Year: 2026

May 28, 2026 Quick space links

2:35 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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My two appearances on The Space Show this week

12:41 pm

David Livingston has now archived for download or listening or watching the two Space Shows this week in which I participated.

On Sunday, May 24, 2026 the show was an open discussion focused on reviewing SpaceX’s 12th Starship/Superheavy test flight on May 22, 2026. The show can be viewed here, here, and here. You can also download the audio here to listen at your pleasure.

On Tuesday, May 26, 2026 I was the Space Show’s main guest, with the discussion avoiding SpaceX almost completely. First I outlined NASA’s just announced new lunar missions and its overall plans for the Moon, adding some commentary amid the discussion with other participants. Then I outlined the state of development of the five American space stations being developed to replace ISS. As always, the discussion was made more interesting by the participation of others. The show can be viewed here, here, and here. You can also download the audio here to listen at your pleasure.

Both shows are definitely worth your time, if you are at all interested in the on-going commercial renaissance now taking place in the aerospace industry.

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An icy Martian crater filled with brain terrain

11:42 am

An icy Martian crater filled with brain terrain
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on March 26, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label an “ice-rich crater fill.”

And yup, that’s what we got. The floor of this 2.8-mile-wide unnamed crater is filled with what planetary scientists have labeled brain terrain, a feature found only on Mars that they associate with the sublimation of near surface ice, but as yet do not fully understand its entire formation process. In the upper right is a full resolution inset of that brain terrain, to give a good sense of its strange nature.

On that floor there are also several small fresh impact craters, as well as older small impacts that have faded almost to obscurity due to that mysterious process forming the brain terrain.

Its iciness of the terrain is also indicated by the rim of the crater, which is distorted as well as blobby. At impact or subsequently the ground here was soft like mud, and thus easy to shape into these cushioned features. Thus, though the rim was almost certainly circular after impact, time and the muddy nature of this ground allows it to get bent and warped.

Nor is it surprising there is near surface ice at this location. We are at 41 degrees south latitude, well away from the dry Martian tropics. This picture simply provides more evidence that once you get above 30 degrees latitude, it will not be hard to find water on Mars.
» Read more

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New long term analysis of solar activity suggests the Sun is undergoing some form of internal structural change

9:36 am

Sunspot activity for the past two cycles
NOAA’s chart of sunspot activity.
Click for the most recent update.

The uncertainty of science: Scientists doing a new analysis of more than forty years of solar data have concluded that some form of “subsurface structural changes associated with successive 11-year [sunspot] cycles” are taking place, with those changes “ever more progressively confined just beneath the solar surface.”

Using almost 40 years of helioseismic data from six telescopes around the world in the Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network (BiSON), the researchers uncovered a gradual change in structure just beneath the surface that has spanned multiple cycles, with the current solar cycle 25 showing particularly strong signatures of these changes.

Lead author Professor Bill Chaplin, from the University of Birmingham, said: “The Sun has its own ‘active biorhythm’ creating rising and falling magnetic activity that shapes space weather. However, traditional surface measures don’t capture the full story – that the Sun may be entering a different mode of behaviour unfolding over decades.

“We have uncovered evidence of systematic changes in the solar activity cycle. Crucially, magnetic activity is becoming more tightly confined near the surface with each cycle.”

The confinement appears to be within the first 600 miles below the surface, which for the Sun is barely skin deep.

In reading the paper [pdf], it is very clear they have detected these changes, but are as yet unable to apply them to any larger fundamental processes. They are observing the Sun change, but don’t know why. It could be simply random fluctuations of behavior, or it could be part of the Sun’s normal behavior related to its magnetic field and the nuclear fusion that makes it burn.

In either case, this lack of deeper understanding means it is impossible as yet to predict what will happen next, or how those future changes will impact us here on Earth.

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New study using Chandrayaan-2 data again suggests ice in crater near Moon’s south pole

9:06 am

The Moon's south pole region

The uncertainty of science: A new study by scientists in India using data from the Indian lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-2 has once again found evidence strongly suggesting the existence of water ice in several permanently shadowed craters near Moon’s south pole.

The findings are based on observations made by the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter’s Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR), a sophisticated microwave imaging instrument capable of probing beneath the lunar surface.

Among the craters examined, scientists found particularly strong evidence of subsurface ice in a 1.1-kilometre-wide crater located within the larger Faustini crater near the Moon’s south pole. Researchers said the crater displayed a distinctive “lobate-rim morphology”- a flow-like structural pattern that may indicate the impact event penetrated an ice-rich subsurface layer.

On the map above the green dot to the right of the south pole marks the location of the small crater inside Faustini Crater. Their conclusions were based first on microwave data suggesting subsurface ice, and second on the lobate shape of this crater’s rim, which has a kind blobby look implying the material is muddy and impregnated with ice.

Increasingly the data from all sources seems to suggest that if there is ice in these permanently shadowed craters, it is likely impregnated in the soil, and will require processing to extract.

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More opposition to the EU’s new space law, this time from European companies

8:39 am

The European Union
This label would be more accurate if it read
“NOT made in the European Union”

At a conference this week officials from a number of European aerospace companies expressed strong opposition to the European Union’s (EU) space law, adding their voice to the opposition that already exists from a number of European nations, at least one left-leaning think tank, and the U.S.

Speaking at SmallSat Europe, panelists said they did not oppose regulation itself or the idea behind a common European framework. However, the words most frequently used to describe the first and second drafts of the EU Space Act were “monopoly,” “slow,” “rigid” and “micromanaging.”

Chiara Manfletti, CEO of Neuraspace, argued the current draft misunderstands how fast-moving commercial space operates. “The idea of having an EU Space Act is absolutely good. The problem is the proposal currently on the table,” Manfletti said during a panel. “If it takes 12 months to get a license, that is ancient history for the commercial space sector.”

A recurring concern among panelists was that Europe already moves more slowly than the United States and that the proposed legislation could institutionalize additional delays.

My sense of the situation is that there is enough opposition that in a rational world the EU would scrape the present draft of this law and start over. Sadly, European governments — especially the EU — no longer function rationally. There is no way to predict what its bureaucrats and power-seeking political leaders will do.

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FAA grounds Starship/Superheavy pending completion of SpaceX’s investigation

8:01 am

According to an announcement yesterday by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Starship and Superheavy are presently grounded pending the completion of SpaceX’s investigation of the engine failures in the Superheavy booster.

After a thorough assessment of the operation, the FAA has determined the May 22 SpaceX Starship Flight 12 launch resulted in a mishap. The mishap involved the Super Heavy booster as it flew back to the Gulf of America after stage separation. There are no reports of public injury or damage to public property. 

The FAA is requiring SpaceX to conduct a mishap investigation. The FAA will oversee the SpaceX-led investigation, be involved in every step of the process, and approve SpaceX’s final report, including any corrective actions.

The propaganda press will make of more this than it should. Based on the FAA’s procedures since Trump took over from Biden, the agency is not going to slow things down. It mostly just observes closely the investigation after any mishap, and as soon as the company is itself satisfied with the solution and has instigated its planned fixes, the FAA issues its stamp of approval and allows flights to proceed immediately.

For example, it acted in this manner for the Starship/Superheavy tests in 2025. It also did the same for Blue Origin in its investigation of its recent New Glenn failure. In both cases there were no delays waiting for the agency to retype the company’s conclusions. The approval was immediate. Expect the same now.

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May 27, 2026 Quick space links

3:09 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.

7 comments

Space Force awards SpaceX $2.29 billion contract for military data constellation

9:13 am

In what is intended as an upgrade to the Starshield military variation of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, the Space Force yesterday awarded SpaceX a $2.29 billion contract to launch a “data transport constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO) for the Space Data Network (SDN), which the service is developing as its central communications network to link sensors to shooters.”

Under the Other Transaction Authority agreement, the company is to deliver “a fully operational prototype capability by the end of 2027,” Space Systems Command (SSC) said in a press release.

The SDN Backbone, formerly known as MILNET and based on SpaceX’s Starshield militarized variant of its commercial Starlink constellation, will serve as the backhaul data transport layer for the broader SDN. While the award to SpaceX is thus not a surprise, the size of the contract is.

It appears that the Pentagon has been so satisfied with its use of both Starlink and Starshield that it was quite willing to give SpaceX this new larger contract.

The good part of this story is that SpaceX is providing good service to the American people, through the Pentagon. The bad part of this story is that it is getting so little competition from the rest of the aerospace industry. This was work that Amazon could have won, had its Leo constellation been operational and competitive. It is not, as yet, and so it loses business. As the saying goes, “He who hesitates is lost.” And sadly a lot of old and even new aerospace companies have been hesitating.

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A call to my readers: Find the location of NASA’s lunar base!

8:46 am

Moon base map from NASA's May 26, 2026 presentation

Moon's south pole, with landers indicated
Click for interactive LRO map.

During yesterday’s NASA press conference outlining the first unmanned missions to the agency’s planned moon base near the Moon’s south pole, Carlos García-Galán, Moon Base program executive, included the graphic above of that base in his presentation.

Though García-Galán said this lunar base map is in the south pole region, the map provided no crater names nor any longitude or latitude information. Nor did it provide a scale to determine the size of these craters. Because of this lack of information, I was unable to identify the map’s precise location near the Moon’s south pole, even after searching extensively at the QuickMap site for Lunar Reconnaissance Rover (LRO) images, now managed by Intuitive Machines images and found here. The map to the right was created from that QuickMap site, annotated by me later with the planned landing locations for Chang’e-7 and Griffin, plus the sites where Nova-C and Vikram landed previously.

I am now asking you, my readers, to do some detective work. See if you can pinpoint the location of the map above with the LRO south pole imagery at the link. The crater patterns should provide the first clue. Remember also that the orientation of the map might require significant rotation to match the LRO data. Remember too that the scale of the map above could require you to zoom in a great deal.

If you think you have a match, post it in the comments below.

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