Abort Tests, Salts, and Spacewalks | SPACE NEWS

Hello, citizens of Earth. It's me, Jared, and welcome aboard Station 204. Now, this week we've got two departures and an arrival to talk about, so let's head on over to our space traffic report. And we have undocking. We start in low Earth orbit with the departure of Soyuz MS-12 on October 3rd at 0737 Universal Time. The Soyuz spacecraft was carrying Commander Alexei Ovchinin, NASA Flight Engineer Nick Haig, and the first astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, Hazza Ali Al-Mansouri, who spent eight days aboard the International Space Station. After a successful deorbit burn, a normal re-entry and landing in Kazakhstan occurred at 1059 Universal Time. All three astronauts were in good health after landing. You'll note that Commander Alexei Ovchinin and NASA Flight Engineer Nick Haig were involved in the Soyuz MS-10 abort that happened in the middle of launch in October of 2018. So, to get back on top of a rocket and do a mission after going through that, yep, that is the right stuff. Expedition 61 now has six astronauts on board the International Space Station. Luca Parmitano, the first Italian commander of a spacecraft, along with Flight Engineers Alexander Skvortsov, Oleg Skripochka, Christina Koch, Drew Morgan, and Jessica Meir. China's on a hot streak of launches, and they've continued by lofting Gaofen 10 on a Long March 4C at 1851 Universal Time on October 5th. Successfully deployed into a polar orbit, Gaofen 10 has an imaging system able to see details as small as one meter across. It will be used for urban planning, land surveys, crop studies, and disaster relief. And here's this week's upcoming arrivals and departures. If you follow my Twitter feed, you know that I am a stickler for safety. And it always was my least favorite thing about the Space Shuttle that it didn't have an abort system. And unfortunately, NASA learned this lesson quite painfully. Well, with SpaceX and Boeing, before they're being allowed to fly crews to the International Space Station as a part of commercial crew, they are having to go through tests to see what their abort systems do in the most difficult times to have an abort during ascent. SpaceX's second Crew Dragon has arrived at the Cape and is undergoing final checkouts. It'll be performing an in-flight abort, specifically at the part of flight where the launch vehicle is undergoing the maximum force of air against it during the entire ascent, what you've probably heard called Max Q. Accelerating away from a failing rocket below you while you've got the atmosphere hammering you? That is an absolute worst case scenario. This is being done to ensure that if any astronauts are on board, the eight SuperDraco engines built into Crew Dragon are able to pull them safely away, and that both structure and parachutes perform as expected, making a bad day in the space business survivable. Those SuperDracos are pretty potent, hitting 16,000 pounds of thrust within a fraction of a second, all thanks to a hypergolic combination of nitrogen tetroxide and monomethylhydrazine. A flown Stage 1 and brand new second stage of a Falcon 9 sans Merlin vacuum engine will be used to carry Crew Dragon up to the proper speed and altitude for the test. The nine Merlin engines on the first stage will then be commanded to shut down, and Crew Dragon will get the heck out of there. SpaceX will not attempt to recover the Stage 1, as they expect it and the second stage to break apart under aerodynamic stress. No astronauts will be on board, just instrumentation. You'll recall that SpaceX has already performed a pad abort test with a mock-up Crew Dragon back in 2015, where it successfully demonstrated the ability of the SuperDracos to pull the capsule away from potential danger on the launch pad below. Boeing, meanwhile, is at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, preparing their Starliner for a pad abort test. In September of 2019, the service module is attached to the Starliner capsule, and fueling is currently underway. Those abort engines, known as the RS-88s, generate about 50,000 pounds of thrust. As you can see, with these and the SuperDracos, no one is messing around here. After this test, Starliner will be cleared for its first orbital test flight, which will not have a crew on board. No astronauts will be flying inside the spacecraft during either test, no matter how fast I would line up to take that ride. But you'll notice something. SpaceX has done a pad abort, and they're about to do an in-flight abort. But Boeing, they're only doing a pad abort. What's up with that? That's NASA's call. Both contracts to either company stipulated that a pad abort test must be done. But an in-flight abort test, that's at the discretion of the company. SpaceX, they elected to do so. Boeing, they exercised their option not to. Read a little bit more. You'll even see that the pad abort tests weren't required before the first uncrewed test flights. So no, it's not favoritism to some old guard company. It's a quirk of the contract. Always read the fine print. Now, NASA is putting a heavy emphasis on safety. There's no denying that. And you really can't blame them. After the Apollo 1 accident and the two shuttle accidents, the human spaceflight