Welcome to Edition 7.10 of the Rocket Report! It has been a big week for seeing new hardware from Blue Origin. We've observed the second stage of New Glenn rolling out to its launch pad in Florida, and the rocket's first stage recovery ship, Jacklyn, arriving at a nearby port. It looks like the pieces are finally coming into place for the debut launch of the massive new rocket.

 

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Vega rocket makes its final flight. The final flight of Europe's Vega rocket lifted off Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union's flagship Copernicus program, Ars reports. About an hour after liftoff, the Vega rocket's upper stage released Sentinel-2C into an on-target orbit. Then, Sentinel-2C radioed its status to ground controllers, confirming the satellite was healthy in space. The Vega rocket will be replaced by the larger Vega-C rocket, with a more powerful booster stage and a wider payload fairing. One of the primary purposes of the Vega-C will be to launch future Copernicus satellites for Europe.

 

A mixed record of commercial success ... "I think it was a great success," said Giulio Ranzo, Avio's CEO, in an interview with Ars a few hours before Wednesday night's mission. "It was our first launcher. It was our first experience as a major player in the launcher domain." However, in a dozen years of service, the Vega rocket never really took off in the commercial launch market. It averaged about two flights per year and primarily deployed satellites for the European Space Agency and other European government agencies, which prefer launching their payloads on European rockets.

 

ABL Space lays off staff. Launch vehicle developer ABL Space Systems has laid off a significant portion of its workforce, citing the need to reduce costs after the loss of a rocket in a static-fire test, Space News reports. In a post on LinkedIn on August 30, Harry O’Hanley, chief executive of ABL, said the company was laying off an unspecified number of people. The layoffs came after the company’s second RS1 rocket was lost in a fire after a static-fire test at the Pacific Spaceport Complex – Alaska on Kodiak Island on July 19.

 

Era of easy money ends ... O’Hanley said in the email that the company had been working to reduce costs at the company even ahead of that test, citing changes in the market and access to capital. The company had raised several hundred million dollars, including $200 million in October 2021 and $170 million in March 2021. Hanley wrote that starting in 2023, “we cut costs and positioned the company for leaner operations with smaller teams, restrained hiring, and more conservative spending.” That was working, he said, until the static-fire incident. (submitted by brianrhurley and Ken the Bin)

 

So many un-spac-tacular results. A recent feature in Space News reviewed how the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, process has gone for several new space firms. Fortunes have been decidedly mixed for the space businesses that merged with publicly traded shell companies in search of capital as COVID-19 ravaged the economy, the publication says.

 

Launch does not fare well ... "Wildly missed revenue projections from most of the class in their eagerness to drum up investor support for their SPAC merger have not helped their reputation," the author, Jason Rainbow, writes. The list includes four launch companies: Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, Astra, and Rocket Lab. Of these, Virgin Orbit has gone bankrupt, and Astra's results were so disastrous that it went private again. Then there's Virgin Galactic, a company whose shares publicly trade at $7, down nearly 90 percent from its peak during the pandemic. Only Rocket Lab gets a gold star for its post-SPAC performance.

 

New investor suit filed against Branson over Virgin Galactic. A newly unsealed lawsuit alleges that Richard Branson exploited bogus hype about the capabilities of Virgin Galactic's spacecraft to make $1 billion worth of illegal insider stock sales, Bloomberg Law reports. A shareholder sued Branson, saying he spent years misleading the public about the readiness of Virgin Galactic’s flagship space tourism vessel, Unity, then dumped “massive portions of his stock” across 2020 and 2021. The sales included $300 million in August 2021, shortly after Branson flew on the spaceship. Branson founded Virgin Galactic about two decades ago.

 

Branson says suit is meritless ... “Despite the near misses, loss of life, and questionable safety record, Branson was determined to be the first billionaire in space” so he could “secure billionaire bragging rights” and try to bail out a travel business empire that lost nearly $1.9 billion during the COVID-19 pandemic, the suit says. Branson and Virgin Galactic disputed the court claims in separate statements Wednesday. Branson called the claims meritless through a spokesperson, saying he would “vigorously defend against them.” The case involves shareholder derivative claims, which are technically brought on a corporation’s behalf against its leaders or owners.

 

MaiaSpace working toward stage testing. French launch firm MaiaSpace has announced that it is preparing to conduct the first hot fire test of the upper stage of its Maia rocket in 2025, European Spaceflight reports. The company is developing a partially reusable two-stage rocket called Maia that will be capable of delivering payloads of up to 1,500 kilograms when launched in an expandable configuration. For both of its stages, the rocket will use Prometheus rocket engines, which are being developed by ArianeGroup under a European Space Agency contract.

 

Is it new space or old space? ... MaiaSpace is an interesting company. It positions itself as a launch startup, but it is also a wholly owned subsidiary of ArianeGroup, which is as traditional a launch company as can be. The rocket’s first stage will essentially be the Themis reusable booster demonstrator, which is also being developed by ArianeGroup under an ESA contract. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Relativity Space faces a rocky road ahead. In a feature article, Ars explores the future of Relativity Space as it strives to develop the Terran R launch vehicle. The good news for the company is that the development of the vehicle's main engine, the Aeon-R, continues to go well. The not-so-good news is that, due to challenges with additive manufacturing, Relativity is likely to outsource the production of large chunks of the rocket to suppliers in Europe and elsewhere.

 

Betting big on reuse ... The company is also counting on reusing the first stage of Terran R to make its business case close. Nominally, the company plans to reuse each first stage 20 times. The changes in Terran R's development—going from being predominantly 3D printed to looking much more like a traditional rocket and outsourcing components like fairings and domes—have been done in response to customer demand, chief executive Tim Ellis said. The company is still targeting a 2026 debut for Terran R, but we'll see what happens.

 

Falcon 9 has launched 7,000 Starlinks. A SpaceX rocket carrying a new batch of Starlink Internet satellites launched into orbit from Florida today (Sept. 5), then returned to Earth in a flawless landing, Space.com reports. So why is yet another Starlink launch news? Because the Starlink 8-11 mission carried aloft SpaceX's 7,001st Starlink satellite, according to launch statistics kept by astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, as the 21 satellites joined 6,980 others launched by SpaceX since 2018.

 

Landing true ... Many of the previously launched satellites have, of course, since been retired. The new Starlink batch includes 13 "Direct to Cell" satellites to provide Internet coverage directly to smartphones. Also notable is that the Falcon 9 landing was the third successful touchdown of a SpaceX rocket in a week after the company's failed landing attempt on Aug. 28 during an otherwise successful Starlink flight. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

New Glenn second stage rolls to the launch pad. On Monday Ars previewed the rollout of the second stage of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, which signals the beginning of final testing before a launch attempt. The large stage rolled out on Tuesday. The launch company is targeting a hot fire test of the upper stage, which is powered by two BE-3U engines, within the next few days. The company's plan is to mate the second and first stages of the rocket and add the payload fairing with the spacecraft inside of it before conducting a short hot fire test of the first stage.

 

Running into a tight window ... NASA has contracted with Blue Origin for the first launch of New Glenn, seeking to boost two relatively small spacecraft to Mars. These ESCAPADE orbiters have a tight launch window, October 13 to October 21. It is an open question as to whether Blue Origin can integrate, test, and launch ESCAPADE within the launch window, which opens in less than six weeks.

 

Europa Clipper launch on track. NASA is on track to clear the Europa Clipper spacecraft for a launch attempt next month after concluding that electronics on the spacecraft can handle the planned mission profile, Space News reports. NASA said the mission team completed testing of transistors used in the power supply system on the spacecraft and concluded that "[a]nalysis of the results suggests the transistors can support the baseline mission." NASA did not elaborate on the testing results, but project officials sounded confident that the mission can proceed into final preparations for launch.

 

A flagship mission ... Europa Clipper is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy during a three-week window that opens October 10. The spacecraft, after performing flybys of Mars and Earth, will enter orbit around Jupiter in 2030 and perform dozens of close flybys of Europa, the Jovian moon that has a subsurface ocean that is potentially habitable. NASA has spent about $4 billion developing the flagship mission, so there's a lot riding on it.

 

Blue Origin drone ship arrives in port. The rocket recovery drone ship named Jacklyn arrived in Port Canaveral this week, ahead of Blue Origin's planned launch of its New Glenn rocket, Space.com reports. Jacklyn is 380 feet long and 150 feet wide (116 by 46 meters), and it is named after the mother of Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin. Jacklyn is a nickname, however; the ship's legal moniker is Landing Platform Vessel #1.

 

Going for gold on launch one ... Construction on the ship began in Romania last year and wrapped up in Brest, France, in the last month or so. Jacklyn departed Brest for Florida nearly a month ago. The drone ship is similarly sized to SpaceX's fleet of three drone ships, which service launches from Florida's Space Coast and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Blue Origin will attempt to recover the New Glenn rocket after its first launch, which is both ambitious and fun to contemplate. (submitted by brianrhurley)

Next three launches

Sept. 6: Falcon 9 | NROL-113 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 03:20 UTC

Sept. 11: H2-A | IGS-Radar 8 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 04:00 UTC

Sept. 11: Soyuz 2.1a | Soyuz MS-26 | Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan | 15:43 UTC

The possibility that there is liquid water on an exoplanet’s surface usually flags it as “potentially habitable,” but the reality is that too much water might prevent life from taking hold.

 

“On Earth, the ocean is in contact with some rock. If we have too much water, it creates high-pressure ice underneath the ocean, which separates it from the planet’s rocky interior,” said Caroline Dorn, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, who led new research in exoplanet interiors.

 

This high-pressure ice prevents minerals and chemical compounds from being exchanged between the rocks and the water. In theory, that should make the ocean barren and lifeless. But Dorn’s team argues that even exoplanets that have enough water to form such high-pressure ice can host life if the majority of the water is not stored in the surface oceans but is held much deeper in the planet’s core. The water in the core can’t sustain life—it’s not even in its molecular form there. But it means that a substantial fraction of a planet’s water isn’t on the surface, which makes the surface oceans a little more shallow and prevents high-pressure ice from forming at their bottom.

Planetary youngsters

“If you looked at the exoplanet community three to five years ago, everybody was thinking that [water] can only be present on the surface of planets,” Dorn said. Scientists, having no evidence to the contrary, simply assumed alien worlds were built how they thought the Earth was built, with the water primarily present in the surface oceans, with some portion, around 40 million cubic kilometers, held deeper in the crust. But all this reasoning went out the window in 2020 when a team of scientists at the University College London published a study claiming the Earth was not built that way at all.

