Category: space exploration

Starship launch likely today in the next 1.5 hours. Watch NOW!

April 20, 2023 • 8:09 am

I’m posting this quickly, as you don’t want to miss it. Elon Musk’s Starship, designed to be the vehicle to take people to live on Mars or the Moon, is scheduled to launch this morning after the first launch was scrubbed a few days ago.

The one-hour launch window is between 9:28 and 10:28 a.m. Eastern, or 8:28 and 9:28 a.m. Chicago time, and 2:28 to 3:28 pm London time. That means the window starts about 20 minutes after this post goes up. The vehicle will circle most of the globe and is slated to come down

To see it, click on the screenshot below to go to the SpaceX site, and then click the “watch” box, which I’ve circled in red. You’ll be sent to another screen and then you’ll have to hit “watch” AGAIN. Who can fathom Elon Musk.

From the NYT:

What is Starship?

It is the tallest rocket ever built — 394 feet tall, or nearly 90 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty with the pedestal.

And it has the most engines ever in a rocket booster: The Super Heavy, the lower section that will propel the Starship vehicle to orbit, has 33 of SpaceX’s powerful Raptor engines sticking out of its bottom. They are able to generate 16 million pounds of thrust at full throttle, far more than the Saturn V that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

Starship is designed to be entirely reusable. The Super Heavy booster is expected to land much like SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rockets, and Starship will be able to return from space belly-flopping through the atmosphere like a sky diver before pivoting to a vertical position for landing.

Why is SpaceX building Starship?

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is the most frequently launched rocket in the world. Starship is the next step. It would be able to carry far more cargo and many more people than Falcon 9. And because it is fully reusable, Starship could greatly reduce the cost of launching payloads to orbit.

NASA is paying SpaceX to build a version of the vehicle to carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon’s surface for the Artemis III and IV missions later in the decade. The spacecraft is also central to Mr. Musk’s vision of sending people to Mars.

What will happen during the flight?

For the test flight on Thursday, Starship will fly almost completely around the Earth, starting from Texas and splashing down in waters off Hawaii.

About eight minutes after the launch on Thursday, the Super Heavy booster will splash into the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship vehicle will fly higher into space, reaching an altitude of about 150 miles and traveling around the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere. If it survives re-entry, about 90 minutes after launching, it will splash into the Pacific Ocean some 62 miles north of the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

But with all the new systems in Starship, the SpaceX founder acknowledged the difficulties of achieving all of the flight’s goals.

“There’s a million ways this rocket could fail,” Mr. Musk said. “I could go on for hours.”

h/t: Jim Batterson

Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic promotes the “compatibility of science and faith” by finding religious people who like science

April 6, 2023 • 9:15 am

This article in the Atlantic isn’t really written by staff writer Conor Friedersdorf, who’s published some good things in the magazine, but is a series of readers’ answers to a question he posed earlier. But it does serve to tout religion and faith, and to promote false claims that science and religion are compatible become some religious people are science fans. (I went after this misunderstanding in Faith Versus Fact.)

Friedersdorf’s into to the piece below:

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I quoted the late astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan on humanity’s place in the cosmos, and asked readers for their thoughts on outer space.

And here is the question he asked his readers:

This week, five planets are aligning in the night sky: Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars will all be visible just after sunset, alongside the moon. I’d like to take this cosmic occasion to ask: What role has outer space played in your life, your worldview, or your imagination?

Or: How, if at all, should we keep exploring it?

He then quotes Carl Sagan:

In Cosmos, the astronomer and astrophysicist did his best to give readers a sense of the unfathomable:

No planet or star or galaxy can be typical, because the Cosmos is mostly empty. The only typical place is within the vast, cold, universal vacuum, the everlasting night of intergalactic space, a place so strange and desolate that, by comparison, planets and stars and galaxies seem achingly rare and lovely. If we were randomly inserted into the Cosmos, the chance that we would find ourselves on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion … Worlds are precious.

In Pale Blue Dot, he writes:

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Maybe we humans ought to spend more time in dark places gazing up at the night sky.

