- 4305 - SPACE ACCOMPLISHMENTS in 2023! Last year,2023 we saw SpaceX make some significant headway in the company's development of its next-generation launch vehicle, “Starship”. The fully stacked rocket lifted off for the first time on April 20, 2023.
------------------------- 4305 - SPACE ACCOMPLISHMENTS in 2023!
- That flight lasted
about 4 minutes. During the test, Starship's upper stage failed to separate
from its Super Heavy booster. The vehicle began toppling end-over-end through
the sky, ultimately reaching an explosive end with an autodestruct command. -
-
- Super Heavy's 33
Raptor engines also blasted out a crater in the concrete beneath the launch pad
at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas, prompting upgrades to both the
rocket and ground infrastructure.
-
- Starship launched
for the second time November 18. A
water deluge system installed beneath the pad, and a new "hot-fire"
staging system incorporated into Starship's launch procedures, solved two of
the major issues the vehicle experienced during its first test, but Starship
again failed to complete its full flight profile.
-
- A short time after
stage separation, Super Heavy exploded, followed shortly by a communications
loss with the Starship upper stage and its subsequent destruction.
-
- After the November
launch, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk voiced optimism that the third
Starship test flight could lift off shortly after, in December. And, in the
middle of the month, SpaceX rolled Starship hardware to the pad for testing
ahead of that anticipated launch.
-
- 2023 was a great
year for science missions launching into space. In April, the penultimate
launch of Europe's Ariane 5 rocket sent the European Space Agency's (ESA) JUICE
spacecraft on a journey to the Jovian system to study three of Jupiter's
largest moons.
-
- JUICE (
"Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer") will spend the next eight years
traveling to the gas giant, completing several gravity-assist maneuvers around
Earth and Venus during the interim years. Once JUICE arrives at Jupiter in
July, 2031, it will begin studying the
big moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa, all of which are believed to contain
liquid-water oceans beneath their icy, outer layers.
-
- Another ESA mission
launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in July of last year, to study and map the
"dark universe." The Euclid telescope is designed to study dark
matter and dark energy, and will spend the next six years scoping out areas of
the universe outside our Milky Way galaxy.
-
- A third science
mission, NASA's Psyche probe, launched on a Falcon Heavy in October. Psyche is
on a 2.2 billion-mile journey to an asteroid of the same name, which is
composed primarily of nickel and iron. Scientists believe the asteroid 16
Psyche may be the remnant of an ancient protoplanetary core, and they hope its
study will yield clues into the processes of planetary formation.
-
- The return capsule
from NASA's first mission to retrieve samples from an asteroid touched town in
September of last year. OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016 and spent two years
traveling to its target asteroid, Bennu. After an extensive survey in orbit
around the space rock, OSIRIS-REx maneuvered to the asteroid's surface to
collect its samples in October 2020.
-
- After another few
years in space, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's trajectory brought it back toward
Earth, providing a window to eject the probe's sample return capsule on
September 24. As the capsule shot through Earth's atmosphere, the craft's heat
shield protected the asteroid samples despite friction-induced temperatures as
high as 5,300 degrees Fahrenheit and speeds up to 27,000 mph.
-
- Following its fiery
flight, the sample return capsule successfully deployed its main parachute and
touched down for a soft landing at the Department of Defense's Utah Test and
Training Range.
-
- NASA has yet to
open OSIRIS-REx's main sample container, and is developing a new tool in order
to safely remove its cover. However, even with the main samples still sealed
shut, enough material was found to have collected outside the main sample
container to exceed OSIRIS-REx's mission targets.
-
- Once NASA is able
to open the probe's sample container, it plans to send 25% of the Bennu samples
to more than 200 scientists across the globe, including those representing the
space agencies of other nations.
-
- Following the
separation of its return capsule, the main OSIRIS-REx spacecraft changed its
course toward a different target, an asteroid named Apophis. Now on a new
mission called OSIRIS-APEX, the spacecraft will reach Apophis in 2029.
-
- India became the
fourth nation to successfully land on the moon when its Chandrayaan-3 mission
achieved the feat in August of last year. Chandrayaan-3's landing duo consisted
of two vehicles, the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover. The Chandrayaan-3
propulsion module remained in lunar orbit to perform its own research.
-
- The lander-rover
duo touched in the moon's southern hemisphere, at around 70 degrees south, on
August 23. Once on the surface, Pragyan exited Vikram to begin its mission of
analyzing the lunar soil and other surface material.
