Weird drainages on Mars

Weird drainages on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on Februay 11, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The camera team posted it yesterday as their own cool image, labeling it “A Fissure and Channel near Pavonis Mons”. From the caption:

A linear trough strikes northeast, then abruptly ends (or changes into a narrow ridge). Where the trough ends, a sinuous channel has an east-southeast strike, trending at almost a right angle to the trough. What happened to form these features?

We can speculate that first there was a southwest-to-northeast trending fracture or fault, perhaps associated with a volcanic vent. Groundwater (or some other runny fluid) coursed through the fault until overflowing and forming the sinuous channel. Continued movement through the fault carved a trough up to the overflow point.

The arrows indicate the downhill grades. Though this caption mentions groundwater, it is far more likely that the “runny fluid” was lava, as shown by the overview map below.
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Varda raises another $187 million in private investment capital

Varda's third capsule, on the ground in Australia
Varda’s third capsule, on the ground in Australia.
Click for original image.

The in-space manufacturing startup Varda has now raised another $187 million in private investment capital, bringing the total cash the company has raised to $329 million.

The $187 million fundraise was led by Natural Capital and Shrug Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Lux Capital, and Also Capital. Since launching their first mission, W-1, in 2023, Varda has completed three successful launch and return missions, with a fourth, W-4, currently in orbit and a fifth expected to launch before the end of the year.

…”With this capital, Varda will continue to increase our flight cadence and build out the pharmaceutical lab that will deliver the world’s first microgravity-enabled drug formulation,” said Varda CEO Will Bruey.

Varda has expanded its footprint terrestrially as well, opening an office in Huntsville, Ala. and a new 10,000 square foot laboratory space in El Segundo, which will allow its pharmaceutical scientists to begin working on developing processes to crystallize biologics, such as monoclonal antibodies. As of 2022, the market size for monoclonal antibodies is estimated to be $210.06 billion.

As I have noted previously, a real market for pharmaceuticals produced in weightlessness has existed for decades. It appears Varda is now well placed to be the first to make money doing so, using its returnable capsules.

One more note: These products and this industry could have been developed on ISS, but NASA has banned all profit-making commercial manufacturing projects there from the station’s beginning. You can do research, but you are forbidden to create any products for sale later on Earth. This strange policy is left over from before the station, when Reagan discontinued all commercial missions on the shuttle following the Challenger accident.

SpaceX gets approval to build oxygen plant at Boca Chica

SpaceX today received the okay from Cameron County to build a plant at Boca Chica to produce oxygen from the atmosphere for use in its Superheavy/Starship rocket.

The commissioners voted, 3-1, to give Elon Musk’s rocket company a beachfront construction certificate and dune protection permit, allowing the company to build a modern-day factory akin to an oil refinery to produce gases needed for space flight launches.

The plant will consist of 20 structures on 1.66 acres. The enclosed site will include a tower that will reach 159 feet, or about 15 stories high, much shorter than the nearby launch tower, which stretches 480 feet high. It is set to be built about 280 feet inland from the line of vegetation, which is where the dunes begin. The factory will separate air into nitrogen and oxygen. SpaceX utilizes liquid oxygen as a propellant and liquid nitrogen for testing and operations.

By having the facility on site, SpaceX hopes to make the delivery of those gases more efficient by eliminating the need to have dozens of trucks deliver them from Brownsville. The company says they need more than 200 trucks of liquid nitrogen and oxygen delivered for each launch, a SpaceX engineer told the county during a meeting last week.

As usual, the same cranks who always complain about this stuff are given space by this news outlet to whine, but the truth is that the commission’s vote well reflects the attitude of the local community. It supports what SpaceX is doing, because of the prosperity the company is bringing to this formerly depressed region.

Moreover, this facility will not only save SpaceX money and make it easier to launch more frequently, it is likely environmentally beneficial. I suspect the facility will be relatively clean compared to the truck convoys it will replace.

Hat tip Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas.

Why did Trump suddenly pick Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to become temporary head of NASA?

The reason for Trump’s sudden decision yesterday to name Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator, replacing long-time NASA manager Janet Piro — who had held the job since Trump took office — remains unclear.

This article suggests the president wanted someone with more political clout who was also part of his inner circle.

Two articles (here and here) imply the decision was related to the recent clashes politically between Trump and Musk, adding that Duffy and Musk have been reported to be in conflict over air traffic controller issues. Picking Duffy thus directly reduces Musk’s influence at NASA.

