Second Launch by German Rocket Company Happens Soon

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Isar Aerospace.

You may remember the name Isar Aerospace from its attempt last year to launch a rocket from the Andoya Space Centre in Norway. It was the first test of the German company’s Spectrum two-stage rocket, and it lasted for less than a minute into launch. That’s how these tests often go.

The second launch, labeled “Onward and Upward,” is scheduled to happen shortly. While it was initially scheduled for January 21st, it has been delayed until March 19th due to pressurization valve issues.

This second time the Germans seem a little more confident given that the launch will include payloads – five CubeSats and one experiment. The company is also securing more space in Munich, Germany, Sweden (Esrange Space Center) and French Guyana (Guiana Space Centre).

When Dr. Markus Söder, Minister President of Bavaria, visited the Isar Aerospace facility last year, he stated:

The success story of our space program continues – and Isar Aerospace is playing a decisive role in writing it. …We are Germany’s Space Valley: Europe’s largest faculty for aerospace is being established at the Technical University of Munich – and 550 companies and 65,000 employees now work in this sector in Bavaria. The future looks bright. With the Bavarian high-tech agenda, we are investing a total of six billion euros in research and science. Live long and prosper, Isar Aerospace!”

Germany is no stranger to rocketry, which benefited the US in no small degree following WWII. With all of this energy directed towards the space industry, Germany and Europe become stronger players in this area and be somewhat less reliant on the US for future payloads.

Pic of the Week: Close-Up View of the Helix Nebula

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Part of the Helix Nebula as captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

This week’s image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows an up-close view of the Helix Nebula, which is about 650 light years away. Taken by the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera, we see the colors of the gases moving away from the exploding star.

NASA notes:

Here, blistering winds of fast-moving hot gas from the dying star are crashing into slower moving colder shells of dust and gas that were shed earlier in its life, sculpting the nebula’s remarkable structure…A blazing white dwarf, the leftover core of the dying star, lies right at the heart of the nebula…Its intense radiation lights up the surrounding gas, creating a rainbow of features: hot ionized gas closest to the white dwarf, cooler molecular hydrogen farther out, and protective pockets where more complex molecules can begin to form within dust clouds. This interaction is vital, as it’s the raw material from which new planets may one day form in other star systems.

Below is a wider view of the nebula from which the image above is taken.

Image (Credit): The full view of the Helix Nebula, taken by the ground-based Visible and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy as well as the JWST’s more focused view. (ESO, VISTA, NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Emerson (ESO); Acknowledgment: CASU)

Musk Madness: Tying SpaceX to xAI

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by StellarUniverse from Pixabay

It was German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who said:

If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage. If you put a spoonful of sewage in a barrel full of wine, you get… sewage.

As much as Elon Musk interferes in German politics, I am not sure whether he reads its philosophers. It is unlikely, or he would have reconsidered merging his xAI with SpaceX.

This comes as a time when Mr. Musk is facing more questions about his ties to the Epstein files, his company Tesla is dealing with a 46 percent drop in profits due to his political antics, and his AI business (already tied to the flaying Twitter/X) is suffering from bad press due to his Grok chat bot creating sexualized images of children. I guess that brings us full circle back to the Epstein files. Of course, this disastrous set of stories not even include the French raid of the Twitter/X offices this week.

As Mr. Musk now prepares an initial public offering of SpaceX stock, it is unclear why he would saddle a successful company with the weight of his questionable AI initiates. It appears he sees an opportunity to use SpaceX as his vehicle for data centers in space one day, in the same way SpaceX has made a bundle of money with its Starlink internet satellites. As we all know, creating those sexualized images uses a lot of power, so why not put the porn portals in space?

It would have been nice to have SpaceX outside of all of the Musk nonsense (not that Starlink has been perfect), but that does not seem to be the plan.

Just as our allies are learning that relying on American arms has put them in a bind, the US space industry is learning that relying on Musk’s SpaceX has put them in a similar bind.

It almost makes you want to move to Mars.

Artemis II: Another Delay Until March

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft in front of the Moon, the ultimate target, on February 1, 2026. (NASA/Sam Lott)

It appears we will need to wait until next month for the Artemis II launch due to a liquid hydrogen leak during the wet dress rehearsal. As a result, the four astronauts can come our of quarantine and rejoin their families.

In its blog, NASA noted other issues as well:

In addition to the liquid hydrogen leak, a valve associated with Orion crew module hatch pressurization, which recently was replaced, required retorquing, and closeout operations took longer than planned. Cold weather that affected several cameras and other equipment didn’t impede wet dress rehearsal activities, but would have required additional attention on launch day. Finally, engineers have been troubleshooting dropouts of audio communication channels across ground teams in the past few weeks leading up to the test. Several dropouts reoccurred during the wet dress rehearsal. 

Such issues are not unusual, so we will just have to be patient. We are almost there.

As NASA Administrator Isaacman noted on Twitter:

This is just the beginning. It marks the start of an Artemis program that will evolve to support repeated and affordable missions to the Moon…Getting this mission right means returning to the Moon to stay and a future to Artemis 100 and beyond.

Space Stories: Another Artemis II Delay, AI Discovers Cosmic Oddities in Hubble Data, and AI Drives a Martian Rover

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artemis II mission patch. (NASA)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—CBS News: “Artemis II Moon Rocket Fueling Test Runs into Problems with Hydrogen Leak“

A hydrogen leak at the base of NASA’s Artemis II moon rocket Monday threw a wrench into a carefully planned countdown “wet dress” rehearsal, but engineers were able to manage a workaround and the test proceeded toward a simulated launch. Whether mission managers will be able to clear the rocket for an actual launch as early as Sunday to propel four astronauts on a flight to the moon will depend on the results of a detailed overnight review and post-test analysis. NASA only has three days — Feb. 8, 10 and 11 — to get the mission off this month or the flight will slip to March.

—ZME Science: “Astronomers Unleashed an AI on Hubble’s Archive and Uncovered 1,300 “Cosmic Oddities.” Most Were Completely New to Science“

For more than three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has collected targeted images to answer specific scientific questions, from mapping galaxies to studying nearby nebulae. Hubble has gathered so much data that despite their best efforts, astronomers haven’t had the time to analyze it all in detail yet…Now, two astronomers have revisited that massive archive with a new plan. They deployed an artificial intelligence system designed to notice when something looks “wrong”. In just 60 hours of computing time, the tool flagged over 1,300 anomalies hidden within 100 million Hubble snapshots. Hundreds of them have never appeared in scientific literature.

—NASA/JPL “NASA’s Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars“

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. Executed on Dec. 8 and 10, and led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the demonstration used generative AI to create waypoints for Perseverance, a complex decision-making task typically performed manually by the mission’s human rover planners…During the demonstration, the team leveraged a type of generative AI called vision-language models to analyze existing data from JPL’s surface mission dataset. The AI used the same imagery and data that human planners rely on to generate waypoints — fixed locations where the rover takes up a new set of instructions — so that Perseverance could safely navigate the challenging Martian terrain.