Space Cowboys Plan to Build Massive Satellite - Deep Space Updates May 13th

Hello, it's Scott Manley here. It's Tuesday, May 12th, and it is time for many, many more deep space updates. Although we were very much lacking on the launches when I started this starting. So, on May the 3rd, we had a

Falcon 9 launching out of Vandenberg. And this was ostensibly to carry uh Korea's Cast 500, which is an obser observation satellite. Now, last year they launched one of these on their new relaunch vehicle, but the Falcon 9 is a whole lot more capable. So, this satellite does like pancromatic multisspectral imaging and all that. Uh, but because they had so much other payload space, they had a bunch of other ride alongs, right? We had like three satellites for planet, one of which was transferred to Sweden's armed forces after launch. Uh, Earth Daily had six satellites on there. There was like seven Earth Hawk for Earth observation satellites. Yeah, lots of these things. It basically looked like a transporter mission, but it wasn't officially a transporter mission. Just basically a lot of payloads, suns synchronous orbit. I couldn't tell the difference. Anyway, May the 6th, the Revenge of the 6th, we also saw a Starlink launch on a Falcon 9 out of Vanderberg, and that was what was there when I finished I started writing this episode. Thankfully, China finally got in on the game and meant that it wasn't going to be 100% Vandenberg, you know, SpaceX launch. So, yeah, uh on the 11th, China launched the Long March 7 out of Wang Chang, and it was carrying Tanjo 10, which is their your cargo spacecraft for Chinese space station. Tang Tanjo 9 had undocked and burned up. So, this one, it reached the station soon afterwards. docked up. It's carrying like supplies, the equipment for the future missions. You know, Shenzhou 23 and 24 crews will be supported by these supplies. It has spare parts. It has another new space suit, a treadmill for on space exercise. As I understand it, China are very much planning to continue expanding this station going forwards. And then uh soon afterwards on Monday night, as far as I'm concerned, the there was another launch out of Vandenberg on a Falcon 9. It was NOL172, which is part of, you know, their proliferated architecture. A whole bunch of spy satellites on the Star Shield buses. We're not sure how many at this point, but it was probably about 20 spacecraft. It was a downrange landing on a drone ship, which meant that they were maxing out the payload on this. Anyway, um yeah, that was it. Not very much in the way of launches. Now