The truth is that we really don’t know exactly what motives brought Trump to make this appointment. It could be that Trump wants someone in charge who will have the political clout to push through his proposed NASA cuts. It also could be Trump wants someone with that clout to review those cuts and change them.

The bottom line is that NASA remains a political football, a situation that in the end had done decades of harm to the American space industry. The sooner it can be made irrelevant and replaced by a commercial, competitive, and (most important) profitable space industry, the better.

We really don’t need a “space agency.” We didn’t have such a thing when we settled the American west.

SpaceX finally passes final regulatory hurdle to sell Starlink in India

You might get deja-vu from this story, since I have reported repeatedly in the past that SpaceX has finally gotten regulatory approval to sell Starlink in India.

However, India’s complex regulatory framework — leftover from the days of British rule and strengthened for decades after independence when the strongly socialist Congress Party ruled — ended up requiring SpaceX to leap multiple regulatory hurdles to get the Starlink approved. According to news reports today, that last licensing hurdle has now finally been leaped.

The final approval marks a crucial milestone that will pave the way for the Musk-led company to launch its commercial satellite operations in the country. The Elon Musk-led company has been waiting for regulatory approvals since 2022 to operate legally in India. With this approval, Starlink has become the third company to enter the satellite space in India after Reliance Jio and Eutelsat’s OneWeb, in which Bharti Airtel, led by Sunil Mittal, is a shareholder.

Does this mean SpaceX can now sell Starlink in India? Of course not:

The next step for Starlink is to secure spectrum from the government, which will likely be assigned in the coming months. It also needs to set up infrastructure on the ground. One of the most critical aspects of Starlink’s India foray will be its compliance with the country’s security rules.

Since Starlink doesn’t need a complex ground infrastructure, selling terminals directly to customers, the infrastructure mentioned in the quote likely involves partnering Starlink operations with the Indian telecommunications companies Airtell and Jio, so that they get a piece of the action.

New census of inverted channels on Mars strongly suggests the planet once had more water

Martian ridges that imitate rivers
Click for original image.

A new review of inverted channels on Mars now strongly suggests that the red planet was once far wetter than presently seen, with the channels implying the existence of liquid rivers.

The discovery of more than 15,000 kilometres of ancient riverbeds on Mars suggests that the Red Planet may once have been much wetter than previously thought. Researchers looked at fluvial sinuous ridges, also known as inverted channels, across Noachis Terra – a region in Mars’ southern highlands. These are believed to have formed when sediment deposited by rivers hardened and was later exposed as the surrounding material eroded.

Similar ridges have been found across a range of terrains on Mars. Their presence suggests that flowing water was once widespread in this region of Mars, with precipitation being the most likely source of this water.

The image to the right is a good example of an inverted channel, a previous cool image posted in April 2025. It is located not in Noachis Terra but in the northern lowland plains.

The researchers argue that these channels suggest that about 3.7 billion years ago there were flowing liquid rivers on Mars, fed by precipitation. This conclusion however still does not explain how this could happen on a planet that is too cold with too thin an atmosphere for liquid water to exist. Every model so far proposed to make Mars warmer with a thicker atmosphere in the distant past remains questionable with many holes.

Could the inverted channels have been created by glacial activity, ice instead of liquid water? At present we don’t know enough about the Mars environment and the physics of such things in the planet’s one-third gravity to answer that question. It is however a question that scientists I think should be asking, based on the extensive evidence of glacial activity in the Martian mid-latitudes.

The big takeaway from this study however is that it adds weight to the overall trend seen in the data, that over time the total amount of water on the planet has declined. We can see this in glaciers, for example, with later glacial flows always falling short of previous flows. This research shows that even in the dry tropics there was once ample water, even if we don’t yet know what form it took.

Sightseeing near Starship’s candidate Martian landing sites

An interesting mesa near Starship's Martian landing zone
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image takes us sightseeing in the region on Mars that SpaceX has chosen for its prime landing zone for its Starship spaceship. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 29, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows a 465-foot-high unusually shaped mesa in this region.

The full resolution inset at the bottom of the picture focuses at the strange tilted layers on the southern slope of this mesa. Apparently the layers at this spot were pushed sideways so they lie significantly angled to the horizontal. Though it isn’t clear from this picture, it is possible that the mesa itself is made up of similar tilted layers, hidden below the surface. We can see the tilt only on the mesa’s southern flank because erosion has apparently exposed it.

