Breaking News & Random Musings on Space, Technology, Sci-Fi & the View From A Writer’s Window
On March 16, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander completed its mission as lunar night arrived. It was a spectacular success in every sense and marks a new era for commercial space missions.
As the craft shut down, it sent one final message home.
Don't worry, Blue Ghost. You'll have plenty of friends - human and robotic - to keep you company soon.
It's a historic day for private space exploration. Early Sunday morning, Firefly Space's Blue Ghost stuck the landing, making it the first fully successful private, commercial moon landing!
On a tiny nanofiche onboard Blue Ghost reside two of my short stories, "Apogee" and "Solatium," as part of the Lunar Codex. All the thanks to Samuel Peralta for making so many writers' and artists' dream come true.
Blue Ghost is ALSO carrying a bucketload of science. Instruments will investigate the structure and composition of the moon’s mantle, the heat flow at different depths beneath the lunar surface, the interaction of solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field, and the impact of solar radiation on the lunar surface.
The lander also carries the Lunar PlanetVac, which is designed to collect regolith from the lunar surface that could be returned to Earth as part of a separate mission, and the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment, which will test the ability to use GPS signals at lunar distances.
Blue Ghost will operate for about 14 Earth days on the lunar surface. On March 14, Firefly expects to capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse when the Earth blocks the sun above the moon’s horizon. How amazing is that going to be?
That’s one heck of a selfie, Athena!
This image is from the Intuitive Machines Nova-C “Athena” lunar craft, which is currently headed toward the moon for a scheduled March 6 landing.*
* Wholly incidentially, with a digital recording of three of my short stories, Venatoris, Re/Genesis and Chrysalis, on board (along with hundreds of other stories, novels and art). I am super excited!
Blue Origin was successful on its first test launch of the New Glenn rocket! Official statement:
“New Glenn safely reached its intended orbit during today's NG-1 mission, accomplishing our primary objective. The second stage is in its final orbit following two successful burns of the BE-3U engines. The Blue Ring Pathfinder is receiving data and performing well. We lost the booster during descent. We knew landing the first stage on the first try was ambitious. We'll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch in the spring. We're thrilled with today's outcome.”
Learn more here: https://www.blueorigin.com/news/new-glenn-ng-1-mission
Two of my short stories, APOGEE and SOLATIUM, are trying for the moon again! Overnight, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket carrying (among numerous NASA and commercial payloads) the Lunar Codex, Samuel Peralta's passion project, a beautiful collection of stories, art, music and more. I am honored beyond words to have my these stories reach the stars and find a home on the moon!
It'll be a little while before Blue Ghost attempts a lunar landing, however. It will spend the next 25 days in Earth orbit, undergoing a variety of systems checks and gathering data. It will then conduct an engine burn and hopefully reach the moon 4 days later, where it will orbit for 16 days before attempting a touchdown in Mare Crisium.
If the landing is successful, Blue Ghost will deliver the Lunar Codex to its home on the lunar surface. Then it spend 2 weeks capturing imagery of the lunar sunset and provide critical data on how lunar regolith reacts to solar influences during lunar dusk conditions, before retiring with the lunar night.
Well OF COURSE brain chips are going to replace phones. One of my safest "predictions," to be honest. And I love that the future is going to be weird!
““The Future is Going to Be Weird.” Elon Musk Predicts Brain Chips Will Eventually Replace Phones”: https://thedebrief.org/the-future-is-going-to-be-weird-elon-musk-predicts-brain-chips-will-eventually-replace-phones/
Starship's fourth test flight went so beautifully! As before, it cruised around the planet for around 40 minutes. This time, the SuperHeavy booster not only survived re-entry, but completed its landing burn and a soft splashdown in the ocean, intact.
And the big news: the ship survived re-entry through the atmosphere, completed its flip and landing burn and splashed down as well. Now, the trip down was spicy AF, and it landed beat up, with the landing flaps hanging on by a thread. But it made it, which is *more* than SpaceX was expecting today (the focus was on making it through the atmosphere without, well, exploding).
Every test has achieved so much more than the last; the iteration SpaceX is able to achieve is incredible.
For the first time in 52 years, an American craft has landed on the moon. And for the first time EVER, it's a private, commercial craft. The company is Intuitive Machines, and the craft is Odysseus.
It was a "spicy" landing, in the words of IM's CEO. As the target landing time neared, they realized that its laser rangefinders weren't working properly. So they implemented a workaround to get the required altitude and velocity data, pressing into service an experimental NASA instrument aboard Odysseus called NDL ("Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing)."
The team delayed the planned touchdown by two hours to make the fix, which required them to beam a software patch to Odysseus from mission control in Houston. That is a heroic effort and an incredible achievement by the engineers at IM.
Now, Odysseus IS somewhat...sideways. See the pic for the adorable reenactment IM performed at the press conference yesterday. But slightly off-kilter or not, the craft is very much alive and doing science. It's solar panels are exposed and drawing power, virtually all of its payloads are accessible, and nothing got crushed. IM expects the craft to operate for several days before it loses that precious sunlight needed to power it.
This mission was part of a NASA initiative called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, or CLPS, in which the space agency is paying private companies to deliver science experiments and other cargo to the lunar surface. (The failed Astrobotic Peregrine mission last month was the first CLPS mission, and there are I think 7 more scheduled over the next 18 months.)
Odysseur landed at the lunar south pole, which is about to be the hottest real estate in space, for one reason: water!