And of course he was inundates with answers about the effect of the planetary alignment—and space exploration itself—on readers’ worldviews.  Surprisingly some readers responded with thoughts about God, or perhaps Friedersdorf selected answer that mention God. Regardless, I think that it’s misleading to couch the answers as showing “The Surprising Compatibility of Science and Faith.”  All it really shows is that people can believe in God and also evince wonder at the universe at the same time, or that science-friendly people can be religious. This of course gives the impression that the readers’ answer buttress some kind of comity between science and faith.   To my mind, that’s not compatibility but cognitive dissonance, as I argue in Faith versus Fact, for science is the very antithesis of faith. But I’ll give a few excerpts of reader’s responses and then reprise my thoughts at the end.

Click to read:

Ben, a man of faith and science, reflects on the biggest and smallest questions:

To explain how I feel about outer space and how it shapes my worldview, I have to start with one of my favorite Bible verses: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (Psalm 8:3-5, KJV).

. . .  believe that understanding the laws and behavior of the universe is one of the few times we can directly observe God’s handiwork. Indeed, looking up at the night sky, I see that humanity is “crowned with glory and honour.”

*******

Glenn was a pastor in Houston near NASA’s Johnson Space Center:

About 75 percent of our church worked in the aerospace industry. It was an interesting experience leading triple-redundancy NASA engineers to “live and walk by faith.”

. . . We have been told that science and faith are incompatible. In fact, there is a vibrant faith community in and around NASA doing the hard work of science. I was having lunch with an astronaut a few weeks after his return from the International Space Station. “You know, I looked out into the void of space,” he said, “and it was black, white, cold, and lonely. And then I looked down at Earth and it was bright green and blue with swirls of white—warm, inviting, and interesting. I decided if I could choose to be any place in the universe, it would be right there on Earth.”

*******

Robert raises the old canard that science takes the awe, wonder, and beauty out of the universe.  Bolding is mine.

Robert, a graduate student in philosophy, harkened back to the ancients:

Like Aristotle, when I was very young, I thought the planets and stars in the sky were something like gods. I don’t think this anymore, of course. Nevertheless, they are in some sense above and beyond us, endowed with a sort of beauty we ourselves are incapable of manufacturing. I simply do not know how someone can gaze at the images from, for instance, the James Webb Space Telescope and think otherwise. Even without technology, there is something marvelous about gazing into the sky and noticing just how much is out there. Thousands of stars, five planets, and even our own galaxy are visible from Earth with the naked eye. Light pollution has crowded out quite a bit of this. But even just a few stars, or a few planets, is enough to see the vastness of it all.

Still, despite the enormous powers of these celestial spheres, they cannot appreciate their own beauty. Humans alone are known to be capable of appreciating the universe in this way. This has always made me ascribe special status to humans, and to think that human concerns are of special importance. I don’t take this to be inconsistent with the scale of it all, but rather a result of it. If we aren’t here anymore, the all the beauty in the universe won’t mean anything to anyone. So something of enormous value would be lost.

I worry that, for all the good that scientific advancements have done for us in understanding space, we’re starting to see the universe as nothing more than a collection of big rocks and balls of gas; these days, the planets and the stars, particularly the moon and Mars, tend to be objects of escapist fantasies more than objects of wonder.

This is a mistake, even for those who think the future of humanity may be space colonization. The beauty of the universe cannot be captured by an exhaustive description of its mechanics or of its utility to us. To think this, rather than appreciating the literally otherworldly nature of outer space, is, I think, the wrong kind of anthropocentrism. The majesty of the heavens has inspired joy, wonder, and creativity in human minds for as long as we have existed, and their beauty is divine. So, I figure, why not let myself think, along with Aristotle, that, even if not literally, the first people were right in thinking that the planets “are gods, and that the divine encloses the whole of nature”?

This view—that understanding more about the universe detracts from its wonder and beauty—was expressed early on by Walt Whitman in his poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” to wit:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
This is written by a man who knew almost nothing about science (the poem was published in 1865), and so learning about the stars and planets was, to Whitman, simply boring.  But this attitude is born of ignorance, and has been eloquently attacked by people like Richard Dawkins, who say, correctly, that if you understand the biology/physics/chemistry behind what we see in nature, it makes it even more wondrous. I cannot understand how anyone can think otherwise!  When you know that there are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, and two TRILLION galaxies just in the observable universe (and many more beyond), and learn how those stars came to be, and how the universe is expanding and is full of black holes that suck everything into them, including light, and that there’s a lot of dark matter out there that we don’t understand—how can these things not add to your appreciation of what you see?