Note also the black stain that surrounds the mesa. Though this might be caused by wind distributing dust, such stains have also been seen at a location where scientists suspect an inactive hot spring might exist, as well as another location where there may have been relatively recent volcanic activity.

Is this stain caused by any of these processes? In situ exploration would probably be necessary to find out. And we may soon actually have spaceships landing here in the relatively near future with the capability to do this.
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Coalition of space companies begs Congress to fund office designed to track satellites

A coalition of 450 space companies has now submitted letters to both the House and Senate begging Congress to not kill the funding for an office in NOAA created during the first Trump administration and designed to help manage satellite traffic in orbit.

A coalition of space industry associations representing hundreds of companies is urging Congress to reject Trump Administration plans to kill the nascent Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). Developed through NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, TraCSS began beta testing last fall to provide data to civil and commercial satellite operators to avoid collisions. Just as the system is finally taking shape, it is targeted for elimination in the FY2026 budget request. The Senate Appropriations Committee takes up that proposal on Thursday when it marks up the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill that includes NOAA.

This new office was first conceived as a replacement for the tracking that the U.S. military has been doing since Sputnik was launched in 1957, information that it provides free to the industry. It appears Trump in his second administration has now concluded this new NOAA office is essentially redundant and therefore unnecessary.

The letters to the House [pdf] and Senate [pdf] urge Congress to reinstate the $65 million in spending for this NOAA office, but offer no suggestions on what to cut to fund this extra cost. Instead, like all such lobbying efforts, it expects Congress to simply print money to pay for the expense.

Meanwhile, it remains a valid question why this additional office is needed if the military has been doing the job quite successfully for the last three-quarters of a century. The letters argue this is a job better suited to a civil agency, but why? The military has to do it anyway for security reasons. Why waste money on a duplicate effort?

ESA tests parachutes and guidance system for its proposed Space Rider reusable mini-shuttle

The engineering
Click for original image.

The European Space Agency (ESA) revealed today that it has completed drop tests from a helicopter of an engineering vehicle of its proposed Space Rider reusable mini-shuttle — similar in concept to the U.S. military’s X-37B — testing the spacecraft’s parachutes and re-entry guidance system.

The drop-test campaign had two objectives: the qualification of the parachutes used to slow the spacecraft during descent, and to test the software that controls the parafoil, guiding the Space Rider’s reentry module to its precise landing site. Space Rider models were dropped from a CH-47 Chinook Italian Army helicopter from altitudes ranging from 1 to 2.5 km, at the Italian military’s training and experimentation area Salto di Quirra.

The press release provides no movie of any of the drop tests, and the images it provides are almost all taken from very far away, making it impossible to see in detail what the engineering vehicle looks like. Only one picture clearly shows it, and that is what I have posted to the right. This is not a model of a spacecraft, but a square box carrying the parachutes and sensors.

Note also that ESA was doing similar drop tests last summer of a similar model. Apparently they aren’t yet ready to test the real thing.

This X-37B copy was first tested by ESA in 2015 and by 2017 the agency was promising it would be flying commercially by 2025. A decade later and they have not yet begun testing a full scale spacecraft. In addition, ESA has established some very complex rules about who can use it commercially, rules so complex I predict few will be interested.

Europe might be trying to adopt capitalism and freedom as its model, but in many ways it behaves as if it hasn’t the foggiest idea what it is doing.

ISRO successfully tests thrusters to be used on its manned Gaganyaan capsule

India’s space agency ISRO last week successfully completed two tests of the attitude control thrusters that will be used on its manned Gaganyaan capsule.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, ISRO said that the short-duration tests, lasting 30 seconds and 100 seconds respectively, were aimed at validating the test article configuration. The space agency stated that the overall performance of the propulsion system during the hot tests had been normal and aligned with pre-test predictions.

It was also noted that during the 100-second test, the simultaneous operation of all Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters in various modes—both steady state and pulsed—along with all Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) engines had been successfully demonstrated.

The first unmanned test flight of Gaganyaan is presently targeting a launch in the last quarter of 2025, with two more unmanned test flights in 2026. The manned mission of one to three days would follow in 2027.

