Boeing Starliner didn't launch this week

Boeing Starliner won’t launch until May 17 (at the earliest)

Let’s start with Boeing Starliner, because that’s on everyone’s mind right now. The first crewed launch of Boeing’s spacecraft was scheduled for Monday, May 6, but it didn’t happen. (If you want a rundown on everything you need to know about this long-delayed flight, check out that newsletter issue.)

The launch was scrubbed about two hours before liftoff, even though everything was going really smoothly. They were even ahead of schedule and were going to close the hatch early, but an oscillating valve meant that the launch wasn’t going to happen.

There’s a pressure valve for the liquid oxygen on the second stage of the rocket. ULA has seen issues before where this valve can get just off its seat, and it’ll flutter and cycle. That’s exactly what happened. They determined that because of the way this valve opened and closed, it was past its rated limits and needed to be replaced.

There was no danger to the crew, and this really is just a flight rule thing, but because it’s a crewed launch and they aren’t taking any chances, they’re rolling the rocket back to the Vertical Integration Building to replace the valve. 

That means that they are targeting Friday, May 17, at 6:16 pm ET for this launch. While the jokes do write themselves at this point, I am glad they’re doing the responsible thing here and prioritizing the well being of the crew over schedule.

SpaceX unveils its new suits for the first spacewalk from a private vehicle

Once Starliner launches, the next major U.S. crewed launch will be Polaris Dawn, which is a private spaceflight mission on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. I know private spaceflight doesn’t interest a lot of people, and I understand why, but I think Polaris Dawn is an exception, which is why I’m covering it alongside regular NASA missions. Basically, if the Hubble Space Telescope gets a boost and servicing mission, the Polaris program will be what accomplishes that. 

Polaris will consist of three missions total — the aim is to culminate in the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship —  and they’re currently targeting this first mission Polaris Dawn for an early summer launch. The mission will fly into high Earth orbit, higher than any human has flown since Apollo.

Polaris Dawn will be the first private spaceflight to perform an EVA, or a spacewalk. Right now we only have spacewalking capability from the ISS, not from a crew vehicle, and it’s possible Polaris Dawn will change that. 

This week, we got a look at Polaris Dawn’s spacesuit. This suit is focused on mobility because the crew will be wearing a single suit all the way from launch through splashdown. When they’re unpressurized, when the crew is in the capsule, they remain soft and flexible. When the suit is pressurized, prior to and during an EVA, they become rigid to protect the wearer from the hazards of space.

They also paid a lot of attention to thermal management: It has an integrated cooling system that the astronauts will be able to turn on as needed. They will also have a heads up display in their helmet that will show them the current suit conditions. 

I’ll have a rundown of the Polaris Dawn mission, including the changes that were made to the Crew Dragon capsule to accommodate an EVA, closer to the launch date.

There’s a problem with NASA’s Orion spacecraft’s heat shield

A big piece of space news recently was about problems with the heat shield on the Orion capsule. Orion is the crew vehicle for the Artemis program, that's supposed to take humans back to moon and establish a sustained presence there.

The next launch, which will be the first crewed launch of the Artemis program, is currently scheduled for September 2025, and then the first moon landing would be 2026, though those are ambitious dates.

The NASA Office of the Inspector General issued a pretty serious report focusing on the heat shield as one of the main issues that NASA has to get sorted if they want to launch Artemis II on schedule. What happened was during Artemis I re-entry, the heat shield broke off in chunks in some places rather than ablating (or basically melting) away like it should have.

It's a complicated problem that they're still figuring out. I dived into it in a separate newsletter because there's a lot to cover here, so check that out if you're interested.

ESA’s Solar Orbiter has a breathtaking video of the sun

In news about our sun, the ESA’s solar orbiter captured an incredible view of the sun’s surface.

This was recorded in extreme ultraviolet light, and at the time this was recorded the orbiter was about 30 million miles or 48 million kilometers away from the sun — that’s about 1/3 of the distance of the Earth to the sun. For reference, this is just a little closer than Mercury orbits our sun.

The video (link takes you to my narration of what’s going on) goes from the sun’s lower atmosphere to its much hotter outer atmosphere, the corona. We still don’t really know why the sun’s corona is hotter than its visible surface.

You can see structures on the sun’s visible surface that make it look fuzzy — this is charged gas, or plasma, that are connected to magnetic field lines within the interior of the sun.

In the lower left corner, there is what’s called coronal “moss”. This is probably the base of a coronal loop that’s too hot to be seen by the orbiter’s settings at the time it took this video.

The bumps you can see on the horizon of the sun are called spicules, and they’re from the chromosphere. They can be 10,000 km or about 6200 miles high.

This eruption that’s highlighted is larger than Earth!

You also can see coronal rain that’s darker than what’s around it because it’s cooler. The brightest spots are hotter (around a million degrees C or 1.8 million degrees F while the darker areas are cooler (relatively speaking of course). The rain is made of high density plasma that falls back onto the sun.

NASA’s exoplanet hunting spacecraft is out of safe mode

Here’s some great news: NASA’s TESS spacecraft, its exoplanet hunter, is back in action after going into safe mode on April 18.

TESS, or the transiting exoplanet survey satellite, uses the transit method to identify exoplanet candidates — it looks for tiny dips in starlight that could be an exoplanet passing in front of a star from our perspective. 

What happened was that momentum built up in TESS’s reaction wheels, which is how the spacecraft properly oriented. It failed to properly unload that momentum. After investigating, the team determined that the propulsion system, which is what is responsible for allowing this routine momentum transfer to happen, hadn’t been fully re-pressurized following a stint in safe mode earlier in April. They re-pressurized the system and TESS was back in operation as of 3.

It’s good news, but it is a little concerning that the team still doesn’t know what sent the spacecraft into safe mode in the first place. TESS was in safe mode from April 11 to April 17, and we’re still trying to figure out why that happened — but for now, it’s good to know TESS is back on the hunt for exoplanet candidates.

NASA’s 360 video shows you what it’s like to fall into a black hole

In kind of wild news, what would it be like to fall into a black hole?

NASA released a video this week on YouTube explaining this, and it’s really cool. I’m showing some of the video here but I’m also going to link to it because it’s worth watching on its own for the full experience — the video was produced on a supercomputer and it’s available in 360 degree video.

What this is showing us is a simulation of a camera approaches, orbits, and then crosses the event horizon of a black hole. There’s also a second video of what it would be like as a camera approached, and then managed to escape, a black hole, which is also worth watching.