 

This attitude is related to scientism, a pejorative word meant to apply to the view that science encompasses everything we need to know about reality.  And, in fact, it does, but so far it’s been unable—and maybe always will be—to explain the feeling of awe (“spirituality,” if you will) that comes with moments like looking at the night sky. But how does knowing what you’re really seeing detract from its wonder in interest? It’s that attitude that baffles me.  How much more interesting nature becomes when you understand that it’s the product of a naturalistic process—evolution, often via natural selection!

At any rate, I can’t see any purpose to this article except to tout God, do down science, claim that science detracts from wonder at the same time that it claims that science and religion are compatible? No, science and religion are incompatible, mainly because religious understanding and its truth claims are based on faith, while science’s truth claims are based on empirical evidence. The presence of religious people who like science no more proves that science and religion are compatible than observing sports fans who like science proves that science and baseball are compatible.

Dawkins has explained the fallacy of this view, but maybe it’s time to explain it to people again.

The controversy continues about naming the Webb Space Telescope; the woke won’t give up in the face of the facts

December 20, 2022 • 10:00 am

This article in a recent New York Times tells a sad tale of the vindictiveness of scientific ideologues and their determination to gain control over science by flaunting their own victim status, as well as by blatantly ignoring the truth. It involves the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) over the objections of people who asserted, wrongly, that Webb was a homophobe who fired gay people from NASA and the government (he was administrator of the organization from 1961-1968, and before that the Undersecretary of State from 1949 to 1952).

Click to read the article; if it’s paywalled, judicious inquiry will yield a copy. This is a piece worth reading, and shows that the NYT is not completely woke, for the piece gives an evenhanded story that winds up putting the woke in a pretty bad light.

For a long time, ideologues have criticized the name of the telescope, demanding it be changed (NASA refused to change it). The kvetchers argued that Webb, as both Undersecretary of State and NASA administrator, helped fire gay scientists under orders from people higher in the government. This all stemmed from an executive order issued by President Eisenhower in 1953 barring gay Americans from working for the federal government—an order that wasn’t formally rescinded until Bill Clinton barred job discrimination based on sexual orientation in 1998.

During this period, between 5,000 and 10,000 gay employees were booted out of government jobs. The allegations about Webb arose when NASA decided to name the space telescope after him, claiming that he was complicit in this firing.  But extensive delving into the historical record by several people and agencies shows that these allegations were false. From the NYT (all quotes indented):

Hakeem Oluseyi, who is now the president of the National Society of Black Physicists, was sympathetic to these critics. Then he delved into archives and talked to historians and wrote a carefully sourced essay in Medium in 2021 that laid out his surprising findings.

“I can say conclusively,” Dr. Oluseyi wrote, “that there is zero evidence that Webb is guilty of the allegations against him.”

That, he figured, would be that. He was wrong.

The struggle over the naming of the world’s most powerful space telescope has grown yet more contentious and bitter. In November, NASA sought to douse this fire. Its chief historian, Brian Odom, issued an 89-page report that echoed Dr. Oluseyi’s research and concluded the accusations against Mr. Webb were misplaced.

NASA acknowledged that the federal government at that time “shamefully promoted” discrimination against gay employees. But Mr. Odom concluded: “No available evidence directly links Webb to any actions or follow-up related to the firing of individuals for their sexual orientation.”

. . . As Dr. Oluseyi discovered and NASA’s report confirmed, it was not Mr. Webb but a different State Department official who oversaw the purge and spoke disparagingly of gay Americans.

Indeed, Webb helped to slow down the firing of gay governmental employees:

Secretary of State Dean Acheson denounced the “filthy business” of smearing diplomats. And President Harry Truman, records show, advised Mr. Webb to slow-walk the Republican investigation, while complying with its legal dictates. Mr. Webb did not turn over personnel files to Senate investigators, according to the NASA report.