-
- A few days after
landing, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) released an image of
Vikram, snapped by Pragyan as it rolled along the surface of the moon. Their
primary mission goals accomplished, both the rover and lander were later placed
in sleep mode, as the lunar night set in on their landing site. However, after
the dark, two-week lunar frost, teams at ISRO were unable to wake the vehicles.
-
Russia also launched a mission to land on the moon during
2023. Unfortunately, however, its attempt was not successful. Luna-25, the first Soviet/Russian lunar
mission in 47 years, launched from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, in Russia's
eastern Amur Region, on August 10. Its mission was to land in the moon's south
polar region, near Boguslawsky Crater, but a malfunction during one of the
spacecraft's engine burns caused the probe to crash into the lunar surface.
-
- On August 19, communication
with the Luna-25 spacecraft was interrupted.
The measures taken on August 19 and 20 to search for the device and get
into contact with it did not produce any results. Several days later, NASA's Lunar
Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) photographed the location of Luna-25's crash, and
the crater its impact created.
-
- The MS-22 Soyuz
launched with Rubio, Prokopyev and Petelin on September 21, 2022, and docked
with the ISS later that day. All was nominal for the trio's first few months,
but just a couple of weeks before the end of 2022, the Soyuz spacecraft sprang
a significant leak, draining all its coolant out into space.
-
- The leak ostensibly
stranded Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio aboard the space station with no way
home, though contingencies were put into place should the ISS crew need to
evacuate in an emergency situation. An empty replacement Soyuz arrived at the
station in February, finally offering the three a dedicated ride back to Earth.
-
- The leaky Soyuz
MS-22 returned to Earth without crew, and was recovered by Roscosmos for
evaluation in March of last year. Russian officials have yet to announce a
definitive cause for the coolant leak, but initial hypotheses at the time of
the event suggested it may have been the result of a micrometeor impact.
-
- The United States
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) launched a sizable classified satellite
last year on a mission called "Silent Barker." The September launch took place aboard a
United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, accompanied by the vehicle's largest
payload fairing option. The launch took the satellite, designated NROL-107, to
a geosynchronous orbit (GEO) above Earth, essentially parking the spacecraft in
place in the sky.
-
- So we actually
want our competitors to know that we have eyes in GEO and that we can see
what's happening in GEO. Not only are we
going to maintain custody and the ability to detect what's going on in GEO, but
we'll have the indications and warnings to know there's something out of the
normal occurring, and that goes a long way towards deterrence.
-
- Virgin Galactic's
VSS Unity space plane lights its rocket motor during the Galactic 05 suborbital
mission, which launched on November 2, 2023.
Virgin Galactic began flying regular private missions to suborbital
space.
-
- The company's
first mission, Galactic 01, took off June 29 and carried members of the Italian
Air Force and Italy's National Research Council on a research flight that
provided the trio a few minutes of weightlessness at their trajectory's apex.
-
- Before launching
under its own power, Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity space plane is flown to
altitude by the double-fuselaged carrier aircraft VMS Eve. At around 50,000
feet up, VSS Unity is released from Eve to burn its rocket motor and complete
its climb to space. Both carrier
aircraft and space plane then return for landing on the same runway where the
duo take off, at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
-
- After Virgin
Galactic's first commercial launch in June, the company kept pace with another
mission every month for nearly the rest of 2023, flying a total of 15 private
customers. Topping off the year with Galactic 05 in November, the company
announced it would ground Unity in December, and resume flights again in
January 2024.
-
- On December19,
Virgin Galactic announced Galactic 06 would fly January 26 of this year using
VSS Unity, which is expected to be grounded sometime in 2024 and replaced with
the company's next-generation "Delta class" vehicle.
-
- SpaceX has, once
again, had its busiest year yet. In 2022, the company set a new record with 61
orbital launches. SpaceX blew through that total in 2023, with more than 90
orbital liftoffs.
-
- The majority of
SpaceX launches last year have used the company's mainstay Falcon 9 rocket, and
have supported the growth of SpaceX's Starlink broadband mega-constellation.
Thanks to its increased launch cadence, SpaceX was able to increase the number
of its internet spacecraft on orbit by nearly 2,000 last year.
-
-
January 1, 2023 SPACE
ACCOMPLISHMENTS in 2023! 4305
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