Main Engine Cut Off - T+173: Headlines

Episode Date: November 14, 2020

With a massive amount of news happening in the week following the election here in the US, it’s a good opportunity to give everyone a listen in on MECO Headlines. I run through all the stories of th...e week each and every weekend just like this for the supporters of MECO, so if you like what you hear, join the Headlines tier or higher!This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 37 executive producers—Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Nadim, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, and seven anonymous—and 421 other supporters.TopicsU.S. Department of Defense > Contract (SpaceX NSSL fleet surveillance)Airbus, Raytheon protest Space Development Agency satellite contract awards - SpaceNewsBlue Canyon Technologies - Small Satellite Leader Blue Canyon Technologies To Be Acquired By Raytheon TechnologiesNew Propulsive Sherpa OTVs Coming in 2021 - SpaceflightArecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is at risk of collapsingArecibo Radio Telescope: Warning of Structure Collapse (Updated)2020 NASA Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity (ACO) Selections | NASANorthrop Grumman Awarded Additional Cargo Resupply Missions to the International Space Station | Northrop GrummanILOA-IM Announce Agreement for 2021 Lunar Landing and Milky Way Galaxy Center ImagingSenate Appropriators Approve Far Less for HLS Than Needed to Meet 2024 Goal - SpacePolicyOnline.comBiden-Harris Transition Team Names Landing Party Members - SpacePolicyOnline.comVirgin Galactic executive to lead Australian Space Agency - SpaceNewsUkraine signs NASA Artemis Agreement to study Moon, Mars, comets, and asteroids - Ukraine signs agreement with NASA to study Moon, Mars, comets, and asteroids - 112.internationalChinese rocket firm Galactic Energy succeeds with first orbital launch, secures funding - SpaceNewsCeres-1 maiden launch - YouTubeIndian PSLV deploys 10 satellites in first launch since start of pandemic - Spaceflight NowLong March 3B lofts second Tiantong-1 spacecraft - NASASpaceFlight.comULA Atlas 5 launches National Reconnaissance Office satellite - SpaceNewsSatTrackCam Leiden (b)log: NROL-101: probably a HEO missionThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to anthony@mainenginecutoff.comFollow @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. It's been a few weeks since I've been here on the podcast, but it has been because the election ate all of the news for the week or two following my last show. That last show does stand up pretty well, though, I think. I talked all about the lunar politics as we talked about, you know, stuff here in the U.S. Internationally, where things stand heading into the election. I do think even knowing the election result now, what I said there still stands up pretty good. So head back and listen to that if you want my thoughts on where things might go with the politics. But after the election ended, there
Starting point is 00:00:47 was a ton of news that came out over the last week. I couldn't really figure out which stories I wanted to talk about on the show. So what I thought I would do, and I do this every year or so, is actually put the headlines show from the headlines feed into the main feed here. So if you are somebody who is a member over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support, if you're $3 a month or more, you get this kind of show every single weekend. I run through all the stories of the week, give you my thoughts on them, talk about stuff that might not come up on the main show. And in cases like this, where there's a ton of news, it's a really good way to stay up to date. So what you're going to hear is
Starting point is 00:01:23 just what you would hear over in the headlines feed. And if you like it, I would suggest going over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support and joining up there, just like 458 people have done so far, including 37 executive producers who made this episode possible. Thank you to Brandon, Matthew, Simon, Lauren, Melissa, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Nadim, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everett Astronaut, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support. And once again, I hope you enjoy this version of Headlines. It's going to be a long one. So what do you say we jump into it? Starting over in the National Security Space
Starting point is 00:02:05 Launch Program, SpaceX this week received another contract as part of phase two. This is the contract that they want to launch national security payloads for the next couple of years. This one is for $29.6 million, and it's for fleet surveillance. So this gives the Department of Defense the ability to get data and some oversight over non-national security flights. So this gives the Department of Defense the ability to get data and some oversight over non-national security flights. So these could be NASA flights, Starlink flights, all sorts of different stuff that SpaceX is launching. There's going to be some visibility there. So we'll see if anything specifically comes out of that or if this is a kind of run-of-the-mill thing here, you know, could be related to some reuse type of operations or something like that.