Webb also has anti-racist bona fides:

Mr. Webb, who died in 1992, cut a complicated figure. He worked with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to integrate NASA, bringing in Black engineers and scientists. In 1964, after George Wallace, the white segregationist governor of Alabama, tried to block such recruitment, Mr. Webb threatened to pull top scientists and executives out of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

Finally, historians who work on gay history haven’t deemed Webb worthy of indictment:

Historians who specialize in this era in gay history said such expectations ignore the historical context. Mr. Webb did not lead efforts to oust gays; there was not yet a gay rights movement in 1949; and to apply the term homophobe is to use a word out of time and reflects nothing Mr. Webb is known to have written or said.

“The activists who say that James Webb should have stood up and spoken against the purges are anachronistic,” said Dr. Johnson, whose Twitter handle is @gayhistoryprof. “No one in government could stand up at that time and say ‘This is wrong.’ And that includes gay people.”

You’d think that would end the kvetching, right? WRONG!  People who argued that Webb was a homophobe didn’t change their tune in light of the multiple studies showing they were wrong. Instead, led by the notoriously woke physicist and activist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a professor at the University of New Hampshire and an activist who doesn’t miss a chance to parade her intersectional victim status (see below), they simply recalibrated their claims, saying that Webb should have stood up to the government. She and her colleagues had written several pieces objecting to the naming of the JWST on the grounds that Webb was a homophobe.

In a blog written with three fellow scientists, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist at the University of New Hampshire with a low six-figure Twitter following, said that it was highly likely that Mr. Webb “knew exactly what was happening with security at his own agency during the height of the Cold War,” adding, “We are deeply concerned by the implication that managers are not responsible for homophobia.”

We’ve met Prescod-Weinstein on this site before—as author of a dreadful article on “white empiricism” that tried to conflate physics with social justice.

And she influenced others. Like all the critics of the JWST, Prescod-Weinstein didn’t do the research that NASA and Hakeem Oluseyi had done; they went after the man and his telescope based on rumors and distortions. Note below that Scientific American, now a woke, inflammatory rag of a magazine, participated in the tarring of Webb (see its two articles “The James Webb Space Telescope needs to be renamed“, of which Prescod-Weinstein was a coauthor, and “New revelations raise pressure on NASA to rename the James Webb Space Telescope“).

. . . . as the telescope neared completion, criticism flared. In 2015, Matthew Francis, a science journalist, wrote an article for Forbes titled “The Problem With Naming Observatories for Bigots.” He wrote that Mr. Webb led the anti-gay purge at the State Department and that he had testified of his contempt for gay people. He credited Dr. Prescod-Weinstein with tipping him off, and she in turn tweeted his article and attacked Mr. Webb as a “homophobe.”

Those claims rested on misidentification and that portion of Mr. Francis’ article has been deleted without notice to the reader. Mr. Francis declined an interview.

Oops!

In October, the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain waded in, declaring that Mr. Webb engaged in “entirely unacceptable” behavior. The society instructed that no astronomer who submits a paper to its journals should type the words “James Webb.” They must use the abbreviation JWST.

The American Astronomical Society demanded in April that NASA issue a formal and public report on its naming decision. And a trio of top scientific publications — Nature, New Scientist and Scientific American — published essays and editorials sharply critical of Mr. Webb with nary a dissenting word. Dr. Oluseyi said Scientific American rejected a letter from him pointing out flawed statements in its essays and rejected his proposal to write about his findings on Mr. Webb.

Scientific American’s editor, Laura Helmuth, declined an interview and wrote in an email that its coverage had been “timely, thorough and fair.”

A petition demanding NASA rename its telescope has garnered more than 1,700 signatures, a majority from faculty and graduate students.

“This is about who we canonize and who are our real saints,” Dr. Prescod-Weinstein said in an interview. “We can’t just exonerate a dead white guy who was in the thick of a repressive government.”

There it is: a dead white guy, as if him being dead, white, and male count towards his perfidy. And even though he didn’t fire anybody, he was—as was every government employee in America—”in the thick of a repressive government.” This is what nasty wokesters say when they can’t pin malfeasance directly on someone. She also said this:

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein wrote that if Mr. Webb had been “a radical freedom fighter,” he would not have served in the Truman administration.

