The image on the left is something you’ve already seen if you looked at this column last week. That’s a render that SpaceX founder Elon Musk provided to give a sense of what the “hopper” being built at SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas would look like when complete. Now check out the image on the right because … it’s complete. That’s not a render. It’s a photograph.
In real life, the “Star Hopper” looks a bit more wrinkly than its rendered prediction. That’s because the steel covering of the test craft is quite thin. The hopper is designed for low altitude tests, so it’s not beefed up to the standards required to handle either the heat of reentry or the stress of high speed flight. That’s especially true of those fins (which Musk says are not fins) which appear to be made of steel just over the thickness of Reynold’s Wrap. Musk insists that the actual two-part spacecraft, considering of what are now called the Super Heavy Booster and the Starship vehicle, will use thicker steel that comes closer to the smooth form of the render.
Still … it’s very much not bad. SpaceX also appears to be running ahead of schedule, and if things go well they’ve indicated that flights could begin in as little as four weeks. Seeing this thing take off and land vertically would be spectacular. And considering that it’s a whole new structure riding completely new engines, there’s also the possibility that we’ll see a spectacular landing in many, many small pieces. Exciting times.
However, some of the excitement at SpaceX this week is of the less desirable sort. SpaceX has let it be know that it’s cutting its workforce by around 10 percent. The official line is that the company is “focusing” in on the immediate tasks at hand, but it’s hard to interpret this in any way that doesn’t look like SpaceX is having trouble finding enough customers to power the company through the development of new vehicles. As a private company, SpaceX’s finances can be pretty opaque, but after several years of what seemed to be clear profits, in 2018 the company sought out a loan. They look to be going after another, larger loan in 2019.
Not so long ago, Musk conducted a general purge of management for the company’s ambitious plan to orbit a fleet of several thousand satellites to provide high bandwidth satellite Internet. But SpaceX really needs that project to come to fruition, because it promises to bring in the sort of dollars needed to keep on track with building rockets that are aimed at Mars.
Despite undercutting every other large launcher by a sizable factor, and reaching a point where the company turns a large profit on every commercial launch, SpaceX appears to be feeling the heat from small launchers like Rocket Lab (and a dozen others just entering the market) whose boosters can carry small satellites to low earth orbit. Which is most of the traffic to space. SpaceX needs more customers with large satellites, or with at least medium satellites heading for geosynchronous orbit, so that it’s growing fleet of Falcon 9 block-5s can strut their fiery stuff.
Even though 2018 brought a record 21 launches from the company that’s redefined space flight, it doesn’t appear to be enough to meet what’s needed to finish the Mars fleet. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen. It just means that the biggest space race at the moment might be happening on the ledger sheets at SpaceX.
Space News: SpaceX completes the new Iridium satellite constellation.
SpaceX launched the final 10 Iridium Next satellites into orbit Jan. 11, completing its first mission of the year and the last in a multi-launch contract for its largest non-government customer, Iridium Communications.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off at 10:31 a.m. Eastern from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Almost an hour later, Iridium’s new 860-kilogram satellites separated from the rocket one-by-one for 15 minutes. Iridium confirmed telemetry from all 10 satellites at 11:53 a.m. Eastern.
Those who predicted SpaceX would get this one off on schedule (which did not include me) proved to be correct. Completing this contract was fantastic work, but completing this contract may also be part of what’s creating a cash squeeze for the stainless steel spacecraft company.
BBC News: Russia’s Spektr-R space telescope has stopped responding.
Russia's only space radio telescope is no longer responding to commands from Earth, officials say.
Astro Space Centre chief Nikolai Kardashev said some of the Spektr-R satellite's communication systems had stopped working.
But it was still transmitting scientific data, RIA Novosti news agency reports.
Still transmitting is good. It shows that Spektr is still operational, which holds out hope that it will wake up and start talking again. But just transmitting, not receiving would seem to be a serious limit on any future data.
ScienceNews: Less than a year after launch, TESS is already finding bizarre worlds.
My personal friend, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is doing amazing work. And finding amazing things.