 

Instead, the 2020 study argued that the majority of water on Earth is not in the oceans or the crust but in the core of the planet and that the core can host 30 to 37 times as much water as all our surface oceans combined. “When the planet is very young and hot, you have a soup of magma with everything mixed in—you have silicates contained in the mantle of the planet but also drops of iron that will eventually sink down and form the core,” Dorn said.

 

Part of the water present in this magma soup associates with the silicates and can one day end up in the surface oceans. Another part stays with iron and sinks down to the core with it. At the immense temperatures and pressures found in the nascent worlds, iron can bind roughly 70 times more water than silicates.

 

As a rule of thumb, if a planet is heavier, a large portion of its water will go down to the core and stay there. And this may be a good thing for our hopes of finding life in space.

Giving life a chance

Even with immense precision of modern instruments, James Webb Telescope included, the only way we can guesstimate the water budget of an exoplanet is through indirect cues: a bulk density calculated from the best estimations of its mass and radius.

 

Before Dorn’s study, whenever we came across an exoplanet with exceptionally high water budget, we assumed the water was in its surface oceans, meaning the oceans were super deep and had absurdly high pressures at their bottom. That was because the hard data we have only tells us what portion of the planet is made of water—it says nothing about its distribution.

 

“Because now we think the water can also be stored in the core, we can have ten times more water on the planet before we reach these high pressures. It’s an order of magnitude difference,” Dorn said. Since the majority of water goes down to the core with the iron, only a small portion remains near the surface to form oceans as we know them, reducing the pressures on the ocean floors.

 

This means the pool of potentially habitable worlds has grown significantly wider. Still, finding conclusive evidence of life on one of these planets remains a huge challenge.

Hunting for LIFE

The capability of running a spectroscopy analysis on distant, preferably Earth-sized alien worlds was one of the selling features of the James Webb Space Telescope, but it has its limitations. The JWST can only observe the upper layers of exoplanets’ atmospheres. “Our group wants to make a connection between the atmosphere to the inner depths of celestial bodies,” Dorn said. “If we find water in the planet’s atmosphere, there is probably a great deal more in its interior.” The problem is that the composition of the upper layers of the atmosphere is not always representative of the layers beneath it.

 

One of the planets that made headlines as a potential home for extraterrestrial life was K2-18b, a world around 8.6 times more massive than Earth orbiting a cool dwarf star about 120 light-years from Earth. “It’s got a lot of attention because, with the James Webb Telescope, we could get some insights from its atmosphere. It has hydrogen and helium, but also other, heavier gases, so there was a discussion in the community [about] if there could be liquid water oceans beneath of this hydrogen-helium dominated layer,” Dorn said.

 

But she said that the planet has very low density, which would mean it has way more water than seems feasible from the cosmochemical perspective. “You can imagine we can’t have planets that are 100 percent just water. Cosmochemistry gives us an upper limit on how much water can be in planets, which stands at 50 percent,” said Dorn. So the probability that this planet is a habitable ocean world is very low.

 

“Honestly, my hope for the future in my work lays in experiments people can do in a lab to see how materials behave and interact with each other, especially the interaction between the gases and the rocky components. This way we can better understand how planetary interiors work and put this knowledge into our models and then apply it to interplanetary data,” Dorn said.

 

But she says she would also like to see if there is carbon dioxide, methane, water, and perhaps life on alien worlds. That's why Dorn is also on the team developing LIFE (Large Interferometer for Exoplanets), a telescope that may one day replace the James Webb if the European Space Agency gives it a go.

 

Nature Astronomy, 2024.  DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02347-z

Signs of volcanic activity on the Moon can be viewed simply by looking up at the night-time sky: The large, dark plains called "maria" are the product of massive outbursts of volcanic material. But these were put in place relatively early in the Moon's history, with their formation ending roughly 3 billion years ago. Smaller-scale additions may have continued until roughly 2 billion years ago. Evidence of that activity includes samples obtained by China's Chang'e-5 lander.

 

But there are hints that small-scale volcanism continued until much more recent times. Observations from space have identified terrain that seems to be the product of eruptions, but only has a limited number of craters, suggesting a relatively young age. But there's considerable uncertainty about these deposits.

 

Now, further data from samples returned to Earth by the Chang’e-5 mission show clear evidence of volcanism that is truly recent in the context of the history of the Solar System. Small beads that formed during an eruption have been dated to just 125 million years ago.

Counting beads

Obviously, some of the samples returned by Chang'e-5 are solid rock. But it also returned a lot of loose material from the lunar regolith. And that includes a decent number of rounded, glassy beads formed from molten material. There are two potential sources of those beads: volcanic activity and impacts.

 

The Moon is constantly bombarded by particles ranging in size from individual atoms to small rocks, and many of these arrive with enough energy to melt whatever it is they smash into. Some of that molten material will form these beads, which may then be scattered widely by further impacts. The composition of these beads can vary wildly, as they're composed of either whatever smashed into the Moon or whatever was on the Moon that got smashed. So, the relative concentrations of different materials will be all over the map.

 

By contrast, any relatively recent volcanism on the Moon will be extremely rare, so is likely to be from a single site and have a single composition. And, conveniently, the Apollo missions already returned samples of volcanic lunar rocks, which provide a model for what that composition might look like. So, the challenge was one of sorting through the beads returned from the Chang'e-5 landing site, and figuring out which ones looked volcanic.

 

And it really was a challenge, as there were over 3,000 beads returned, and the vast majority of them would have originated in impacts.

 

As a first cutoff, the team behind the new work got rid of anything that had a mixed composition, such as unmelted material embedded in the bead, or obvious compositional variation. This took the 3,000 beads down to 764. Those remaining beads were then subject to a technique that could determine what chemicals were present. (The team used an electron probe microanalyzer, which bombards the sample with electrons and uses the photons that are emitted to determine what elements are present.) As expected, compositions were all over the map. Some beads were less than 1 percent magnesium oxide; others nearly 30 percent. Silicon dioxide ranged from 16 to 60 percent.

 

Based on the Apollo samples, the researchers selected for beads that were high in magnesium oxide relative to calcium and aluminum oxides. That got them down to 13 potentially volcanic samples. They also looked for low nickel, as that's found in many impactors, which got the number down to six. The final step was to look at sulfur isotopes, as impact melting tends to preferentially release the lighter isotope, altering the ratio compared to intact lunar rocks.

 

After all that, the researchers were left with three of the glassy beads, which is a big step down from the 3,000 they started with.

Erupted

Those three were then used to perform uranium-based radioactive dating, and they all produced numbers that were relatively close to each other. Based on the overlapping uncertainties, the researchers conclude that all were the product of an eruption that took place about 123 million years ago, give or take 15 million years. Considering that the most recent confirmed eruptions were about 2 billion years ago, that's a major step forward in timing.

 

And that's quite a bit of a surprise, as the Moon has had plenty of time to cool, and that cooling would have increased the distance between its surface and any molten material left in the interior. So it's not obvious what could be creating sufficient heating to generate molten material at present. The researchers note that the Moon has a lot of material called KREEP (potassium, rare earth elements, phosphorus) that is high in radioactive isotopes and might lead to localized heating in some circumstances.

 

Unfortunately, it will be tough to associate this with any local geology, since there's no indication of where the eruption occurred. Material this small can travel quite a distance in the Moon's weak gravitational field and then could be scattered even farther by impacts. So, it's possible that these belong to features that have been identified as potentially volcanic through orbital images.

 

In the meantime, the increased exploration of the Moon planned for the next few decades should get us more opportunities to see whether similar materials are widespread on the lunar surface. Eventually, that might potentially allow us to identify an area with higher concentrations of volcanic material than one particle in a thousand.

 

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adk6635  (About DOIs).

 

In a new study, we have sequenced DNA from a Christian community in medieval Spain that lived in artificial caves carved into a rocky outcrop.

 

This is one of several medieval cave communities known to have lived on the Iberian Peninsula—which includes both Portugal and Spain. Why these groups favored caves over more conventional village dwellings is a subject of longstanding debate for archaeologists. While it may be tempting to speculate about hermits or religious groups, there’s scant evidence to support such theories.

 

Our study, published in Science Advances, explores the possibilities, adding genetic analysis to what we know about the physical remains of people from the site’s cemetery. DNA was able to shed light on the ancestry of this community, their relationships to each other and the diseases that afflicted them.

 

The combined information reveals a story of inbreeding, occasional bouts of violence, and disease during a fascinating period in history. One possibility is that some of the earliest settlers were people with military experience, though it’s unclear whether they were professional soldiers or not.

 

The settlement existed from the mid-sixth century to the 11th century CE. The early Middle Ages was a dynamic and tumultuous era in many parts of Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula. After the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 CE, Iberia came under the rule of the Visigoths, who came from northern Europe.

 

The Visigothic kingdom collapsed following a conquest by Muslim armies crossing from North Africa in 711 CE. This event established a territory known as Al-Andalus, which, at its greatest extent, covered much of Iberia. But Christian kingdoms persisted in the north of the peninsula and gradually reclaimed territory.

 

What we know about the period in this part of the world has been dominated by events in Iberia’s major cities at the time, such as Toledo, Granada, and Cordoba. These were hubs of trade, diplomacy, and power.

 

The rural site of Las Gobas offers a glimpse into life away from these urban centers, in one of the distinctive cave-dwelling communities known from this period.

 

Located in Burgos province, northern Spain, near the village of Laño, Las Gobas features a cemetery that was used continuously from the seventh to the 11th century. It was initially connected to a church, also built within the cave complex. By the 10th century, the inhabitants had moved to a more typical rural village, though the cave church and cemetery remained in use until the 11th century.

 

Archaeological excavations at the cemetery have uncovered the remains of 41 people. We subjected 39 of them to genetic analysis, and 33 provided enough DNA for sex identification (22 males and 11 females). Some 28 remains yielded enough DNA for further investigation with a variety of genetic techniques.

Sword blows

First, we found that the inhabitants were overwhelmingly of local Iberian ancestry with very minimal contribution from North Africans—despite their proximity to the northern edge of Al-Andalus.

 

This aligns with historical records indicating limited genetic influence from North African populations in northern Iberia during the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, some migration did occur, evidenced by several people with higher North African ancestry after the Muslim conquest.