There were NO “radical freedom fighters during the Truman administration”!

Prescod- Weinstein’s rancor was exacerbated by Oluseyi’s report, which alluded to her, though not by name:

When Dr. Oluseyi wrote his essay on James Webb, he took to task journalists and an astrophysicist, whom he did not name, for not rigorously researching the accusations. He said that the scientist, who was cited by name in the Forbes article, had “propagated unsubstantiated false information.”

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein wrote on Twitter that she was this unnamed scientist in Dr. Oluseyi’s article and that he “is writing poorly researched articles that are basically hit pieces on me.”

“The leader of a professional society and a senior scientist,” she wrote, is “going out of his way to justify historic homophobia” and “attack a junior queer Black woman professor.”

Months, later, in August 2021, George Mason University recruited Dr. Oluseyi as a visiting professor, and Peter Plavchan, an astronomy professor, offered a tweet of welcome to the man he played a role in recruiting.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein objected. In a stream of tweets, she said Dr. Oluseyi had championed “a homophobe.”

She wrote that Dr. Plavchan’s welcome was “a reminder that senior men in astronomy can treat junior women” poorly — using an expletive — “and be welcomed by colleagues with open arms.”

Notice the emphasis on her identity, and the victimhood she emphasizes by being attacked by a a “senior” man. When criticized for her inflammatory words, Prescod-Weinsten always brings up the fact that she’s black, gay, a woman, and, sometimes Jewish as well. More from the NYT:

Ms. Prescod-Weinstein, 40, was born in Los Angeles to a family of left-wing activists and is among a handful of Black women to work in theoretical cosmology. Charismatic and outspoken, she describes her writings on race and gender and science as inseparable.

“The civil rights versus gay people schtick is marginalizing and pathetic,” she said. “It’s straight people arguing about the straight canon. As a Black queer Jewish person, I’m not interested.”

Well, Dr. Weinstein, as a white, straight Jewish man (and an old one to boot), I do care: about the truth. Apparently you don’t, and your behavior reeks of self-aggrandizement and sheer nastiness.  Further Prescod-Weinstein also participated in the demonization of Oluseyi by spreading rumors—which again turned out to be false—that he was guilty of transgressions at his former university, Florida Tech.

The attacks against Dr. Oluseyi had shifted, as some accused him of personal misconduct.

Dr. Plavchan said that in July 2021, as word circulated in academia that Dr. Oluseyi might win an appointment at George Mason, he heard from a professor at a different university who claimed that Dr. Oluseyi had mishandled a federal grant and sexually harassed a woman.

Dr. Plavchan said that he reported these accusations to George Mason. Soon Florida Tech officials were combing through records and thousands of emails. They found nothing to substantiate these charges, according to Hamid K. Rassoul, a physics professor at Florida Tech and former dean who took part in the investigation. George Mason went ahead with its appointment in the fall of 2021.

Prescod-Weinstein, who must spend hours a day on Twitter, repeated these false rumors:

On Twitter, Dr. Prescod-Weinstein has pushed some of the same accusations, while not naming Dr. Oluseyi directly. “It continues to be the case that academic institutions play pass the harasser,” she wrote in a veiled reference to Dr. Oluseyi in August 2021. And this past November she questioned on Twitter why journalists have not asked why he left his last job.

Dr. Prescod-Weinstein did not reply to three emails asking for more information.

She’s clearly out to get Oluseyi, and since she didn’t get him for homophobia, she’s wants to get him for sexual harassment.

Another person who had no comment was the editor of Scientific American, whom we know well:

Scientific American’s editor, Laura Helmuth, declined an interview and wrote in an email that its coverage had been “timely, thorough and fair.”

Well, read this Sci Am op-ed, by Prescod-Weinstein and two colleagues, and see if it’s thorough and fair. A few quotes:

When he arrived at NASA in 1961, his leadership role meant he was in part responsible for implementing what was by then federal policy: the purging of LGBT individuals from the workforce. When he was at State, this policy was enforced by those who worked under him. As early as 1950, he was aware of this policy, which was a forerunner to the antigay witch hunt known today as the lavender scare. Historian David K. Johnson’s 2004 book on the subject, The Lavender Scare, discusses archival evidence indicating that Webb, along with others in State Department leadership, was involved in Senate discussions that ultimately kicked off a devastating series of federal policies.

