"With 12 launch towers": The largest launch base to be built in Louisiana | The week in space
SpaceX announced the construction of a giant launch base for Starship, China postpones the moon mission, reduction in Falcon 9 activity, research of exoplanet atmospheres, and a revolutionary space telescope is on its way. A summary of the week across the universe.
Delays on the way to the moon
China was supposed to launch the Chang'e-7 mission at the beginning of the week – an unmanned mission to explore the south pole of the moon. However, less than a day before the launch, the China Manned Space Agency announced the postponement of the mission to a date yet to be determined, apparently only next year. The announcement stated that the Chang'e-7 mission "did not meet the requirements for launch and cannot be carried out in the planned launch window this year." The agency added that the decision was made based on considerations of caution, reliability, and absolute safety.
The Chinese agency did not explain the sudden postponement. Commentators raised several possibilities, including strong winds near the launch site in southern China due to a tropical storm or a technical malfunction in the spacecraft or the launch rocket. About two weeks ago, a Chinese rocket, Long March 7A, exploded in the air shortly after launch. The moon mission is intended for launch on another rocket from the same family, Long March 5, which has already been launched successfully several times, but there are several common systems in both rockets and it is possible that the Chinese decided to check them and not take a risk.
Chang'e-7 is supposed to continue a lineage of Chinese unmanned space missions, the last of which brought back two years ago the first soil samples from the far side of the moon. Its main mission will be to try to estimate the amount of ice in the soil of the south pole and its availability, in preparation for China's plans to establish a base in the area, parallel to the plans of the United States. Water is an important resource for manned activity on the moon, and in addition to using it for drinking and irrigation, it is possible to produce oxygen for breathing from it, as well as hydrogen and oxygen that can be used as rocket fuel.
Even with a delay of several months, there is an excellent chance that the Chinese lander will significantly precede missions with a similar destination planned by other space agencies. NASA plans to launch only at the end of 2027 the VIPER mission, an unmanned vehicle for searching for ice. The program was canceled several years ago, and last year the space agency brought it back to life, after choosing the company Blue Origin to land it on the moon. Alongside these, the PROSPECT mission of the European Space Agency is also planned with a lander for drilling, and a joint mission of Japan and India named LUPEX.
"The largest space base"
SpaceX announced that it intends to build a giant space base for Starship launches in the state of Louisiana with an investment of one hundred billion dollars. The company bought an area of more than 500 square kilometers in Vermilion Parish, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It plans to start construction work at the end of next year and is aiming for a first launch from the site at the end of 2029.
"The Starbase in Louisiana will eventually include more than a dozen launch towers, and will allow more than 30 Starship flights every day, which will make it the largest launch site on Earth," tweeted SpaceX president Elon Musk. SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell said that the facility will eventually be "an independent space base, with fuel production capabilities, a power station, a deep-water port, a rocket and spacecraft factory, and in all likelihood an airport as well."
Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry welcomed the initiative. However, to receive the permits for the construction of a launch base of such a scale, SpaceX will have to deal with a host of regulatory bodies. In building its space base in Texas, the bureaucracy lasted ten years, and to this day SpaceX is dealing with legal proceedings from environmental organizations. As a preemptive measure, Shotwell said that the company intends to preserve the natural environment in a large part of the coastal marsh area it purchased and will fund assistance in protecting the environment and its restoration during the construction work.
Last launch from Florida
SpaceX's entire plan is based on the fact that Starship will indeed become operational. Next month, another test flight of Starship is planned, the 14th in number, in which the company may try to perform for the first time an orbital flight and landing of the spacecraft on the launch tower. SpaceX has so far made three successful landings of the launch rocket on the tower, but all of them were in the previous generation of the system.
The announcement of the construction of the giant space base in Louisiana is another expression of SpaceX's plan to move most of its space activity to Starship spacecraft and to gradually end the operation of Falcon 9 rockets. This week, the company launched another 29 satellites of its communication network, Starlink, from the launch base at Cape Canaveral. This was the 100th launch this year of a Falcon 9 rocket, and also a new record in rocket recycling — this was the 37th flight for the specific first stage that performed this launch.
A few hours after the launch, SpaceX Vice President Kiko Dontchev announced that this was the last flight ever of a Falcon 9 for launching Starlink satellites from Florida. From now on, Starlink launches from Florida will be carried out on Starship spacecraft, and Starlink launches on Falcon 9 rockets will continue from Vandenberg base in California. SpaceX is building two launch and landing pads for Starship at Cape Canaveral, but they have not yet entered into use.
Exploring distant atmospheres
NASA's Pandora mission began its scientific activity this week — to explore the composition of the atmosphere of exoplanets. The small space telescope (325 kilograms) was launched in January into a sun-synchronous orbit at a height of 600 kilometers. After a long period of calibration and testing, it began regular observations of twenty pre-selected planets, measuring wavelengths in both visible light and infrared frequencies.
Pandora is the first space mission launched as part of NASA's "Pioneers" program, which promotes research in astrophysics through missions of small, relatively low-cost spacecraft. Its observations are supposed to complement research by large telescopes, such as James Webb. Its infrared light detector was developed in reserve for the Webb telescope and was not installed in the giant telescope. Pandora is supposed to observe each planet for 24 hours, repeating each observation ten times.
"The advantage of Pandora is its ability to observe targets for a long time and at several wavelengths. Large telescopes like James Webb, which have high demand for their observation time, cannot do this," said Nicole Colón, mission manager at NASA's Goddard Center. The mission team will look for water, as light from the star itself might distort the signs of water. Pandora was designed to separate the signals from the star from those of the planet.
A new romance with the universe
If there are no last-minute delays, on Sunday NASA will launch on a Falcon Heavy rocket of SpaceX its next large space telescope, Nancy Grace Roman (Roman). The Roman telescope has a primary mirror with a diameter of 2.4 meters, exactly like the mirror of the old Hubble telescope, but the field of view of the new telescope is a hundred times larger, and its sophisticated instrumentation allows it to collect in a month the amount of information that Hubble can collect in a hundred years. Like the James Webb telescope, it will be positioned in an orbit around point L2.
Its technologies will allow it to scan the sky in an unprecedented way, helping us advance to the solution of cosmological mysteries such as dark matter and dark energy, and to find many more planets throughout the Milky Way. The main instrument is a Wide Field Instrument (WFI), which allows for photographing large parts of the sky in high resolution. The telescope is supposed to perform several sky surveys, and repeated observations will allow for measuring with great precision the movements of stars and galaxies. The telescope will also try to discover planets by direct imaging, with the help of the Coronagraph instrument, which hides the light of the star itself. The telescope is named after the astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who was the driving force behind the development of the project that later became the Hubble Space Telescope.