looking to the future, there was a few discussion, what's the status of Artemis going forward? We now have like a lot of the Artemis 3 hardware. Well, first of all, Artemis 2 capsule is now back at the Space Coast and they're doing the deservicing operations. They're starting to remove payloads, remove hardware, defuel it, and analyze the heat shield to collect the data, make sure that everything they can learn from this is ready for Artemis 3. The Artemis 3 booster core has now been delivered to KSC via the Pegasus barge and it's like now vertical in the high bay. It's getting integrated with the boat tail section which will of course have the engines. It's got some other equipment that has to get installed like mounting points for the boosters, the strakes, all that's going to get integrated. The Orion spacecraft for Artemis 3 that uh is also at the Cape and that's getting going through like functional testing. The heat shield is now installed and the service module for Artemis 3 uh Airbus they put on the solar panels so they're it's got its wings. It's getting ready to fly although those wings will be packed up soon but right the original plan or sorry the plan that they announced very optimistically a few months ago was to have two launches in 2028 and that would require a spring launch of Artemis 3 so that they could have their 10-month cadence. doesn't look like they're going to make this at this point. It sounds like Artemis 3 is definitely going to be more towards the middle or even the second half of 2027, meaning that they may have time for one launch of Artemis 4 in 2028. And we'll see who gets there. But this is largely gated on the HLS suppliers being able to ship their stuff up there in time. And this is what we're getting. The message we're getting from SpaceX and Blue Origin at the late second half of 2027 is far more likely. But in the middle of this, we have been asking about what's going to happen with Artemis 3. We know it's supposed to rendevous with these spacecraft. We don't know which ones. We don't know, for example, whether they're going to use the ICPS, right, the extra upper stage. What we have found is that there was a request for information put out by NASA which reveals some secrets because they're looking for an alternate communication system that will provide high data rate communications for this mission so that they can produce 4K video from orbit perhaps during the you know docking and other testing sequences and the problem is that the TEDRS system that the space station uses is heavily oversaturated that it's a series of satellites in high earth orbit so they are looking far hardware which can be used which will provide uh from a 250 nautical mile orbit 33 degree inclination a 12 megabit down link and a 500 kilobit uplink right and there's two options either it can be a piece of hardware that's fitted to the service module on the outside or it can be one which would you basically operate from inside the cabin you maybe put the antenna up to the window now the service module one has to be delivered by fall of this year whereas as if it's to be one that's just used from the inside, they can wait until, you know, 2027 to get it. Now, what's interesting, of course, is that a piece of hardware like this that does high bandwidth communications from low Earth orbit was actually tested and operated by uh the current administrator of NASA on Polaris Dawn, right? There was the Starlink optical relay terminal which was in SpaceX the Dragon trunk. Now, we don't know how big that piece of hardware is or what kind of, you know, power it would take, but I suspect that the NASA requirements are strongly influenced by this piece of hardware. So, we might take it, you know, to give us an idea of how big the optical terminal is. Regardless, uh the hope is what we can take from this is the hope is that we're going to have high definition, sorry, HD 4K or whatever footage from low Earth orbit and also we're going to have a 33°ree inclination orbit, which is coincidentally what it looks like SpaceX's bit next Starship test is aiming to go into. And one update that just came out as I was editing this video, NASA put out another update on the Aremis 3 mission. And most important thing here that I noticed is that they have confirmed that instead of using the upper stage, the interim cryogenic propulsion stage or ICPS, they are going to use a customuilt spacer. So the rocket is the right height, it's going to have the right shape, the right mass, but it will be completely non-functional. And so they're saving the ICPS for flight number four. That is now confirmed. Uh anyway, uh and interestingly al also by the way there was a quarterly report by a company called MDA space which you know you probably don't know much about but they're notable because they were building a very important piece of hardware for the gateway. They were building the robot arm you know Canada's biggest contribution to this whole thing. Uh and they said oh yeah we know the gateway has been cancelled and we actually think it's a good idea. The new plan is great, but we're still building the robot arm. I'm not sure where they plan it to be operating, but you know, they're getting uh they're getting money for this, so they're going to keep building it. Uh following up on Artemis

2, by the way, 12,000 images taken by the crew have been published through NASA's Gateway through to astronaut photography of Earth. These are a lot of raw images, not necessarily indexed particularly well. Um, there's metadata and stuff in there, but it looks like we're going to get more data over time as scientists analyze this and anything that's useful will go into like the planetary data system so you can figure out what it's being pointed at and what features are in there, etc., etc. Uh, of those images, by the way, I spent a lot of time browsing them and the ones that I really like are the ones that sort of show that they are being taken from a spacecraft with people in it, right? They're catching bits of the frame of the window or the panels or maybe somebody just sort of in the background. I think it's extraordinary to see these images with the human sort of touch in there. And finally, one sequence that got people really excited was someone took the a sequence of the night side images. Remember they published this soon after flying as after flying past the night side of the earth. They took uh this image and you could see the nightlights. sodium layer, the um the aurora. And you know, we thought it was amazing. You know, they obviously ramped up their gains that they could actually see these details on the side of the earth which was illuminated by the moonlight. Now, they took a lot of images there. They took a sequence. Now, if you sequence these out in time and then, you know, stack them and create an animation, well, there's all sorts of more details that come out in this. You can now see the aurora move, which is absolutely beautiful. You can see thunderstorms on one side of the planet, but best of all, you can see on the limbs, especially on the like the left side of the image, you can see like uh satellites glinting. Basically, these are flares of Starlink satellites probably with their panels or their antenna aligning and reflecting the sunlight exactly in the direction of the viewer on Artemis. And it's amazing. You can see these fly things flying past. Earth looks so much more alive. You know, it shows more inhabited. It's sort of revealed the world in a new view yet again. This mission has been amazing for that. Anyway, let's move forwards.

