If you like rocket launches T-9

[Suff]

Another little bit of history.

T-9 minutes for the Starship Launch.

Largest rocket ever launched. Largest rocket ever designed to land again. Unknown whether it will blow up on the pad, blow up in the air, fail to make orbit or even do exactly as expected.

To quote Elon. "Excitement guaranteed"

[Suff]

Sadly it was a scub.

More attempts this week.

[Workingman]

Then again at the weekend that useless agency, ESA, used one of its crap Ariane 5 rockets to launch its Juice probe to Jupiter. That's the same type of rocket NASA opted for to put the James Webb Space Telescope aloft.

Once at Jupiter "Juice" will observe Jupiter's atmosphere and magnetic fields before concentrating on the moons Callisto; Europa and Ganymede. These moons have iron or rocky cores and Europa is covered in a shell of water ice with liquid water below. Due to their compression and relaxation as they orbit Jupiter it is hoped that the geological conditions to create the necessary minerals for life might be at work - geothermal vents.

They will not find living things such as fish or krill, but there might be living organisms; unlike on Mars where the best we can hope for are simple single cell fossils.

[cruiser2]

Has it been added to the ULEZ list?

[Suff]

Then again at the weekend that useless agency, ESA, used one of its crap Ariane 5 rockets to launch its Juice probe to Jupiter.

Actually the A5 is quite reliable now they actually decided to test it. It is the Vega C which has a rather more chequered history.

Even then, I arrived at ESOC (the European Space Operations Centre), just 4 months after flight V88 had to be aborted and the ESA cluster mission was lost. They still had the mock up of Cluster in the front entrance of the operations building. To say that they were either devastated or embarrassed is to put it mildly. At that time they had no idea what had gone wrong they were still investigating. Turns out they were not half as embarrassed as they should have been. Given that they quite simply decided not to test one of the A4 modules that they chose to simply plug and play in the A5. The module that failed in cascade over all three modules and caused the abort.

I've been in the operations centre for the obligatory tour for all new employees. Some of the staff were clearly devastated at the loss of a decade of work to get cluster built and launched. Talk about close to crying over their beer.

Then they landed Huygens on Titan. I watched it and read about the fact that they lost contact with it for quite a long while before being able to reacquire it via the backup channel. It was not until we visited the space operations manager who ran the team that put Huygens down that his wife told me the real story. Whilst developing the comms system the engineers decided they didn't need to "test" the system, they were engineers and knew what they were doing and they'd done this many times before. Even though there was a clear documented history of the US having a similar problem and what needed to be done to ensure it didn't happen again. That document was public and everyone in the business should have known about it.

OK it worked out in the end, but it was close. Since she used to be a programmer for ESA, before giving up after getting married, she was very capable of knowing exactly what happened. To say that she was disparaging of "engineers" is to put it mildly.

So, yes, I am somewhat critical of ESA. Not because I don't like the EU but because I have worked there and have contacts who work there and I know exactly what goes on.

When Juice launched and went into orbit I watched the team very closely. When it was supposed to link to Australia they became tense, when the link up took longer than expected but still within tolerance, they became more tense. When it started to get longer and longer, especially when Australia reported receiving telemetry, but the data signal was still not received, some started to get quite despondent, you could see it in their body language.

The relief when the data signal came through was huge.

There is one thing you can say about SpaceX. They make mistakes, yes, but they make them once and exactly Once. Because the first time they make the mistake it is a learning curve and they do learn. It becomes part of the ever growing list of things which "must" be done before any new, or existing, rocket can launch

[Suff]

Not a happy day in ESA land.

In a draft request to EU countries seen by POLITICO, the Commission is planning to ask for a green light to negotiate "an ad-hoc security agreement" with the U.S. for its rocket companies to "exceptionally launch Galileo satellites.”

The Commission reckons only SpaceX's Falcon 9 heavy launcher and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan system are up to the job of sending the EU's new geo-navigation Galileo satellites — which weigh around 700 kilograms each — into orbit.

Since ULA had an explosion in the upper stage of their Vulcan rocket, the May test date is now extremely unlikely.

Leaving? Ta Daaaaa. SpaceX. ULA is committed to the two launches to get the rocket certified for Space Force, plus 7 launches a year for space force over the next 5 years plus a bunch of Amazon Kuiper launches. This doesn't leave much room for the EU commission to get their Galileo satellites launched. Unless they go SpaceX. Even then Falcon Heavy is fairly constrained for launches. They're more likely to get to space on Starship than F Heavy.

Better that they "hurry up" Ariane 6 and get launching. But it has been a decade in the works and keeps slipping. Even though it was chosen to use pre existing technology to speed up the process. Where did we see that again? Ah, yes, SLS, a decade late and many $Billions over budget.

This is now on my interest radar.