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- Europe's Lunar Drills, NASA's Burj Khalifa, and more
Europe's Lunar Drills, NASA's Burj Khalifa, and more
Ep. 07 of the newsletter
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Hey everyone. Butch Wilmore called CAPCOM from the ISS yesterday with an unusual message - Starliner was making noises that sounded like sonar pings. A moment of confusion before ground teams figured out what was going on; audio feedback between the capsule and the station. Starliner’s still all good for its crewless return on September 6 - it just creeped everyone out.
Headlines:
Launch Tracker:
Noteworthy: Polaris Dawn, the mission everyone’s been eyeing for the past few weeks, is due to launch tomorrow after a series of delays caused by F9’s landing mishap last week and unfavorable weather. The day contains three launch windows, just in case. SpaceX launched two missions within 65 minutes of each other on Saturday, right after receiving the go from the FAA.
Also: Sentinel-2C will be the send-off into retirement for Europe’s Vega launcher, which has carried over 100 smaller satellite missions into space. Sentinel-2C complements Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B, which image all of Earth’s land and coastal waters every five days.
Eurofocus
Drill, Baby, Drill
ESA’s contribution to Prospect. Credit: ESA
Volatiles are a hot topic on the moon. The search for water ice on our planet’s satellite - which could be used for generating oxygen, satisfying propellant needs, and… as water - is one of the main milestones that await this generation of astronauts. In 2020, NASA scientists confirmed the presence of water molecules stuck to sunlit lunar dust, not long after India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft data evidenced deposits of solid water ice at the lunar poles.
ESA is now hitching a ride to the moon to get in on the fun. Their contribution, named ProSEED, is a part of ‘Prospect’, a larger suite of six experiments to be launched by Intuitive Machines on their fourth mission to the Moon in 2027. ProSEED drills through the lunar surface for a depth of up to one meter, where conditions are expected to trap lunar ice in larger deposits - temperatures can reach as low as -150°C. An onboard laboratory, ProSPA, will process samples to extract volatiles using novel methods which “could be applied for resource extraction in the future”, says ESA.
ProSEED has undergone testing on low-pressure, low-temperature regolith and preforms well, prime contractor Leonardo reports. The mission represents a decade-long push for European resource extraction science in the near future. Missions like Rosetta/Philae, which successfully landed on a comet in 2014, and the ExoMars/Rosalind Franklin rover, which after a series of delays is due to launch in 2028, informed decisions on this pathfinder mission, a Leonardo rep detailed.
While rare, ESA has shifted to missions like these in the past decades, away proliferated quantity and towards clear-set milestone missions that advance towards long-term investment. With less than a third of the budget of comparative institutions like NASA, ISRO, or CNSA, it may be the only way for ESA to remain as relevant as it has been for planetary exploration in a future in which space exploration is a mass market and launch services are a common good. Then again, the European approach to change is at best conservative, and with dominators like ArianeSpace, almost the sole EU launch provider, staying true to non-renewable launch services, while SpaceX overtakes both their valuation and launch cadence by a factor close to 50, Europe’s place amongst the big players is far from secure. link
Rapid-fire
D-Orbit’s space tug ‘Magnificent Monica’ begins satellite deployment
Launched on the 16th of August aboard Falcon 9, and named after an employee of the Italian New Space company, the craft deployed four Lemur-2 EO satellites for US-based space data company Spire Global.
Bepi-Columbo’s arrival at Mercury delayed over thruster issues
The mission, launched in 2018 on Ariane 5, will arrive 11 months later than planned due to a malfunction of the electric propulsion system discovered in April. The mission duration of the two orbiters, including the Japanese Magnetospheric Orbiter, will not be affected.
Zooming out
Florida’s Burj Khalifa
NASA’s Mobile Launcher 1. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
According to a report by the NASA inspector general, building the SLS Block 1B-2 launch tower, which will support the manned Artemis moon missions, will cost $2.7 billion. That’s nearly twice the cost of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
A perfect example of how cost overruns occur, the contract for the second mobile launcher (ML-2) required for NASA’s lunar ambitions was awarded to Bechtel Engineering in 2019 with a budget of $383 million. The deadline? March 2023, at which point Bechtel had only begun with the first structural assemblies.
Artemis IV, the second planned lunar landing under the Artemis program and the first to use the taller and more capable SLS Block 1B rocket, was planned to launch in 2028, which would require for NASA to receive the ML-2 by November 2026 in order for the SLS to be assembled and checked out before launch - something that NASA determines has a ‘zero percent chance’ of occurring under the current circumstances. Evidently, Bechtel massively underestimated the labor hours the effort would take: between May 2022 to January 2024, estimated overtime hours doubled to nearly 850,000 hours, NASA admitted.
What could have avoided this? Fixed-price contracts, a competitive structure that awards a contractor a fixed amount for a given piece of hardware. Effective for dealing with budgetary constraints like those NASA faces, but not something the agency is very familiar with. A contract option like this, which has success stories like Starliner (fixed-price contracts have saved NASA ~$2 billion to date with the capsule’s delays), was even declined by the agency, as the cost of exercising the option would likely mean “a cost … far beyond NASA’s budgetary capacity”. Why didn’t NASA structure the contract with a fixed price from the beginning? It was the express direction of the US Congress. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on fixed-price contracts: “You get it done cheaper, and that allows us to move away from what has been a plague on us in the past, which is a cost-plus contract, and move to an existing contractual price.” link
Headlines
Polaris Dawn’s crew will wear cyberpunk-looking contact lenses
Chinese scientists collect water from retrieved lunar dust
The regolith, which landed on Earth with the Chang’e-5 mission in 2020, enabled the discovery of a method which produced 51 to 76 kgs of water for one metric tonne of dust. The discovery could have important implications amid a U.S.-China race to find and mine the moon’s resources.
Starship’s RUD tore a ‘hole’ in the ionosphere, as per a Nature study
Starship’s last full flight test in November last year ended in the explosion of both flight articles in the ionosphere, ~90km above the Gulf of Mexico, and changed the charge of this section of atmosphere, whose charged properties used for reflecting radio signals.
Research Report
Blue pill red pill
Kamala Harris gives talk on the NSC (left), Trump debuting the Space Force (right). Credit: USIoP, Kevin Dietsch/UPI
With elections in the US coming up quickly, the space industry is considering the impact Kamala Harris’ nomination has on space policy and politics. How does Trump’s record stack up against Biden’s in vying to secure the future of in-space dominance for western nations?
Find out soon, when we publish a weekend-round up together with our Research Report.
Oh, one more thing: we’d love to hear from you. Give us feedback, let us know if we’ve missed updates that you find exciting, or shoot us a message just because. DM us on social media, or just reply to this email.