Canadian rocket startup hopes to fly first suborbital launch from its proposed Newfoundland spaceport in August

Nordspace's proposed spaceport
Nordspace’s proposed spaceport. Click for original.

Though details remain slim, the Canadian rocket startup Nordspace now says it is targeting an August launch of its hopes to fly first suborbital launch from its proposed spaceport in August.

NordSpace’s Taiga rocket isn’t going to reach orbit when it launches in August, but it’s a big step toward the company’s ultimate goal. Taiga is a small, liquid-fueled, hypersonic launch vehicle capable of carrying just over 110 pounds (50 kilograms) above the Karman Line. This summer’s shakedown cruise will be a low-altitude demonstration of Taiga’s capabilities.

The map to the right indicates the location of the spaceport, near the town of St. Lawrence on the southern coast of the island of Newfoundland.

Whether this launch occurs is very uncertain. For example, a previous report in January 2025 about this launch site suggested that government approvals were still required. It is not known if those approvals have been obtained.

Nordspace is the second company in Canada to propose offering a combined spaceport/rocket service. The other, Maritime Launch Services, first appeared almost a decade ago, but has never gotten off the ground. Nordspace first announced its plans in July 2024, so achieving a first test launch in 2025 will clearly place it ahead of Maritime.

SpaceX gets launch contract from Globalstar

As it appears right now to be the only American rocket company capable of taking on new launch contracts, SpaceX today was awarded a new launch contract from Globalstar to launch its third generation set of satellites.

The press release is not clear about the number of satellites or launches involved, but either way the deal signals SpaceX’s continuing dominance. For larger satellites it has no real competitors. Not only are its launch prices the cheapest, none of its competitors are capable of adding new customers to their launch manifests. In fact, those competitors, ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin, are having trouble simply getting their rockets off the ground on a regular basis.

This situation however is likely to change by two years, assuming the new rockets being developed by Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, and Relativity finally begin flying.

Spanish high altitude balloon company to fly tourist flights from South Korea

The Spanish high altitude balloon startup Zero-2-Infinity has now established an office in South Korea with the intention of flying tourist flights from there for a ticket price of about $60k per flight.

Zero 2 Infinity plans to begin its Korean operations with a project called “Byul” — the Korean word for star — which offers a symbolic farewell for pet lovers. The initiative will invite volunteers to send the ashes of their deceased furry companions into the stratosphere, carried in star-shaped, biodegradable capsules. The company aims to begin collecting participants this September, with the first near-space release scheduled for December in Korea.

Byul will apparently be a smaller balloon with no human passengers. The company claims it has already test flown a larger helium balloon with humans aboard to an altitude of 6 miles, and again unmanned to 20 miles. If so it has done so with no publicity at all. This announcement today appears more a push to raise the $70 million the company says it needs to develop this manned balloon capsule.

SpaceX launches 28 Starlink satellites

After an unusual pause of launches of several days (likely due to the July 4th weekend), SpaceX last night successfully launched by placing another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 22nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

85 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 85 to 63.

Returning to Mars’ glacier country

Overview map

Returning to Mars' glacier country
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image illustrates again why I rail against those who still claim Mars is dry. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 2, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The picture was labeled simply as a “terrain sample” by the MRO camera team, which almost always signifies that it was taken not as part of any specific science research project or by request by a scientist, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature. When such a gap-filler picture is required, the team tries to pick interesting features in that time frame, but don’t always succeed.

In this case, that time frame placed MRO over the northern mid-latitudes and a region I label “glacier country” because practically every picture taken in this region shows glacial features. This picture is no exception. The white dot in the overview map above marks the location, in the Protonilus Mensae area of the 2,000-mile-long strip of glaciers. The arrow in the picture itself shows the downward grade of the glacial flow. The small 2,000-foot-wide crater appears as if the impact occurred on soft ice, and the stippled terrain surrounding it appears to resemble the feature geologists have labeled “brain terrain”, a surface feature unique to Mars and associated with near surface ice, though its exact formation process is not yet understood.

Nor have I cherry-picked this image to prove my point. Its glacial-like features are very typical for this region of Mars. Note for example the inset with the larger crater to the northeast. It appears almost buried by this glacial material, which has poured through the gap in its southwest quadrant to fill it. A close look at all the low lying terrain shows similar glacial-like flows.

Mars is surely not a paradise. It is bone-chillingly cold almost all the time. Its atmosphere is so thin and lacking in oxygen you would quickly suffocate if you tried to breath it. But the data continues to suggest that the red planet has ample supplies of near-surface ice outside of its dry tropics. All future colonists will need to do is dig a bit and process the water out.

Air Force won’t land rockets on a Pacific island as part of its program to test point-to-point rocket cargo delivery

Faced with loud opposition from activists groups, the Air Force has decided it will not land rockets on Johnston Atoll in the Pacific island as part of its program to test point-to-point rocket cargo delivery.

The service had chosen Johnston Atoll, an unincorporated U.S. territory about 700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu, for testing a program using rockets to rapidly deliver tons of cargo around the globe. The Air Force had announced in the Federal Register in March that it was undertaking an environmental assessment for the construction of two rocket landing pads on the atoll. It anticipated issuing a draft assessment by April, but publication was delayed as opposition to the plan by environmental groups surged. A petition calling for the Air Force to abandon the plan had garnered 3,884 signatures as of Wednesday.

…The Pacific Islands Heritage Coalition, which launched the change.org petition, said in a March 13 news release that building the launch pads on Johnston “only continues decades of harm and abuse to a place that is culturally and biologically tied to us as Pacific people.”

I wonder if this coalition included many local residents. I have doubts. This complaint sounds like something that comes out of the racist anti-white DEI offices in many American colleges.

This decision doesn’t kill this program, but eliminates this island as a test landing site, which means its residents won’t benefit from the development the program would have brought them.

ESA picks five rocket startups for future launch contracts

European Space Agency

Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that it has chosen five rocket startups — out of twelve that applied to its “European Launcher Challenge” — now approved to bid on future ESA launch contracts.

The startups are Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg from Germany, PLD Space from Spain, MaiaSpace from France, and Orbex from Great Britain. Though none have successfully completed a first launch. all five showed the most advancement. Isar has had one attempted launch failure, while Rocket Factory lost its rocket during a static fire test just before launch. PLD meanwhile has achieved a short suborbital test, while Orbex has said it was ready to launch three years ago but was blocked by red tape in the United Kingdom.

MaiaSpace is technically the least advanced, but it is also a subdivision wholly owned by ArianeGroup, a partnership of Europe’s largest aerospace companies, Airbus and Safran. It was also established in partnership with France’s space agency CNES. Thus, it has well-established connections within Europe’s aerospace industry that makes it favored.

The goal of this ESA program is to shift from the government model it has used for decades, where ESA builds and owns the rockets, to develop a competitive rocket industry of independent companies that market their rockets to ESA for contracts. ESA has seen the success in the U.S. when NASA shifted to this capitalism model in the past decade, and wishes to emulate this.

Whether it remains uncertain. ESA is still mired by bureaucratic government thinking, as illustrated by the next phrase in this challenge:

The next phase of the proposal will see ESA open dialogue between the preselected companies and their respective Member States. This process will help formalise the proposal ahead of the agency’s Ministerial-Level Council meeting (CM25), which will take place toward the end of the year. At CM25, Member States are expected to formally commit funding to the initiative. Following the meeting, ESA will issue a Phase 2 call for proposals, which will be restricted to the preselected candidate companies. European Launcher Challenge contracts will then be awarded after a final evaluation period.

The ESA’s very nature seems to impose odious bureaucratic rules on its member nations that could hinder these private companies. For example, these rules now block any other independent rocket startups from bidding on contracts. Like the bootleggers during Prohibitioin, the ESA has essentially divided competition up by territory and given it to these favored companies. No one else is allowed in.

Two Russian satellites are maneuvering toward an American military satellite

Two Russian “inspector” satellites, launched together in 2022 but now separated, appear to be maneuvering toward an American military satellite and are about to position themselves to within 30 and 50 miles respectively every four days.

[O]n June 26, 2025, a new object was apparently ejected from the main satellite at a separation speed of just around 10 kilometers per hour, according to an estimate by Jonathan McDowell.

By the end of June 2025, Object C (Full ID — 2022-089C), as the newly released satellite was identified in the US Space Force catalogue, was around 140 kilometers from its Kosmos-2558 “mother vehicle,” according to observations by Marco Langbroek. It was tracked in a 545 by 451-kilometer orbit, with an inclination 97.24 degrees toward the Equator. On July 3, 2025, at around 18:42 UTC, Object C made a sudden orbit-lowering maneuver descending to an altitude of around 435 kilometers, while Kosmos-2558 remained in its original orbit.

According to Nico Janssen, the newly formed orbit would put Object C within 81 kilometers from USA-326, on July 5, 2025, at around 00:54:20 UTC. In the meantime, Kosmos-2558 would pass at a minimum distance of nearly 49 kilometers from USA-326 on the same day, at around 09:40:50, Janssen predicted on the Seesat-L Internet message board on July 4, 2025.

Russia’s anti-satellite technology is based on tests several decades ago whereby it brought a killer satellite close to a target satellite and destroyed both by blowing up the killer satellite. These maneuvers now are not likely aimed at such a test, destroying the American classified military satellite. Instead, Russia likely wants to obtain close-up photography and data collection about it. The maneuvers however do prove once again that Russia’s anti-satellite technology is viable.

A Martian meteorite discovered in Africa is up for auction

A Martian rock that fell as a meteorite in Africa and was discovered by a professional meteorite hunter and is the largest such Mars rock found so far is about to go up for sale by auction.

NWA16788 is the largest known piece of Mars on Earth, and its internal composition suggests it was disgorged from the surface of the Red Planet by an asteroid impact so extreme that it turned some of the meteorite’s minerals into glass.

Looking certain to blow past its lower estimate of US$2.0 million, this monumental 54-lb (24.67-kg) lump of Mars has already been bid to $1,920,000 (inc Buyer’s Premium) 12 days before the on-line hammer falls, and even its $4-milllion upper estimate doesn’t look safe with this much interest so early in an online auction.

The expected high price is partly because of the meteorite’s size, and partly because almost such meteorites are found by scientists working for NASA, and are thus never made available for sale. To have one available for purchase is rare indeed.

ULA finally begins stacking Vulcan for next launch

After months of delay following the nozzle failure on the rocket’s second launch, ULA has now finally begun preparing a new Vulcan rocket for its third launch, carrying a number of a classified NSSL national security payloads.

Based on statements by ULA’s CEO, Tory Bruno, the company is finally about to begin the aggressive 2025 launch schedule he had promised last year.

During a media roundtable on the sidelines of the 40th Space Symposium in early April, Bruno said they planned to launch around 11 to 13 times by the end of the year. He said that would be a roughly 50-50 split between Atlas and Vulcan rockets.

The next two Vulcan launches are planned to be two NSSL Phase 2 missions: USSF-106 and USSF-87. The Vulcan rockets for both have been at the Cape since last year, but the status of the payloads hasn’t been publicly discussed given their ties to national security.

Bruno said following those two NSSL missions, ULA will launch the first Kuiper Vulcan mission and then bounce back and forth between Atlas and Vulcan flights through the end of the year.

If this schedule turns out to be true, it will be good news not only for ULA but for Amazon, as it indicates the possibility of ULA launching more than 500 Kuiper satellites before the end of the year. That will make a significant dent in its requirement to place 1,600 satellites in orbit by July 2026. At the moment only 54 are in space.

Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS

Russia today (July 4th in Kazakhstan) successfully launched a new Progress freighter to ISS, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.

The freighter will dock to ISS in two days, bringing with it almost three tons of cargo and more than a half done of hardware and equipment. Expect NASA to order its astronauts to shut the hatch between the American and Russian sections of ISS due its fear that a docking to the Zvezda module could cause a catastrophic failure because of the stress fractures in that module’s hull. That docking will however not be directly to Zvezda, but to the Poisk module that is itself docked to Zvezda.

The lower stages and strap-on boosters crashed inside Kazakhstan in the normal drop zones that Russia has used for decades.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

84 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 84 to 63.

Russia’s launch pace this year is its lowest pace in decades. At this rate Russia might only get about 15-17 launches off in 2025, a count more comparable to what it did in the very early 1960s. This decline can be directly linked to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. That invasion caused Russia to lose billions in contracts in the international launch market. And it continues to prevent Russia from winning any new international contracts as well. Except for its government launches (which are limited due to government cash shortages), the only other missions Russia flies are those to ISS, and those number about four per year.

Mars is not dry!

Global map of glaciers found on Mars

I once again feel compelled to rant against the shallow ignorance of too many people in both the journalism field as well as academia about the most recent data we now have of Mars. Two articles today once again show this ignorance, assuming blandly that Mars is a dry planet with little water on it anywhere, when orbital data over the past decade has unequivocally shown that — except for its equatorial regions — the planet is covered with a LOT of near-surface ice.