Starting point is 00:02:47 Interested to see if we get more detail on that. My guess is we won't. So for now, this is a nice little $30 million boost for SpaceX on the launch side of things. Now, on the other hand, in terms of SpaceX satellites, you might remember a story from a couple of weeks ago where SpaceX and L3 Harris won awards from the Space Development Agency to build some satellites for the new missile warning constellation that the Space Development Agency is building out. This past week, actually, I think this was the week before, but it was so close to deadline that I missed the news.
Starting point is 00:03:23 Actually, I think this was the week before, but it was so close to deadline that I missed news. Airbus and Raytheon both filed protests over these awards that went to SpaceX and L3Harris. No real comment on what the protest was over. Airbus said that they offered the Arrow satellite bus, which is the one that they're making for OneWeb satellites. They make those down in Florida. Raytheon didn't have any comment at all about what they offered. satellites. They make those down in Florida. Raytheon didn't have any comment at all about what they offered. And really, the only statement we saw was in a Sandra Irwin article on Space News
Starting point is 00:03:51 from an Airbus spokesperson who said that post-award debrief review identified concerns about the government's evaluation process. And as a result, we filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office. So we'll see where this goes from here too. This one is tricky because it places all these projects on hold until they're resolved, until the protests are resolved. And with the Space Development Agency hoping to move fast on this, that could be problematic. They're hoping to launch these eight satellites, four each from SpaceX and L3Harris, hoping to launch those fall of 2022. So not a ton of wiggle room in the schedule. And it could be that this process brings out some more details about the SpaceX and L3Harris satellite buses that we didn't have
Starting point is 00:04:31 before, which I would be quite curious to find out about. Raytheon this week was also in the news for an acquisition. They are going to be acquiring Blue Canyon Technologies, who makes small satellite buses. They have recently been winning a ton of contracts from the Department of Defense to build out satellite buses. So right now, they say that this is going to still run as its own brand in its own facilities. There's not going to be a lot of change here. That tends to be the case for like two years until the acquisition is through and then something changes. But who knows? For some of these kind of prime contractors in the military industrial complex side of things, these acquisitions sometimes are just scooping up a good partner. You might remember a year ago,
Starting point is 00:05:13 maybe two years ago, Boeing, I think they acquired Millennium Space, very similar. I think Lockheed got one as well. Tyvek, maybe, if my memory serves correctly. So not a huge surprise that they want to scoop up somebody like this who's winning a lot of DoD contracts, especially considering Raytheon and the areas that they're playing in with some things like this Space Development Agency contract. It's an area they want to grow, and Blue Canyon Technologies seems to have a good line in on the Department of Defense side of things right now. Now when it comes to launching those tons of options out there, one of which is Spaceflight, who previously had announced SherpaFX. They announced
Starting point is 00:05:50 this a couple of weeks back, which is their Sherpa bus that can carry multiple different payloads up as part of a rideshare. It doesn't have any propulsive capabilities, does have some tracking of satellites that are deployed from it. And the first one's going to be going up on a SpaceX rideshare in December on SXRS3. That'll be carrying 14 payloads. But this past week, Spaceflight announced the two other Sherpa series vehicles. There's Sherpa LTC and Sherpa LTE. Not like the cellular network, but actually these are referring to propulsion. So the LTC, C stands for chemical propulsion. So this one is, as they say in the press release, a high thrust bi-propellant green propulsion subsystem that's going to be provided by Benchmark Space Systems. Based on their site I'm looking at, I'm going to guess it's their Peregrine system, which the ISP is quoted at
Starting point is 00:06:41 270 to 290 seconds. Spaceflight says, you know, this is useful if you have a payload that you want to get up onto its orbit very quickly. And their other option is the SHERPA LTE, where the E stands for electric propulsion. This one will be powered by a hall thruster by Apollo Fusion Inc., the Apollo Constellation Engine. And Spaceflight is particularly marketing this one for small satellites going to geosynchronous or geostationary orbits, going out to cislunar space or even Earth escape orbits. So being able to boost, you know, with this electric propulsion, they have a ton of delta V available for whatever their payloads are on top of Sherpa. This doesn't come as a huge surprise. I think even when we had
