Year: 2025

Isaacman hints of future space plans

9:11 am

In receiving an award from a space advocacy group on June 21, 2025, billionaire Jared Isaacman hinted that his future space-related plans could include working with science organizations to finance scientific probes.

[Had he become NASA administrator he had wanted] NASA to partner with academic organizations on missions where such organizations would have had a bigger role in funding. “My priorities would have been leadership in space and the orbital economy,” he said, “and trying to introduce a concept where NASA could help enable others to conduct interesting scientific missions, getting academic organizations to contribute.”

That was something he said he might be interested in pursuing outside the agency. “I wouldn’t mind maybe trying to put that to a test and see if you could fund an interesting robotic mission, just to show that it can be done, and try and get some of the top tier academic institutions who want to perform. So that’s on my mind.”

He also indicated that he generally has no problem with the Trump administration’s proposed NASA cuts, noting that such academic organizations need to figure out how to work with less money.

Despite this statement, it appears he is still unsure of what he will do next in space. He has not restarted his Polaris Dawn manned program — suspended when he was nominated to become NASA administrator — and has said that right now he is more focused taking advantage of this unexpected break from work to spend more time with his family.

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NJ Boy scouts win first prize in international rocketry competition

9:00 am

A rocketry team form Boy Scout Troop 74 in New Jersey has garnered first prize in the International Rocketry Challenge held this week at the Paris Air Show in France.

The team competed against top student rocketeers from across the globe. This year, the United Kingdom placed second, followed by France in third, and Japan in fourth.

The “Troop 74 Rocketeers” won the opportunity to represent the United States by securing the title of National Champion at the 23rd annual American Rocketry Challenge National Finals in May. The team bested a record-breaking 1,001 middle and high school teams who participated in the design, build, and launch competition.

This year marked the first time teammates Chase, Makayo (Mak), and Thomas qualified for the National Finals. Their precision in designing, building, and launching a model rocket was unmatched by any other team in the country.

This contest, which has been growing steadily in recent years, suggests a robust next generation of rocket engineers is on the way. And it also appears they will have plenty of job opportunities for their talent.

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ULA launches the second set of Kuiper satellites into orbit

8:44 am

ULA this morning successfully placed 27 Kuiper satellites into orbit, its Atlas-5 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This was the second set of Kuiper satellites launched for Amazon. It now has 54 satellites in orbit, with a requirement to launch about 1,600 by July of 2026.

As this was only the second launch in 2025 for ULA, both Atlas-5 launches of Kuiper satellites, the leader board in the 2025 launch race remains unchanged.

77 SpaceX
35 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 77 to 58.

ULA had predicted it would do 20 launches in 2025. It appears the company will not only not reach that goal, it will not do so by a lot.

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Scientists discover unexpected mineral in Ryugu asteroid sample

1:21 pm

Scientists analyzing the samples brought back from the rubble pile asteroid Ryugu by Japan’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft have now discovered an unexpected mineral, dubbed djerfisherite, that the formation theories of the asteroid say should not be there.

“Djerfisherite is a mineral that typically forms in very reduced environments, like those found in enstatite chondrites, and has never been reported in CI chondrites or other Ryugu grains,” says first and corresponding author Masaaki Miyahara, associate professor at the Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University. “Its occurrence is like finding a tropical seed in Arctic ice—indicating either an unexpected local environment or long-distance transport in the early solar system.”

At present the scientists propose two hypotheses for explaining the mineral. Either it came from another asteroid as Ryugu was congealing, or it formed in Ryugu when conditions raised its temperature above 350 degrees Celsius. The researchers now favor the latter theory, even though the generally accepted histories of Ryugu’s formation never included such conditions.

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ESA partners with French company to build space plane “demonstrator”

1:12 pm

The European Space Agency (ESA) and the French company Dassault Aviation yesterday announced a partnership for building a space plane “demonstrator” that will lay the groundwork for developing a family of such spacecraft dubbed Vortex.

