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Universe Today

SpaceX resumes Falcon 9 launches after FAA go-ahead

SpaceX Falcon 9 liftoff at night
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Credit: SpaceX via X)

SpaceX is flying again after the Federal Aviation Administration ruled that the company can resume Falcon 9 rocket launches while the investigation into a failed July 11 mission continues.

The FAA’s go-ahead came on July 25 after SpaceX reported that the failure was caused by a crack in a sense line for a pressure sensor attached to the upper stage’s liquid-oxygen system. That resulted in an oxygen leak that degraded the performance of the upper-stage engine. As a near-term fix, SpaceX is removing the sense line and the sensors for upcoming Falcon 9 launches.

It didn’t take long for SpaceX to get back to its flight schedule. The company launched a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:45 a.m. ET July 27 (10:45 p.m. PT July 26). Like the July 11 mission, this one sent a batch of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit.

The launch appeared to proceed without incident. After stage separation, the first-stage booster descended to a landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, while the second stage proceeded to orbit and deployed 23 satellites for the Starlink high-speed internet network.

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GeekWire

Clean-tech pioneer First Mode braces for more layoffs

Mining truck at First Mode's proving grounds in Centralia
A hybrid mining truck takes a test drive through First Mode’s Centralia proving grounds. (First Mode via X)

First Mode, a Seattle-based company that’s concentrating on reducing carbon emissions in mining and other heavy industries, has alerted its employees to a significant round of layoffs that’s expected to unfold in early August.

A memo sent out today to U.S. employees doesn’t specify how many will be laid off — and emphasized that “individual determinations are still in process.” But First Mode told me in an email that the layoffs could amount to as much as 50% of the company’s global workforce.

In the memo to employees, chief people officer Mornie Robertson said the total number of impacted workers in the U.S. “will be large enough” to obligate First Mode to provide all U.S. employees with notification under the terms of the WARN Act. That blanket 60-day advance notification accompanied today’s memo.

“Impacted employees will be notified the week of August 5,” Robertson wrote.

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Universe Today

NASA cancels VIPER moon rover due to costs and delays

NASA VIPER rover in clean room
NASA’s VIPER rover sits assembled inside the clean room at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. (Credit: NASA)

NASA says it intends to discontinue development of its VIPER moon rover, due to cost increases and schedule delays — but the agency is also pointing to other opportunities for robotic exploration of the lunar south polar region.

The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover was originally scheduled for launch in late 2023, targeting the western edge of Nobile Crater near the moon’s south pole.

The south polar region is a prime target for exploration because it’s thought to hold deposits of water ice that could sustain future lunar settlements. NASA plans to send astronauts to that region by as early as 2026 for the first crewed lunar landing since 1972.

Unfortunately, the VIPER project ran into a series of delays, due to snags in the testing and development of the rover as well as the Astrobotic Griffin lander that was to deliver the rover to the lunar surface. The readiness date for VIPER and Griffin was most recently pushed back to September 2025.

During an internal review, NASA managers decided that continuing with VIPER’s development would result in cost increases that could lead to the cancellation or disruption of other moon missions in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, or CLPS. NASA notified Congress of its intent to discontinue development.

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GeekWire

Interlune tests system for processing moon soil

Maia Willebrand with Interlune hardware on parabolic airplane flight
Former Interlune intern Maia Willebrand helps test an early prototype of Interlune’s soil-processing hardware on a parabolic flight in February. Interlune funded the February flight, but a NASA grant will support future flights. (Zero Gravity Corp. Photo / Steve Boxall)

Seattle-based Interlune has received a $348,000 grant from NASA to test its system for processing lunar soil on a series of reduced-gravity airplane flights — marking one more small step toward harvesting helium-3 and other resources on the moon.

The project is one of 11 selected for funding through NASA’s TechFlights program, which supports space technology testing on suborbital rockets, rocket-powered landers or airplane-based platforms.

Interlune’s system is known as CRUMBLE — an acronym that stands for “Comminution of Regolith Using Milling for Beneficiation of Lunar Extract.” Basically, the system would break down lunar dirt and rock, or regolith, and make it easier to extract potentially valuable ingredients such as helium-3.

The TechFlights grant will fund parabolic flights provided by Zero Gravity Corp. to see which kinds of equipment would work best in the airless, reduced-gravity conditions present on the moon’s surface. Interlune would use simulated moon dirt to put prototypes for its CRUMBLE processor through their paces.

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GeekWire

Alitheon makes headway with ID system aided by AI

Roei Ganzarski at Alitheon HQ
Roei Ganzarski became Alitheon’s CEO in 2022. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — Seven years after it came onto the Seattle area’s tech scene, a startup called Alitheon is making headway with a product identification system that can make sure a high-priced purse — or a high-performance airplane part — is the real deal rather than a counterfeit.

The system, known as FeaturePrint, doesn’t use barcodes or blockchain. Instead, Alitheon’s AI-enhanced software analyzes ever-so-slight irregularities in the surface of a manufactured item.

“We are able to see all of the features, flaws, aspects of the manufacturing process, however you want to define them,” Alitheon CEO Roei Ganzarski explained at Alitheon’s Bellevue headquarters. “Because they’re random and chaotic by nature, because they’re not there by design, they constitute a digital fingerprint.”

Sorting out what’s real and what’s fake is a challenge for supply chains, and finding solutions would be worth a lot of money. Experts estimate the market in counterfeit goods at more than $1 trillion per year and say that figure is steadily rising.

