An evening pause: A parody of “Smells like Teen Spirit,” according to the webpage, but as far as I am concerned it is a very funny parody of most “official” music videos, the kind I generally don’t like to post as evening pauses because, as Yankovic says in the first verse:
What is this song all about?
Can’t figure any lyrics out
How do the words to it go?
I wish you’d tell me, I don’t know
It gets better from there.
Hat tip Alan Hennings.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on August 24, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The camera team labels this simply as a “terrain sample,” which usually means it was not taken as part of any specific research request, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature. When they need to do this, they try to find interesting things to photograph, and mostly succeed.
At first glance the picture to the right does not appear that interesting. If anything it shows an endless expanse of mottled terrain, with no features of any interest at all. This sameness however is what makes this picture and landscape intriguing. What caused it to look this way?
» Read more
SpaceX once again broke its annual record for successful launches today, placing 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 15th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
141 SpaceX (a new record)
65 China
13 Russia
13 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 141 to 107. The U.S. launch total in 2025, now 159, is also a new record.
2023 artist rendering of the manned Blue Moon lander
Link here. According to the article, the company is presently stacking its first unmanned version of its Blue Moon lander, dubbed Blue Moon Mark 1, scheduled for launch now next year.
The 8.1-meter-tall cargo lander will help with ongoing development of their crewed lander, named Blue Moon Mk. 2, which is 15.3 meters tall. Both are powered by Blue Origin’s BE-7 engines, which are being tested on stands in Alabama, Texas and Washington.
…“A big milestone for you to look out for online is that Mk. 1 is three modules that are being stacked as we speak: aft, forward and mid. And once it is stacked in its finished configuration, we will be barging it over to NASA Johnson Space Center Chamber A to do a full up thermal vac campaign,” said [Jacqueline Cortese, Blue Origin’s Senior Director of Civil Space]. “So when you see that on its boat, you will know that big things are happening.”
Both versions of the lander are powered by a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. A key difference though is that Mk.1 can be launched to the Moon with a single launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket while Mk. 2 requires orbital refueling. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted sentence above is important because it illustrates the absurdity of the comments last week by interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy, claiming SpaceX’s program to make Starship a manned lunar lander is “behind”, forcing him to open up the competition to Blue Origin, who might get it done sooner.
One of the big issues used against SpaceX is that Starship will need to be refueled once in orbit to work as a lunar lander, and that technology needs to be developed and tested. The problem with this criticism is that, as noted above, Blue Origin’s manned lunar lander also needs to be refueled.
» Read more
In what appears to be first, the startup Besxar has signed a deal with SpaceX to fly what it calls its Fabships on the first stage of the Falcon 9 in order to take advantage of the extreme vacuum of space to produce better semi-conductors.
Fabships will be integrated on Falcon 9 first stage boosters and retrieved post launch after the rocket safely returns to land. The campaign marks the first-ever reusable payload program to launch on a SpaceX rocket and will accelerate Besxar’s path toward building the world’s first orbital semiconductor foundry. This flight campaign will debut Besxar’s “Clipper-class” Fabship, engineered for short-duration, quick-turnaround sorties that enable rapid iteration and demonstrate the first phase in Besxar’s broader vision to establish scalable semiconductor production in orbit.
Besxar is pioneering a new class of orbital manufacturing, using the ultra-high vacuum (UHV) of space to produce ultra-pure substrates and precursor materials—the foundational building blocks for AI data centers, quantum computing, nuclear systems, next-generation defense systems, and directed-energy applications. By manufacturing in orbit, Besxar can achieve purity levels and yield efficiencies impossible on Earth, effectively doubling the chip cost-efficiency for next-generation AI workloads.
The deal is for twelve flights, with the first occurring as soon as this year. The deal not only allows Besxar an opportunity to produce a better product it can sell, it gives SpaceX another avenue for profits. It is in fact surprising that SpaceX has not done more deals like this, especially with its Dragon cargo capsule. There is a whole cottage industry now developing using returnable capsules for in-space manufacturing — led by Varda. That SpaceX hasn’t offered Dragon as yet is puzzling. It is possible Dragon is simply too expensive and large at this time, based on the nascent state of this industry. Once investors see profits from the smaller new capsules like Varda’s they will look at Dragon as an option.
My heart be still: Lockheed Martin yesterday completed the first flight for NASA of the X-59 supersonic test plane, designed to produce a much quieter sonic boom.
The X-59 took off from Skunk Works’ facility at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, before landing near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. The X-59 performed exactly as planned, verifying initial flying qualities and air data performance on the way to a safe landing at its new home.
The plane did NOT yet fly at supersonic speeds. It needs to do more flight tests before it attempts that feat. A somewhat uninteresting video of the flight can be seen here. (Hat tip to Jay.)
This NASA program is another example of government waste. NASA issued the company a $247.5 million the contract for this test plane in 2018, after two years of preliminary design work. Seven years later it finally flies once, but not at supersonic speeds.
Meanwhile, the commercial startup Boom Supersonic started at about the same time, raised far less investment capital, and successfully flew a supersonic flight in January 2025 in which it broke that sound barrier three times, with no audible sonic boom.