 

Two of the skeletons dating to the early phase of settlement exhibited signs of violence, which probably resulted from sword blows to the head. The two individuals were genetically closely related. Amazingly, one of them survived an injury that cut through the skull. These skeletons, however, come from a time before the Muslim conquest, so their injuries were not caused by conflicts along the Al-Andalus border.

 

This period saw elevated levels of inbreeding, with approximately 61 percent of the sample where there was enough genomic data to analyze showing signs of inbreeding (14 out of 23). This suggests that the population at this time practiced endogamy—marrying only within the community.

 

Together with the evidence for inbreeding, we can see that several of the earliest males are close kin because there are only relatively small variations observed in their Y-chromosome (a package of genetic material passed from father to sons). This suggests that the site could have been populated in the seventh century CE by a small patrilocal (where couples settle in the husband’s home or community) group that may have had experience of warfare.

 

The early phase of the Las Gobas settlement also revealed several cases of the bacterium Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae, which causes a skin disease in humans. More interestingly, the bacterium often originates in domestic animals. The bacterium was also present in the settlement’s latter phase, but at a lower frequency.

Smallpox source

The presence of this bacterium, commonly found in pigs, suggests that keeping these livestock animals was an essential part of the community’s lifestyle. Furthermore, one of the people infected with E rhusiopathiae was also carrying Yersinia enterocolitica, a bacterium known to infect humans through bad meat or bad water.

 

Endogamy remained a strong feature throughout the population’s history, even as the community transitioned from cave dwellings to a more typical rural settlement in the 10th century. During this later phase, we detected DNA from the variola virus, responsible for smallpox, in a 10th-century individual.

 

Smallpox, with its high mortality rate (30 percent without vaccination), has been suggested by some researchers to have reached Iberia via the Muslim conquest. However, the Las Gobas smallpox strain resembled those found in Scandinavia, Russia, and Germany during the same period. Therefore, it appears as if at least one pandemic route was from the east.

 

Increased mobility, exemplified by the growing importance of the northern city of Santiago de Compostela for Christian pilgrims in the ninth and 10th centuries, may even have helped spread the virus. In all these ways, Las Gobas stands out as a unique site spanning the turbulent early medieval period in Iberia.

 

It reveals a community marked by isolation, violence, and devout worship. What started as a cave-dwelling group evolved into a typical rural village that endured its share of disease. As such, the site offers a rare and detailed glimpse into the lives of people whose stories are often eclipsed by history told from the perspective of major urban centers and their elites.

 

Anders Götherström is Professor in Molecular Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, and Ricardo Rodriguez Varela does Research in Molecular Archaeology, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University.

 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in US dairy cows has now spread to three herds in California, the largest milk-producing state in the country with around 1.7 million dairy cows, federal and state health officials have confirmed.

 

Fourteen states and 197 herds have now been affected by the unprecedented outbreak in dairy cows, which was first confirmed by federal health officials on March 25.

 

In a statement, the secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture, Karen Ross, said the spread of the virus to California was not unexpected. "We have been preparing for this possibility since earlier this year when [Highly pathogenic avian influenza or HPAI] detections were confirmed at dairy farms in other states," Ross said. "Our extensive experience with HPAI in poultry has given us ample preparation and expertise to address this incident, with workers’ health and public health as our top priorities."

Virus on the move

The herds in California are thought to have been infected through the movement of cattle, despite a federal order mandating testing of cattle prior to movement between states. So far, health officials believe that all of the dairy infections across the affected states stem from a single spillover event from wild birds to dairy cows in Texas. The virus is thought to spread from cow to cow, as well as from contaminated milking equipment, dirty hands, and boots.

 

Wild bird populations worldwide have been devastated by H5N1 in recent years, with its spread in the US first documented in 2022. But, unlike past avian influenza outbreaks in wild bird populations, the current strain of H5N1 spreading—clade 2.3.4.4b—has proven unusually adept at spilling over to various mammals. For instance, the US dairy outbreak marked the first time the virus was documented to cause an outbreak among cows.

 

Since the beginning of the US dairy cow outbreak, federal officials have suggested that they are well-equipped to stop the spread. However, the tally of affected herds has continued to increase, with 17 herds reported infected in the last 30 days, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The state with the most affected herds—64—is Colorado, the only state to mandate bulk milk testing for H5N1. Since that July 22 mandate, the state has identified 11 infected herds through bulk testing. Overall, testing for H5N1 is limited, and experts believe that official tallies of infected herds are significant undercounts.

Reassortment risk

For now, the risk to the general population is still considered to be low, and the virus does not pose a risk via pasteurized milk and dairy products or properly cooked meat. The influenza virus is readily inactivated by heat treatments. The risk is also relatively low for the infected cows, most of which make full recoveries within a few weeks.

 

Farmworkers exposed to infected animals are at risk of contracting the virus, however. To date, four dairy farmworkers and 10 poultry farmworkers have contracted the bird flu virus behind the dairy outbreak. The infections have been mild so far, with some having only inflamed eyes and others having classic flu symptoms. Officials have not seen evidence of the virus spreading from human to human in any of those cases. However, experts fear that the continued adaptation to mammals and exposure to humans will give the virus ample opportunities to shift to a more dangerous, more transmissible virus, potentially one that could spark the next pandemic.

 

The concern was evident in a July 30 press briefing when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a $5 million effort to get farmworkers vaccinated against seasonal flu. The fear is that farm workers could become human mixing bowls for H5N1 and the seasonal flu strains this year. Influenza viruses are notorious for undergoing reassortment, a process in which different strains of flu viruses can exchange segments of their genomes with each other when they co-infect a host. This can create genetically distinct strains, potentially ones with new abilities. By vaccinating farmworkers against seasonal flu, health officials hope to keep the bird flu and human-adapted seasonal flu from commingling.

 

On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.

 

"I've got a question about Starliner," Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control, at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "There's a strange noise coming through the speaker ... I don't know what's making it."

 

Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via "hardline" to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.

 

 

Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. "Alright Butch, that one came through," Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. "It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping."

 

"I'll do it one more time, and I'll let y'all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what's going on," Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. "Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out."

A space oddity

A recording of this audio, and Wilmore's conversation with Mission Control, was captured and shared by a Michigan-based meteorologist named Rob Dale.

 

It was not immediately clear what was causing the odd, and somewhat eerie noise. As Starliner flies to the space station, it maintains communications with the space station via a radio frequency system. Once docked, however, there is a hardline umbilical that carries audio.

 

Astronauts notice such oddities in space from time to time. For example, during China's first human spaceflight int 2003, astronaut Yang Liwei said he heard what sounded like an iron bucket being knocked by a wooden hammer while in orbit. Later, scientists realized the noise was due to small deformations in the spacecraft due to a difference in pressure between its inner and outer walls.

 

This weekend's sonar-like noises most likely have a benign cause, and Wilmore certainly did not sound frazzled. But the odd noises are worth noting given the challenges that Boeing and NASA have had with the debut crewed flight of Starliner, including substantial helium leaks in flight, and failing thrusters. NASA announced a week ago that, due to uncertainty about the flyability of Starliner, it would come home without its original crew of Wilmore and Suni Williams.

 

Starliner is now due to fly back autonomously to Earth on Friday, September 6. Wilmore and Williams will return to Earth next February, flying aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft scheduled to launch with just two astronauts later this month.

 

Welcome to Edition 7.09 of the Rocket Report! When will SpaceX launch the next test flight of Starship? It certainly doesn't look to be imminent, with SpaceX ground teams in Texas feverishly working to beef up the launch pad in preparation for an attempt to catch the rocket's massive Super Heavy booster when it returns to the launch site on the next flight. Meanwhile, the FAA is reviewing SpaceX's proposal to recover the booster on land for the first time. And on Thursday, a NASA official monitoring SpaceX's Starship effort said the next test flight was scheduled for launch in the "fall," suggesting it could be a month or more away. Also, we've listed the next three launches as "TBD" (To Be Determined) because SpaceX is waiting for FAA approval to resume Falcon 9 launches following a booster landing failure this week, and the Polaris Dawn mission is on hold due to an unfavorable weather forecast.

 

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly has a new chief executive. Jason Kim, former head of Boeing-owned satellite-maker Millennium Space Systems, has been appointed CEO of Firefly Aerospace effective October 1, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Kim joins Firefly as the ambitious space transportation startup, which has raised close to $600 million from investors since its 2021 founding, looks to launch a commercial lunar lander for NASA before the end of the year. Firefly is also working on a medium-lift rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman, with the goal of competing for missions to resupply the International Space Station and launch payloads for the US military and commercial customers.

 

Kim brings national security chops ... At Millennium, Kim shepherded several national security space missions to completion, including Victus Nox, a responsive satellite and launch mission for the US Space Force. Millennium manufactured the satellite for the Victus Nox mission, and Firefly Aerospace successfully launched it on an Alpha rocket just 27 hours after receiving the launch order from the military. This required Millennium and Firefly to integrate the satellite with the Alpha rocket on short notice. Kim replaces Bill Weber, who left the CEO role at Firefly in July after allegations he had an improper relationship with a female employee.

 

New Shepard flies again. Blue Origin launched six passengers, including a NASA-sponsored researcher and the youngest woman to fly in space, on a sub-orbital trip out of the lower atmosphere Thursday in the company's eighth crewed spaceflight, CBS News reports. University of Florida researcher Rob Ferl, philanthropist Nicolina Elrick, adventurer Eugene Grin, Vanderbilt University cardiologist Elman Jahangir, American-Israeli entrepreneur Ephraim Rabin, and University of North Carolina senior Karsen Kitchen lifted off from Jeff Bezos' West Texas launch site on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket. Kitchen became the youngest woman to fly higher than 100 kilometers (62 miles), and Ferl was the first NASA-funded researcher to fly on a suborbital rocket. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, its competitor in the suborbital human spaceflight market, have long touted their vehicles' ability to support human-tended research in microgravity.

 

Three good chutes ... This was Blue Origin's first New Shepard flight since May 19, when one of the crew capsule's three main parachutes failed to open fully on the descent. The passengers on that flight were fine, and Blue Origin says the capsule can return safely with just a single parachute if two fail. Blue Origin said it identified the cause of the parachute issue on the May flight, but didn't offer details other than that the investigation "focused on the dis-reefing system that transitions the parachutes from the reefed to the disreefed state that did not function as designed on one of the three parachutes on NS-25," Space News reports.

