Some Space-Related News

There have been some interesting news stories this week related to space exploration. 

To start, there are several stories about SpaceX, which continues to test its Starship prototype. It looks like a high-altitude test flight and landing attempt is planned for today. As I type this just after 8:00 a.m.,, it's already being streamed live but if past practice is any indication, the launch won't happen until later this afternoon.

The next launch of SpaceX's Starlink satellites will probably happen tomorrow after Sunday's launch was aborted just before liftoff. So far, there's been no news from SpaceX about what caused the delay. The previous launch was successful but the booster failed to land on the barge, apparently due to a leak of hot gas that caused an engine failure. 

Blue Origin, the company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has announced that its New Glenn heavy-lift launcher won't fly until 2022 (at least). Ars Technica explores the reasons behinds the delay. It sounds like Bezos bit off more than he could chew.

Instead of crawl-walk-run, Bezos asked his engineering team to begin sprinting toward the launch pad. The engineering challenges of building such a large rocket are big enough. But because New Glenn is so expensive to build, the company needs to recover it from the outset. SpaceX enjoyed a learning curve with the Falcon 9, only successfully recovering the first stage on the rocket's 20th launch. Blue Origin engineers will be expected to bring New Glenn back safely on its very first mission.

The decision to skip the "walk" part of the company's development has cost Blue Origin dearly, sources say. The company's engineering teams, composed of smart and talented people, are struggling with mighty technical challenges. And there are only so many lessons that can be learned from New Shepard—the smaller rocket has 110,000 pounds of thrust, and New Glenn will have very nearly 4 million.

NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars a couple of weeks ago and seems to be operating as planned. The main goal of the mission is to look for signs that there may have been life on Mars millions or billions of years ago. Gizmodo profiles Abigail Allwood, who designed one of the key instruments carried by the rover.  

Allwood’s brainchild, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL, for short), is what launched her onto the Mars 2020 ballot and is one of the keys to unlocking those answers. One of seven instruments aboard Perseverance, PIXL is an X-ray spectrometer outfitted for remote operation, meaning that it uses a precise laser to isolate bits of Martian rock the size of a grain of salt for analysis. PIXL can detect 26 different elements—a veritable alphabet of Martian soil make-up—as well as how much of each element there is. It can paint a picture of the conditions on the Red Planet at the time those rocks were formed.

Finally, although it hasn't been getting much press in Western media, China has been steadily expanding its crewed space program and will begin assembling its Tiangong space station this year.

Starting in 2021, the construction of the Tiangong orbital space station is expected to be complete in 2022 after eleven missions, including three launches of different modules, four launches of cargo vehicles and four crewed launches.

This step comes after a phased approach to human spaceflight development, beginning with the uncrewed test flights of a crewed space vehicle (Shenzhou-1 to Shenzhou-4). This was followed by the launch of a crewed mission (Shenzhou-5 with one taikonaut), the launch of a space crew (Shenzhou-6 with two taikonauts and Shenzhou-7 with three taikonauts), and the execution of an extravehicular activity (Shenzhou-7).