Starting point is 00:07:22 Grant Bonin on the podcast a couple of months ago talking about spaceflight, he hinted at their interest in this kind of last mile propulsion element where they can get a bunch of small satellites on a rideshare, whether that be a dedicated rideshare on SpaceX or on Rocket Lab or something like that, or as part of a Starlink launch. Once they're up, though, then they have propulsive capabilities to be able to go to where that satellite actually intends. A lot of different companies are offering this, but spaceflight having such a known quantity offering in the industry is particularly of interest to people that have worked with them before, already have good relationships,
Starting point is 00:08:01 already know they can rely on spaceflight. So definitely a good expansion there. And I'm curious to see, you know, they say they're going to fly about six of these a year, specifically around that SpaceX rideshare program. And I think that's why back when SpaceX announced the rideshare program, with such low prices, we were saying, you know, this is not something to worry about if you're spaceflight, because it actually makes your business a lot easier. And this is even an upgrade over that where SpaceX is going maybe to a Starlink orbit, but you want to go somewhere else.
Starting point is 00:08:34 Well, you can get a Sherpa LTE and you've got plenty of Delta V to get where you're going on a very cheap access to space basis. So that's really cool. And I hope maybe we can have somebody else back on to talk about that as they get closer to launch. An update on the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Things are not going well down there. Back in August, they had an auxiliary cable that is supporting the platform in the middle of this gigantic radio dish. They had an auxiliary cable fail.
Starting point is 00:08:58 Well, on that same tower, there's three towers that hold that platform up in the middle. On that same tower, they had one of the primary cables fail. There's a fantastic article on this by Nadia Drake for National Geographic. I never knew this until this article, but apparently her dad is Frank Drake, the guy from the Drake equation, the SETI founder. I think he sent the Arecibo message as well. So pretty cool that she could quote her dad as a source of this article. But she had a great rundown on what's going on there.
Starting point is 00:09:26 And then Leonard David had some updated statements from UCF. So the best summation I can give you is that there are three towers holding up the platform in the middle of the dish. Each tower has four primary cables, only two of which are required. Back in the 90s, they added auxiliary cables. So now on one of the towers, an auxiliary cable failed. That actually just slipped out of its socket. It didn't actually rupture in the middle, but this time a primary cable ruptured, which indicates that these things are pretty damaged. The worry here is that if one
Starting point is 00:09:56 more cable were to fail on the one tower, considering the fact that obviously one of them is damaged at this point, if the others are as well, that could collapse the tower, which then puts more strain on the other towers and the whole structure could come down. So they're really trying to figure out what to do here and what the best path forward is. They have a safety zone around this thing. UCF also said that the National Science Foundation
Starting point is 00:10:20 is reviewing a request for $12 million, $12.5 million for repair funding. We'll see if they get that money. And if not, this is a bad sign for Arecibo. Even if they do get the money, it seems like it's a pretty shaky situation down there. So hopefully everything goes well and they figure out a path forward. But it could be pretty bad times down there in Puerto Rico. NASA this past week announced their 2020 announcement of collaboration opportunity
Starting point is 00:10:46 selections. As they put it on their site, this is 20 different partnerships to 17 companies. So a couple of the companies have multiple partnerships here. And this whole collection is a bunch of unfunded Space Act agreements. What that means is NASA is not funding these companies for any of this work, but what they are offering is expertise or access to NASA facilities if they want to use different centers and their testing facilities, things like that, or even access to experts or past work. The total estimated value of what the agency is committing to in terms of resources is about $15.5 million. I'm not going to read every single project out, but there are a couple to point out.