Yeah, let's talk about some other moon missions. So, the Viper spacecraft, as you know, I'm a bit of a fan of it. Blue Origin, who are of course going to fly it there on their Blue Moon Mark1 lander, they put out a video showing how they were going to offload the rover and set it down on the surface. And the Blue Moon Mark1 lander is huge. It's like, you know, 7 m tall. So, they have to take the spacecraft and move it over using davits and then sort of lower it onto the surface using cables. All this stuff had to be demoed. They had to show that they will handle if the spacecraft lands and there's like a bit of a slope like they can handle up to like 10° slopes apparently. Make sure it maintains clearances. So that's a great little video to watch. Of course, Viper, yeah, we all know it went through a bit of a development hell towards the end where it got cancelled and then reinstated. But the original spacecraft that was going to carry it was I think Astrobotics Griffin and they suddenly didn't have a payload. They instead got I think was Astro I forget the name of it. Astrolab. Yeah, they created another rover called Flip and they have been working on this very quick quickly. It's like apparently, you know, they only really started working on this like two years ago and it's now driving doing test drives. So, they've got some video of their rover with their interesting wheel designs that sort of distort. They're very soft. They have like a youird sort of fabric covering on them and they flex. But uh yeah, they they've got video of the Flip rover driving about. And uh again, also another rover that I'm really hoping to start to see fly. Coming back to Blue Origin for a minute, by the way. Uh May the 4th, right? Yes, it was lots of May

the 4th. So we saw a tweet from Dave Lip saying, "This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them showing the two boosters sitting side by side. Right. So now we have never tell me the odds and no it's necessary. It's kind of cool to see two boosters side by side. Although Jeff Bezos also tweeted an image and I don't know he just didn't get into the Star Wars day thing. I thought from the angle he had that it looked like you were getting ready to fly the world's biggest pod racer pulled by two new Glenn boosters. So anyway, um that's again looking cool to see two of those things. Okay. Uh NASA has given a

small contract, $6. 9 million contract to a company called Interoon. What are Interlun doing? They want to extract helium 3 from the moon and return it to Earth. So they're going to get money to fly or test a payload as part of a future eclipse mission. Uh or at least they're going to test the hardware. is going to take like some regalith, scoop it up and test various ways to extract the volatiles, including the valuable isotope of helium 3, and then use mass spectrometers to verify the concentrations and availability of this material. So, helium 3 is a ridiculously expensive item. It costs something like $20 million per kilogram right now. It's a rare isotope of helium and there's really it's hard to make on Earth except in nuclear reactors. It doesn't get produced in the same way helium is produced by radioactive materials decaying via the alpha process, but helium 3 isn't produced that way. So, this company apparently has like $500 million in orders which are like confirmed if they can get this stuff to the earth at the price they say they will sell $500 million worth of this stuff, which okay, I guess that's now I think about it, it's only 25 kg, right? But uh you know this material it's interesting because it's slightly different mass from helium. It can be used in a very specific type of cryogenic cooler to get very low temperatures and the companies that want this are the ones working on quantum computing. Um anyway elsewhere there was a story

doing the rounds about a scient a Brazilian scientist who had figured out a shortcut to Mars. This story got repeated by multiple news outlets and I took a quick look at it and it says it he's found out a shortcut to Mars which can get to Mars in 36 days. You just need to go faster than any rocket which I figured out that how to do that. I figured that out with Kerbal Space Program. Look the way this was taken is it's you know it's cool just bit of paper. He was saying, "Hey, look, you know, I found this asteroid which passes near Mars and the Earth relatively short time. Can we turn that into a trajectory to get from, you know, Earth to Mars or vice versa? " And sure enough, identify multiple trajectories, right? We actually have a way of doing this. It's called a pork chop plot where you figure out where Earth and Mars will be at different times and then figure out the trajectory to get there and then you change the starting conditions and you produce a plot and you figure out where the low spots are. That's how you produce fast transits. And yes, you all need very high speeds like, you know, 18 kilometers per second departure speeds. This it's fascinating that this story got repeated so much, but whatever. Uh I I'm all for getting to Mars faster. Okay, now um it is

