July 23, 2025 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Year: 2025
Nils Lofgren – Valentine
An evening pause: Performed live 1991.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
July 23, 2025 Quick space links
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.
- Chinese pseudo-company Space Pioneer touts completion of its launchpad at Jiuquan spaceport
It is hard to tell how much of the video are 3D graphics and how much is real. The pad is for its Tianlong-3 rocket, essentially a copy of the Falcon 9. This is also the same company that has a first stage launch itself during a static fire test in 2024. It had said it would do its first launch this summer, but it is not clear when that will happen.
- Axiom touts its ownership of the Rafaello multi-purpose logistics module that flew to ISS four times
The company acquired it in 2023. It is not clear how they will use it, since they no longer have the shuttle to put it into orbit.
- Amateur astronomer posts his own pictures of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas
Expect a lot more of these in the coming months.
- Russia’s next Bion returnable capsule arrives in Baikonur for launch in August
It will fly for 30 days, then use its Vostok landing capsule to bring back its “biomedical experiments.”
- On this day in 1962 Telstar-1 relayed the first live transatlantic television broadcast from across the U.S. and Europe.
Ah, what could have been! Privately designed, privately financed, and privately launched, this AT&T satellite was created to demonstrate that company’s plans for commercial satellite operations, for profit, plans that got banned when Congress and President Kennedy passed a communications bill that created the failed government corporation COMSAT.
Curiosity amid the boxwork
Click for original image.
Click for interactive map.
Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped to post here, was taken on July 20, 2025 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks uphill to the south into the canyon that Curiosity will eventually travel, with the white chaotic upper flanks of Mount Sharp on the horizon. The mountain’s peak itself is out of view, about 25 miles away.
The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, on the northern edge of the large patch of very distinct boxwork ridges visible from orbit. You can see these ridges in the foreground of the panorama above.
The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line roughly indicates the rover’s future travels. At the moment, however, it is going nowhere, as the science team is focused on studying these boxwork ridges in the hope they can determine their origin. Such features are usually associated with cracking later filled with lava, with the polygon-shaped cracking usually associated with a formerly wet environment drying.
SpaceX launches NASA’s twin Tracers solar wind monitoring satellites
SpaceX today successfully launched NASA’s twin Tracers solar wind monitoring satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in Califorina.
The first stage completed its sixteenth flight, landing back at Vandenberg. The two fairing halves completed their 2nd and 14th flights respectively. As of posting the satellites had not yet deployed.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
91 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
8 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 91 to 64.
Rocket Lab’s new Neutron rocket faces red tape delays at Wallops
Proposed dredged channel. Click for original.
We’re here to help you! Rocket Lab appears to be having regulatory problems getting approvals to transport hardware for its new Neutron rocket to its new launchpad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island in Virginia, delays that might prevent it from launching as planned later this year.
It appears the company needs to dredge a deeper channel to ship the heavier Neutron hardware into Wallops, but it has not been able to begin work because of approval delays by the federal government.
The dredging project was approved by VMRC [Virginia Marine Resources Commission] in May, but the company has yet to start digging because it’s still awaiting federal sign-off from the Army Corps of Engineers.
Lacking this approval and unable to get the channel ready for this year’s launch, the company is seeking permission to use a stop-gap different approach to transport the hardware through these shallow waters.
Kedging, a little-known nautical method, is used to ensure the barges can safely navigate the existing shallow channel. Workers would use a series of anchors and lines to steer the barge through the shallow waters. The company is seeking permission to use this method through the end of June 2026 or until the dredging work is complete, whichever comes first.
Lacking an okay to do even this alternative approach, Rocket Lab will be forced to transport the hardware using “ramps and cranes,” an approach that is impractical in the long run for achieving a profitable launch pace. It also would likely result in not meeting its targeted launch date before the end of 2025 for the first Neutron launch.
One of China’s big satellite constellations appears in trouble
According to a report in China’s state-run press today, one of the giant satellite constellations China is building to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is in trouble, and will likely fail to meet its international licensing requirement to place more than six hundred satellites in orbit by the end of 2025.
Only 90 satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit for the Qianfan broadband network – also known as the Thousand Sails Constellation or G60 Starlink – well short of the project’s goal of 648 by the end of this year.
Under international regulations to prevent spectrum hoarding, satellite operators must deploy a certain proportion of their constellation within set times after securing orbits and radio frequencies.