Starting point is 00:11:28 Aerojet Rocketdyne is going to be working with NASA Goddard. They're going to be doing a follow-on to the Green Propellant Infusion Mission, using some of the things that they learned there, and they're going to be developing a new hybrid propellant. They say Green Ionic Liquid and Conventional Hydrazine. That'll be what they're focusing on there. Blue Origin won two different things, I think. They are going to be working with a couple of different centers, Ames, Goddard, Johnson, and Marshall. One of them is on a space robot operating system, as they say. So this is
Starting point is 00:11:56 going to be working on future operations, I guess, on the lunar surface. And then they're also going to be working on some different engine designs, additive manufacturing, all the buzzwords you can think about in terms of engines. That one's with Marshall. Orbital Science Corporation, which is actually Northrop Grumman. This is, think of the arm that does Cygnus and Antares. They're going to be working with Glenn to develop a small spacecraft electric propulsion system. Uh, this could be interesting to be used around the moon. I don't know how small this is.
Starting point is 00:12:31 They'd say it's pretty low power. Uh, so it might not be something that they would use when you're thinking about things like Cygnus out to the moon, but, uh, maybe smaller spacecraft buses that they could be working on in the future. Phase four, they are working on new electric propulsion system.
Starting point is 00:12:46 That one will also be with Glenn. So that's pretty cool. I've seen their name thrown around a lot lately in the propulsion space. Rocket Lab also got one of these related to the recovery efforts. They've got the first recovery attempt coming up this week where they're actually going to try to recover the first stage. And they're working with Ames, Langley, and Armstrong Flight Research Center on a bunch of different things. One thing mentioned in here about the recovery system is that
Starting point is 00:13:13 the recovery system will enable more frequent and less expensive launches for government and commercial customers. It will also allow for payload return from the International Space Station, entry systems for small spacecraft, and a flight testbed to mature related entry, descent, and landing technologies. Very curious what they mean by that. The way that Rocket Lab is going to be recovering their first stage is by using parachutes, and then they're going to actually have a helicopter come and snag the first stage when it's under parachute. Very similar to how some of the early spy satellites recovered film canisters. I sort of wonder if that's what they mean there, by having some sort of small payload return from the ISS,
Starting point is 00:13:51 maybe some small spacecraft that could come back. Also, the way that it's worded, though, could mean that they're working on the actual decelerator design, which could be used for these other applications. Haven't heard a lot more on that, but that seems particularly curious to see Rocket Lab doing that kind of work. The last two I want to mention are probably the coolest here. SpaceX is going to partner with Langley to capture imagery and thermal measurements of a Starship vehicle during orbital re-entry over the Pacific Ocean. So you might remember way back in the day when Falcon 9 was first
Starting point is 00:14:27 working on landings, NASA actually partnered with SpaceX to capture imagery of one of their stages doing re-entry burn and supersonic retro propulsion and a couple of things that nobody had really done to that point yet. And there's just amazing imagery out there. Sounds like they're going to do similar things here with Starship. NASA obviously interested in Starship for Artemis and other programs out there. They've been embracing it more and more with these kind of partnerships. And this is yet another one. Reentry over the Pacific Ocean sounds like that's going to be pretty high altitude if they're going to, I don't know exactly. No, I guess they're going to land on a drone ship first. So maybe they're going to be doing this just off the coast of California where they have a drone ship stationed and they'll actually be capturing all the imagery there.
