Minutes of February 8 Oklahoma Space Alliance Meeting
Oklahoma Space Alliance met February 8, 2024, at the McMurrays’ house in Norman, Oklahoma. Attending in person were Clifford and Claire McMurray, Adam Hemphill, Dave Sheely, and Syd Henderson. Robin Scott attended by Zoom. OSA President Clifford McMurray presided over the meeting He and Clifford did an Update discussing links to material covered in the meeting and this is online at https://osa.nss.org/Update2502.pdf so I’ll cover the details that aren’t covered there.
Bezos’s landing ship that they use for New Glenn booster landings is named Jacklyn after his mother. The lost payload was the
The payload of the first New Glenn launch was a test version of Blue Ring Pathfinder. From the article https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-launches-massive-new-glenn-rocket-into-orbit-on-1st-flight-video:‘Blue Ring is being developed as part of the Defense Innovation Unit's (DIU) Orbital Logistics Program. … Blue Origin is developing Blue Ring to fulfill DIU's need for a "heavy utility multi-orbit logistics vehicle," or m-OLV.’ The next flight of New Glenn will be sometime this spring.
SpaceX lost contact with the Starship second stage after seven minutes and forty seconds. All debris (which resulted from an on-board self-destruct mechanism to prevent it from falling out of control) fell within the designated area but there was some property damage. But it did produce a spectacular artificial meteor shower.
The next flight of Starship will feature an attempt to catch the second stage since they are making a bunch of changes. [This may have to wait since the last second stage self-destructed. In any case, the launch will be late at night on March 3, so it may not make Outreach but will make Update.]
Bill Nelson has resigned as NASA Administrator with the incoming administration (similar to Jim Bridenstine four years ago). We went through some news of Jared Isaacman’s appointment. He has some conflict of interest because he was issued SpaceX stock.
The first Argonaut mission has been scheduled for 2031. This is the ESA’s cargo lander that will support lunar colonies and perhaps someday Mars expeditions.
Artemis 2 is now scheduled to launch in May of 2026. [This has caused a cascade of reschedulings for the later Artemis missions from September launches to May launches.]
We inspected an article on the Tianzhou cargo spacecraft which supplies the Tiangong space station, and the commercial spacecraft that will supplement or replace it.
Yutu-2 (“Jade Rabbit 2”) was still transmitting last September, which made it the longest-lived lunar rover. However, it stopped transmitting last month. Still, January 3 was the sixth anniversary of its landing, and five years and nine months is pretty spectacular.
The Pentagon needs to put together a plan for the Iron Dome space defense system within sixty days,
Sunita Williams is now fourth overall for total EVA time, and first for women.
We watched a livestream of Earth via Sen from SpaceTV, but weren’t able to figure out what part of Earth it was showing. You can watch it too at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO9e9jnhYK8.
The new Varda spacecraft was just one of 121 payloads carried on a SpaceX rideshare mission.
India’s successful test docking was at eleven millimeters per second, which is extremely soft (and also indicates to me how precise they were.)
One of Blue Origin’s test experiments is to show how fire would propagate in Zero-G.
Vast is going through qualification work. Currently they don’t have a contract with NASA. In fact, they are getting no outside funding at all. They will be launching modules in 2029 and 2030.
We had a look at the proposed Vast-2 space station. This features eight modules, two each on an arm of a cross, plus a core module. It can be complete by 2032. If they can get the first module up before the ISS is decommissioned, they will be doing well.
We looked at a video about the Blue Ghost and Resilience moon landers. The latter is part of Hakuto-R Mission 2.
With the flyby return of Elon Musk’s Tesla Cruiser, we looked at other manmade objects that returned and were mistaken for natural objects. One of these was the Rosetta spacecraft which was doing an Earth flyby in 2007 on its way to a comet. Between 2020 and 2022, mistaken for asteroids were Lucy, BepiColombo, both doing flybys, the SpectR X-ray observatory at the Earth-Sun L2 point, and, most famously, an upper stage from what appears to be the launch of the Surveyor 2 lunar probe which failed in 1966. We also got a link to https://www.whereisroadster.com.
We watched a video of SpaceDeX mission and docking.
The first module of India’s space station will go up in 2028.
--Minutes By OSA Secretary Syd Henderson
Contact person for Oklahoma Space Alliance is Claire McMurray.
PO Box 1003
Norman, OK 73070
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