 

ABL's rocket test failure damaged ground systems. A fiery malfunction on an Alaska launch pad last month not only destroyed the RS1 rocket ABL Space Systems was preparing for launch, but also damaged some ground systems at the site, ABL said in an update posted on X. The company said a fire developed "external to RS1's base" after the booster's 11 engines shut down during an aborted test-firing at Kodiak Island, Alaska. The fire was fed by fuel leaks from two of the engines, and ABL's launch team was able to use water and inert gases to suppress the fire for more than 11 minutes. But the remote launch site doesn't have a direct water supply, and mobile water tanks ran dry, causing the fire to grow until the rocket collapsed. ABL said a majority of the plumbing and electrical connections to the launch mount were damaged, but the launch mount's structure, flame deflector, and other equipment were unharmed.

 

Few details on next steps ... ABL published a detailed update on its investigation into the test failure, and its openness is worth noting. Engineers found two of the engines—the ones that leaked and fueled the fire—experienced "combustion instability" during their startup sequence. ABL said it believes differences in this RS1 rocket, called a Block 2 design, resulted in a higher-energy startup than expected. The company will return its damaged ground support equipment from Alaska to a facility in Long Beach, California, for refurbishment, and ABL says its next RS1 rocket is "well into production." But the company didn't share any information on corrective actions or a timeline for implementing them and returning to the launch pad with RS1. ABL aims to compete with other, more established small satellite launch companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace, but its RS1 rocket hasn't made it far from the launch pad. ABL's first orbital launch attempt in January 2023 ended when the RS1 rocket lost power and fell back on its launch pad.

 

Hello, 2025, for Rocket Factory Augsburg. Rocket Factory Augsburg no longer plans a maiden flight this year after losing part of its RFA One rocket during a static fire test, Space News reports. “We won’t be firing another first stage this year and the first test flight has also been postponed until next year,” RFA spokesperson Jonas Kellner told Space News via email. The German startup had aimed to fly RFA One for the first time in a matter of weeks, before its first stage was destroyed August 19 during tests at SaxaVord Spaceport, Scotland. The inaugural mission had appeared set to be the first-ever vertical launch to orbit from British soil.

 

Post-mortem ... RFA has identified a fire in an oxygen pump on one of the rocket's nine engines as the cause for the test failure. The company released a video of raw footage from the fiery incident on X, showing several views of the fire igniting and growing until the RFA One rocket's first-stage booster tipped over and fell off its test stand in Scotland. RFA's chief operating officer, Stefan Brieschenk, said in the video that the company is working on a second booster for the RFA One rocket, with more than 100 improvements. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Falcon 9 booster lost on landing. For the first time in more than three years, SpaceX lost one of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters on landing following a liftoff Wednesday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with a batch of Starlink Internet satellites, Ars reports. The booster touched down on SpaceX's drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean, but it was destroyed after it tipped over a moment later. Before Wednesday's landing failure, SpaceX had landed 267 boosters in a row. The company's last failure occurred in February 2021. The cause of the failure was not immediately clear, and SpaceX said "teams are assessing the booster's flight data and status." This booster was SpaceX's fleet leader and was on its 23rd flight since debuting in November 2020. The Falcon 9's upper stage continued into orbit and successfully deployed its Starlink payloads.

 

FAA grounding ... The Federal Aviation Administration grounded SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket family while the company investigates what went wrong with the landing. But the grounding is likely to be short-lived, and the FAA will allow SpaceX to resume Falcon 9 launches once the company shows the cause of the failure does not impact public safety. A timetable for Falcon 9's return to flight was unclear at the time of this writing; however, SpaceX has not ruled out launching another Starlink mission on a Falcon 9 from California as soon as Thursday night (local time in California). Meanwhile, the all-private Polaris Dawn crew mission was supposed to launch this week from Florida, but it has been delayed primarily by a poor weather forecast in the Dragon spacecraft's offshore recovery zone. Jared Isaacman, commander of the mission, posted on X Thursday that the cause of the Falcon 9 booster landing failure "is well understood."

 

Space Command chief laments China's space debris problem. The head of US Space Command said Wednesday he would like to see more transparency from the Chinese government on space debris, especially as one of China's newer rockets has shown a propensity for breaking apart and littering low-Earth orbit with hundreds of pieces of space junk, Ars reports. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of US Space Command, says he has observed some improvement in the dialogue between US and Chinese military officials this year. But the disintegration of the upper stage from a Long March 6A rocket earlier this month showed China could do more to prevent the creation of space debris and communicate openly about it when it happens.

 

China lags behind US and Russia ... US launch companies typically either reserve enough propellant on their upper stages to remove them from orbit after they deploy their payloads, or vent their tanks and drain their batteries to reduce any explosive hazards if the rockets will remain adrift in space. Russian rockets also do this. But China has a track record of leaving behind a lot of space junk. Space Command says two Long March 6A incidents in the last two years have created more than 800 pieces of debris in orbit. LeoLabs, a commercial company specializing in tracking orbiting objects, says there are nearly 1,000 abandoned rocket bodies in low-Earth orbit, with an average mass of 1.5 metric tons. "While Russia and the US have improved their 'rocket body abandonment behavior' over the last 20 years, the relative contribution by other countries has grown by a factor of five and China by 50x," LeoLabs says.

NASA's launch tower is more expensive than the world's tallest building. NASA's problems with the mobile launch tower that will support a larger version of its Space Launch System rocket are getting worse rather than better, Ars reports. According to a new report from NASA's inspector general, the estimated cost of the tower, which is a little bit taller than the length of a US football field with its end zones, is now $2.7 billion. Such a cost is nearly twice the funding it took to build the largest structure in the world, the Burj Khalifa, which is seven times taller. This is a remarkable explosion in costs as, only five years ago, NASA awarded a contract to the Bechtel engineering firm to build and deliver a second mobile launcher (ML-2) for $383 million, with a due date of March 2023. That deadline came and went with Bechtel barely beginning to cut metal.

 

Why does NASA need two launch platforms? … This second mobile launcher (ML-2) is required for an upgraded version of the SLS rocket that will begin flying with the Artemis IV mission, which is slated to be the second lunar landing mission for NASA's Artemis program. This version of the SLS, called the Block 1B, is taller than the SLS Block 1 rocket that flew in 2022 on the Artemis I mission, and will fly again on Artemis II and III. The SLS Block 1B has a more powerful Boeing-built upper stage with four engines, instead of the single engine on SLS Block 1, to haul heavier cargo out to the vicinity of the Moon. Artemis IV has a nominal launch date in 2028, but there's practically zero chance of this happening due to the issues with building ML-2, aside from any rocket or spacecraft problems that may crop up.

 

SpaceX is beefing up its own launch tower. Pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks, workers wielding welding guns and torches have climbed onto SpaceX's Starship launch pad in South Texas to make last-minute upgrades ahead of the next test flight of the world's largest rocket, Ars reports. Most of the work appears to be on two mechanical arms that will close around the Starship rocket's Super Heavy booster as it slows to a near-hover over the launch pad. SpaceX intends to use the arms to catch the booster in mid-air after it returns to Earth on the next Starship test flight, which will be the fifth full-scale launch of Starship overall. It will be the first time SpaceX tries to recover the Super Heavy booster intact.

 

More to do … While Starship, itself, appears to be ready to fly, SpaceX officials clearly believe there's more work to do on the launch pad. Closer views revealed welders are installing structural supports, or doublers, to certain parts of the catch arms. Elsewhere on the arms, workers were seen removing and adding other unknown pieces of hardware. SpaceX hasn't specified exactly what kind of work teams are doing on the Starship launch pad in Texas, but the focus is on beefing up hardware necessary for catching the Super Heavy booster. The FAA, meanwhile, says it is reviewing SpaceX's proposed flight plan for the next Starship flight, which presumably includes a description of the planned catch of the booster.

 

FAA review of Starship on hold. The Federal Aviation Administration has answered one question about why it suddenly postponed public meetings earlier this month related to SpaceX's proposal to increase the flight rate of the Starship rocket from Texas. The FAA said Thursday that it postponed the meetings after the FAA became aware of allegations that SpaceX violated the Clean Water Act at its Starbase launch facility located at Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. "The FAA was unable to confirm the accuracy of certain representations in SpaceX's license application and the draft tiered environmental assessment prior to the public meetings," the agency said in a statement.

 

SpaceX has strongly denied these claims ... This all stems from a story published by CNBC on August 12 reporting that SpaceX violated environmental regulations by repeatedly releasing pollutants into or near bodies of water. In a series of posts on X, SpaceX strongly denied the accusations, saying that its water deluge system at Starbase uses only potable water, and that state and federal environmental regulators told the company it could continue launch operations.

Next three launches

TBD: Falcon 9 | Starlink 9-5 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | TBD

TBD: Falcon 9 | Starlink 8-10 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | TBD

TBD: Falcon 9 | Polaris Dawn | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | TBD

Early on Wednesday morning, at 3:48 am ET local time, a Falcon 9 rocket booster making its 23rd launch took off from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

 

The mission successfully delivered 21 Starlink satellites, including 13 of the larger vehicles with direct-to-cell capabilities, before attempting a landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas. However, the experienced booster had a shortfall of stability and tipped over shortly following touchdown.

 

Prior to Wednesday's landing failure, SpaceX had landed 267 boosters in a row. The company's last failure occurred in February 2021. The cause of the failure was not immediately clear, and SpaceX said "teams are assessing the booster's flight data and status." Based on video of the landing, it is possible there was an engine burn timing issue.

Fleet leader

This particular first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket made its debut in November 2020, launching the GPS III-04 mission for the US Space Force. By making its 23rd launch on Wednesday morning, Booster 1062 briefly became the fleet leader of SpaceX's collection of first stages that perform a majority of the company's launches.

 

Booster landings are considered secondary objectives to a launch's primary mission of delivering payloads into orbit. However, in recent years SpaceX has delayed launches due to poor recovery weather conditions, as it does not want to lose the first-stage hardware, which probably costs at least $20 to $30 million to manufacture, test, and deliver to the launch site.

 

The landing failure had one immediate consequence for the company's launch manifest. A second Starlink launch planned for early Wednesday morning, from the other side of the country at Vandenberg Space Force Base, was scrubbed so that SpaceX could assess the cause of the landing issue with the Florida launch.

Implications for Polaris Dawn

It is not clear whether the landing problem will impact the high-profile Falcon 9 launch of the Polaris Dawn mission, carrying Jared Isaacman and three other pilots and engineers on an adventurous mission to an orbit more than 1,200 km above the Earth before performing the first private spacewalk.