Starting point is 00:15:11 But that one will be very cool to watch. And finally, Space Systems Loral, part of Maxar, they're working on a way to shake dust off of solar panels, specifically around lunar dust. But this could be a solution that works elsewhere, thinking of Mars specifically. But they're going to have a mechanism, this is from the little press release here, a mechanism will mechanically pulse the array at various levels and attempt to shake the dust loose. The technology offers a potentially simple solution for removing dust from planetary solar arrays. So a common problem at Mars and would be a common problem at the moon, depending on what we're doing there, is that dust builds up on the arrays and lowers your power level. So maybe this is a way to do that clearing
Starting point is 00:15:54 without having somebody go out there with a broom and brush it off, I guess, if you don't have anyone on site. So that'll be a cool one to watch as well. Bunch of other stuff that I didn't mention, so if you're interested, go read the press release. I have linked in the show notes. Northrop Grumman was awarded two additional cargo resupply missions to the ISS as part of the Commercial Resupply Services 2 contract. These are going to both be Cygnus flying on Antares. These will be occurring in 2023. So this is at the tail end of their current agreement.
Starting point is 00:16:24 And total, it's going to cover just under 7,500 kilograms between those two missions. So full loads there for Cygnus, a little add-on to their CRS contract, which is good news for them. Intuitive Machines announced an agreement this week with the International Lunar Observatory Association, who is looking to put a small observatory on the South Pole, the moon, eventually. This announcement just covers a small payload, a precursor payload, just about 0.6 kilograms. So it's a very small instrument that will actually be flying on the first Intuitive Machines mission that they have contracted with NASA. Intuitive Machines is part of the Commercial
Starting point is 00:17:02 Lunar Payload Services Program, which is small landers to the moon, kind of cargo delivery per contract with NASA. So they have a flight scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2021, head to the moon, and it's got a bunch of NASA payloads on it that NASA has selected both internal and external. But Intuitive Machines has extra space to sell and actually, you know, not only fill out their vehicle, but actually make some more money. So this is where the commercial side of this comes in. And this is the first announcement in this regard that we've heard. So a small payload, definitely just trying to pave the way for the ILOA. They say it's going to include a dual camera miniaturized lunar imaging suite.
Starting point is 00:17:46 They're trying to capture a picture of the galactic center from the surface of the moon as a kind of experiment. I assume this is really to work out some of their operations, some of their initial hardware. But it is really cool to see one of the CLPS providers starting to sell the excess payload space they have that's not covered by that NASA mission. So I expect to see a lot more of this as we get closer to those launch dates for the CLPS providers. We have a handful of policy-related things, both here in the U.S. and elsewhere, to talk about before we get to the launches that happened this week. First up is the U.S. Senate this week approved budget for NASA. The House has already done this a while
Starting point is 00:18:26 back. Now the Senate has went through with their bill. And not a lot to note in here except two things, really. Number one, the funny part that I found funny was in the bill, they complained about the fact that specifically the Trump administration, but this happens with most administrations and NASA, they proposed to cut a bunch of different NASA programs that they know Congress is going to fund so they can leave that out of the budget request and say that they're not requesting a ridiculous amount of increase, even though they really are. And they've done this many years in a row. And in this bill, they complain about the fact that NASA needs to stop doing that and stop leaving out things that you know we're going to fund anyway, because it makes your
Starting point is 00:19:11 numbers work out, but we know what you want us to do. So it's just a little bickering there in the bill. The other part is that the Senate approved $1 billion for the human landing system for fiscal year 2021. NASA requested $3.4 billion. The House approved $628 million. The Senate approved a billion. So they'll likely end up somewhere between there. Obviously, not a full amount. I don't think anyone thinks that they're going to make the 2024 landing at this point for the Artemis program. But it's also, you know, let's assume it's $800 million. They split the difference. It's $800 million going towards a human lunar landing system, which it's been a long time since that much money has been spent in this way.