. . . This struggle is not limited to science or to the past: Just a few months ago Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas introduced the LOVE Act of 2020, which “requires the State Department to set up an independent commission to review the cases of individuals who were fired since the 1950s as a result of their sexual orientation, receive testimony, and correct employment records.” Passage of the act would not only prompt an apology from Congress for its past complicity in the lavender scare but also provide protections for queer diplomats at home and abroad.

Yet we can honor the incredible heroes who worked tirelessly to liberate others. Before she became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, a disabled and enslaved Harriet Tubman almost certainly used the North Star, just as it is documented that others did, to navigate her way to freedom. Naming the next Hubble the Harriet Tubman Space Telescope (HTST) would ensure that her memory lives always in the heavens that gave her and so many others hope.

Shoot me now! At any rate, Oluseyi (and remember, he’s president of the National Society of Black Physicists) gets the last word:

Dr. Oluseyi is aware of the risk of damage to his reputation. For just a moment, he sounded plaintive.

“Look, I didn’t care about James Webb — he’s not my uncle,” Dr. Oluseyi said. “I had no motivation to exonerate. Once I found the truth, what was I supposed to do?”

The lesson is that being a black, gay, Jewish woman (or a woman editor of Scientific American) doesn’t give you special abilities to discern homophobia if there is no evidence, nor does it make you immune from criticism. If there’s any lesson Prescod-Weinstein should have learned as a member of the scientific community, it’s that the truth is independent of the personal characteristics of the person who finds it.

But then, in another post I wrote about Prescod-Weinstein, I analyzed her Slate piece called “Stop equating ‘science’ with truth.” To her, the truth is simply what is produced by those who have power, a distinctly postmodern position.

The final lesson is this: the woke never apologize (and they double down on their victims who do apologize), and they never admit they were wrong. Wouldn’t it be lovely if Helmuth and Prescod-Weinstein, along with the other critics of James Webb as a homophobe and Oluseyi as a sexual harasser, admitted they were wrong?

Don’t hold your breath.

Artemis-1/Orion splashdown today: 12:39 EST

December 11, 2022 • 10:00 am

This announcement comes from Jim “Bat” Batterson, and if you’re interested in seeing the splashdown, you can start watching below at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.  If you just want to see the final action, I’d suggest starting to watch about half an hour in advance: roughly noon EST.

From Bat:

Artemis-1/Orion mission ends today with splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego, California scheduled for 1239 EST.  NASA Live video coverage begins at 1100 EST at the NASA live site.

Here’s a bit of info and some photos of practice rescue using a mock Orion capsule:

Concluding its 25½-day mission, Artemis’ Orion capsule will slow from a dizzying 25,000 mph – roughly a dozen times faster than a rifle bullet – to 300 mph after entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule’s heat shield should reach a roasting 5,000 degrees, or twice the temperature of molten lava.

After a series of parachutes deploy, NASA engineers predict the 11-by-16½-foot capsule should slow to about 20 mph before gliding earthward and striking the sea’s surface within eyesight of the recovery ship’s crew, 50 to 60 nautical miles off the San Diego coast. [According to Bat, bad weather at the site off San Diego has forced the entry 300 nautical miles away—off Mexico.]

The three-parachute configuration will be similar to that used in the Apollo recovery (below)

Comprised of about 95 people, the Orion landing and recovery team includes Navy amphibious specialists piloting inflatable boats; NASA engineers and technicians from KSC and Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas; Air Force weather specialists; and Lockheed Martin Space Operations personnel. A helicopter squadron from nearby Naval Air Station North Island will provide aerial spotting.

The Portland will approach the bobbing Orion, and divers will use sensors to conduct “sniff checks” for leaking hydrazine or ammonia from the capsule, Jones said. Then Navy personnel will attach tending lines to Orion and flood the ship’s well deck with about 6 feet of seawater, and a cable will tow the floating spacecraft through the ship’s lowered stern gate into a specially designed cradle.