 

A planned launch of this mission on early Tuesday morning was scrubbed after a helium leak was discovered in the ground systems that support the rocket. Then, a second launch attempt of the vehicle on early Wednesday was scrubbed several hours before liftoff due to weather issues. Meteorologists are concerned about sea states for the Crew Dragon vehicle's landing three to five days after liftoff, when the spacecraft returns to Earth in the seas near Florida.

 

"Our launch criteria are heavily constrained by forecasted splashdown weather conditions," Isaacman wrote on X on Tuesday evening. "With no ISS rendezvous and limited life support consumables, we must be absolutely sure of reentry weather before launching. As of now, conditions are not favorable tonight or tomorrow, so we’ll assess day by day."

 

The earliest that the Polaris Dawn mission could launch is now Friday morning, at 3:38 am ET (07:38 UTC) from Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. But that is dependent on both weather and, now, SpaceX becoming comfortable with understanding the landing failure of Wednesday morning's Starlink launch.

Seven months after its first lunar lander fell short of reaching the Moon, Astrobotic announced Tuesday that the spacecraft was stricken by a valve failure that caused a propellant tank to burst in orbit. The company's next landing attempt, using a much larger spacecraft, will include fixes to prevent a similar failure.

 

Astrobotic's first Peregrine lander, which the company called Peregrine Mission One, launched January 8 aboard United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket. But soon after separating from the rocket in space, the lander ran into trouble as it stepped through an activation sequence to begin priming its propulsion system.

 

A review board determined "the most likely cause of the malfunction was a failure of a single helium Pressure Control Calve called a PCV—Pressure Control Valve 2, within the propulsion system," said John Horack, a space industry veteran and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Ohio State University.

 

Helium was supposed to pressurize Peregrine's propulsion system and force fuel and oxidizer from the lander's onboard storage tanks into the spacecraft's small rocket engines to combust and generate thrust.

 

"PCV2 suffered a loss of seal capability that was most likely due to a mechanical failure in the valve caused by vibration-induced relaxation between some threaded components that are inside the valve, so a failure deep inside the valve itself," said Horack, who chaired Astrobotic's investigation into the failure of the Peregrine lander.

 

It didn't take long for the valve malfunction to have catastrophic consequences for Astrobotic's Peregrine lunar lander, which was attempting to become the first US spacecraft since 1972 to achieve a soft landing on the Moon.

 

"Upon actuating, opening, and closing the PCV2, helium began to flow uncontrollably into the oxidizer tank, and that caused a significant and rapid over-pressurization of the tank," said John Thornton, Astrobotic's CEO. "Unfortunately, the tank then ruptured and subsequently leaked oxidizer for the remainder of the mission.”

 

Astrobotic's ground controllers, working out of a control center at the company's headquarters in Pittsburgh, acted quickly to stabilize the situation on the spacecraft. The lander's engines used hydrazine fuel mixed with nitrogen tetroxide to generate thrust, but with its diminished supply of nitrogen tetroxide, Peregrine was unable to maneuver into orbit around the Moon and attempt a landing.

 

But the company kept the lander alive, and ground teams were able to make small adjustments to ensure Peregrine's solar panels pointed toward the Sun to produce power as it arced on a loop that reached approximately the distance of the Moon. Ten-and-a-half days after launch, Earth's gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere, and it burned up over the remote Pacific Ocean.

 

Astrobotic developed and built the Peregrine lander under contract to NASA, which awarded the company a $108 million contract to deliver a suite of government-sponsored science payloads to the lunar surface. Peregrine Mission One was the first mission launched under the umbrella of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which buys transportation from commercial vendors for science payloads heading to the Moon.

Going to the Moon on a budget

It turns out Astrobotic officials were aware of the risk of a pressure control valve failing on the Peregrine spacecraft. The lander had two of these valves, one controlling the flow of helium into the fuel tank, and another into the oxidizer tank. During ground testing before the mission, the pressure control valve on the fuel side started leaking, so engineers swapped it out for a new one. The similar valve on the oxidizer side, which ended up failing in space, showed no problems during ground tests, according to Sharad Bhaskaran, Astrobotic's mission director for Peregrine Mission One.

 

Although the pressure control valve on the oxidizer side was the same design, Astrobotic decided not to replace it because doing so would have required disassembling large portions of the Peregrine lander, further delaying the mission's launch, which was already running several years behind schedule.

 

Tests of a spare pressure control valve that were conducted following the Peregrine mission confirmed it could leak after engineers subjected it to vibrations like those it would experience during a rocket launch.

 

“You’ve got a threaded component inside the valve," Horack said. "So you can think about a screw and a washer, or any threaded component. And if you shake it sufficiently, you can get some changes in the mechanical configuration that will prevent the valve from seating. And it's pretty much no different than when your sink starts to drip in your kitchen. Water gets through the seal and comes out the other side. In this case, it’s helium and it's high pressure, so it's much harder to confine."

 

Astrobotic did not identify the third-party vendor who supplied the pressure control valve, but officials said the company is working with its supplier to redesign the component. "It is slightly different than the actual valve that flew on Peregrine, the same vendor, but we worked closely with them to redesign the internal workings," said Steve Clarke, Astrobotic's vice president of landers and spacecraft.

Astrobotic's next lander, named Griffin, is larger and more complex than Peregrine. It will use the redesigned pressure control valves, and Astrobotic will install pressure regulators and so-called latch valves in the helium system on Griffin. These new components would control the flow of helium into the propellant tanks in the event of a similar pressure control valve failure on Astrobotic's next mission, officials said Tuesday.

 

"We’ve got increased reliability now in the system to mitigate against that single point failure," Clarke said.

Accepting risk

One of the key tenets of NASA's CLPS program is to foster the development of a new commercial industry for transporting instruments and cargo to the Moon. These CLPS missions are precursors to future human lunar landings with the Artemis program, and CLPS contractors are trying to reach the Moon for a fraction of the cost of a typical NASA mission.

 

Thornton, Astrobotic's CEO, said the company had to make "tough decisions" on the Peregrine mission to keep costs down. NASA set up the CLPS program to use firm fixed price contracts, similar to the contracts the agency uses for commercial crew and cargo services for the International Space Station. This puts Astrobotic and the other CLPS companies on the hook for any cost overruns.

 

But unlike those programs, NASA didn't offer any of the CLPS contractors up-front money to develop their spacecraft.

 

"We do have to keep it in context that this is not a multibillion-dollar mission," Thornton said. "These are the first missions. It’s a little bit like the first launch of a new launch vehicle in a commercial paradigm. How many times have we seen a first launch fail? It’s part of the development cycle. It’s part of how we learn. It’s part of how we get better as an industry."

 

NASA officials have said they're willing to accept risk on the CLPS program. When the agency set up the program in 2018, officials used the sports analogy of taking "shots on goal" for the approach they wanted to take with CLPS.

 

Intuitive Machines, a Houston-based company, launched the second CLPS mission a month after Astrobotic's failed Peregrine mission. Their Nova-C lander touched down on the Moon on February 22, marking the first successful controlled lunar landing by a US spacecraft in more than 51 years.

 

Astrobotic currently has one more CLPS contract to use the Griffin lander. NASA originally contracted with Astrobotic to use Griffin to deliver a half-ton rover named VIPER to the Moon's south polar region. But NASA canceled the VIPER rover project in July after it ran over budget and behind schedule. NASA is soliciting ideas from US companies to take over the VIPER rover, which is fully assembled but in need of testing, if the companies can afford to pay the remaining costs to get it to the launch pad.

 

NASA is keeping its $323 million contract with Astrobotic for the Griffin lander mission, which is now slated to launch in late 2025, but the agency won't have any significant science payloads on the spacecraft. Thornton said Astrobotic is seeking opportunities to fill some of the Griffin lander's excess capacity with payloads from other customers, but time is short, with a launch scheduled for next year.

 

NASA will provide Astrobotic with a mass simulator to maintain the weight and balance of the Griffin lander without VIPER. The space agency is also flying a laser retroreflector array on Griffin, and Astrobotic will use the mission to deploy its own privately-developed small lunar rover, a fraction of the size of VIPER, on the Moon.

 

Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA's science directorate, told reporters last month that he wants to see Astrobotic demonstrate the Griffin lander because it can deliver heavier cargo to the lunar surface than most other CLPS providers. Astrobotic says Griffin can deliver nearly 1,400 pounds (625 kilograms) of payload mass to the lunar surface, while Peregrine has a payload capacity of up to 220 pounds (100 kilograms).

 

Astrobotic doesn't have any more missions on the books with its smaller Peregrine lander, but Bhaskaran said the Peregrine design could be repurposed as a tug or a spacecraft platform for applications other than lunar landings.

 

Other important systems on the Peregrine lander performed well over the craft's 10-and-a-half days of operations. All of the other anomalies on the spacecraft were either resolved in real-time by Astrobotic's ground team, or were not significant, company officials said.

 

“I think the decisions that were made at each point in time were sound engineering decisions and sound programmatic decisions," Horack said. "If you're going to ask me what I wish we had, I wish we had a more robust design of the valve. Sometimes hardware just fails."

 

"We’re trying to do a mission at a price point that has never been possible before, and as such, we have to make decisions on where to focus and how quickly we can get to launch, and we’re trying to balance that," Thornton said. "And I think we got really, really close. I’m very confident that with Griffin, we’re going to hit the right balance, and we’re going to stick that landing and be ultimately successful.”

SpaceX is set to launch the 14th crewed flight on its Dragon spacecraft early on Tuesday morning—and it's an intriguing one.

 

This Polaris Dawn mission, helmed and funded by an entrepreneur and billionaire named Jared Isaacman, is scheduled to lift off at 3:38 am ET (07:38 UTC) on Tuesday from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

 

This is just the second free-flying Crew Dragon mission that SpaceX has flown, and like the Inspiration4 mission that came before it, Polaris Dawn will once again field an entire crew of private astronauts. Although this is a private spaceflight, it really is not a space tourism mission. Rather, it seeks to push the ball of exploration forward. Isaacman has emerged as one of the most serious figures in commercial spaceflight in recent years, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fly into space and push forward the boundaries of what private citizens can do in space.

 

"The idea is to develop and test new technology and operations in furtherance of SpaceX's bold vision to enable humankind to journey among the stars," Isaacman said last week during a news conference ahead of Tuesday's launch.