Starting point is 00:19:52 Obviously, with the election result, the new administration is going to come in and have some sort of changes to NASA. Things aren't going to be exactly as they were before. So I see a couple of different ways this can go. The new administration would come in and think that a single provider could be covered by $800 million, and they end up down selecting to just a single provider rather than the two or three that was theorized previously. Or this gets drawn out with lower funding levels per year. And in that case, the longer it goes on, I think the better the chances are that SpaceX is the favorite because they obviously are going all in on Starship. Blue Origin will obviously be
Starting point is 00:20:30 building the descent element, Blue Moon, regardless of what kind of contract they win. But I don't know that the same is true for Lockheed Martin, who's building the ascent element, or Northrop Grumman, who would be building the Transfer element. It's possible in that case that Blue Origin wants to see humans on the moon enough that they cover the development of both of those items, and they actually start contracting with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Dynetics I don't think would go and push on with their lander without a contract. So if that's the way it goes, I think Blue and SpaceX really are looking more and more like the favorite. But we've got a long way to go before that's resolved. NASA chief scientist back during the Obama administration, and she now is the director of the National Air and Space Museum. A bunch of other very science-y focused people on the transition team, a couple astronauts in there, maybe one astronaut. Very science and earth
Starting point is 00:21:36 science heavy, so not unexpected. That's definitely the direction that people are thinking the administration will go. It's probably not worth dissecting the transition team too much because I dare you to name somebody that was on the Trump transition team. Usually you don't really remember, but you get a general vibe. And the Trump transition team vibe was back to the lunar focus. The Biden one seems to be back to planetary science, earth science, very science focused, less human focused. But we'll see what they actually develop, because who knows where this goes with where things are in space policy right now, with a lot of the momentum building internationally for things like the Artemis program, a lot of agreements signed. That puts it in a distinctly different position than past transitions, because there was some hardware and work, but there wasn't a lot
Starting point is 00:22:25 extra built up around that. So it was easier to throw everything out back then. It might not be so easy this time. So we'll see where they land in a couple of weeks. Australia had an announcement this week that was quite interesting. The Australian Space Agency is getting a new head, and it is Enrico Palermo, who is right now the COO of Virgin Galactic. He was one of the first employees at Virgin Galactic. He was one of the first employees at Virgin Galactic. He worked at the spaceship company, eventually became the president, and then has been the COO of Virgin Galactic since January. He's going to be taken over ahead of Australian Space Agency in January. The Australian Space Agency is a new agency.
Starting point is 00:23:01 It was only formed in 2018, but they've quickly tried to get integrated with the major players, specifically the ISS partners, and they very early on committed to the Artemis program. They were one of the original eight signatories to the Artemis Accords that just was announced a couple of weeks back. So it'll be interesting to see somebody who is a very known quantity over this way go to be the head of an agency that's such a promising upstart, likely has very good relationships with a lot of people in the industry already. And that'll be very helpful to Australia and whatever they hope to do in the future. So we'll see how his tenure goes starting in January. And speaking of the Artemis Accords,
Starting point is 00:23:40 the ninth signatory has been added and uh might be a little surprising considering the international politics at play but ukraine has signed on to the artemis accords this makes it way less likely that russia will sign on uh russia and ukraine not the best of friends right now to say the least uh russia not enthused about the artemis accords generally so could be interesting to see if uh there's any comments that i Dmitry Rogozin now that Ukraine has signed on officially. But that is the ninth and the first to be added on after the announcement of that. So always fun to watch that space. So let's look at the launches that happened this week. We had, I think it was four launches. And starting off over in China,
Starting point is 00:24:21 Galactic Energy, which is a air quotes private Chinese launch company. I need to get Andrew Jones back on the show to talk about these private companies in China. But this is the second one to reach orbit with their Series 1 booster. It's 19 meters long, 1.4 meter diameter. The fairing is about 1.3 meters. It can carry 350 kilograms to low Earth orbit, 230 to sun synchronous orbit. And this is another kind of all solid booster, three solid stages and then a liquid upper stage. This launch was out of the Jukon Satellite Launch Center. It carried a 50 kilogram small satellite for, I think it was for, it was a Shanghai company. I didn't write it down, I think it was for, it was a Shanghai company.
