Sequel to Space Race Gets Real - Deep Space Updates November 3rd [33:50]

Transcript

Chapter 1: Recent rocket launches

Hello, it’s Scott Manley here. It’s Tuesday, November 3rd. The US is well, it’s in the middle of the midterm elections. But I think a lot of you would really prefer that I talk about some deep space updates. So, let’s get going talking about the rocket launches.

Rewinding to October 21st when in China we had a series 1S launching off a barge in the Yellow Sea carrying a payload called Jing Yuang 4. It’s a pathfinder for the Wu Yang constellation. Described as the world’s first lowincation remote sensing network, this is a 300 kg satellite which gives you halfmeter optical, 2 m multisspectral and 30 m infrared uh imaging. And basically, yeah, it’s it’s designed, you know, for lower inclination orbits.

Uh 23rd was a busy day. We had a rocket launch out of Mahia, the the Rocket Lads Electron. We’re not hawking around, this one was called. And uh this was carrying a satellite for Hawkeye 360 which does a private or independent low earth orbit signals intelligence constellation. So there was three satellites on this. Apparently these satellites what they do is they look for radio intelligence on the ground. They’re looking for things like cell phone antennas, radar sites, um GNSS jamming. All this information is of course available to whoever wants to actually buy it. And this was a successful launch.

Then later we had a long march 4B launching out of Jookuan. Uh this was carrying six Yaoan satellites although the numbering was kind of interesting. It was number 53 7 through9 and then group 561 19 through 21. These are basically uh Chinese government reconnaissance satellites. Um they were all into like 45 degree low inclination or or 45 degree LEO orbits. Um yeah we don’t really know what these things do. We get the usual thing about it monitoring the surface and being available for disaster recovery and and other things like that, but we we know that they can do military stuff as well.

Uh, another one on this 23rd was a Falcon 9 launching Starlink out of Vandenberg Slick 4E of course 27 V2 mini satellites into 70°ree inclination orbits. Uh, this was boosters 1063 and this was its flight number 36. There’s currently two boosters that have made it to three dozen launches and recoveries. Uh 25th of October, a long march 8A launched out of Wang Shang carrying satnet LEO or Gu Wang group number 28. So that’s nine small like communication satellites. Again, this is Chinese government’s equivalent of Starlink. There’s something like 200 plus satellites at this point.

Uh 27th of October we had a another Falcon 9 launching out of Vandenberg. This was booster number 1082 on flight number 26. Again recovered off the you know down near Mexico. 30th of October in India we have the GSLV Mark II launching out of Satish one and this was carrying NVS03 and this is the third of their next generation Navic navigation satellites. So this was injected into a geostationary transfer orbit and ultimately is supposed to end up in a geocynchronous orbit at 111.75 degrees east. This carries like of course you know atomic clocks and these ones are supposed to help with GPS and Galileo and other communication or navigation networks to provide better precision to users in India that have the the special equipment. Now this is actually a replacement for NVS number two which after injection into the geostationary transfer orbit uh it was unable to uh open it was it was unable to fire its engines for the apogee circularization burn due to pyro valve problems. So apparently they just left the valves open completely in this case to solve that problem.

31st of October Vandenberg again another Falcon 9 launching more Starlinks. Uh, and this was actually apparently the 700th Falcon 9 launch. Remember the last time when I was talking the 600th launch. Will Falcon 9 make it to 1,000? It’s not entirely clear at this point.

Anyway, yeah. Um, next 2nd of November, Electron again for Rocket Lab launching the Sea God Surveys out of Maha. This was um this was a flight for IQPS. That’s a Japanese synthetic aperture radar constellation. This satellite was very specifically called Wadatsumi number two. Um, and interestingly, this is the 99th launch for Rocket Lab with Electron. So, next one, it’s it’s a big number. I have a t-shirt from Rocket Lab, and it was launch number 10, and the name was running out of fingers. They’ve very much run out of fingers and toes and all sorts of other I don’t know how you count to, you know, 100 on your body. I’m sure someone will have an idea.

Anyway, uh 3rd of November this morning, we had a Kinetic 2 launching out of Juwan and this is the second flight of the Kinetic 2, which is a tririccore liquid fueled rocket using RP1 and liquid oxygen. It’s not like the solidfueled Kinetic 1. This carried 18 kanfan or thousand sale constellation. So again, this is another communications low Earth orbit communications constellation in China. It’s not the same one as Gowang. Anyway, that was all the launches.

Transcript

Chapter 2: Moon mission updates

Nothing interest particularly interesting in that group, but nevertheless, we’ve had plenty of other stories. And I think the big story this month has been or the big last two weeks has basically been US and China having big like showboat events talking about their moon plans. So yes, we had the Artemis acceleration update on the 23rd and that was, you know, just another sort of press conference or like a live stream which had a lot of cool stuff. There was some great clips showing some new stuff from Blue Origin and some new stuff from, well, the SpaceX stuff mostly had stuff we’d already seen, but we saw a few clips of them like working with cabin space and stuff uh on a Starship design. So they were at least getting to the point where they’re cutting holes in the side of a starship to sort of figure out where the crew would actually go.

But yeah, part of this they also were really outlining how Artemis 3, four, and five is going to proceed. And they made it very clear at this point, by the way, that Starship and SpaceX are no longer guaranteed to get flight Artemis 4, the first landing on the moon. It’s going to be whoever is ready in time. But initially we’re looking at of course Artemis 3 and we know that the profile for that now is going to be launch a blue moon into this blue moon produce or ever standin. It’s mostly a blue moon but it’s not quite a blue moon. So it’s more like a you know light blue moon. Regardless that’ll go up once that’s up in a safe orbit. We will have Orion launch and it’ll dock to it and they’ll do some stuff. There may be portions of a suit available, but they’re not going to have a fully capable suit on there for testing partway through the mission. Uh they will then launch a Starship into low Earth orbit and that will then perform its, you know, they will then dock with that and spend some time.

But the other stuff was a little more interesting. I think this is stuff we already knew, but the one of the interesting things they talked about was some more improvements to SLS. And I know like oh SLS we’re spending all this money blah blah blah you know right so the the exploration upper stage it’s still dead but they’ve worked with uh ULA to make a bigger Centaur 5 or Centaur V. Uh so this is going to be the 180K version which I guess it adds much more hydrogen much more mass. Interestingly they’re switching the design from using stainless steel to incanel which is interesting. Um, it’s going to have like larger tanks for the hypergolics as well for attitude control updated everything human raiding work. The nice thing about this instead of the exploration upper stage is that it means that ULA can use it for their customers and indeed they’re already showing it on their site.

Uh, but anyway, that would expand it to give them a bit more performance and get them closer to getting uh Orion into low Earth orbit, which has been a problem with a lot of mission planning up until now. Uh, another thing that they showed was potentially adding uh another kickstage underneath their existing service module. And I’m not clear, but it sounded like some people think that this is just going to be another service module, but perhaps simplified, you know, without having the solar panels because you don’t need extra solar panels. Maybe just being the engine and leaving the attitude control on the rest of the service module. Other things could fit in this space, right? And I think they’re still doing studies on it. You know, for example, I pointed out that they had this um this thrust kit or whatever that they added to the Dragon. They put in the cargo in the trunk that could be used to reboost the space station and that would be a really good candidate for turning into like a kickstage. But I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen there.

What they did show was that NASA as was doing some wind tunnel tests with various um you know models of the upper stage to see how it affected the larger um piece of hardware. At least Ames is building the hardware. There will be some of the Ames hardware will be tested at Langley as I understand it. Anyway, finally, they sort of also talked about the concept of operations for both the Starship and the Blue Origins, you know, Blue Moon M2. Blue Moon Mark II is going to have three Blue Moon Mark 1’s used as space tugs to push it into lunar orbit. So, yeah, that’s interesting. Um whereas the Starship is going to go into a sort of high earth orbit rendevous with the Orion and then it’s actually going to use its engines to get Orion to the moon and then land on the moon and then return to Orion.

So yeah, there was some talk of there being 22 launches of of Starship and you know the the Super Heavy to actually refuel. This has been refuted repeatedly by many people. We’re still not sure exactly how many stages there will be. And and of course, Elon Musk also has been, you know, publicly saying that Raptor 3, while it looks clean, it hasn’t actually delivered any more thrust than Raptor 2 with the reliability needed, which is unfortunate. So, now they’re talking about Raptor 4, which will finally deliver something like 300 tons or whatever. Regardless, all of this stuff was very, very interesting. And you there’s definitely I should actually go into more detail, perhaps play it in Kerbal Space Program. Who knows?

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