A novel step forward

Isaacman, chief executive of the Shift4 payments company, led the Inspiration4 mission in September 2021, which was unique because the crew consisted of himself—an experienced pilot—and three newcomers to spaceflight. Isaacman used the world's first all-civilian spaceflight, on a private vehicle, to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity and expand the window of who could become an astronaut.

 

Yet whereas Inspiration4 felt like something of a novelty, Polaris Dawn is truly pushing the boundary of private spaceflight forward. Working closely with SpaceX, Isaacman has plotted a five-day flight that will accomplish a number of significant tasks after it launches.

 

During the initial hours of the spaceflight, the crew will seek to fly in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching an altitude as high as 1,400 km (870 miles) above the planet's surface. This will be the highest Earth-orbit mission ever flown by humans and the farthest any person has flown from Earth since the Apollo Moon landings more than half a century ago. This will expose the crew to a not insignificant amount of radiation, and they will collect biological data to assess harms.

 

The Resilience spacecraft will then descend toward a more circular orbit about 700 km above the Earth's surface. Assuming a launch on Tuesday, the crew will don four spacesuits on Friday and open the hatch to the vacuum of space. Then Isaacman, followed by mission specialist Sarah Gillis, will each briefly climb out of the spacecraft into space.

 

Isaacman's interest in performing the first private spacewalk accelerated, by years, SpaceX's development of these spacesuits. This really is just the first generation of the suit, and SpaceX is likely to continue iterating toward a spacesuit that has its own portable life support system (PLSS). This is the "backpack" on a traditional spacesuit that allows NASA astronauts to perform spacewalks untethered to the International Space Station.

 

The general idea is that, as the Starship vehicle makes the surface of the Moon and eventually Mars more accessible to more people, future generations of these lower-cost spacesuits will enable exploration and settlement. That journey, in some sense, begins with this mission's brief spacewalks, with Isaacman and Gillis tethered to the Dragon vehicle for life support.

 

Lasers and SpaceXers

Isaacman and his crew will also conduct a number of other research experiments, including trying to better understand a recently detected but major concern of space habitation, spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. This will also be the first crewed mission to test Starlink-based laser communications in space.

 

Then, there is the crew. Isaacman's close friend, retired US Air Force Col. Scott "Kidd" Poteet, will be the mission's pilot, with Gillis and Anna Menon serving as mission specialists. Both Gillis and Menon are SpaceX engineers who worked with Isaacman during Inspiration4. Now, they'll become the first SpaceX employees to ever go into orbit, bringing their experiences back to share with their colleagues.

 

This is the first of three "Polaris" missions that Isaacman is scheduled to fly with SpaceX. The plan for the second Polaris mission, also to fly on a Dragon spacecraft, has yet to be determined. But it may well employ a second-generation spacesuit based on learnings from this spaceflight. The third flight, unlikely to occur before at least 2030, will be an orbital launch aboard the company's Starship vehicle—making Isaacman and his crew the first to fly on that rocket.

 

Jumping into a new car from the driver's seat of something built before 2010 can cause quite the case of future shock. Over that time, automakers have been on a technology frenzy, loading up new vehicles with all manner of gizmos, gadgets, and features, some meant to make your life easier, others to make your journey safer. But do car buyers actually want all this stuff? A new survey by JD Power suggests they may not.

 

With enough time, a new convenience feature just becomes something buyers expect to be there. Starter motors replaced hand cranks for a reason, and I imagine most modern motorists would prefer not to deal with manual chokes. Manual window winders became more expensive and heavier than electric ones, leading to their extinction.

 

Some of the technology creep has come about by regulation or the threat of it. While many bemoan the "iPad on the dash," the legal requirement for a backup camera means there needs to be a screen in the car to display that feed. Steering wheels and dashboards grew to conceal airbags. And now vehicle fascias conceal sensors that can alert the driver or stop the car in the event of an imminent head-on crash.

 

But according to JD Power's Tech Experience Survey, which "measures problems encountered and the user experience with advanced technologies as they first enter the market," advanced technology in cars needs to solve real problems, and too much tech simply doesn't do that.

 

For example, drivers generally appreciate advanced driver assistance systems, known as ADAS in the industry; blind spot monitoring solves a real problem. But does anyone ever actually use their automatic parking system? JD Power found that systems that partially automate a driving task—even the most advanced hands-free systems—had a low perceived usefulness, a finding that dovetails nicely with data published last month by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety that revealed partial automation did not make cars any safer.

Enough with the screens

My current bete noir is the trend for automakers to include an additional infotainment screen directly in front of the front passenger, separate from the main infotainment screen in the center stack. Blame Ferrari, which started adding a passenger screen to its supercars in the perhaps misguided impression that Ferrari drivers wanted their passengers to know how fast they were actually going.

 

The early Ferrari passenger displays were somewhat limited, but they have morphed into a second fully fledged infotainment display for the not-driver. Porsche did this with the Taycan, then Mercedes brought us the "hyperscreen," which was really three separate displays and plenty of blank dashboard, all bonded to a single sheet of glass. The latest trick, as seen in some new Audis, is to have an active privacy mode so that the passenger can watch video but the driver can't see anything at all on that display.

 

If the idea of giving passengers their own display when there's already one immediately next to it sounds excessive, welcome to my club. We're not alone—JD Power says passenger screens are negatively reviewed by many owners and notes that "it is difficult for dealers to teach new owners how to use the primary infotainment screen, let alone a second one."

 

Other examples of new technology solving a nonexistent problem include facial recognition, fingerprint scanners, and gesture control. Having experienced all three in various new cars over the past few years, I am not surprised by their inclusion. I never felt safe enough, though, with Genesis' facial recognition to leave the key at home, and BMW's gesture controls mean that you might accidentally turn the sound system to full volume if you talk with your hands too much.

 

But not every new innovation was met with opprobrium. JD Power calls out AI-based features like smart climate control as having quickly won popularity.

 

"A strong advanced tech strategy is crucial for all vehicle manufacturers, and many innovative technologies are answering customer needs," said Kathleen Rizk, senior director of user experience benchmarking and technology at JD Power. "At the same time, this year’s study makes it clear that owners find some technologies of little use and/or are continually annoying."

 

The market research company says its tech survey is designed to help automakers decide where to invest their R&D resources. If we start seeing any objectionable in-car tech become less common, we'll know which OEMs were paying attention.

 

Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency's most experienced contractors, won the lion's share of government money available to end the agency's sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.

 

At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.

 

A decade later the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft's first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule June 5, will instead return to Earth inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn't confident enough in Boeing's spacecraft after it suffered multiple thrusters failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS.

 

So where does this leave Boeing with its multibillion contract? Can the company fulfill the breadth of its commercial crew contract with NASA before the space station's scheduled retirement in 2030? It now seems that there is little chance of Boeing flying six more Starliner missions without a life extension for the ISS. Tellingly, perhaps, NASA has only placed firm orders with Boeing for three Starliner flights once the agency certifies the spacecraft for operational use.

Boeing's bottom line

Although Boeing did not make an official statement Saturday on its long-term plans for Starliner, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters he received assurances from Boeing's new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, that the company remains committed to the commercial crew program. And it will take a significant commitment from Boeing to see it through. Under the terms of its fixed price contract with NASA, the company is on the hook to pay for any expenses to fix the thruster and helium leak problems and get Starliner flying again.

 

Boeing has already reported $1.6 billion in charges on its financial statements to pay for delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program. That figure will grow as the company will likely need to redesign some elements in the spacecraft's propulsion system to remedy the problems encountered on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. NASA has committed $5.1 billion to Boeing for the Starliner program, and the agency has already paid out most of that funding.

The next step for Starliner remains unclear, and we'll assess that in more detail later in the story. Had the Starliner test flight ended as expected, with its crew inside, NASA targeted no earlier than August 2025 for Boeing to launch the first of its six operational crew rotation missions to the space station. In light of Saturday's decision, there's a high probability Starliner won't fly with astronauts again until at least 2026.

 

Starliner safely delivered astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station on June 6, a day after their launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. But five of the craft's 28 reaction control system thrusters overheated and failed as it approached the outpost. After the failures on the way to the space station, NASA's engineers were concerned Starliner might suffer similar problems, or worse, when the control jets fired to guide Starliner on the trip back to Earth.

 

On Saturday, senior NASA leaders decided it wasn't worth the risk. The two astronauts, who originally planned for an eight-day stay at the station, will now spend eight months on the orbiting research lab until they come back to Earth with SpaceX.

If it's not a trust problem, is it a judgement issue?

Boeing managers had previously declared Starliner was safe enough to bring Wilmore and Williams home. Mark Nappi, Boeing's Starliner program manager, regularly appeared to downplay the seriousness of the thruster issues during press conferences throughout Starliner's nearly three-month mission.

 

So why did NASA and Boeing engineers reach different conclusions? "I think we’re looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does," said Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator, and the agency's most senior civil servant. "It’s not a matter of trust. It’s our technical expertise and our experience that we have to balance. We balance risk across everything, not just Starliner."

 

The people at the top of NASA's decision-making tree have either flown in space before, or had front-row seats to the calamitous decision NASA made in 2003 to not seek more data on the condition of space shuttle Columbia's left wing after the impact of a block of foam from the shuttle's fuel tank during launch. This led to the deaths of seven astronauts, and the destruction of Columbia during reentry over East Texas. A similar normalization of technical problems, and a culture of stifling dissent, led to the loss of space shuttle Challenger in 1986.

 

"We lost two space shuttles as a result there not being a culture in which information could come forward," Nelson said Saturday. "We have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection, you come forward. Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest, and even at its most routine. And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine. So the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety."

 

Now, it seems that culture may truly have changed. With SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft available to give Wilmore and Williams a ride home, this ended up being a relatively straightforward decision. Ken Bowersox, head of NASA's space operations mission directorate, said the managers polled for their opinion all supported bringing the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without anyone onboard.

 

However, NASA and Boeing need to answer for how the Starliner program got to this point. The space agency approved the launch of the Starliner CFT mission in June despite knowing the spacecraft had a helium leak in its propulsion system. Those leaks multiplied once Starliner arrived in orbit, and are a serious issue on their own that will require corrective actions before the next flight. Ultimately, the thruster problems superseded the seriousness of the helium leaks, and this is where NASA and Boeing are likely to face the most difficult questions moving forward.

 

Boeing's previous Starliner mission, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), successfully launched in 2022 and docked with the space station, later coming back to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico. The test flight achieved all of its major objectives, setting the stage for the Crew Flight Test mission this year. But the spacecraft suffered thruster problems on that flight, too.