apparently, by the way, the getting to be the 40th anniversary of this little movie from the 80s. It was a bit of an indie hit called a Top Gun. Uh you might know that it featured a type of aircraft called the F-14 and they don't fly anymore because the US well because Iran had some and they were flying them for a long time and then the US basically rendered all of theirs unflyable so that spare parts couldn't be smuggled to Iran. Now all the ones in Iran are not flying. Anyway, uh there was this thing called the Maverick Bill, which was apparently proposed by Tim Sheehy, who you might know was somewhat uh heavily involved in making sure Jared Eisenman get renominated. Well, this bill basically transfers three F-14s that are in relatively good condition but not flyable to a, you know, to the Marshall Space Flight Center, Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. and then we'll solicit bids from private groups and organizations to get them flyable again or at least create static displays. So, and Jared basically came on Twitter and said, "Yep, the side quest continues. " So, I am Look, I am all for F-14s flying again. Like, this I grew up with this. Uh, this was always the coolest aircraft. Uh, I do kind of I do find it amusing that the pilots with the most kills in the F-14 are of course in Iran because they were flying modern jet fighters against Iraq. But um, regardless, you know, this little side quest, I hope it succeeds. Elsewhere, the Ital there's a program in Italy called the Avio Lancio program. It's literally like air launch in Italian and it's basically can we launch rockets from planes? and they posted some pictures of their HAX25 demonstrator being released from an alpha jet. And if you look at that alpha jet, you'll think that paint job that looks a bit familiar. It looks like Jared Isaacman's uh alpha jets like the one I flew in. I looked up the tail number. Then I looked a little further and sure enough they were parked outside his hanger in Montana. So he is also involved in Italy's little uh air launch to space program. Regardless, I don't know how high this launched. Uh, apparently it was a suborbital flight. I don't know if they got, you know, to 80 km or 100 km, but I'm all interested in seeing more air launch attempts. I think launching big rockets off of aircraft has the problem that the aircraft can't really give enough vertical velocity, but fighters, light aircraft, are actually able to perform climbs uh at those high speeds and therefore actually contribute more to the velocity. The other company doing this just had a news a press release which wasn't nearly as interesting. They just said they'd hired some people from Blue Origin. But yeah, there's a company called Starf Fighter Space and they're in Florida. They have a bunch of F104 star fighters which can definitely get into a zoom climb and go very fast and could potentially launch rockets. Um I would like to see them succeed too. So

while a lot of the space community are watching what's going on in Bokhica, getting ready for another uh Starship launch, a Chinese company called Nayuta Space has been in the news for getting funding to build their version of a belly flopping rocket with the flapper fins that control the spacecraft as it's descending in a sort of belly flop orientation. Theirs is a lot smaller and also it has landing rockets on its side so it never transitions to the vertical for landing. Uh they posted a little video of their thing flapping up and down. Uh it looks kind of stressed if you ask me. Uh JPL have innovated on

their Mars helicopter. Right. So previously the Ingenuity spacecraft, it spun its rotors really fast because you have to spin it fast in the thin Martian air so you can get lift. Uh the Ingenuity rotors were limited to Mach. 7. Now they have been working on it. They've optimized the shape, the blade design, and they are now running the blade tips at speeds of up to Mach 1. 08, but that is Mach 1. 08 in the Martian atmosphere. Martian atmosphere uh has a speed of sound which is about 100 meters/s slower than the Earth because it's colder and the atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide primarily rather than oxygen. But this could potentially contribute to the Skyfall mission which uh will be getting flown to Mars on Space Reactor 1 Freedom if uh everything goes to plan. Rocket Lab on May 7th

they had their quarterly earnings report. They said it was their strongest quarter yet with $200 million in revenue. They say they have $2. 2 billion in backlog. So that's about three years worth of backlog. That includes 70 plus launches. Uh we're expecting that they will pass 100 launches by the way later this year. So that will make them getting to the 100 launch mark a bit faster than other companies including SpaceX. Uh haste is a big seller with there's another 20 launches contracted with the department of defense and three test launches for haste with and who are testing something. They also acquired a company called Motive Space Systems and they are a company that makes like robotic arms, actuators, drive electronics for spacecraft. And you know this is again Rocket Lab really leaning into producing satellites of every form. So there's a bunch of different customers that might want a robot arm. They want to be able to provide this. And uh with Neutron, we're getting closer. We've got a footage of a test stage separation that was happening on the ground. You know, basically you've got a counterbalance rig that's showing that the stage can separate out cleanly because they're going to need to do this reliably. But also Peter Beck posted a tweet saying for your enjoyment and it was basically a threeishminut run of an Archimedes engine at Stenis. Now there's a bit of a green flash at startup, you know, maybe just taking a little bit of copper off the outside. Um, but more importantly, yeah, we see clean mark diamonds for the whole time. We see the engine gimbling around for the whole thing. And then there's a cool sort of honk sound right at the end, illustrating that Archimedes is definitely getting closer to flight status.