program came within a hair's breadth of being completely canceled. And NASA, they really don't want to take that kind of a risk anymore. So if you think that working to improve the safety of spaceflight by an order of magnitude is a waste of time and money, well, I can come on over and help you remove all the seat belts and airbags from your car. I'm sure that you'll be fine. Now, moving on to something that's just as salty. Here's Jade. Curiosity has stumbled upon a salty surprise in the Gale Crater and has uncovered yet another puzzle piece in the very colorful history of the Red Planet. Although salts on Mars have been previously detected by Martian orbiters, this is the first time a rover has used its instruments to study these salty remnants. These salts, left behind by evaporated water, come in the form of sulfate-enriched sedimentary rock, dating back to about 3.3 to 3.7 billion years ago. Because the rocks alternate from salty to, well, less salty, these latest measurements indicate that Mars may not have just suddenly dried up in one swoop, but instead went through several phases of drying and overflowing. By studying the bedrock, scientists are able to piece together the climate fluctuations that transformed Mars from the wet and habitable to the arid and lifeless Mars we all know and love today. Residing in smaller beds around the crater, scientists have speculated that these highly concentrated segmented ponds could have been the homes to halo-tolerant biota, or life adapted to high-salinity environments, similar to what we see in high-saline bodies of water here on Earth, like the Great Lake in Utah. Hence, the search for life, or evidence thereof, continues. Additionally, unlike typical dried-up lake beds, the salts found in Gale Crater are mineral salts, not table salts, meaning ancient Martian life could have had one heck of an Epsom salt bath back in the day. And this is pretty great, because it just further validates why we chose Gale Crater to study in the first place. Years after its original mission expiration date, curiosity is still trekking along and proving to us time and time again that there is still much to be learned about our planetary cousin. Knowledge that we can, and will, extrapolate to planet Earth. Plus, it makes me that much more excited for Mars 2020. Back to you, Jared. Well, Jade, I'm still feeling a little salty. So, in order to brine myself some more time, let's head on over to Dr. Tamitha Scove for this week's space weather. Space weather this week definitely remains a bit on the quiet side. As we flip to our front side, Sun, you can see we actually do have a couple bright regions on the Earth-facing disk, despite the fact that we're knee-deep in solar minimum right now. The interesting thing is that the biggest of these regions, this was region 2749, it did emerge as a sunspot for a short while, and now it's kind of dying out slowly and diving back below the surface. But that was a cycle 24 sunspot. The other really notable thing is that we got two high-latitude bright regions. Now, these did not become sunspots. They didn't get bright enough and strong enough for it. However, they had solar cycle 25 polarity. So, this is one of the few times we've ever seen a cycle 24 sunspot and two cycle 25 sunspots in each hemisphere all at the same time. So, this tells us that the Sun is definitely getting much closer to starting solar cycle 25, so we are watching it with bated breath. Now, switching to our backside Sun, you can see it's been pretty quiet on the Sun's backside as well. Now, we do have a coronal hole that's going to be rotating into Earth view here in the next few days, probably three or four days. And in about two weeks or so, it could give us a small solar storm. But until that happens, things are going to continue to be pretty quiet. Switching to our Moon, we are now passing through the first quarter phase on our way to a full Moon, with the full Moon being on the 13th. So, you night sky watchers, if you want to catch those dim objects in the sky, you're going to have to check your local rise and set times. For more details on this week's space weather, including those new cycle bright regions, and whether or not they are boosting the solar flux, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Small satellite launch companies right now are a dime a dozen. This really reminds me of NewSpace back in the early aughts, when everyone and their grandma had a spaceflight company. And only a few, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, have survived and even thrived in today's environment. Well, in the coming years, there is going to be a mass extinction in the small sat launch year category, but there is one company that right now is doing all the right things and getting all the right opportunities in order to make sure that they stay around for a relativity long time. Bad puns aside, Relativity Space is trying to enter into a market that's projected to quadruple in size by the end of the 2020s. As a startup, fundraising rounds can make or break you, but Relativity just landed a slam dunk, 140 million dollars. 