Afterward, the Portland will transport the capsule to a pier at Naval Base San Diego.

The unique aspect of the re-entry, not previously used, is the “skip” maneuver, in which the capsule will bounce off the Earth’s atmosphere before plunging through it again. This allows the capsule to reduce speed (therefore reducing the heat the capsule experiences) as well as to permit a more precise landing:

After discarding its unneeded service module, which supplied electricity and power for nearly a month, Orion will do a daring skip maneuver off the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. The capsule will use a bit of our protective envelope, along with associated lift, to skip just like a rock across the surface of a lake. This maneuver wasn’t possible during the Apollo program, but advances in spacecraft navigation make that possible today.

“The skip entry will help Orion land closer to the coast of the United States, where recovery crews will be waiting to bring the spacecraft back to land,” Chris Madsen, Orion guidance, navigation and control subsystem manager, said in a NASA statement(opens in new tab).

“When we fly crew in Orion beginning with Artemis 2, landing accuracy will really help make sure we can retrieve the crew quickly and reduces the number of resources we will need to have stationed in the Pacific Ocean to assist in recovery.”

The maneuver will also reduce the g-forces future Artemis program astronauts will experience once the Orion capsule is crewed. “Instead of a single event of high acceleration, there will be two events of a lower acceleration of about four g’s each,” NASA wrote in the same statement. “The skip entry will reduce the acceleration load for the astronauts so they have a safer, smoother ride.”

Here’s a diagram of a “skip” re-entry from Wikipedia:

 

Orion/Artemis-1: “On our way home”

December 9, 2022 • 9:00 am

Here’s an update on the Orio/Artemis-1 mission, a photo, a video of what’s going to happen when it splashes down on Sunday, and another video for lagniappe.

I know it is likely too late for today’s Hili, but in case you want to mention location of some updated Artemis material on the Nasa mission blog:  the blog is updated every day or so and the version from Dec 7 has an embedded six-minute video that shows animation of re-entry process that is planned for Sunday and video of earlier sub-orbital tests of the capsule-parachute and recovery ship systems.

Here’s a photo taken of the Moon’s surface during one of the capsule’s closest approaches (the closest it got was 80 miles or 130 km):

(from NASA): art001e002164 (Dec. 5, 2022): Cameras mounted on the crew module of the Orion spacecraft captured these views of the Moon’s surface. On flight day 20 of the Artemis I mission, the spacecraft made its second and final close approach to the Moon before its returned powered flyby burn.

Here’s an informative 6-minute video of what’s happened and how the entry to Earth’s atmosphere and landing will go:

And an appropriate Beatles video; song by McCartney, recorded for the Let It Be album on Jan. 31, 1969. The whole gang is here, including Linda, Yoko, and George Martin and Billy Preston on the keyboards.

Artemis-1 launch early tomorrow morning (and I mean EARLY)

November 15, 2022 • 11:00 am

My friend Jim Batterson, who worked for NASA and has written updates on space exploration on this site, now has a summary of the crewless NASA Artemis-1 Mission which has been scheduled for launch three times and delayed all three times. It’s now scheduled for early tomorrow morning (you can watch if if you’re a night owl or live overseas). The goal is to get humans to the Moon and have them stay there for a while, i.e., establish a lunar base. And that is preparation for the ultimate goal: establishing a base on Mars where humans can live for substantial periods, if not permanently.

NASA Artemis-1 Mission Update Summary

Jim Batterson

November 14, 2022 (1615 EST)

(Interpreted from public news reports with my best efforts)

As of this afternoon (Monday), NASA managers at Kennedy Space Station have assessed the hurricane storm-damage reports provided by engineers and technicians who have inspected the Artemis-1 rocket and launch systems after last week’s high winds and water from Hurricane Nicole. The report is that that the damage is either repairable or does not compromise flight safety; so they are still committed to a 1:04 AM EST Wednesday morning launch.

NASA plans to launch the delayed Artemis-1 moon rocket mission very early Wednesday morning at 1:04AM EST from NASA’s Cape Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  The mission was delayed several times due to mechanical glitches, conflicts with other higher priority launches, and by a couple of late-season hurricanes that hit Florida this Fall.