Cowboy Space Corp., well, that's the new name that Ether Flux has taken. They've taken on another, you know, few hundred million dollars of investment to a $2 billion valuation. They wanted to do space-based solar power. Now they're getting into space data centers. Yeah. They're founded by the same guy that founded uh the Robin Hood stock trading app. And well, the thing that really caught my eye here wasn't the money that they were getting and or the fact that they're nearby. No, it was the fact that they showed off a shiny animation of a rocket stage into orbit and then it makes like a transformer. It starts folding out panels for radiators and solar panels and essentially the upper stage with the engine and the fuel tanks turns into this orbital data center. If that's their strategy, that's an interesting one. I'm not sure what they're going to launch these stages on top of, but uh you know obviously you know data centers in space is a hot thing right now. So I could totally see them you know capitalizing off this with animations that suggest that they might be in a good position to do it. But I think that the person the company that is most likely to be in a good position to do this will be of course SpaceX and

they are getting ready for launch at Bokhica. So, we've now seen a full uh super heavy V3 static fire, 14 seconds worth. Uh it's really coming together. You can now see like really a lot of beautiful changes to it. Right. So, this the rocket as stacked now with the Starship and the Super Heavy on top of each uh you know in a stack. They look cleaner. They look better. There's small changes. Right. So, V3, what do we have? It's there's some stretches in the tanks. The interstage is now different. and it uses trusses. The dome is a different shape for the hot staging. The hot staging ring doesn't need to come off during flight to save mass. There's um the fins, there's now only three fins. And the fin like a actuator roots, those actually go inside the propellant tanks, which is fascinating. The internal tank structure is a whole lot more clever. You know, you've got this big down comer which contains a huge amount of propellant and onto off to the side of that there's also a header tank for the liquid oxygen layer on Starship side. Yeah, you know, you've moved the fins a little. There's now more plumbing. The skirt section, if you look at it, it is so much more clean. Like, we thought Raptor 3 was cleaned up. Well, they cleared up everything else in the skirt area of Starship. You can now see the vent lines which would just like be usually there to like depressurize the tanks and stuff in orbit. These now have little uh nozzle type structures. So they'll be able to turn these things on and off to get attitude control. That's something you're going to need for docking in orbit. We now have the ports on the top for anchoring two spacecraft together. I'm guessing these are dummies largely or at least they're not active because there's nothing to dock with. But they really need to test that these things can survive re-entry after multiple flights. So yeah, they did a wet dress rehearsal. They loaded thousands of tons of propellant. They got down to their countdown. Uh and now they're destacking things. Uh they're taking things back. Someone's suggesting that we might need another uh engine replacement on Starship 39. The last we talked the first time we saw a schedule, it was May 12th was when the flight could happen. Then it moved to May 15th. Now we're talking like May 19th. So that's a good seven days away. Maybe by the time I come back for the next Deep Space update, we will have a Starship flight. One of the things that I was saying is that like the V3 Starship and Super Heavy, they've optimized a lot of stuff and it looks cleaner. The design is better and it's really Starship and Super Heavy. They've always had this amazing brute force, but now I'm starting to see some real finesse in the design of this. And I'm presum I'm hoping that this will actually be translate to actual success on orbit cuz this is really what we're at. We want to see this thing fly successfully so that flight number 13 it can actually come and potentially land. We can actually see a uh Starship catch. That would be awesome if that happens. But we are now expecting again the flight no earlier than the 19th and could well be pushed back further. And so one other really important thing that I noticed is on the page where they're describing the plans for launch number 12 is they

specifically talk about how two of the Starlink dummies that will be deployed will have camera hardware on board that they will investigate the heat shield. But most importantly with those cameras they will be able to take photographs of Starship on orbit or on suborbit for the first time. We'll see the entire vehicle from a camera that is elsewhere. This is something I've been asking for such a long time. It's always seemed like such an obvious thing to do. And you know, we actually had Mike Nichols, who does Starlink at SpaceX, they he actually posted a really cool like long duration video from Starlink satellites as they're separating across the orbit. And I was like, "Yeah, maybe since we get cameras of this quality, we can actually put them on the Starlink uh the Dumblink satellites. " And it sounds like my wish is coming true for flight 12.

Now, if you're looking for something else to pay attention to before the next deep space update, well, CRS34, the crew commercial supply flight on Dragon spacecraft is going to the ISS. It's probably gone by the time you see this, but look to see that docking. unloading. Until the next time, I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe.