New Ascension Launch Dates, Progenitor Launch Suspension Remains
After suspending rocket operations earlier this year, the Ascension team is finally ready to resume work towards launching missions, with new dates/windows published for the coming months:
6/23 @ TBD – Mk1 (unkerbed)
7/16 @ TBD – Mk1 (Spc Bob)
TBD August – Mk2
More information will be released over the coming days along with vessel and mission details in the Ops Tracker. Flight Director Lanalye and Lead Engineer Simon worked closely with the rocketry teams to produce a more comprehensive set of protocols and guidelines for future missions, including these upcoming ones, to reduce quality control issues that have popped up on past missions as well as lack of oversight in various areas. Operations Director Drew signed off on all the improvements earlier this week to allow the Ascension program to resume launch prep. All 4 astronauts have been forging ahead with their training, already looking into ways to prepare for extended stays in space – days or maybe a week.
Over at the Progenitor program things are going just as well internally here at KSA, with permission to push to launch readiness and all new protocols and guidelines in place – however due to persisting legal issues, no launches are currently scheduled. We did file to appeal the decision to prevent us from launching using certain USI parts but it was denied earlier this week. At this point all we can do is build the rockets and make them ready for launch and then hope the legal mess clears up. There is still talk of an unknown USI buyer – if that goes through they may have the funds to just settle the suit and let everything move forward again.
Because of all the general delays to the Progeny Mk7-B and now the recent launch delays, the Ascension Mk3 has been pushed back to the start of 2021. The Mk3, originally slated to debut Q3 this year, will be making use of technology that the Mk7-B was supposed to be prototyping early this year such as the new 0.625m dual-segment booster and gimbaling vacuum engine, the design of which is to be scaled up to 1.25m for the Mk3’s orbital stage. Reaction wheel control systems for future probes as well as booster recovery also are seeing setbacks.
Genesis & KerBalloon Continue Operations
While the high-altitude KerBalloon crew have since departed on 5/28 with a month-long expedition to the Badlands, the low-altitude crew completed another traversal contract up north of the Wall with assistance from Kravass. Unfortunately despite previous experience detailing with recovery in mountainous terrain not enough prevention was taken to protect the payload from damage if it were to land on a slope. Sure enough, that’s what happened and the data collected was lost, leading to a mission failure.
The Deuce was recently scrambled this week to head out and investigate a potential severe storm forming out over the south Kerblantic. The mission led to a maritime alert being posted later that day to warn merchant vessels shipping between Umbarg and Sheltered Rock. We hope to someday play an even more direct role in weather forecasting when we can place satellites in orbit.
Alaba Gets New Long-Term Propagation
After the 38th encounter back on 5/18 there was a large shift to the orbit of our moonlet Alaba, which in turn began to throw off the long-term prediction made back in March of this year. This was suspected based on past behavior of moonlets astronomers have been able to observe and over the next two encounters was confirmed, as the encounter times slipped by minutes then hours. After the most recent encounter last weekend, a new long-term prediction was made (browse right to see the trajectories through Mun’s SOI) but it too has a large orbital shift that makes astronomer’s doubt its accuracy through into next year. A close eye will continue to be kept on it.
It may not be obvious why we at the KSA pay such close attention to the orbital studies of these moonlets – we are not directly involved with anything the Asteroid Tracking Network does. The reason is that we’ll be using the same propagation models for our future spacecraft, which when exploring planetary systems will benefit from making fly-bys of numerous large bodies. Being able to accurately model many encounters into the future will allow for better mission planning: fuel saving, observation opportunities, etc. Even just making multiple planet fly-bys to slingshot our way to the outer system, as our Extremis I probe is slated to do starting in 2021, will benefit from what we learn observing how these asteroids interact with the SOIs of large bodies.
ATN Database
The latest update for the Asteroid Tracking Network database is available here, containing 5,229 asteroids and 3 updated with new observation data. Here are the 29 asteroids that were discovered this past week.
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) but it slows the actual game rate so the flight lasted 1.8 hours in game but in actual time took 3 hours to complete. I then had to spend another hour or so hunting down the problem – 
but it really didn’t affect much other than make the aircraft slower and more side-slippy. I thought it was just 1.9.1 being weird. But since it had no big effect I didn’t mention it during the mission tweets.