more to come?… Space Force deputy chief of operations Lt. Gen. Doug Schiess told a House subcommittee on Wednesday that the Army is considering moving more missions with ULA’s Vulcan rocket to other providers. Currently, only ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are certified for national security launches. The Vulcan rocket is expected to be grounded until at least this summer as engineers investigate a recurring problem with the vehicle’s solid rocket booster.
NASA is blowing things up. A team of NASA engineers is deliberately blowing up models of methane-fueled rockets in Florida to see how big a bang they create when they detonate, Ars reports. Methane is the launch industry’s attractive new rocket fuel because it is better suited for reusable engines. Heavy and super-heavy-lift rockets such as Blue Origin’s New Glenn, ULA’s Vulcan, and SpaceX’s Starship now use it. But rockets sometimes explode. The U.S. Space Force and NASA, the agencies responsible for range safety at America’s federally owned spaceports, want to better understand how the dangers posed by exploding methane-fueled rockets might differ from other launchers. This is important as launches have become more regular, with companies expecting multiple flights per day from launch pads that are, in some cases, only 1 or 2 miles away.
for a good cause… Federal safety officials require explosion-risk areas to be evacuated around each launch pad as rockets are fueled for flight, and some companies have raised concerns that SpaceX, which has the largest number of methane-burning rockets, could disrupt their operations at neighboring launch pads. Explosive yield tests underway at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, are intended to help officials improve their threat analysis to determine the appropriate size of danger zones for methane-fueled rockets. Hopefully, the data will show that the danger zones are becoming too conservative, and the exclusion zones will shrink. The concept is simple. “We put fuel in a rocket, fly it to a remote location and measure how big the bounce is,” said Jason Hopper, deputy manager of the Methalox Evaluation Project at NASA’s Stennis Space Center.
next three launches
28 March: electron | Daughter of the stars Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand 09:14 UTC
28 March: spectrum | Forward and upward. Andøya Rocket Range, Norway 20:00 UTC
29 March: Atlas V | Amazon Leo LA-05 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida 07:53 UTC
<a href