Unlike Kepler, which stared unblinkingly at a single patch of sky for years, TESS scans a new segment of sky every month. Over two years, TESS will cover the entire 360 degrees of sky visible from Earth’s orbit.
In the first four segments, TESS has already spotted eight confirmed planets and more than 320 unconfirmed candidates, said Xu Chelsea Huang of MIT. And several of them are downright strange.
Take the third-found planet, HD 21749b. Only 52 light-years away, it has the lowest temperature known for a planet orbiting a bright, nearby star, astronomers reported at the meeting and in a paper posted at arXiv.org on January 1.
That planet turns out to be a “Sub-Neptune” in a 36 day orbit around a dwarf star. The difference between what scientists thought we would see in terms of planetary systems, and the incredible variety we’re finding, really shows the peril of making predictions based on a single example. Let’s hope we’re just as wrong about life.
CNN: Score a final planet for Kepler.
Sure. TESS is racking up the planets now, but before there was TESS, there was Kepler. And credit that amazing probe with one more planet.
Although NASA's Kepler space telescope ran out of fuel and ended its mission in 2018, citizen scientists have used its data to discover an exoplanet 226 light-years away in the Taurus constellation.
The exoplanet, known as K2-288Bb, is about twice the size of Earth and orbits within the habitable zone of its star, meaning liquid water may exist on its surface. It's difficult to tell whether the planet is rocky like Earth or a gas giant like Neptune.
New York Times: Mysterious radio signals from deep space
For the last several years, astronomers have been teased and baffled by mysterious bursts of radio waves from the distant universe: pops of low-frequency radiation, emitting more energy than the sun does in a day, that occur randomly and disappear immediately. Nobody knows when these “fast radio bursts,” or F.R.B.s, will occur, or where exactly in the cosmos they are occurring.
More than 60 of these surprise broadcasts have been recorded so far. About the only thing astronomers agree on is that these signals probably are not extraterrestrials saying hello.
So it was big news a year ago when scientists found a repeating radio burster and tracked it to a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years from Earth. Subsequent observations suggested that the burst was generated by extremely powerful magnetic fields, most likely ruling out lasers from alien spaceships.
It’s not aliens. Or, if it is aliens, the energy represented by these “signals” is so high, we should be very, very glad they’re way over there.
Motherboard: Tons of Stars Are Actually Solid 'Crystal Spheres' Hanging In Space
Sorry, I accidentally omitted this terrific story until … just now.
As detailed in a paper published on Wednesday in Nature, astronomers at the University of Warwick in the UK obtained the first direct evidence of a star’s core turning into a crystal of solid oxygen and carbon. What’s more, the research suggests that the sky is full of stars that are undergoing or have completed crystallization and that our own Sun will one day transform into a crystal as well.
Indeed, as University of Warwick physicist Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay put it in a statement, ”billions of white dwarfs in our galaxy have already completed the process and are essentially crystal spheres in the sky.”
Washington Post: 2019 is a promising year for space.
Though the prospect of the return of human spaceflight from U.S. soil has at times seemed like a mirage, NASA’s astronauts could this year return to space from the Florida Space Coast for the first time since the space shuttle was retired more than seven years ago. If successful, it would punctuate a year that government and industry officials believe could mark a turning point in the U.S. space program, which could see all sorts of new milestones as NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing.
Boeing is also working to develop a spacecraft it hopes would ferry NASA’s astronauts to the International Space Station by the end of 2019, meaning there would be not one but two American spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to orbit. After successfully scratching what many consider the edge of space last month, Virgin Galactic is planning to make space tourism a reality in 2019. Blue Origin also hopes to fly its first test mission to space this year. And small rocket companies hope to start launching to orbit on a more regular basis.
As it happens, I was supposed to be headed to Florida on Tuesday to conduct interviews, make a pad visit, and settle in for the first launch of Crew Dragon. But … shutdown. Still, hopefully things will be back on track soon.
And speaking of this, I’m holding off on the launch calendar this week. Thanks.