Space Stuff and Launch Info

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Hakuto-R will try to land on the Moon in a bit over 24 hours. Livestream will be here.
If successful, it will make Japan the fourth country to softly land on the Moon (after the Soviet Union, the US and China, and failed attempts by India and Israel).

Six new missions with landers/rovers are planned to launch later this year.

A Falcon Heavy launch is planned for Wednesday 23:24 UTC. Falcon Heavy will fly fully expendable for the first time to deliver the satellite directly to geostationary orbit - no booster landings.
 
mfb said:
Lost signal shortly before the planned landing.
It seemed weird that they pre-announced that they would lose the comm signal before the landing, and should re-acquire it shortly after landing. Why would they anticipate losing the signal right before landing? There were obviously no plasma effects like in Earth re-entry. I don't think I've heard of an "anticipated comms blackout" during the last few meters of landing on the Moon" before...
 
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Vast, a company of a cryptocurrency billionaire, plans to build a commercial space station. We'll see how well that works, but at least they have funding. They now have launch contracts, too: One Falcon 9 flight to launch a first station module and a Falcon 9 / Dragon flight to visit it. No earlier than August 2025 and with delays basically guaranteed, but it's the first company with a launch contract.

Axiom-2, the second fully commercial mission to the ISS, is now scheduled to launch May 21.
 
Falcon rockets have achieved 200 successful missions in a row. This streak includes all 6 Falcon Heavy launches and all 166 launches of the only operational Falcon 9 version (Block 5), plus 28 launches of older Falcon 9 versions.
If we only consider rocket versions SpaceX uses today: They have made 171 flights and never failed. This is 5+166 as the first FH flight used older hardware.[/size]

As a related milestone, we can expect 200 consecutive Falcon 9 successes in June.
 
NASA has selected a company to land astronauts on the Moon with Artemis V. They'll announce the winner on Friday.
Blue Origin and Dynetics both got significant funding for earlier studies. They lost against SpaceX in the original award (Starship will land as part of Artemis III and IV), but that makes them leading candidates for the second round. SpaceX was excluded from this so NASA gets a second provider.Edit: ULA is preparing for a static fire of Vulcan Centaur. No launch date yet:
Engineers have isolated a small region on that dome where they believe the leak came from, as well as the likely ignition source. “I’m pretty confident that we’re going to find the leak, and once we find the leak we’ll know if we have to take corrective action or not on the flight vehicle,” he said.

If ULA doesn’t need to modify the Centaur, that would allow the Cert-1 launch to take place in early summer, he said. “If we do, it could take longer, but I don’t expect it to get out of the year.”
 
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Blue Origin (+partners) has gotten the contract for the second Moon lander. Dynetics was second and did not get selected. Nothing too surprising. With $3.4 billion from NASA it is just slightly more expensive than the SpaceX contract for Artemis III.
More details.
Here is a render:



Edit: Some more discussion here:

 
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Successful launch of Axiom-2, currently approaching the ISS and docking should occur in around 15 minutes. This is the 10th crewed mission of Dragon 2 and the 9th to the ISS.

For the first time, the booster returned to the launch site after a crewed flight. This is likely a result of SpaceX optimizing the rocket performance further. We have first seen this from an extra Starlink satellite they managed to add to each batch.
 
Virgin Orbit, the company operating the air-launched LauncherOne, is dead. After their latest failed launch they didn't find enough investors to keep going. Some hardware has been sold, looks like no one was interested in the rocket itself.

Virgin Galactic, the company offering suborbital tourism flights, is back. Their 2021 flight, the first one with several passengers, raised questions about the flight profile and safety and started an FAA investigation. The company took that time to upgrade their vehicle, too. After a low altitude flight last month they are now preparing for a high altitude flight in the early morning of Thursday (US time). No live coverage, unfortunately. The flight will only carry employees of the company.

Other news:
* Remains of Hakuto-R found on the Moon
* In the first quarter of 2023 a total of 290 tonnes were launched to orbit (report). 233 tonnes by SpaceX (80%!), 24 by China, 23 by Russia, 5 by India, 4 by Japan, 1 tonne by the rest of the world.
 
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Virgin Galactic's flight was a success.

Accident investigation for Hakuto-R:
During descent it flew over a cliff on the Moon, which caused the radar altimeter to suddenly produce a much larger distance estimate (correctly, of course). The software interpreted that as a broken altimeter and tried to land without it - it significantly underestimated its altitude and flew a touchdown maneuver 5 kilometers above the real surface until it ran out of fuel. This was not caught in simulations because they were only made for the initial landing site that didn't have large cliffs. They changed the landing site later without fully testing it again in simulations.
Video about it

Assuming no delay we might get a new record of 17 people in orbit next week, up from 14 first achieved in 2021:
7 long-term ISS crew
4 ISS visitors (Axiom-2) <- landing May 31 to June 2
3 incoming Tiangong crew <- May 30 launch
3 outgoing Tiangong crew <- they'll wait for the new crew to arrive before leaving

Edit: Launched on time. New record.
 
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Starliner, which was supposed to fly crew next month, has been delayed again - Boeing "doesn't want to rule out" a 2023 launch which likely means it'll be no earlier than 2024.
News article
News article

* A component of the parachute system is weaker than expected and broke in a test. Nominally Starliner lands with three parachutes, but if one doesn't deploy then it is able to land with two. That leads to larger forces between these parachutes and the capsule, however, and some connection between them could break in that case.
* Tape wrapped around wiring was found to be flammable.
* When trying to load propellant they found a sticky valve. Remember August 2021?

Valves are notoriously difficult to work with but the other two points were part of the design for many years. Why did they only discover this now, as they were preparing to launch humans, and how many similar issues are there left to be found?

Luckily this is a fixed-cost contract. Boeing only gets more money if they actually fly. With a cost+ contract NASA would keep paying everyone and then add a bonus that gets larger with every extra delay caused by Boeing.

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Falcon 9 has now flown 200 successful missions in a row.

The final Ariane 5 launch is scheduled for June 16, launching two communication satellites.
 
Animation of SpaceX launches as function of time, the end is wild:



Trivia:
* SpaceX has flown 50 missions in the seven months since ULA's last launch in November 2022. ULA has flown 50 missions in the seven years since March 2016.
* Dragon capsules (all versions combined) have flown to the ISS 38 times, now surpassing the 37 Space Shuttle missions.
* In a bit over four years (first flight March 2019) the Dragon 2 fleet has spent more time in space than the Shuttle orbiter fleet in 30 years. Dragon Endeavour reached one year in space in late May.
 
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The Spanish company PLD Space made a first launch attempt of their suborbital Miura-1 rocket, but it was aborted shortly after ignition (video with timestamp). It is a reusable single-stage rocket, with the idea to scale it up build the partially reusable orbital Miura-5 rocket.

The final launch of Ariane 5 was delayed because they found some issues with the rocket. No new launch date yet.
 
mfb said:
A test version of the upper stage of Vulcan failed in a ground test.
They need to destack the Vulcan that was being prepared for launch and reinforce the upper stage tank before its maiden flight. No new target launch date yet, but we can expect a delay measured in months.

Bad news for Astrobotic with their Moon lander and Amazon which wants to launch two prototypes of its Kuiper satellites on that rocket. It will delay operational launches and/or shorten the time between getting test results and mass-producing satellites.

 
Longer article about the Vulcan delay
No earlier than the fourth quarter, which likely means early 2024. It is very likely some military satellite launches will move from Vulcan to Falcon 9.

Two days until the launch of Euclid.

44 SpaceX launches in the first half of the year: 41 Falcon 9, 2 Falcon Heavy, 1 Starship. The goal of 100 will be difficult (weather tends to be worse in the second half of the year), but they'll easily beat the record of 61 set in the previous year.
 
One hour until the launch of Euclid.
ESA livestream
SpaceX livestream

With a cost of around 800 million Euros ($1 billion) it's likely the most expensive non-classified payload of Falcon 9 so far, but otherwise it's a routine launch for the rocket and a high profile telescope for cosmologists.

Psyche in October is a bit under $1 billion. Europa Clipper (October 2024) will be somewhere around $2 billion.
 
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Successful launch, ESA has confirmed acquisition of signal with Euclid after separating from the rocket.

Euclid was designed and built to launch on Soyuz, Falcon vibrates a bit more, but ESA checked and confirmed it can fly on Falcon 9. The alternative would have been to store the spacecraft until 2025 or so. Ariane 6 and Vulcan would be able to launch it but you don't want to put a billion dollar spacecraft on the first launches of a new rocket. Despite SpaceX being the only option, the cost was just $70 million. 5 million over the base price because space telescopes need much better cleanroom conditions.
 
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The last Ariane 5 is on the launch pad, getting ready to launch two communication satellites on July 4, 21:30-23:05 UTC (this post was made 3:40 UTC). Ariane 5 has been the workhorse of European spaceflight for over 20 years. After two losses early on it has flown 102 missions in a row without losing a payload, although one flight went to an incorrect inclination (the payloads were able to correct for it).

Arianespace keeps the smaller Vega rocket, which had a dubious track record recently, and keeps working on the Ariane 6 as successor to Ariane 5. It won't fly before 2024, however.

Edit: One day delay due to weather, but now it launched successfully.

Static fire test of Themis, Europe's path towards a partially reusable rocket.
 
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SpaceX has used a booster for the 16th time. Previously boosters were limited to 15 flights and SpaceX took a few months to qualify them beyond that milestone.
This individual booster has launched 801 satellites and two astronauts since May 2020. Here is a table.

Another booster has launched 755 satellites in 15 flights and is planned to launch 22 more in about two weeks. SpaceX uses these fleet leaders for Starlink launches, i.e. their own payloads, due to the potential risk. So far no reused booster has failed, however.Second flight for Zhuque-2 in 10 hours. If successful, it will be the first methane-fueled rocket to reach Earth orbit. Several other rockets are in development and/or have made unsuccessful attempts. I don't expect any live coverage unfortunately.
Edit: Success!
 
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Chandrayaan-3 will launch in half an hour (xx:05). It is India's second attempt to softly land on the Moon after Chandrayaan-2 crashed due to a software issue (Chandrayaan-1 did not include a lander).
Live coverage, mostly in English.
Landing is planned for August 23 close to the lunar south pole.

Edit: Successful launch. The difficult part will come in August, of course.On the ground it's blow-your-engine-up time:

An Epsilon rocket failed in October because the second stage didn't ignite. A recent test of that engine on the ground ended explosively (Video).

One of the engines assigned to the second Vulcan flight exploded two weeks ago during an acceptance test firing, but this only became known recently. ULA says it won't affect the launch of the first Vulcan and says it's not a big deal, but external observers are more skeptical.
 
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SpaceX is preparing for a true double launch from Florida.

* A Falcon 9 launching Starlink satellites at 02:20 UTC (in ~8 hours)
* Falcon Heavy launching Jupiter-3 to a geosynchronous transfer orbit at 03:04 UTC. Jupiter-3 will become the heaviest geostationary satellite ever launched. Both side boosters will fly back to the launch site to land.

Starlink satellites are typically released something like 40-60 minutes after launch, so both rocket launches could actually overlap in time.

Starlink livestream
Falcon Heavy livestream

Edit: Falcon Heavy got delayed by another day. A first launch attempt was aborted a minute before takeoff because something with the rocket wasn't as expected, now we had two delays by one day.
This could also have an impact on the launch of Crew-7 from the same pad, currently planned for August 17. SpaceX needs around 2-3 weeks to reconfigure the pad for Falcon 9.
 
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Starliner's crewed test flight (CFT) is now planned for March 2024
A critical parachute test is planned for November.

Assuming no new delays on either side, Crew Dragon will have flown 52 people (two of them twice) in 14 missions before Starliner's first crewed flight:
  • Demo-2, the equivalent to the CFT.
  • Crew-1, Crew-2, Crew-3, Crew-4, Crew-5, Crew-6 from the original NASA contract
  • Crew-7 and Crew-8 from the next contract
  • Inspiration4, a tourism and fundraiser flight
  • Axiom-1, Axiom-2 and Axiom-3, commercial flights to the ISS
  • Polaris Dawn, part of a private spaceflight development program
The four flights in italics are planned to fly before March 2024, Crew-6 will return later this month, all others are completed.

Delays are possible in both programs, but much more likely on the Starliner side. Going by 2019 plans CFT was supposed to happen in early/mid 2020, it's now at least four years late.