This launch is designed to stress-test the NASA Space Launch System, a rocket-and-capsule configuration designed to send a human crew to the Moon and return them safely to Earth.  This test will NOT carry humans. The combination of four Space Shuttle-style main engines and two solid-fuel rocket boosters produces more thrust than either the Space Shuttle System or the Apollo/Saturn V systems.

The mission is designed to last around 26 days while the Orion Crew Capsule exercises its maneuvering capabilities in lunar orbit before returning to Earth with a high-speed entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. After Orion splashes down in the ocean, it will be recovered with a ship.

The nighttime launch should be spectacular, with the solid rockets burning out after two minutes, separating from the rest of the rocket and falling into the ocean, the main rocket stage with its four liquid-fueled rocket engines continuing for another six minutes before it separates from the upper stage rocket/Orion Crew Capsule combination.  At this point the upper stage and capsule are in Earth orbit.  Over the next two hours, the upper stage engine will perform a couple of burns that take it and the capsule out of Earth orbit into a trajectory to the moon (I get excited just writing this! – jgb).

At this point the capsule is headed into a five-day coast to the moon.  It will slow due to Earth’s gravitational pull on it until it reaches a point where the moon’s gravitational pull is greater than the Earth’s and at that point will begin an acceleration toward the moon.  So the action for now is pretty much between 1:00 and 3:00 AM EDT Wednesday morning, with the next critical maneuvering scheduled for when the capsule arrives in lunar vicinity early next week.  Jerry published a very informative write-up on WEIT on September 3, before an earlier delayed launch attempt at URL

All of the information and activities listed there should be the same for this mission, except for the actual dates.  NASA Live TV will cover the launch at NASA.GOV as will my website of choice, SPACE.COM.

JAC: Here’s a NASA video of the Orion spacecraft from some time ago. Orion is the capsuleFhot, and Artemis the name of the series of its projected mission.

JAC: Here’s a NASA video showing the goal of the entire project:

The DART mission was a success: orbit perturbed!

October 12, 2022 • 11:00 am

We’ve had several posts on September 26th’s DART mission—the one in which NASA crashed a small spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour. The object was to perturb Dimorphos’s orbit around a larger asteroid, Didymos. (DART stands for “Double Asteroid Redirection Test”.) The perturbation was effected by transferring momentum from the DART spacecraft (which crashed in a satisfying cloud of dust) to Dimorphos.

The ultimate goal of this program is to see if we can deflect a comet or asteroid heading towards Earth, staving off the immense destruction that a collision could cause. And, judging by DART, it’s at least possible.

As usual, my old friend and former NASA employee Jim Batterson gives us the details:

Earth Global Defense Test Results (DART Experiment)

Jim “Bat” Batterson

When the NASA/APL (Applied Physics Lab) spacecraft successfully impacted the small asteroid, Dimorphos on September 26, some WEIT readers wanted to know when we would know if it achieved its full mission – an actual perturbation of Dimorphos’ orbit.

 In the post-impact press conference later that day, the mission engineering leadership estimated that the answer would come in a couple of weeks or so as Earth-based telescopes took careful measurements of Dimorphus’ orbital path around its larger companion asteroid, Didymos.  They were right!  Yesterday afternoon, NASA held a press conference at NASA Headquarters in which mission leaders gave us the answer:  the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos changed significantly – from 11hrs 55min to 11hrs 23min – a 32 minute change.

Here’s the full press conference, an hour long:

The first 30 minutes comprises what I thought was a very informative presentation from three lead project scientists; the final 30 minutes consists of the scientists answering questions from the global press.  They explain in pretty good detail how the orbital change was measured and what these results mean.

Here’s one last video that APL [Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, which partnered in the venture] put out on a summary sheet. The 40-second video compresses the final pics from the DART spacecraft and is really exciting to me. The final frame before blackout due to collision is only 51 ft across, which means the bigger boulders are about ten feet across and the visible small rubble is a foot in size or even smaller.  Incredible technology.

Click on the screenshot below to go to the summary sheet and video. This is the moment before impact: