#WASHINGTON — Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner will return from the International #Space Station in September without the two astronauts on board who launched on it in June after NASA concluded thruster problems posed too much risk.

NASA announced Aug. 24 that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the NASA astronauts who flew to the ISS on Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission in June, will remain on the station until next February, with Starliner returning to Earth in early September uncrewed.

Agency officials said at a briefing they reached that decision after concluding they did not understand well enough the performance of reaction control system thrusters that malfunctioned during Starliner’s approach to the station in June. NASA and Boeing have worked since then to determine what caused the drop in performance of the thrusters to see if it would reoccur during Starliner’s undocking and return to Earth.

However, they said they could not resolve all the uncertainties about the thrusters to their satisfaction. “That uncertainty remains in our understanding in the physics going on in the thrusters,” said Jim Free, NASA associate administrator.

Testing of the thrusters at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico was able to duplicate the loss of performance in the thrusters, with inspections revealing a Teflon seal had heated and expanded, constraining the flow of oxidizer to the thruster. But officials said they didn’t know enough about how that was happening to be confident that there would not be problems during time-critical burns during Starliner’s departure from the station and its deorbit burn.

“There was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” said Steve Stich, #NASA commercial crew program manager. “There was just too much risk for the crew, and so we decided to pursue the uncrewed test flight.”

The Progress MS-28 cargo #spacecraft, which was launched from the Baikonur spaceport on Thursday, has docked the Zvezda module of the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS), according to a Roscosmos broadcast.

The cargo #spacecraft docked the station in automatic mode. The process was controlled by specialists of the Mission Control Center and by Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko (TASS special correspondent), Nikolay Chub and Alexander Grebenkin.

The Progress MS-28 cargo spacecraft delivered 2,621 kilograms of cargo to the ISS, including 950 kilograms of fuel, 420 liters of drinking water, 50 kilograms of compressed nitrogen in cylinders, as well as about 1,201 kilograms of various equipment and materials in the cargo hold: food for the crew, clothing items and kits for scientific experiments.

In particular, Progress arrived with the SPIN-X1-MVN X-ray spectrometer, which the cosmonauts will install outside the Zvezda module during extravehicular activities. It will allow scientists to periodically conduct an almost complete survey of the celestial sphere in the X-ray range. In addition, the spacecraft also brought stowages for new scientific experiments.

Andrey Vedernikov, a senior research fellow responsible for nutrition, told TASS that fresh oranges, grapefruits and onions arrived on the cargo ship to the station. The Progress MS-28 spacecraft also delivered coffee with and without sugar to the cosmonauts.

Two #Chinese spacecraft appear to have successfully reached their intended lunar orbits despite an initial launch issue that left them stranded in low Earth orbit.

A slide attributed to the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization (CSU) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), recently posted on the Tieba Baidu social networking platform, indicates that the DRO-A and DRO-B spacecraft have successfully entered distant retrograde orbits around the Moon. The DRO missions are part of a pilot project run by CAS.

“[DRO] #Satellites A, B, and L have been powered on and are operating stably in orbit, with their working status normal,” the slide reads.

The mission is not critical to China’s immediate lunar plans. However, this successful recovery, if confirmed, would bolster the country’s deep space capabilities and demonstrate resilience in overcoming in-orbit challenges. China has yet to provide an update on the mission following a short report of a launch anomaly back in March.

SAN FRANCISCO – A NASA formation-flying experiment shows the promise of autonomous navigation for #satellite swarms.

The four cubesats in the Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment, or StarFOX, calculate their orbits by combining visual images from star trackers with robotics algorithms.

“Such a visual-navigation system on a swarm of satellite can be used to navigate around Earth,” Simone D’Amico, Stanford University associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and founding director of Stanford’s Space Rendezvous Lab, told SpaceNews. “Since we don’t use GPS, it can be used to fly around the moon or around Mars with an increased level of autonomy.”

Mission operators communicate with Starling, a swarm of four cubesats launched on a Rocket Lab Electron in July 2023, as a single entity. StarFOX is one of four experiments testing communications, navigation and autonomy technologies for future swarms.

The U.S. military has begun to recognize the utility of small satellites, with programs like the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated #Warfighter Space Architecture leveraging smallsats for missile tracking and communications. However, a new report argues that the U.S. Space Force has yet to fully commit the resources to capitalize on this technology at scale.

“The Space Force, Congress, and the industrial base must adjust old paradigms built around large, legacy space systems with long and costly development timelines and move toward a hybrid approach that includes both smallsats and large, exquisite satellite systems,” says a report released July 25 by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

The report calls on the U.S. military to fully leverage the innovations in small satellite technology to enhance its space capabilities and maintain superiority in a contested domain.
Smallsats have become increasingly popular in both commercial and military applications due to their lower cost, faster production times, and ability to be deployed in large numbers. This proliferation allows for greater resilience and redundancy in space operations, the report says, arguing that proliferation is crucial to maintaining what the military terms “space superiority” — the ability to operate freely in space while denying adversaries the same capability.

#Smallsats, typically weighing less than 1,200 kg, have gained significant traction in recent years. Commercial players like SpaceX and Planet have demonstrated the power of large constellations of small satellites for various applications, from global internet coverage to Earth observation.

Charles Galbreath, lead author of the report, says the Space Force must embrace the smallsat revolution or risk losing the high ground in space. “Our adversaries, particularly China and Russia, are developing sophisticated counterspace weapons aimed at our legacy satellite systems. SmallSats offer a way to enhance our resilience and operational capabilities in this new environment.”

The report recommends the Department of Defense boost production rates, strengthen supply chains, and increase funding to support large-scale smallsat deployment.

#Spacenews.

A new kind of #space politics .

On July 16 2024, #Elon #Musk shouted from the proverbial rooftops that he will move SpaceX out of California to Boca Chica, Texas. By his own admission, he is not moving only for corporate advantage, value, or profitability, but also for politics. (He is also moving X, aka Twitter, from San Francisco to Austin, likewise for political reasons; he originally bought Twitter for ideological reasons.)

Ironically, Musk’s announcement came the day after another Musk company, Tesla, reversed a large number of recent California layoffs in Fremont, CA. Likewise, only two years after moving Tesla’s management to Texas with great fanfare, he brought the global engineering team back to Palo Alto, CA.

While #Elon Musk’s resources may permit him to do whatever he wants, I suspect the SpaceX story will end up looking a lot like Tesla’s. If so, in a few years, SpaceX management might in a few years be right back where they started.

It is very easy to say you are moving a company.

It is only a little bit harder to actually move a company of programmers and office workers. Aside from employees who may not want to go, the barriers to doing so are relatively low.

Moving a #manufacturing operation like that of the #Falcon 9 is a whole different kettle of fish. You’re not just moving computers and monitors and people to another already furnished office. You’re moving multiple entire factories, including jigs, tooling and heavy machines.

#SpaceX cleared to launch Falcon 9 rocket after rare failure

#Russia to launch five Earth imaging satellites by yearend — #Roscosmos. The space vehicles slated for launch include two Aist-2T stereoscopic imaging satellites, a Kondor-FKA remote sensing satellite, a Resurs-P observation satellite and an Obzor-R multipurpose observation #satellite

#India to build first phase of its own space station by 2028
We have completed or rather engineered the detailed #design, which is capable of being launched by the LVM3, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Chairman Sreedhara Panicker Somanath said