The headlines make this ignorance quite clear:

In both cases, the articles assume that the data obtained from rovers and landers in the dry Martian tropics applies to the entire planet. It does not. This evidence of a dry planet carries a bias that comes from the decision by the planetary community as well as NASA to send every rover to that dry equatorial region. Only one lander, Phoenix, has ever been successfully dropped far from the Martian equator, and it was purposely sent to a very high latitude, where it proved there was ice present just below the surface.

Orbital data in the past decade from both Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express has clearly shown that there is a lot of near surface ice on Mars, as shown by the map above. In the mid-latitudes the terrain is dominated by glaciers, as this is the region where the vast ice sheets in the high latitudes begin to fade away.

Only the equatorial region, indicated by the white lines on the map, is dry and barren. And yet, even here, orbital data has detected evidence that suggests underground ice still exists.

It seems to me that journalists and academic PR departments should know these facts, and include them in any reports about the dry nature of Mars’ equatorial regions.

European capsule startup wins $15 million grant

A Luxembourg-based startup aimed at building orbiting recoverable capsules for cargo as well as in-space manufacturing has won a $14.7 million grant from the European Innovation Council as part of its European Innovation Council Accelerator program to encourage development in Europe’s private commercial space sector.

The company, Space Cargo Unlimited, will use the money to develop what it calls its “BentoBox in-orbit testing and manufacturing platform.” It is also partnering with well-established European company Thales-Alenia, with the BentoBox development based on previous work done for the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Rider demonstrator project.

The overall nature of this grant and work illustrates Europe’s aggressive shift in the past two years from the government model, where ESA designed and owned everything, to the capitalism model, where the government is merely the customer, buying what it needs from the private sector. The government-built Space Rider, which was intended to be a re-usable space plane similar to the X-37B, has never flown. Now, its technology is being repurposed by private European companies for their own spacecraft with the intention of making profits. And this Bentobox project is a prime example.

The inaugural flight of the BentoBox platform as a standalone system using the ATMOS inflatable heatshield is expected in the fourth quarter of 2025. As of a late 2024 update, Space Cargo Unlimited had already secured bookings for 80% of the inaugural flight, and 50% and 40% of the second and third flights, respectively.

Note too that Space Cargo is a European competitor with Varda in the U.S. It appears Europe wants some of this business for itself.

China launches technology test satellite

China today successfully launched a technology test satellite, its Long March 4C rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China.

As is usual for China’s state-run press, little information about the satellite was released. The most information any article provided was this:

The satellite, designed and built by the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, will measure and survey space environmental elements and test new technologies.

Nor did that state-run press provide any information about where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

84 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
7 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 84 to 62.

Two more former SpaceX employees sue the company for harassment and discrimination

SpaceX employees cheering the first chopstick capture of Superheavy
SpaceX employees cheering the first chopstick capture of
Superheavy, October 13, 2025. Click for video.

Two new articles today outline two different new lawsuits against SpaceX by former employees, with both claiming harassment and discrimination as reasons for their firing.

In the first case, the former employee, L’Tavious Rice, claims that he “was fired for being late to work while caring for his young daughter as she recuperated from a heart transplant, while his white colleagues were given a pass for their own “consistent tardiness and absences.” The lawsuit also claims the SpaceX human resources department was retaliating against him because he testified about another employee’s misbehavior in another unrelated case.

In the second case, the former employee, Jenna Shumway, claims she was passed over for promotion, and the man who got the job “waged a campaign of harassment against her, which included stripping her of her responsibilities over a period of months and ultimately leading to her termination in October 2024.” She also claims this “harassment extended to other female employees, too.”

I have no idea whether these claims are true or not. I tend to be skeptical, because of the overall make-up of SpaceX’s entire work-force. The image to the right, a screen capture from the company’s broadcast during the fifth flight of Starship/Superheavy on October 13, 2024 and taken mere seconds after the first successful capture of Superheavy. illustrates this. The SpaceX work-force is young, and typical of engineering, more male than female. At the same time it has many long time female employees, including the company’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell.

We must not also dismiss the possibility of political motives in these lawsuits. In the past three years the left has made it clear it is out to get Elon Musk, and that campaign has included vandalism, regulatory sabotage, and numerous other environment lawsuits by leftist activist groups whose funding is political.