Starting point is 00:25:04 I didn't write it down. But that went up to a 500 kilometer sun synchronous orbit. And then over in India, we had a PSLV launch. This launch had 10 satellites aboard. The biggest one was EOS-1, a radar imaging satellite for India, 630 kilogram satellite. That joined two similar satellites that were launched in May and December of 2019. And then the other nine were rideshare payloads for a bunch of different customers. There was a couple of CubeSats for Clio Space, a couple of Lemur 2 satellites for Spire, and then a CubeSat for Nano Avionics of Lithuania. And all of those went up to 575 kilometer orbit at 37 degrees.
Starting point is 00:25:50 So a good launch there after a long stand down for the pandemic for PSLV. And then back in China, we had a Long March 3B launch Tiangtong-1, which is a communications satellite for China Satcom. This was out of the Sichangong Satellite Launch Center, headed up to Jio. It was deployed into a transfer orbit. 4,600 kilogram satellite. So this is a pretty big boy for Long March 3B. And then finally, we had an Atlas V out of Cape Canaveral.
Starting point is 00:26:18 This one carrying NROL-101. It was a pretty big booster too. It was an Atlas V 531. Three boosters. And this one was a good watch because it was the first flight with the Gem 63 solid rocket boosters from Northrop Grumman. The larger variant of that, the Gem 63 XL, is what will be used for the Vulcan launch vehicle that United Launch Alliance is working on now. So this was an important launch for them. They're transitioning away from Aerojet Rocketdyne boosters to these Northrop Grumman boosters. We're not quite sure what this was launching yet. It's likely headed up to Ammonia orbit,
Starting point is 00:26:54 which is one of these very elliptical orbits that keep the satellite over the northern hemisphere for a very long time. Some people think it's a new satellite data system spacecraft, which is a U.S. military communications satellite, but there is some speculation about some other possibilities. So I've got a link in the show notes if you want to see some of the speculation around that. Uh, but a good launch there for Atlas V after a couple of delays, uh, which is becoming the norm here for ULA lately, which is, uh, something to watch. So with that, let's look ahead to next week.
Starting point is 00:27:26 Head over to rocketlaunch.live to see the upcoming manifest. We do have a couple of good ones coming up. I'm recording this on Saturday, and tomorrow night, November 15th, 7.27pm local time out of Florida, we've got Crew-1 flying up to the International Space Station. This is carrying Shannon Walker, Soichi Noguchi, Victor Glover, and Mike Hopkins out of Kennedy Space Center on top of a Falcon 9, the first operational flight for commercial crew. So this is a big deal to get these four astronauts up to space. This was delayed a day for recovery weather. So they're actually going to be taking a longer rendezvous route. It was originally going to be an eight-hour rendezvous, but now're actually going to be taking a longer rendezvous route. It was originally going
Starting point is 00:28:05 to be an eight hour rendezvous, but now it's going to be something in the 27 hour range or something like that. So that won't get up to the ISS until Monday. On November 16th, 8.52 East Coast time, which is November 17th, 1.52 UTC, We've got a Vega launch out of the Iana Space Center. On November 18th, November 19th, 144 UTC. I keep switching between time zones, because this one, you're going to have to find your own time zone, because this is an Electron launch out of New Zealand, so everyone's time zone is all crazy. But this one is, as I mentioned earlier, a big deal. This is the first one they're going to try to recover. It's called Return Descender.
Starting point is 00:28:46 It's got a great postage stamp logo up on the fairing, carrying a bunch of different satellites. And then they're going to try to actually recover this first stage, which will be really exciting to watch. And then on November 21st, 1717 UTC, I think that is like 9 a.m. local time out of California. It is a Falcon 9 launching Sentinel-6 for ESA. And that'll do it for what is a very long episode of Headlines.
Starting point is 00:29:12 So thanks to you all out there listening who are supporting and getting this in your Headlines feed. But to everyone else listening, this is actually going to be in the main feed. I hope you enjoyed this. Consider heading over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support to get this every week. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. you Thank you. Bye.

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