The ESA press release is here. Both this release and the Dassault release linked to above provided little detailed information, other than the demonstrator will be a small scale suborbital testbed for eventually developing the full scale orbital vehicle. Neither a budget nor time schedule were even hinted at.

ESA has funded a number of these demonstrators in the past decade — Themis and Callisto come to mind — all of which are behind schedule and have as yet not flown. It will be interesting to see if this project fares better, as it seems it is being led by a single commercial company rather than the government run mishmashes of the other projects.

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SpaceX provides update on Starship explosion while fueling for static fire engine test

1:02 pm

SpaceX has now posted an update outlining its preliminary conclusions as to the cause of the Starship explosion as the spacecraft was being fueled prior to a static fire engine test on June 18, 2025.

Engineering teams are actively investigating the incident and will follow established procedures to determine root cause. Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship’s nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing. There is no commonality between the COPVs used on Starship and SpaceX’s Falcon rockets.

It remains unclear how long it will take to get that test stand back up and running.

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Clickspring – Recreating the ancient engineering that built the Antikythera Mechanism

6:01 pm

An evening pause: For background, the Antikythera Mechanism is an archaeological artifact from ancient Greece:

The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary precision.

Today’s pause shows how this very complex mechanism, that includes many metal gears, might have been made by hand, without electricity and our modern tools.

Hat tip Cotour.

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June 20, 2025 Quick space links

3:03 pm

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.

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Two lunar orbiters spot the crash site of Ispace’s Resilience lander

2:53 pm

Resilience crash site on the Moon, as seen by Chandrayaan-2

Scientists using both NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and India’s Chandrayaan-2 lunar orbiter have spotted the crash site for the private commercial lunar lander Resilience, built and launched by the Japanese startup Ispace.

The picture to the right was taken by Chandrayaan-2. As noted at the LRO website showing its photo:

The dark smudge (60.4445°N, 355.4120°E, -2431.6 m elevation ) formed as the vehicle excavated and redistributed shallow regolith (soil); the faint bright halo resulted from low-angle regolith particles scouring the delicate surface.

The lander attempted a soft landing on June 5, 2025, but because its laser rangefinder was unable to gather good data as to its elevation, it did not decelerate properly and was going too fast when its engines tried for a soft landing. It instead crashed.

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New nova spotted and now visible to the naked eye

2:39 pm

Astronomers have now spotted a brand new nova in the southern hemisphere that has quickly brightened so that is now just visible to the naked eye.

On June 12th (June 12.9 UT), the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) discovered a new 8.7-magnitude stellar object in Lupus. Not long after, Yusuke Tampo, with the South African Astronomical Observatory (University of Cape Town), obtained a spectrum of the “new star” and identified it as a classical nova based on its spectral features and dramatic increase in brightness.

The nova went through a slew of temporary names — AT 2025nlr, ASASSN-25cm, and N Lup 2025 — until receiving its official designation V462 Lupi on June 16th. Since discovery, the nova has brightened rapidly. As of 3 p.m. Eastern Time June 17th, it’s at magnitude 6.1, and visible without optical aid from a dark-sky location. Its rise has been phenomenal when you consider that prior to the explosion, the progenitor star was approximately magnitude 22.3 (in the blue band) according to American Association for Variable Stars (AAVSO) observer Sebastián Otero, who dug up an older image from a photographic plate.

Though in the southern hemisphere, this nova star is also visible in the northern hemisphere to the mid-latitudes. The article at the link provides some details if you wish to try spotting it.

Novae occur when a central heavy white dwarf star robs enough material from its closely orbiting stellar companion. When enough material piles up on the surface of the white dwarf it goes critical, resulting in a thermonuclear explosion strong enough to produce the nova.

Whether the nova will continue to brighten remains unknown, but I guarantee that a plethora of amateur astronomers will watching to find out.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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