Link to a great article about the mission and the landing: https://www.universetoday.com/165864/odysseus-moon-lander-is-tipped-over-but-still-sending-data/
And a fascinating article out today with a behind-the-scenes look at the people at Intuitive Machines who saved the mission over and over again: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/it-turns-out-that-odysseus-landed-on-the-moon-without-any-altimetry-data/
"Shoot for the moon - even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
I haven't posted about this before now, because the ultimate fate of the Peregrine spacecraft wasn't certain until yesterday. But now I can tell the story in full.
The space enthusiasts among you probably know that Peregrine successfully launched early last week, with a planned lunar landing in February. However, a propellant leak once it reached space derailed those plans. The team made a remarkable recovery, and the craft did reach lunar distance (but the moon wasn't there at the moment) and did a lot of science before sweeping back toward earth; it burned up safely in the atmosphere yesterday.
In the image below, top left is the DHL MoonBox, which held the tiny digital record of my short stories, Apogee, Solatium, Venatoris, Re/Genesis, Fractals, Chrysalis and Starlight Express, together with the writings and art of thousands of other creators, thanks to the tireless efforts of Susan Kaye Quinn (Writers on the Moon) and Samuel Peralta (Lunar Codex).
So for a time my stories soared among the stars where they belong, before returning home. And because Sam Peralta never, ever gives up (and understands the power of redundancies!), the Lunar Codex will also be flying on at least four additional lunar missions by Astrobotic and Inuitive Machines in the next year, so those stories will get to the moon soon enough!
Ad Astra, Per Aspera
What life might be thriving here, one wonders?
The photograph comes from a group that calls itself the Association of Widefield Astrophotographers, and the photo was a 100-hour project by six participants in the United States, Poland, and the United Kingdom. They collected data over several months to produce the image.
According to the organization, "Our goal with this project was to prove that very expensive equipment and dark skies aren’t required to create unique images of faint objects. Since most of us are high schoolers and college students with a passion for astronomy, our summer jobs did not allow us to afford the expensive gear used by most astrophotographers."
Learn more here.
Starship gets stacked ahead of its second test flight on Saturday!
From SpaceX: “This is another chance to put Starship in a true flight environment, maximizing how much we learn. Rapid iterative development is essential as we work to build a fully reusable launch system capable of carrying satellites, payloads, crew, and cargo to a variety of orbits and Earth, lunar, and Martian landing sites.”
If you are curious about the nuts-and-bolts of how ChatGPT and other LLMs work, this is a great article. Long, but written in an accessible and understandable way. It's pretty fascinating.
Just look at these photos!
From SpaceX on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1702774532174733387:
“Starship represents a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”
Starship flew Thursday morning! And for 4 minutes and 1 second, we watched the dawn of the future of human spaceflight.
...then stage separation failed and the ship experienced a Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.
Only in rocket testing can you have an incredible success and also a giant explosion, all on the same flight. SpaceX seems very happy with the test (clearing the pad without destroying it was apparently a big win, lol). Expect a second test launch in 1-2 months.
Image Credit: John Kraus (https://twitter.com/johnkrausp.../status/1649047541651210244)
The FAA has finally given its approval to SpaceX, and the first real Starship test launch is scheduled for next Monday morning! (If Monday doesn’t work out, there are additional launch windows on Tuesday and Wednesday).
Note: even if all goes perfectly, Starship will not quite reach Earth orbit in this test. Also, there’s a reasonable chance it will explode - Elon has been very honest about this. The Falcon 9 exploded a few times before it flew, too, and it’s now flown over 100 times.
Learn more about the test flight here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/green-light-go-spacex-receives-a-launch-license-from-the-faa-for-starship/, and you can watch it live on SpaceX’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5QXreqOrTA.
Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One is officially launching to the moon on May 4th (yes, yes, May the Fourth Be With You). This mission is near and dear to my heart, as many of my short stories will be onboard the lander! Along with the works of many other writers, artists and musicians), as part of the Lunar Codex project. I’m very excited.
Originally posted on Twitter.
Rocket Lab has just joined SpaceX in the club of space companies that can launch an orbital-class rocket booster and bring it back alive.
In a sense, the California-based company one-upped SpaceX by having a helicopter snag the first-stage booster of its Electron rocket with a cable and a hook as it floated past on the end of a parachute, 6,500 feet above the Pacific Ocean.
Read more about it here: https://www.universetoday.com/155706/they-did-it-rocket-lab-uses-copter-to-catch-and-release-a-rocket/
Originally posted on Twitter.
Captain Kirk has finally made it to space and come home again! (Or if he's in a time loop, gone to space for the first time of many?).
His words on returning are for the ages. “That was unlike anything you’ll ever feel, ever.”
"Everybody in the world needs to do this. Needs to see this. It was unbelievable."
"What you have given me is the most profound experience you can imagine. I hope I never recover from it. What I feel right now, I don't want to lose it."
...and now I'm bawling. Who wants to go? #ToBoldlyGo
Also, how incredible does Shatner look? 90 years old, seriously? He doesn't look a day over 70.
Originally posted on Facebook.
It was a big week for the future of civilian and tourist space flight! SpaceX completed the first "all-private" crew to space in a Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket. The Inspiration4 mission was privately funded and will be raising money for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
The crew orbited the Earth for 3 days - can you imagine it? Then they returned safely home from what will be the first of many such missions.
You can learn more about the crew members here: https://www.upi.com/.../SpaceX.../7831631288629/, and more about the entire mission here: https://inspiration4.com/.
Special shout-out to the stuffed golden retriever tagging along for the adventure.
Originally posted on Facebook.
We're going to be using Starlink for internet at the new house, and yesterday I received an email updating beta users on upcoming improvements to the service. This email contains the word "space," followed immediately by the word "lasers."
THE WORD "SPACE." FOLLOWED BY THE WORD "LASERS." #giddy
Originally posted on Facebook.
