an outlier, as all other launch providers have stayed the course and continue to offer only expendable booster rockets. Competitors such as United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin have teased varying degrees of reusability for their future vehicles, but to date have nothing to show for it beyond some flashy computer-generated imagery. All the while SpaceX continues to streamline their process, reducing turnaround time and refurbishment costs with each successful reuse of a Falcon 9 booster.

But that changed earlier this month, when a helicopter successfully caught one of Rocket Lab’s Electron boosters in midair as it fell back down to Earth under a parachute. While calling the two companies outright competitors might be a stretch given the relative sizes and capabilities of their boosters, SpaceX finally has a sparing partner when it comes to the science of reusability. The Falcon 9 has already smashed the Space Shuttle’s record turnaround time, but perhaps Rocket Lab will be the first to achieve Elon Musk’s stated goal of re-flying a rocket within 24 hours of its recovery.

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NASA’s Giant SLS Rocket Rolled Back For Repairs

April 27, 2022 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

There’s little debate that the most exciting move in a rocket’s repertoire is when it launches itself skywards on a column of flame. But failing that, it’s still pretty interesting to see how these massive vehicles get juggled around down here on terra firma before getting fired off into the black. Which is great for anyone interested in NASA’s towering Space Launch System (SLS), as it’s been doing an awful lot of milling about on the ground for a vehicle designed to return humanity to the Moon.

Most recently, the SLS completed a trek from the iconic Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) to launch pad 39B and back again aboard the same “crawler” that moved the Space Shuttle and Saturn V before it. While the nearly 60-year-old tracked vehicle has received some updates to carry the 98 meter (322 ft) tall booster, clearly the space agency subscribes to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of thought.

The SLS itself however is definitely in need of some work. The rocket was brought out to the pad for the first time on March 18th, where it was to conduct what’s known as a “wet dress rehearsal” — a test of the pre-flight operations, propellant loading, and countdown that includes everything except engine ignition. Unfortunately, the test was plagued with technical issues, and after three attempts, it was decided to bring the rocket back into the VAB to make the necessary repairs to both it and the ground support equipment.

One issue involves a valve in the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), a propulsion module that’s being used on the early SLS flights to provide the trans-lunar injection (TLI) burn that will send the Orion spacecraft on a course towards the Moon. As the name implies, the ICPS is destined to be replaced with the larger Exploration Upper Stage on later missions. There’s also a leak on the launch tower itself that will need to be addressed. After the identified problems are repaired and some adjustments are made, the SLS will once again be rolled out to the pad to reattempt the launch rehearsal.

Now in development for over a decade, the Space Launch System has been plagued with technical issues and delays. At the same time, commercial launch providers like SpaceX have moved the state of the art forward considerably, leading many to wonder if the mind-bogglingly expensive rocket will be able to compete with in-development vehicles such as Starship and New Glenn. The fact that missions which were previously assigned to the SLS have started to get shifted over to commercial rockets would seem to indicate that even NASA is losing confidence in their flagship program.

The Apollo Digital Ranging System: More Than Meets The Eye

April 25, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 15 Comments

If you haven’t seen [Ken Shirriff]’s teardowns and reverse engineering expeditions, then you’re in for a treat. His explanation and demonstration of the Apollo digital ranging system is a fascinating read, even if vintage computing and engineering aren’t part of your normal fare.

The average Hackaday reader should be familiar with the concept of determining the distance of a faraway object by measuring how long it takes a sound or radio wave to be reflected, such as in sonar and radar. Going another step and measuring Doppler Shift – the difference in the returned signal’s frequency – will tell us the velocity of the object relative to our position. It’s so simple that an Arduino can do it. But in the days of Apollo, there was no Arduino. In fact, there were no Integrated Circuits. And Apollo missions went all the way to the moon- far too distant for relatively simple Radar measurements. Continue reading “The Apollo Digital Ranging System: More Than Meets The Eye” →

Axiom’s Private ISS Mission Was No Space Vacation

April 25, 2022 by Tom Nardi 14 Comments

In an era where anyone with deep enough pockets can hitch a ride to the edge of space and back, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Axiom’s Ax-1 mission to the International Space Station was little more than a pleasure cruise for the four crew members. Granted it’s a higher and faster flight than the suborbital hops that the likes of William Shatner and Jeff Bezos have been embarking on, but surely it must still be little more than a publicity stunt organized by folks with more money than they know what to do with?

Thankfully, there’s a bit more to it than that. While the mission was privately funded, the Ax-1 crew weren’t just orbital sightseers. For one thing, there was plenty of real-world experience packed into the SpaceX Dragon: the mission was commanded by Michael López-Alegría, a veteran NASA astronaut, and crew members Larry Connor and Eytan Stibbe are both accomplished pilots, with the latter clocking in thousands of hours on various fighter jets during his time with the Israeli Air Force.

But more importantly, they had work to do. Each member of the crew was assigned a list of experiments they were to conduct, ranging from medical observations to the testing of new hardware. Of course there was some downtime — after all, if you spent $50 million on a ticket to space, you’d expect to have at least a little fun — but this wasn’t just a photo op: Axiom was looking for results. There was no hiding from the boss either, as López-Alegría is not just the Mission Commander, he’s also Axiom’s Vice President of Business Development.

Which makes sense when you consider the company’s ultimate goal is to use the ISS as a springboard to accelerate the development of their own commercial space station. The data collected during Ax-1 is going to be critical to Axiom’s path forward, and with their first module already under construction and expected to launch by 2025, there’s no time to waste.

So what did the crew members of the this privately funded mission to the International Space Station accomplish? Let’s take a look at a few of the more interesting entries from the docket.

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Mercury Thrusters: A Worldwide Disaster Averted Just In Time

April 18, 2022 by Lewin Day 60 Comments

The field of space vehicle design is obsessed with efficiency by necessity. The cost to do anything in space is astronomical, and also heavily tied to launch weight. Thus, any technology or technique that can bring those figures down is prime for exploitation.

In recent years, mercury thrusters promised to be one such technology. The only catch was the potentially-ruinous environmental cost. Today, we’ll look at the benefits of mercury thrusters, and how they came to be outlawed in short order.

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Hacking An Experimental ESA Satellite

April 12, 2022 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Hacking these days means everything from someone guessing your password and spamming your contacts with toxic links, to wide-scale offensive cyberattacks against infrastructure by sophisticated operators backed by nation states. When it comes to hacking satellites, though, [Didelot Maurice-Michel] found himself tangling with some hardware belonging to the European Space Agency.

As part of an event called HackCYSAT, hackers were invited to attack the ESA’s OPS-SAT, a CubeSat intended to demonstrate improved techniques for mission control and more advanced satellite hardware. The computer hardware on board is ten times more powerful than other existing ESA satellites, and aims to take satellite technology on a new leap forward.

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Mothballing Rosalind: How To Put A Space Mission In Storage

April 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

In planetary exploration circles, Mars has quite a bad reputation. The Red Planet has a habit of eating spacecraft sent there to explore it, to the degree that nearly half of the missions we’ve thrown at it have failed in one way or another. The “Mars Curse” manifests itself most spectacularly when landers fail to negotiate the terminal descent and new billion-dollar craters appear on the Martian regolith, while some missions meet their doom en route to the planet, and an unlucky few have even blown up on the launchpad.

But the latest example of the Mars Curse, the recent cancellation of the second half of the ExoMars mission, represents a new and depressing failure mode: war — specifically the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The international outrage over the aggression resulted in economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation of Russia, which retaliated by ending its partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), depriving the mission of its launch vehicle and dooming the mission that would have landed the rover Rosalind Franklin on Oxia Planum near the Martian Equator in 2023.

While there’s still a chance that administrators and diplomats will work things out, chances are slim that it will be in time for the narrow launch window that the mission was shooting for in September of 2022. That means the Rosalind Franklin, along with all the other flight hardware that was nearly ready to launch, will have to be put in storage at least until the next launch window opens in 2024. That begs the question: how does one put a complex spacecraft into storage? And could such mothballing have unintended consequences for the mission when it eventually does fly?

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