At the same time, it is very possible that these two former employees have legitimate beefs. We shall have to see how both cases play out in the courts.

Sunspot update: Sunspot activity rebounds somewhat in June

As I have done since I started this website fifteen years ago, I post at the start of every month an update of the Sun’s ongoing sunspot activity, using the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspot activity but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

Below is that graph, showing that in June sunspot activity rebounded upward somewhat from the shocking drop in activity that occurred in May.

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Another interstellar object identified entering the solar system

A11pl3Z's path through the solar system

Astronomers think they have identified another interstellar object that is now entering the solar system.

The dim space rock is currently at about magnitude 18.8. Our new visitor, A11pl3Z, will get its closest to the sun – at about 2 astronomical units (AU), or twice as far as Earth is from the sun – in October. As it reaches perihelion – its closest point to the sun – it should be moving at about 68 km/s relative to the sun, or at about 152,000 miles per hour.

The object’s calculated path through the solar system, shown by the blue line in the graphic to the right, as well as the object’s high speed, are why the astronomers think it is interstellar in origin. Both facts suggest it is coming from beyond the Oort cloud.

This is the third such object discovered, after Oumuamua (whose nature remains somewhat unknown), followed by Comet 21/Borisov.

UPDATE: The object has now been renamed 3I/Atlas. The “3I” indicates it is the third interstellar object discovered, and “Atlas” refers to the discovering telescope survey.

Astronomers discover supernovae that apparently exploded twice

Double detonation supernova
Click for original picture.

Using the ground-based Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, astronomers have discovered evidence suggesting a star apparently exploded twice went it went supernova several hundred years ago.

They detected this possibility by looking at the remnant of that blast, shown to the right. It shows a double halo, indicated by the blue and orange colors. The blue however is seen in both shells. As noted by the VLT’s press notice:

Calcium is shown in blue, and it is arranged in two concentric shells. These two layers indicate that the now-dead star exploded with a double-detonation.

This type of supernova, dubbed type 1a, occurs when a white dwarf sucks matter from its closely orbiting stellar companion. That material piles up on the surface of the star until it reaches critical mass and explodes, causing the supernova.

The two shells, suggesting a double detonation, fits a theory proposed for this process. From the paper’s abstract:

Our analysis reveals that the outer calcium shell originates from the helium detonation at the base of the outer envelope, while the inner shell is associated with the carbon–oxygen core detonation. This morphological distribution of intermediate-mass elements agrees qualitatively with the predicted signature of the double detonation of a sub-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf from a hydrodynamical explosion simulation.

In other words, the outer shell resulted from the explosion caused by the helium ripped from the companion star, with the resulting shockwave detonating the second explosion inside the white dwarf’s core.

That’s the theory at least. This data supports it, but it certainly doesn’t prove it.

Methane climate satellite fails

Fifteen months into a five year mission it appears the methane climate satellite MethaneSat has apparently failed prematurely.

From the press release by the environmental activist organization Environmental Defense Fund that operated the satellite:

On Friday, June 20, the MethaneSAT mission operations lost contact with MethaneSAT. After pursuing all options to restore communications, we learned this morning that the satellite has lost power, and that it is likely not recoverable.

The satellite was unusual in that it was developed and built by this activist organization, not a government or academic institution. Its failure is especially unfortunate at this time, because this non-governmental approach to science research is exactly what the science community needs to pursue faced as it is with major cuts in federal funding.

Senate reconciliation budget bill includes Cruz’s big spending additions to NASA

Senate NASA budget increases

According to a tweet yesterday by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), the reconciliation budget bill that was passed by the Senate included the budget additions that Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had proposed to save SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway.

The graphic to the right lists these budget numbers. It is not clear whether the launch taxes on payloads that Cruz proposed were also included, though likely not based on the rules under which the reconciliation bill was passed.

This additional money for these projects contradicts directly the NASA 2026 budget proposal put forth by Trump that aimed to cancel Lunar Gateway and end SLS and Orion after only two more flights. Their existence in this passed Senate bill suggests that Congress is cool with the idea of spending this money and continuing these projects, even though they do nothing but waste taxpayer money and get us no where in space.

It also appears from the language in the graphic that the Senate is eager to also spend more money on NASA’s Mars sample return project, even though NASA itself still has no idea how to accomplish the task.

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