140 million dollars is one of the largest sums ever raised in a funding round for an aerospace company. And you might have heard of some of these investors too, like the actor Jared Leto or the businessman Mark Cuban. In total, Relativity has 185 million dollars of funding committed to it, and the company has said that this is more than enough to carry them through its first orbital launch from the Cape, which they're aiming for in 2021 with their Terran 1 rocket, which can chuck 900 kilograms to a polar orbit. Relativity is a super exciting company to me because of how they're going to be assembling their rockets. They're not using some kind of new material that they developed themselves. They're not also looking to the past and using old school stuff that you see as a new school kind of way of doing it. They're not using some kind of exotic propulsion system that sends it from the Earth to orbit in whatever way. They're going to be printing their rockets. Relativity already has four of the largest metallic 3D printers in the world, dubbed Stargate, and after tests wrap up, they'll start printing the first flight-ready Terran 1 rocket. Relativity already has several customers lined up, like Telesat, the company Spaceflight, and a small sat tie company called Moospace. And Relativity says that right now they can print one rocket per month. And think about that. Relativity is still at the beginning stages of themselves as a company, and they're already talking about building one rocket per month. I don't even know how many they can print once they optimize that. Like, that's going to be a lot of rockets per month. They've already fired their Aeon Methylox engine 200 times, and they went back to their payload fairing and decided to expand it from two to three meters in diameter. So, Relativity, they're looking well on their way to delivering on their goal of a launch in 2021. And you can actually catch Relativity CEO Tim Ellis on tomorrow's Space Orbit 11.19. Then we talk shop, printing rockets. Now, talk about ambition. And what's even better about that is they're making it happen. Everything needs maintenance from time to time. Like, I have to clean out the gutters at my house every fall, and I actually do have to still go do that. And, you know, my Jeep, it needs an oil change. It needs to have its tires rotated. I have to get under it to make sure I haven't damaged any parts of it when I'm going off-road. So, you know, maintenance kind of a thing. And space, well, space is no different. You still got to make sure that all of your systems are working correctly and also repairing and upgrading and other things. And a slew of spacewalks is getting ready to do that on the International Space Station. So it's kind of like no different than cleaning off your granite countertops, except you're moving at eight kilometers per second. These suited-up astronauts transferred to battery power at 1139 Universal Time on October 6th, with Christina Koch and Drew Morgan heading outside for the first extravehicular activity in a month-long campaign to remove the station's old nickel-hydrogen batteries and install upgraded lithium-ion batteries in their place. Over seven hours and one minute, both astronauts carefully shuffled back and forth at the end of the station's port-side truss. Koch and Morgan completed the work well ahead of time, which allowed them to remove and install more batteries, a task that was expected to occur during a second spacewalk on October 11th. A final set of lithium-ion batteries will be delivered by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's planned HTV-9 mission in May of 2020, in which another long series of spacewalks will have completely removed all nickel-hydrogen batteries from the ISS. More spacewalks are scheduled this month, with the upcoming ones on October 11th, 16th, 21st, and 26th at the recording of this Space News episode. Now, those are also going to be swapping out the old batteries for the new ones. And if that wasn't enough for you, there will also be a Russian spacewalk on October 31st. So that sets up October to be a six EVA month. In November and December, another series of spacewalks, five total, will see astronauts working to fix the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle physics experiment that's on the outside of the station. And this is considered to be the most complex spacewalks since the Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions. So these would probably be some that you're going to want to watch live. Thanks for watching this week's Space News on Tomorrow. Don't forget, we also do have a live show on Saturdays at 1800 Universal Time. And you're going to want to catch the one this week because we have a very interesting guest for Orbit 12.32. Laura Farsyk, author of Rise of the Space Age Millennials, a book she's done that's due for release in January of 2020. She's also the founder of Astrolytical Space Consulting. So if you're fascinated by all of this new stuff that's happening in space right now, you're definitely going to want to tune in. And of course, a huge thank you to all of the citizens of Tomorrow. We wouldn't be able to do Space News without you. We wouldn't be able to do our live shows without you. And we wouldn't be able to hit our ultimate goal, which is to get everyone excited about spaceflight without your help. 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