Boom has already obtained numerous contracts with the airline companies United and Japan Airlines to provide them planes. It is in the process of manufacturing its Overture commercial passenger jet for sale.
Lockheed Martin’s NASA project has no investors and no airlines interested in the test plane. Lockheed Martin itself is not marketing it and has no plans to use the technology commercially. In fact, NASA likely forbids it from doing so.
I am sure these tests will provide data helpful to Boom and the handful of other commercial supersonic startups. At the same time, the entire project is another example of a poor use of taxpayer funds.
An evening pause: Created from “very rare footage of the Hollies recording ‘On A Carousel’ in the legendary Abbey Road Studios in 1967.”
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
They aren’t just mindless, they are driven by hate
I always say it is the audience that counts. No matter what idiocy the leaders on both sides of the political spectrum might propose, the real future is determined by what their base wants.
It is now very clear that the base of the Democratic Party is driven entirely by hate, envy, and a lust for power, based on an ignorance of history that is appalling. And my saying this not simply an opinion. It is founded on what that base itself has said repeatedly in the past year. First that base has increasingly thrown its support behind Hamas and its anti-Semitic hate of Israel and Jews. Next, it mourned the failed assassination attempts against Donald Trump, then celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, a man whose primary goal was to foster free debate.
In this election season now that base is supporting a candidate in Maine, Graham Platner, who got a Nazi tattoo placed on his chest, and has made numerous hateful posts online over the years against anyone who disagreed with him.
In Virginia that base is excited to support a candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, who enthusiastically called for the murder of his political opponents as well as the death of their kids.
And finally, in New York that base is rallying with great joy around an anti-Semitic Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, who hates the police and wishes to impose communism on that city. And the base showed its envy of the success of others at a big Mandani rally this past weekend, chanting without prompting over and over again that Mandani and New York’s Democratic Party governor Kathy Hochul should “Tax the rich!”
It was very clear that they weren’t chanting this to simply to re-distribute wealth, or to improve New York. No, it was very clear they wished to tax the rich because they wanted to destroy the rich. How dare such people have success when I don’t!
» Read more
This label would be more accurate if it read
“NOT made in the European Union”
A European think tank, the Centres for European Policy Networks (CEP), today released its analysis of a proposed space law it wants the European Union to adopt during its on-going fall session.
The Commission’s draft seeks to harmonize national regulations and establish common safety standards. According to the CEP, this is necessary to ensure a level playing field for space activities in the European single market.
This law was first released in June 2025. In reviewing it then, I concluded it would be a disaster for Europe should it be approved.
It imposes new environmental, safety, and cybersecurity regulations on the design of satellites and spacecraft in a manner that will likely slow development and competition in Europe significantly. And it applies these regulations not only to European companies but to the rest of the world’s space industry, should it do any operations at all in Europe.
CEP’s policy analysis [pdf] confirms my assessment, but thinks it is a great idea, especially its provisions that impose its rules on other countries.
In this context, the EU Space Act aims to extend the EU’s jurisdiction to space service providers based outside the EU who offer space-based data or services within the Union. This approach would ensure that no space operator is given an advantage by being exempt from the rules and prevents the circumvention of EU regulations. [emphasis mine]
In other words, the EU must rule everyone! What will instead happen if this law is passed is that American companies will simply refuse to do business with Europe. I can guarantee that SpaceX will pull its Starlink business from Europe if the EU tries to impose these regulations on it.
Europe meanwhile will find its own space industry hobbled trying to meet the law’s many odious regulations.
That the EU is still considering this law is remarkable in itself. The law was first proposed in 2024, but the vote on it was delayed a year when a number of EU members opposed it vehemently. Those nations all want their own nascent home-grown space industries to prosper, and see this law as bad policy that will kill them.
Whether that opposition can stand up to the globalist desires of the EU and Europe’s bureaucratic culture however remains very uncertain.
Though no monetary numbers have been released, its appears Cards Against Humanity (CAH) has settled its $15 million lawsuit with SpaceX, instigated when the company illegally stored equipment on a piece of land CAH had purchased in 2017 in an effort to block Trump’s border wall.
Per AP, according to Texas court records, a settlement was finalized last month, prior to the upcoming Nov. 3 jury trial marked on the calendar. SpaceX owns other land plots in the Brownsville, Texas area in Cameron County, but apparently had no right to use this patch.
“The upside is that SpaceX has removed their construction equipment from our land and we’re able to work with a local landscaping company to restore the land to its natural state: devoid of space garbage and pointless border walls,” CAH wrote in a recent message to customers. “Were we hoping to be able to pay all our fans? Sure. But we did warn them they would probably only be able to get like $2 or most likely nothing.”
Based on a somewhat childish and obscene statement from CAH describing the settlement, it got little additional money from SpaceX. The company admitted its trespass, agreed to pay for the restoration, but agreed to nothing else. In response, CAH says it will issue a free new set of cards “all about Musk” to those who donated to buy the land. The tone of CAH suggests the cards will be equally childish and obscene.
As for the border wall, if the Trump administration decides it wants to build it across this piece of land, CAH’s ownership won’t make any difference. The Trump administration will simply initiate eminent domain proceedings to take the land.