 

Several of the reaction control system thrusters stopped working as Starliner approached the space station on the OFT-2 mission, and another one failed on the return leg of the mission. Engineers thought they fixed the problem by introducing what was essentially a software fix to adjust timing and tolerance settings on sensors in the propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne.

 

That didn't work. The problem lay elsewhere, as engineers discovered during testing this summer, when Starliner was already in orbit. Thruster firings at White Stands, New Mexico, revealed a small Teflon seal in a valve can bulge when overheated, restricting the flow of oxidizer propellant to the thruster. NASA officials concluded there is a chance, however small, that the thrusters could overheat again as Starliner departs the station and flies back to Earth—or perhaps get worse.

 

"We are clearly operating this thruster at a higher temperature, at times, than it was designed for," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "I think that was a factor, that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully, we’re operating the thruster outside of where it should be operated at."

In the doghouse

This is the fundamental design flaw that will cause the Starliner test flight to come to a disappointing end. The thrusters are clustered in four doghouse-shaped propulsion pods around the circular perimeter of the Starliner spacecraft's service module. Thermal modeling now shows these doghouses act like a thermos, trapping heat from the thrusters as they fire over and over in pulses.

 

“As we look back at OFT-2 now, with this newer lens of what we learned at White Sands, certainly we could have explored OFT-2 in a little more detail, either leading to some redesign of the doghouse to get the thermal environmental lower, or operate the thrusters differently," Stich said.

 

"It’s easier to do that in hindsight," he said. "If we had went back and thought about the whole integrated problem a little bit more, could we have done some kind of testing? What I would say is it’s very difficult to test the doghouse environment on the ground, where you’ve got thrusters that fire in multiple directions, and it's very hard on the ground to have a test facility, a vacuum chamber, that accommodates thruster firings in multiple directions.

 

"We thought, obviously, we had done enough analysis to show that the thrusters would be within the temperatures that they were qualified for," Stich said. "Clearly, there were some misses in qualification. We’re going to go through that data in more detail post-flight, and then figure out what we can do to go fix them.”

 

He said NASA is also re-evaluating its qualification and certification processes to determine if the agency should change any of its procedures to reduce the chance of any similar misses in the future.

 

Scott Hubbard, a former director of NASA's Ames Research Center and a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, told Ars earlier this month that NASA and Boeing should revisit their decision to launch the Crew Flight Test with unresolved technical problems. "Was the decision well-supported, or did someone have 'launch fever?'" Hubbard asked.

 

Starliner's problems go back much further than 2022. Software woes cut short Starliner's first test flight in 2019 before it could dock at the International Space Station, and they forced Boeing to fly a second test flight, OFT-2, to gain confidence that the spacecraft could safely fly astronauts. NASA and Boeing then delayed the second unpiloted test flight nearly a year to overcome an issue with corroded valves in the ship's propulsion system.

 

Last year, just a couple of months before it was supposed to launch on the crew test flight, officials discovered a design problem with Starliner's parachutes and found that Boeing installed flammable tape inside the capsule's cockpit. All of that happened before Starliner reached the launch pad for the CFT mission.

 

SpaceX, which NASA has tapped to rescue the Starliner crew, has now launched eight operational long-duration crew missions to the International Space Station to date, plus an initial piloted test flight of the Dragon spacecraft in 2020, and several more fully private human spaceflight missions. SpaceX has finished all of its work in its initial commercial crew contract with NASA, and is now working off of an extended contract to carry the program through 2030, the planned retirement date for the ISS.

What's next for Starliner?

NASA officials said Saturday it is premature to decide whether the agency will require Boeing to conduct yet another test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, or if Starliner could be pressed into operational service after Boeing resolves the myriad problems with the craft's propulsion system.

 

In either case, don't count on another Starliner crew flight next year. NASA will have to continue leaning on SpaceX, which has shown it is up to the task of launching long-duration crews to the space station every six months. The agency's goal from the start of the commercial crew program has been to fully certify SpaceX and Boeing for operational crew missions, allowing NASA to alternate between Crew Dragon and Starliner missions, with each company flying once per year.

 

This would give NASA another layer of redundancy for getting its crews to the space station. Right now, the prime route is through SpaceX. NASA continues to fly one astronaut on each Russian Soyuz spacecraft, in exchange for a seat for a Russian cosmonaut on each SpaceX crew mission.

 

It's not yet clear if NASA will officially classify the situation with the Starliner Crew Flight Test as a "mishap" or a "loss of mission." Such a determination could trigger a more formal independent investigation, which might trigger longer delays in Starliner's next flight, in whatever form it takes.

 

One thing that could complicate the investigation into the thruster problem is that the control jets are located on the Starliner service module, which jettisons from the crew section of the spacecraft before reentry. The service module will burn up over the Pacific Ocean, so engineers won't have a chance to get their hands on the suspect hardware.

 

Assuming the investigation doesn't uncover any additional problems, and NASA and Boeing return Starliner to flight with astronauts in 2026, there will not be enough time left in the space station's remaining life—as it stands today—for Starliner to fly all six of its contracted missions at a rate of one per year. It's difficult to imagine a scenario where NASA elects to fly astronauts to the space station exclusively on Starliner, given SpaceX's track record of success and the fact that NASA is already paying SpaceX for crew missions through the end of this decade.

 

It is noteworthy to mention here that NASA has only given Boeing the "Authority To Proceed" for three of the potential six operational Starliner missions. This milestone, known as ATP, is a decision point in contracting lingo where the customer—in this case, NASA—places a firm order for a deliverable. NASA has previously said it awards these task orders about two to three years prior to a mission's launch.

 

The commercial crew contracts are structured as Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) agreements, where NASA can order individual missions from SpaceX and Boeing as needed. If SpaceX keeps performing well and the space station is actually decommissioned in 2030, it may turn out that NASA officials decide they just don't need more than three operational flights of Starliner.

 

But that would mean NASA turning its back on a decade-and-a-half of established policy. Apart from ensuring redundancy for crew transportation to the space station, one of the reasons for selecting two contractors in 2014 was to allow Boeing and SpaceX to compete on technical ability and price. A decade later, there's a clear winner on these criterion.

 

After retiring the International Space Station, NASA wants commercial companies to deploy human outposts in low-Earth orbit. Ideally, these future space stations will be cheaper to operate than the ISS, and open to use by NASA and money-making commercial ventures. Future space station operators will require transportation for crew and cargo, just as the ISS does.

 

Some companies involved in commercial space stations are in direct competition with SpaceX. For example, Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, has partnered with Boeing to ferry people to and from its proposed Orbital Reef space station using Starliner, rather than choosing SpaceX for the job.

 

But there are many open questions about when the first commercial space stations might be in orbit, and the market outlook for these projects. In the end, with human lives at stake and a bottom line to worry about, the owners of a private space station will almost certainly go with the less expensive, flight-proven vehicle to transport people to and from orbit.

 

NASA and its international partners haven't ruled out extending the life of the ISS beyond 2030. If that happens, Boeing's Starliner could be in the mix for more crew flights. However, once NASA and its partners give the "go" to nudge the ISS out of orbit, its fiery plunge through the atmosphere will not just be the coda to 30-plus years of space station operations, it may also mark the end of Boeing's foray into the realm of commercial human spaceflight.

Following weeks of speculation, NASA finally made it official on Saturday: two astronauts who flew to the International Space Station on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in June will not return home on that vehicle. Instead, the agency has asked SpaceX to use its Crew Dragon spacecraft to fly astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth.

 

"NASA has decided that Butch and Suni will return with Crew-9 next February," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson at the outset of a news conference on Saturday afternoon at Johnson Space Center.

 

In a sign of the gravity surrounding the agency's decision, both Nelson and NASA's deputy administrator, Pam Melroy, attended a Flight Readiness Review meeting held Saturday in Houston. During that gathering of the agency's senior officials, an informal "go/no go" poll was taken. Those present voted unanimously for Wilmore and Williams to return to Earth on Crew Dragon. The official recommendation of the Commercial Crew Program was the same, and Nelson accepted it.

 

Therefore, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will undock from the station early next month—the tentative date, according to a source, is September 6—and attempt to make an autonomous return to Earth and land in a desert in the southwestern United States.

 

Then, no earlier than September 24, a Crew Dragon spacecraft will launch with two astronauts (NASA has not named the two crew members yet) to the space station with two empty seats. Wilmore and Williams will join these two Crew-9 astronauts for their previously scheduled six-month increment on the space station. All four will then return to Earth on the Crew Dragon vehicle.

 

Saturday's announcement has big implications for Boeing, which entered NASA's Commercial Crew Program more than a decade ago and lent legitimacy to NASA's efforts to pay private companies for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station. The company's failure—and despite the encomiums from NASA officials during Saturday's news conference, this Starliner mission is a failure—will affect Boeing's future in spaceflight. Ars will have additional coverage of Starliner's path forward later today.

Never could get comfortable with thruster issues

For weeks after Starliner's arrival at the space station in early June, officials from Boeing and NASA expressed confidence in the ability of the spacecraft to fly Wilmore and Williams home. They said they just needed to collect a little more data on the performance of the vehicle's reaction control system thrusters. Five of these 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed during the trip to the space station.

 

Engineers from Boeing and NASA tested the performance of these thrusters at a facility in White Sands, New Mexico, in July. Initially, the engineers were excited to replicate the failures observed during Starliner's transit to the space station. (Replicating failures is a critical step to understanding the root cause of a hardware problem.)

 

However, what NASA found after taking apart the failed thrusters was concerning, said the chief of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, Steve Stich.

 

"I would say the White Sands testing did give us a surprise," Stich said Saturday. "It was this piece of Teflon that swells up and got in the flow path and causes the oxidizer to not go into the thruster the way it needs to. That's what caused the degradation of thrust. When we saw that, I think that's when things changed a bit for us."

 

When NASA took this finding to the thruster's manufacturer, Aerojet Rocketdyne, the propulsion company said it had never seen this phenomenon before. It was at this point that agency engineers started to believe that it might not be possible to identify the root cause of the problem in a timely manner and become comfortable enough with the physics to be sure that the thruster problem would not occur during Starliner's return to Earth.