Ganzarski noted that the idea of tracking variations in manufacturing tolerances isn’t new. “What’s really new is the intellectual property that we’ve developed which allows us to do this with standard, off-the-shelf cameras,” he said. “So, no need for spectral imaging, no infrared, none of that nonsense. Just a standard camera. In fact, we can do it with a cellphone.” And he proceeded to demonstrate …

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Fiction Science Club

Movie points to the past and future of moon marketing

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum on "Fly Me to the Moon" poster
Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum star in "Fly Me to the Moon." (Apple Original Films / Columbia Pictures)

In a new movie titled “Fly Me to the Moon,” a marketing consultant played by Scarlett Johansson uses Tang breakfast drink, Crest toothpaste and Omega watches to give a publicity boost to NASA’s Apollo moon program.

The marketing consultant may be totally fictional. And don’t get me started on the fake moon landing that’s part of the screwball comedy’s plot. But the fact that the makers of Tang, Crest and Omega allied themselves with NASA’s brand in the 1960s is totally real.

More than 50 years later, those companies are still benefiting from the NASA connection, says Richard Jurek, a marketing and public relations executive in the Chicago area who’s one of the authors of “Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program.”

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Jurek says Tang sold poorly when it was introduced in the late 1950s. “But once it was announced that it was being used in the space program and marketed that way, it became a huge bestseller for them, and in fact, still sells more overseas — and is a multibillion-dollar brand today,” he says.

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Universe Today

SpaceX rocket failure could delay lots of launches

View of Falcon 9 second-stage engine from rocket-cam
A view from the Falcon 9 upper stage's rocket-cam shows ice forming around engine hardware. (Credit: SpaceX via YouTube)

After going eight years and more than 300 launches without a failure, SpaceX had a Falcon 9 rocket launch go awry, resulting in the expected loss of 20 Starlink satellites.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it would oversee an investigation into the anomaly, raising the prospect that dozens of launches could be delayed until the problem is identified and rectified. Update for July 27: SpaceX was able to resume Falcon 9 launches after the FAA ruled that no public safety issues were involved in the anomaly.

As many as 40 Falcon 9 launches are on tap between now and the end of the year — potentially including missions that would carry astronauts to the International Space Station and send the privately funded Polaris Dawn crew into orbit for the world’s first commercial spacewalk.

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Universe Today

Ariane 6’s debut puts Europe back in the launch game

The European Space Agency's Ariane 6 rocket rises for the first time from its launch pad in French Guiana. Credit: ESA via YouTube

Europe’s next-generation Ariane 6 rocket rose today for the first time from its South American spaceport, ending a yearlong launch gap caused by the Ariane 5’s retirement.

The heavy-lift launch vehicle’s demonstration flight began with liftoff at 4 p.m. local time (19:00 GMT) from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, and continued with satellite deployments in orbit.

“A completely new rocket is not launched often, and success is far from guaranteed,” Josef Aschbacher, the European Space Agency’s director general, said in a statement. “I am privileged to have witnessed this historic moment when Europe’s new generation of the Ariane family lifted off – successfully – effectively reinstating European access to space.”

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GeekWire

Gravitics makes a $125M space station deal with Axiom

Illustration: Gravitics spacecraft in orbit
An artist's conception shows Gravitics' spacecraft in orbit. (Gravitics Illustration)

Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics says it has won a $125 million contract from Axiom Space to provide a pressurized spacecraft for Axiom’s yet-to-be-launched commercial space station.

The hardware would play a utility role by providing a variety of support services for Axiom Station.

Axiom Station’s first space module is being built by Thales Alenia Space. That habitation module would be attached to the International Space Station in the 2026 time frame, and when it’s time for the ISS to be retired, Axiom plans to detach its hardware to serve as a standalone orbital outpost.

Gravitics would help Axiom build out its orbital infrastructure. The startup, founded in 2021, offers a product line of spacecraft ranging in diameter from 3 meters (10 feet) to a Starship-sized 8 meters (26 feet). The spacecraft to be built for Axiom will be 4 meters (13 feet) in diameter, with its own propulsion system and power system.

Gravitics’ deal with Axiom points the way toward an ecosystem for building and operating commercial space stations.

“Axiom Space and Gravitics are working together to develop space infrastructure to enable a sustainable global space economy in low-Earth orbit,” Matt Ondler, president of Axiom Space, said today in a news release. “Our next-gen platform, Axiom Station, will provide new pathways to space for traditional space users and non-traditional industries. We are expanding commercial opportunities in space, from in-space manufacturing to technology demonstrations to research and innovative solutions that will advance civilization.”

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Fiction Science Club

How future satellite wars will be fought — and won

Illustration: Surveillance satellites in orbit
An artist's conception shows satellites that are part of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program. (Space Force Illustration)

Wars in space are no longer just science fiction. In fact, Space War I has been raging for more than two years, with no quick end in sight.

This isn’t the kind of conflict that involves X-wing fighters or Space Marines. Instead, it’s a battle over how satellites are being used to collect imagery, identify military targets and facilitate communications in the war between Ukraine and Russia.

“As I looked at Ukraine in the early months, it was obvious to me: This is the first space war,” says David Ignatius, a journalist who lives a double life as a foreign-affairs columnist for The Washington Post and a spy-thriller novelist.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Ignatius delves into the potential national-security threats posed by satellite-based warfare — and how he wove those threats into the plot threads of a new novel titled “Phantom Orbit.” The tale lays out a scenario in which Space War I tips toward a potentially catastrophic Space War II.

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