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Issue No. 283 | The Orbital Index Jump to: Navigation Issue No. 283 The Orbital Index Issue No. 283 | Aug 28, 2024 🚀 🌍 🛰  ¶Starliner will return home crewless. NASA announced on Saturday that, due to safety concerns around ongoing helium leaks and reaction control thruster issues on Boeing’s Starliner, the vehicle will undock and return to Earth uncrewed in September. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will stay on the ISS through February, then fly home as part of Crew-9. That mission’s Crew Dragon can dock once Starliner vacates a port on the station. While NASA has remained positive for the duration of the test, it has become clear over time that there is significant disagreement within the agency on Starliner’s safety, with the agency now admitting that the “uncertainty and lack of expert concurrence does not meet the agency’s safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight.” Nelson said, “We have had mistakes done in the past, we lost two Space Shuttles, as a result of their not being a culture in which information could come forward. So NASA, ever since, has tried very hard to bring about an atmosphere in which people are encouraged to step forward and speak their mind.” We assume that Crew-9 will launch with two extra empty spacesuits, as Starliner’s spacesuits are incompatible with Crew Dragon. Boeing, who received more funding via the Commercial Crew Program than SpaceX, is clearly struggling on all fronts and has now absorbed over $1.5 billion in losses as part of the delayed Starliner program (Boeing’s decline arguably stems from its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in 1997 and the subsequent systematic loss of Boeing’s engineering-first culture). We feel that the US does require multiple vehicles capable of delivering and returning crew from LEO, and it isn’t a good situation for SpaceX to be the only option (Orion, hobbled by low cadence and the incredible expense of SLS, clearly isn’t one). We’re rooting for an eventual booster-agnostic crewed Dreamchaser and, hopefully, clarity before too long on Starliner’s uncertain future. Starliner over Egypt's Mediterranean coast, as viewed from Crew Dragon. The Orbital Index is made possible through generous sponsorship by:   ¶China planning exoplanet hunter. China’s planned Earth 2.0 (aka ET, haha) exoplanet observatory, shooting for a 2028 launch, is an ambitious mission designed by the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It will carry six wide-field optical telescopes to L2 (near JWST) where it will observe ~2 million stars for exoplanet transits over four years. The mission’s 28 cm aperture telescopes are designed to be able to detect small, rocky worlds and the long observing window will hopefully let it detect planets with orbital periods that are Earth-like (paper). It also carries a 35 cm telescope designed to watch for rogue planets in the Galactic bulge via microlensing events, something the Roman Space Telescope (2027) will also do. Launching in 2026 before China’s observatory, ESA’s PLATO mission will have a whopping 26 cameras, but will observe for less time and may struggle to find planets in longer period orbits. Further out is NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory (c.f. Issue 237), but that likely won’t launch for more than 20 years. Earth 2.0/ET mission graphic. Credit: CAS ¶Transporter 11. SpaceX continued their now quarterly cadence of launching a truckload of small payloads to SSO, completing their 11th launch of the Transporter program earlier this month. T11 carried 116 satellites to orbit and was the 11th flight for Falcon 9 in the just under three weeks since its return to flight (after an upper stage failure grounded the rocket for 15 days). The rideshare program has now launched over 1,000 satellites. Highlights of the latest batch include:Hyperspectral imagers continue to be a dominant trend: Tanager-1 from Planet, which will provide GHG mapping for the Carbon Mapper Coalition; Norwegian HYPSO-2, which will monitor ocean health, Lemu Earth’s Nge; Hyperfield-1 from Kuva Space; and, Kanyini, South Australia’s first state-owned and manufactured satellite.SAR feels like it is reaching maturity, with groups of satellites launched from well-known constellation providers (two each from Umbra and Capella, four from ICEYE, and one from iQPS). Weather data was also a common application, with an Arctic weather satellite from ESA, two Spire Lemurs fitted with radio occultation sensors (GNSS-RO), PlanetiQ’s GNOMES-5 (also GNSS-RO), and Tomorrow.io’s two 6U microwave sounders.A first satellite from Senegal, the tiny 1U GaindéSat-1A.PTD-4 from NASA Ames, which will demonstrate the Lightweight Integrated Solar Array and AnTenna (LISA-T) for low-cost power on small spacecraft with deployable thin-film photovoltaics that have embedded antennas.An ION Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) from D-Orbit (nice mission updates page!) carrying five satellite

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