Shanghai Yuanxin Satellite Technology, the company leading the project, plans to deploy more than 15,000 satellites by 2030 to deliver direct-to-phone internet services worldwide.
To meet its license requirement, it require a launch pace for the rest of ’25 of about 30 satellites per month, something that the article says is unlikely due to “a severe shortage of rockets” in China.
This story might also explain why China’s government yesterday ordered all its rocket pseudo-companies to speed up their test schedules, pushing to launch their new rockets for the first time this year instead of in 2026. The Xi government’s order appears to be trying to address this rocket shortage.
Senegal to sign Artemis Accords
According to a NASA announcement today, Senegal will become the 56th nation to sign Artemis Accords tomorrow.
The full list of nations now part of this American space alliance: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.
It remains unclear whether the second Trump administration has taken a new interest in using this alliance to renew the accords’ original goals, of encouraging private enterprise and property rights in space. The Biden had shifted the purpose away from those goals towards the more globalist approach represented by the Outer Space Treaty.
Trump administration moving to reduce rocket launch environmental regulations
According to a draft executive order that has not yet been released, the Trump administration is planning a major revision of the FAA’s environmental and launch regulations that has badly impacted rocket companies, with the goal of streamlining licensing.
The order would give Trump even more direct control over the space industry’s chief regulator by turning the civil servant position leading the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation into a political appointment. The last head of the office and two other top officials recently took voluntary separation offers.
The order would also create a new adviser to the transportation secretary to shepherd in deregulation of the space industry.
…The draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies like SpaceX, documents show. It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.
The order would also have the secretary of transportation ‘reevaluate, amend, or rescind’ sections of Part 450, the FAA licensing regulations that it imposed during the Biden administration that was supposed to streamline licensing but ended up adding considerable new red tape which contributed significantly to squelching the new launch industry that had popped up during the first Trump term.
As is usual for the propaganda press, the article at the link implies that these changes would result in horrible environmental consequences as well as increased safety risks to the public. What it does not note is that these changes appear to simply return the regulatory framework back to what existed prior to the Biden administration, a framework that had existed for more than a half century previously. The environment and public safety did just fine under those more freedom-oriented rules. I am sure both will do just fine again.
This order might also help explain Trump’s decision to withdraw Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator and appoint Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator. The order puts much of this work on his head, and having him in charge of NASA will likely aid that work.
Lucie Horsch & The Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century – Bach
An evening pause: Sadly they don’t identify the specific music piece.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
July 22, 2025 Quick space links
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.
- Lunar Outpost touts driving tests of its manned lunar rover prototype
The company dubs this test rover “Eagle”, and tries very hard to make exciting a video of what is simply an off road vehicle driving in the desert.
- Chinese government orders all pseudo-companies to increase quality control while forcing them to push their first test flights forward to the fourth quarter of 2025
Clear proof once again that these are not real private companies, but subdivisions within the Chinese government that have been allowed to operate somewhat like private companies. I wonder if this top-down order to hurry things is going to cause more problems.
- Iran completes a suborbital rocket launch
The flight is “claimed as a tech development test for future orbital missions.”
- On this day in 1994 Comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter
Fortunately, Hubble’s out-of-focus optics had been fixed six months earlier, allowing numerous high resolutions images to be taken of the multiple impacts.
First Hubble images of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas released
Click for original.
An undergraduate student has just released the first pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the interstellar object 3I/Atlas, confirming that it is a comet as indicated by the earlier image taken by the Gemini North telescope.
One of those images, taken only hours ago, is the inset on the map showing the comet’s route through the solar system to the right. The streaks on the image are either stars or cosmic rays. Though this image is of significantly lower quality than the Gemini North picture, it once again shows both the comet’s nucleus and developing coma.
A preprint [pdf] of a new research paper based on data from both telescopes further confirms this conclusion:
[T]hese results suggest that 3I/ATLAS hosts a coma containing large water ice grains, and that its dust continuum is stable over at least week-long timescales. The spectral characteristics further distinguish 3I from known ultrared trans-Neptunian objects and align it more closely with active Jupiter-family comets.
The last conclusion is very significant. Though the path and speed of this interstellar object says it must come from beyond the solar system, its cometary make-up more resembles comets that reside in the inner solar system. These facts strongly imply that there is at least one other solar systems not very different from our own.