Thank you for flying SpaceX

The result of this uncertainty is that NASA will now turn to the other commercial crew provider, SpaceX. This is not a pleasant outcome for Boeing which, a decade ago, looked askance at SpaceX as something akin to space cowboys. I have covered the space industry closely during the last 15 years, and during most of that time Boeing was perceived by much of the industry as the blueblood of spaceflight while SpaceX was the company that was going to kill astronauts due to its supposed recklessness.

 

Now the space agency is asking SpaceX to, in effect, rescue the Boeing astronauts currently on the International Space Station.

 

It won't be the first time that SpaceX has helped a competitor recently. In the last two years SpaceX has launched satellites for a low-Earth orbit Internet competitor, OneWeb, after Russia's space program squeezed the company; it has launched Europe's sovereign Galileo satellites after delays to the Ariane 6 rocket; and it has launched the Cygnus spacecraft built by NASA's other space station cargo services provider, Northrop Grumman, multiple times. Now SpaceX will help out Boeing, a crew competitor.

 

After Saturday's news conference, I asked Jim Free, NASA's highest-ranking civil servant, what he made of the once-upstart SpaceX now helping to backstop the rest of the Western spaceflight community. Without SpaceX, after all, NASA would not have a way to get crew or cargo to the International Space Station.

 

"They're flying a lot, and they're having success," Free said. "And you know, when they have an issue, they find a way to recover like with the second-stage issue, We set out to have two providers to take crew to station to have options, and they've given us the option. In the reverse, Boeing could have been out there, and we still would face the same thing if they had a systemic Dragon problem, Boeing would have to bring us back. But I can't argue with how much they've flown, that's for sure, and what they've flown."

Lithium-ion battery fires can be intense and frightening. As someone who used to repair second-hand smartphones, I’ve extinguished my fair share of flaming iPhones with punctured lithium-ion batteries. And the type of smartphone battery in your pocket right now is similar to what’s inside of electric vehicles. Except, the EV battery stores way more energy—so much energy that some firefighters are receiving special training to extinguish the extra-intense EV flames that are emitted by burning EV batteries after road accidents.

 

If you’ve been reading the news about EVs, you’ve likely encountered plenty of scary articles about battery fires on the rise. Recently, the US National Transportation Safety Board and the California Highway Patrol announced they are investigating a Tesla semi truck fire that ignited after the vehicle struck a tree. The lithium-ion battery burned for around four hours.

 

Does this mean that you should worry about your personal electric vehicle as a potential fire hazard? Not really. It makes more sense to worry about a gas-powered vehicle going up in flames than an electric vehicle, since EVs are less likely to catch fire than their more traditional transportation counterparts.

 

“Fires because of battery manufacturing defects are really very rare,” says Matthew McDowell, a codirector of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Battery Center. “Especially in electric vehicles, because they also have battery management systems.” The software keeps tabs on the different cells that comprise an EV’s battery and can help prevent the battery from being pushed beyond its limits.

How do electric vehicle fires happen?

During a crash that damages the EV battery, a fire may start with what’s called thermal runaway. EV batteries aren’t one solid brick. Rather, think of these batteries as a collection of many smaller batteries, called cells, pressed up against each other. With thermal runaway, a chemical reaction located in one of the cells lights an initial fire, and the heat soon spreads to each adjacent cell until the entire EV battery is burning.

 

Greg Less, director of the University of Michigan’s Battery Lab, breaks down EV battery fires into two distinct categories: accidents and manufacturing defects. He considers accidents to be everything from a collision that punctures the battery to a charging mishap. “Let's take those off the table,” says Less. “Because, I think people understand that, regardless of the vehicle type, if you're in an accident, there could be a fire.”

 

While all EV battery fires are hard to put out, fires from manufacturing defects are likely more concerning to consumers, due to their seeming randomness. (Think back to when all those Samsung phones had to be recalled because battery issues made them fire hazards.) How do these rare issues with EV battery manufacturing cause fires at what may feel like random moments?

 

It all comes down to how the batteries are engineered. “There's some level of the engineering that has gone wrong and caused the cell to short, which then starts generating heat,” says Less. “Heat causes the liquid electrolyte to evaporate, creating a gas inside the cell. When the heat gets high enough, it catches fire, explodes, and then propagates to other cells.” These kinds of defects are likely what caused the highly publicized recent EV fires in South Korea, one of which damaged over a hundred vehicles in a parking lot.

How to react if your EV catches fire

According to the National Fire Prevention Agency, if an EV ever catches fire while you’re behind the wheel, immediately find a safe way to pull over and get the car away from the main road. Then, turn off the engine and make sure everyone leaves the vehicle immediately. Don’t delay things by grabbing personal belongings, just get out. Remain over 100 feet away from the burning car as you call 911 and request the fire department.

 

Also, you shouldn’t attempt to put out the flame yourself. This is a chemical fire, so a couple buckets of water won’t sufficiently smother the flames. EV battery fires can take first responders around 10 times more water to extinguish than a fire in a gas-powered vehicle. Sometimes the firefighters may decide to let the battery just burn itself out, rather than dousing it with water.

 

Once an EV battery catches fire, it’s possible for the chemical fire to reignite after the initial burn dies down. It’s even possible for the battery to go up in flames again days later. “Both firefighters and secondary responders, such as vehicle recovery or tow companies, also need to be aware of the potential for stranded energy that may remain in the undamaged portions of the battery,” says Thomas Barth, an investigator and biomechanics engineer for the NTSB, in an emailed statement. “This energy can pose risks for electric shock or cause the vehicle to reignite.”

 

Although it may be tempting to go back into the car and grab your wallet or other important items if the flame grows smaller or goes out for a second, resist the urge. Wait until your local fire department arrives to assess the overall situation and give you the all clear. Staying far away from the car also helps minimize your potential for breathing in unhealthy fumes emitted from the battery fire.

How could EV batteries be safer?

In addition to quick recalls and replacements of potentially faulty lithium-ion batteries, both researchers I spoke with were excited about future possibilities for a different kind of battery, called solid-state, to make EVs even more reliable. “These batteries could potentially show greater thermal stability than lithium-ion batteries,” says McDowell. “When it heats up a lot, it may just remain pretty stable.” With a solid-state battery, the liquid electrolyte is no longer part of battery cells, removing the most flammable aspect of battery design.

 

These solid-state batteries are already available in some smaller electronics, but producing large versions of the batteries at vast scale continues to be a hurdle that EV manufacturers are working to overcome.

 

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

 

With the impending arrival of the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccines approved yesterday, some Americans are now gaming out when to get their dose—right away while the summer wave is peaking, a bit later in the fall to maximize protection for the coming winter wave, or maybe a few weeks before a big family event at the end of the year? Of course, the group pondering such a question is just a small portion of the US.

 

Only 22.5 percent of adults and 14 percent of children in the country are estimated to have gotten the 2023–2024 vaccine. In contrast, 48.5 percent of adults and 54 percent of children were estimated to have gotten a flu shot. The stark difference is despite the fact that COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus is evolving faster than seasonal influenza viruses.

 

In a press briefing Friday, federal health officials were quick to redirect focus when reporters raised questions about the timing of COVID-19 vaccination in the coming months and the possibility of updating the vaccines twice a year, instead of just once, to keep up with an evolving virus that has been producing both summer and winter waves.

 

"The current problem is not that the virus is evolving so much, at least in terms of my estimation," Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, told journalists. "It's that we don't have the benefits of the vaccine, which is [to say] that it's not vaccines that prevent disease, it's vaccination. It's getting vaccines in arms." When exactly to get the vaccine is a matter of personal choice, Marks went on, but the most important choice is to get vaccinated.

Estimates for this winter

The press briefing, which featured several federal health officials, was intended to highlight the government's preparations and hopes for the upcoming respiratory virus season. The FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are urging all Americans to get their respiratory virus vaccines—flu, COVID-19, and RSV.

 

CDC Director Mandy Cohen introduced an updated data site that provides snapshots of local respiratory virus activity, national trends, data visualizations, and the latest guidance in one place. HHS, meanwhile, highlighted a new outreach campaign titled "Risk Less. Do More." to raise awareness of COVID-19 and encourage vaccination, particularly among high-risk populations. For those not at high risk, health officials still emphasize the importance of vaccination to lower transmission and prevent serious outcomes, including long COVID. "There is no group without risk," Cohen said, noting that the group with the highest rates of emergency department visits for COVID-19 were children under the age of 5, who are not typically considered high risk.

 

So far, CDC models are estimating that this year's winter wave of COVID-19 will be similar, if not slightly weaker on some metrics, than last year's winter wave, Cohen said. But she emphasized that many assumptions go into the modeling, including how the virus will evolve in the near future and the amount of vaccine uptake. The modeling assumes the current omicron variants stay on their evolutionary path and that US vaccination coverage is about the same as last year. Of course, beating last year's vaccine coverage could blunt transmission.

Free tests coming

"We need to continue to be vigilant," Cohen said, emphasizing that we should protect ourselves with vaccines, testing, and treatments. "We have the tools to do it. We just need to use them."

 

To that end, Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, made the announcement in today's briefing that in late September, the government will once again provide free COVID-19 tests. Households will be able to order four free tests on the website COVIDTests.gov.

 

The FDA's Marks, meanwhile, highlighted yesterday's vaccine approvals and explained further why the agency has taken such a firm stance to try to couple the vaccines against flu and COVID-19, which are unquestionably different diseases. It comes down to opportunity, he said.

 

"The point of this campaign is that, if you have someone in the [doctor's] office and you can get them to get a COVID-19 vaccine while they're getting their flu vaccine, and we get that immunity into them, then that is probably better even than what we have now, which is people who haven't had a COVID-19 vaccine for one or two years," Marks said. "Even though COVID is not the flu, being able to get that shot in the arm is what we really need to have happen."

 

There's also the fact that winter is still when we see the highest levels of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, Cohen noted.

When to get vaccinated

For those who are already certain they'll get a COVID-19 vaccine this year and are only deciding on when exactly to get it, the officials offered some things to consider. First, the CDC recommends that Americans get their 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccines sometime in September or October, with the idea of boosting protection against the winter wave (not necessarily the summer wave). Deciding whether to go within that window or later, Marks leaned on the earlier side, though he considered it a personal choice.

 

"We're talking about a vaccine that is covering a virus that is continuing to evolve. And it is likely that what is going to be there in four or five months from now will further evolve from where it is now," Marks said. "Now, getting vaccinated a little later probably will help protect against it then, too. But getting vaccinated now probably gives you the maximum amount of protection against what is currently circulating, and that will last for several months at least."

 

"I can tell you," he concluded, "I already have my appointment."